SALLY MCGILL WINS 1st LS Christmas POETRY CONTEST!

For immediate release: Sally McGill has won the 1st Lutheran Surrealist Christmas Contest! Here is her poem:

EXPECTING
by Sally McGill

waiting
is at the core of the life
of any expectant mother

of anyone hoping
to see new life brought forth

yes there is labor
but first comes
a long period
of waiting
after the seed
has been planted

the Word
gestating
in Mary's womb

God's Word
incubating
in the heart
of each
believer

waiting
to be brought forth
as a light
to the world

let us
wait
expectantly

LEFT AND RIGHT: HOW PERSONAL IS THE POLITICAL?

About a year ago I was browsing in a Psychology Today (a virulent left-wing periodical) and saw an article about how conservatives came from rigid families, and progressives came from flexible families. I doubted if this was true.



My dad was conservative and my mom more progressive. I went to a progressive college called Evergreen State in the 1970s. I was never really a radical leftist. But many of my friends were. It seemed to me that they came from totally dysfunctional families. My two best friends: one of them came from San Francisco and his parents were extreme alcoholics. He told horror stories of trying to go to sleep as his parents roared at him in alcoholic hysteria about nothng he could even understand. He would finally force his bedroom door shut and lock them out so he could get some sleep. He's an anarchist who has worked for the last couple of decades as a Greenpeace secret agent who infiltrates aircraft carriers and arsenic factories in order to liberate them, or hang banners of liberation, or commit acts of sabotage. I haven't heard from this friend for years. He's on the lam from the law, I think.



My other best friend had a crazy father who would blow up occasionally and beat the mother half to death. My friend said of his father, "He was like a book of what not to do as a parent."



This friend has been a Marxist throughout much of his life, and is now an extreme progressive working in Hollywood.



I'm still friends with these guys. I have all kinds of communist and leftist friends. But the one thing that distinguishes all of them is that they hate one or both parents, or have at least one parent who is missing in action, and so it left their family quite vulnerable.



When I see the crowds of people at the Obama rallies, I ask myself: are these people who hate their families or have one or both parents MIA? My hypothesis is that the great majority of the left is mostly made up of people who hate their families, or at the very least think that they can do much better than their parents did. Even Obama himself felt this way about his own grandmother who raised him, and he seemed to even look down on his own pastor as being hopelessly in the past. The signs of CHANGE! makes it seem as if they are voting against their own families for something different. Even the Democratic presidents (at least the last few) grew up in families in which one parent was missing. Obama didn't know his father and only met him once. Clinton's father was also missing. Bush on the other hand loved his father and mother and still does. McCain felt the same way about his folks, and they reciprocated the feeling of love and respect. In the conservatives there is a strong sense of continuity, and obligation. In the progressives, there is the sense that they are more than willing to throw their parents under the bus and move on.org.



I feel more or less as the conservatives do. My mom and dad were great. Neither one ever smoked or drank or got violent. I can't even remember a single time when either one of them said a bad word (by which I mean a swear word). They were Iowan farm kids who got off the farm and into education. My father taught Physical Education at a small college in eastern Pennsylvania. My mom taught first grade. They were never once out of control, or AWOL. Every night there was dinner on the table, and after that, they helped us do our homework. My dad coached Little League baseball, and my mom was a Boy Scout troop leader who taught us how to tap dance (we were only five so we thought it was fun).



At college and since then I've always secretly thought that how far left someone is is generally a measure of how intensely they disliked their upbringing. "Change" is therefore a cry for the love they didn't have. It's not as if someone can help the upbringing they got. If it was bad enough, of course you'd want change.

On the right, to vote for "No Change!" is like wanting your upbringing all over again, thank you very very much! It's a vote that says, I enjoyed my upbringing! I liked it! I liked all of it, and would happily do it all over again!


The traditions of Christmas are part of that upbringing. The people who trash Christmas are making an argument against the way that they were raised. They were badly brought up, and it shows. People who honor Christmas and honor the religion in which they were raised are just saying thank you. They want to honor their mother and father by holding to the traditions in which they were raised.



The left is therefore very strange for me, but I've had a lifetime to study and understand them. It seems to me that the common denominator is that they hated their families, or feel that they can do MUCH BETTER. In graduate school one of my top professors seemed overall to hate his parents. He's now a violent Marxist who wants change. (I met his parents and thought they were lovely.) I've never understood the basic feeling of the far left, but I am something of an entomologist in terms of that group. They are strange, fascinating bugs. Entomologists love the bugs they study, and I feel the same way.

I went to Naropa Institute to have a closer look at the Beat writers. They bugged me, and yet fascinated me. I lived next door to William Burroughs for a summer. One of the most interesting things in his writing is a story about how intensely he hated his nuclear family, especially an uncle who developed public relations. Burroughs relates how at dinner times he would fasten his eyes on this uncle like a couple of sharp pins, hoping to rip into him. Ginsberg's mother was a nut who sexually abused him. Corso's parents dropped him off at the Catholic orphanage at six months of age, and rarely had anything to do with him after that point. One could understand the need for something different in these writers, and the restlessness that accompanied it. These were very unhappy people, looking for a solution either in heroin, or in promiscuity, or in just about any other temporary feeling of elation. Drinking, moving from town to town, anything other than staying home and facing the pain their families had dealt to them.


I've never really felt like this. I don't drink or smoke, and can't understand why anybody would do these things. I did once get a morphine derivative when I had a kidney stone, and it was extremely pleasant, but it removed the ability to feel the fluctuations of ordinary life and turned me into a zombie. It did have a certain appeal, but not one that was stronger than ordinary life.



One could argue that World War II exacerbated the personal situation for many families, especially for Jewish people who came streaming in from Europe to the relative safety of America. Many of these people had relatives who were incinerated. This changed America, and gave us one abiding belief: Nazis are bad. But the war also tore indigenous families apart, and destroyed much of the fabric of American social life. Women were now outside the home, working, and when they got home, were perhaps too exhausted to function as loving mothers. Could this explain the sixties left? These were kids who would have been born during or just after the war. Was the sixties left one of the last casualties of Adolf Hitler's Panzer campaigns?

Certainly all the drug-taking and promiscuity must have been an attempt to medicate a wounded population. I never understood it as peaceful or loving. The people were just awful to themselves and to each other. How are you supposed to love a stranger, like they did at Woodstock? Or at Altamont? Is it really possible to love someone you don't really know? Were the songs of the Rolling Stones really peaceful? It seemed to me to be more about rage. Jimi Hendrix, as marvelous as his music is, never struck me as a peaceful, or happy human being. He was not a cheerful man. The singer named Janice Joplin never struck me as a serene person who had enjoyed her upbringing. The mood darkened in the 70s with bands like Black Sabbath, and AC/DC, in which rage seems to be playing out on the stage in which the equivalent of a tantrum is being staged by the lead singer and guitarists taking turns getting louder and less and less cheerful. And the songs? They are often about sex with people who don't even have a name, and the need for it to be very intense, and not very kind. What sense does it even make to love someone you haven't even been properly introduced to, when you don't even know their family, and haven't been introduced, and aren't planning to even bond with them, or have children together?

The music of the left is very strange. Here's something called Teach Your Children Well, from a group that was called Crosby, Stills, Nash, & also Young, -- part of the lyrics go like this:



You who are on the road

Must have a code

that you can live by

And so become yourself

Because the past

is just a good bye.

Teach your children well,

Their father's hell

did slowly go by...



So the song is addressed to a generation that is in constant movement: On The Road, as the Kerouac title goes. And somehow you are supposed to have a code in order to become yourself! As if you're not naturally yourself, but have to somehow become yourself by going somewhere else (it's actually impossible to be yourself outside the place you grew up). But in this song the past is a GOODBYE. So the left says goodbye to the past and gets on the road. The right on the other hand embraces the past, embracing their own history and traditions. Embraces their parents, and their parents' parents, and hopes only to be half as good as their parents themselves. Moreover, the song continues that the "father's hell," will slowly pass away, as if they can't wait to get away from their own families and its history, and want to move as far away as possible, staying permanently on the road in order to do so.

And so they live for the future, a communist future, driving magic busses and Volkswagons from one freak convention to the next, in which everything is going to be a lot better than it was while they were growing up. Meanwhile, the conservatives look back to a golden age of childhood and Sunday school, and loving their parents, loving the Easter bunny, loving Santa, loving Little League, loving playing with Matchbox toys around the sycamore tree, loving everything about their life, and their heritage, wanting to stick close to the town in which they were were raised, and feeling comfortable in it, and with it, even if it's just a box house with swing set out back, it's nevertheless home.

I used to think that I could argue the left out of their positions, but their positions seem to come out of the emotional chaos of their family situations as much as out of any kind of intellectual paradigm. The right on the other hand also arrives at its more settled position by having loved and cherished their families and wanting to connect to that past, and if anything honor it and obey it. So they want to CONSERVE it, whereas the PROGRESSIVES are hoping it will "slowly go by" or fade, hell that it was, so that they can get on the road to something else, going to Tibet, or to India, or just any other place, in order to find something worth more than their own upbringing. There is a good part to this restless search: the rest of us can enjoy sitar music, or Indian food (I love it), and learn a lot about geography, and about Hindus and mud huts.

When you listen to country music on the other hand it's about how they love their small towns, the boondocks and the corn fields of Iowa and Illinois and Louisiana, and love their mom and dad and Jesus, and how everything is just hunky dory, and they just hope their kids get home by 9:30, and don't do anything atrocious that will shame their family traditions.

I like country music. I like the country. The left feels sorry for people like me, and think we have a problem. That we are inflexible, and can't change.


I feel sorry for the left. But I don't think there is anything that can be done for them. The left have a fascinating culture. I like reading the Beat writers. I like the weirdness of people who live for now, without a thought for the future, and whose motto is the old hippy adage, "Be Here Now." It's a stupid way to live, but it's fun to read about.

I like the culture of the right, too. The churches, the synagogues, the stable world reaching back into the centuries with the Bible and Shakespeare and Madison and Burke. It's a culture in which time is always present, and in which the notion of accomplishing something within time is the crucial aspect. In which work, rather than play, is foregrounded. It's a culture that goes back at least two thousands to the birth of Jesus, and which will go into the future until Christ's return.

I don't think it's possible for the two sides to enjoy one another more than they already do. I think it's impossible for there to be a middle ground. I do think that for a few people like the Lutheran Surrealists, it's possible to enjoy both, but not to live both. I live as a conservative, but I like the communist and surrealist culture of the left, since I've studied them, and they're as interesting as any group of vampire bats to a vampire specialist. In many ways, the leftist culture is the more exciting one, since it's always about the delirium of change, since what's common to the left is that they hated their families (this is also true among all the early surrealists), and are therefore tumultuously trying to find something different. But there are some cultures that seem to span the divide. I especially seem to like the Unitarians. They have a culture based on reason, but which is not completely contemptuous of religious faith. I have several Unitarian pals. They believe that everybody is being reasonable, as reasonable as they can on their own terms. I believe this, too. I wonder however about Universalism. I do think that there will be a Judgement Day. But I hope that God will be kind to the left. Mostly, they haven't really chosen their ideas. They are the products of broken homes and dysfunctional families, and are doing the best they can to make something reasonable out of the terrible situations handed to them. They're just messed up, and are hoping for Change. If you put yourself into their painful shoes, you'd want a Change, too!

The Anchoress

I was over at Ann Althouse's blog today exploring some of the conservative blog divas from whom we are supposed to choose a new conservative blog diva. There is a woman named Elizabeth Scalia who runs a blog called the Anchoress. She has an amazing piece up today about a Christian family in India who were bombed by Hindu extremists. The face of a little girl who was caught in the explosion is quite arresting:



http://theanchoressonline.com/2008/12/18/they-do-not-love-jesus/



I don't quite have the flavor yet of the Anchoress' blog. She seems to go in various directions. She argues that it is wrong for the gay activists to hound the Mormons over Proposition 8 when it was largely the black and Hispanic populations who went for Obama who got the Proposition to pass, and argues that it is pure cowardice and political correctness that keeps them from addressing this, or going after the Muslims who also voted against Proposition 8. Mormons are just the easiest target because it is well known that they will turn the other cheek.



She also talks about Lou Dobbs, a kind of populist on CNN, and gives details about how he has attacked Teeth Doberman, a popular news anchor on MSNBC. Dobbs, like Doberman, is a Bush hater, but he is a little more centrist, and thought it was repulsive to watch the dogs of the media shred Sarah Palin simply because she was a Christian.



But this piece that I link to above about the little girl caught in the explosion in India is amazing. Although Christianity no longer suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune in the west, it does take on the brunt of the wrath of other religions in places like India, Vietnam, China, N. Korea, and all over Africa. And perhaps slowly it will begin to become a martyr's religion even here in America as it continues to compete with the various kinds of paganism that are resurfacing.



But the Christians in the rest of the world are dying for their beliefs. The media rarely reports on this, apparently because most of the media are secularists, and don't care if Christians are mangled, or blown to kingdom come.

I may vote for the Anchoress for Conservative Blog Diva. I like Althouse, but she voted for Obama. I can't see how that would make her a conservative. The Anchoress was clearly on the side of Palin and McCain. Althouse argued that McCain wasn't conservative enough, and so she voted for Obama. That makes sense. She refused to vote for a liberal like McCain, and if there were just going to be two liberals in the race, she thought she would vote for one who was at least what he said he was. But I think I am going to vote for the Anchoress, and I'm going to link to her today, too, mostly so that I can stay abreast of her blog. Althouse is a tiny bit Christian here and there (she puts her toe in the water), but the Anchoress is a high-fiving Christian, who dives into the deep end after doubly and triply crossing herself, and lands with a perfect ten with her feet crossed at the ankles, and her arms akimbo.

LYING VS. TELLING THE TRUTH

When you give sworn testimony, the idea is that you have sworn "to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

But even without that sworn truth, I think it's rare for people to lie.

If you lie, and you get caught, you have traded away your credibility.

Who would do that?

Criminals of course learn to live with lies. Lifelong criminals are people who've turned away from the path of the truth. Once they err, they may never find their way back to the path of the Lord. But most people stay on the good path.

Once you err, you are lost, in every sense. You have only sulphur to follow. So some people do follow this. And they go on like that brazenly following whatever compass they have instead of the truth and they end up in hell. Toward the end, as one criminologist said, "They lose their pepper." [This phrase was reported to me by a lawyer friend who said that it was said about career criminals in a criminology class.] This means that you have lost your light, and your spark, and are simply inert, even if you want to hurt someone, or do something bad, you no longer have the oomph to perform the deed.

But most people aren't career criminals. Those few who are, may lie quite often. They may even become inveterate liars. Stretching the truth so that you are effectively "bearing false witness" is essentially the same thing as being a common criminal. Some people may believe that only lies exist. Nietzsche believed that, for instance. He thought that all truths were just convenient lies. But Nietzsche was extremely goofed up, and terribly lonely, because he didn't believe in any truth that people could share. He thought people were just out for power, and that they would do anything to justify power. He must have been wrong about this, because his life was so sad. Most people do not live such sad lives, because they live lives devoted to the truth.

The notion of "poetic license" is extended to poets and novelists who deliberately condense and expand the truth so that what their writing forms a greater truth, a poetic truth, that is based on aesthetics and ethics, and isn't the plain and unvarnished truth of the documentaries. In this separate sphere, this ability to "create" is even considered a virtue. Most fiction books open with the disclaimer that no part of the book is true or based on actual incidents or characters. And many readers will have nothing to do with such texts, preferring non-fiction. Personally, I think that "creative" texts are valid insofar as they aim to tell us a higher truth, one that gets at a point that is true, but which rearranges the details of the writer's life in order to spare those who have shared the writer's life, the glare of the public into the private.

Aside from the special status granted to the lie in the art-world, or in tall tales where we're clearly just having fun, there is another framework in which we expect the truth.

If someone writes a testimonial, or if the back of a book says that the work inside is "non-fiction," we expect the truth. We expect the same from a sociology book, or a work of literary criticism. We expect the author not to attempt to bend the truth to an a priori lie that they then proceed to verify. Marxists do not believe in the truth. They think if you tell lies often enough then everyone will believe them, and they think since this is how history gets made, you have to do the same thing. Saul Alinsky apparently said in Rules for Radicals that any lie you tell to get communists in power was justified, because the end justifies the means. Marxists believe that their little fib about class war, and how everyone is going to be friendly under their dictatorship, is worth lying for, and worth doing anything to make happen. But meanwhile, living under a Marxist dictatorship, where the loudspeakers never stop speaking lies, and where the journals print only the convenient truths of the fatsos who run the dictatorships, the truth itself gets so bent out of shape, that those countries become hell.

Lawyers are permitted to cover the truth, and to simply make the best possible case for their client.

On the other hand, when the surrealists wrote their testimonials such as Last Nights of Paris by Soupault, or when Breton wrote Nadja, they are largely the truth. Because they are testimonials. And because they implicate themselves in their bizarre plans to bed down with nightwalkers, and they show us how it didn't work out, and it left a sense of sulphur in their mouths, why shouldn't we believe them?

When the Gospel writers wrote about the life of Jesus, I see no reason to think that they were lying. Why would these four men lie? What would they have to gain from such a lie? Why would their accounts substantially agree? If they are not liars, and there is nothing to argue that they are liars, nothing to impugn the good names of these four good men, then why shouldn't we believe that Christ really did walk among us, and raise the dead, heal the sick, and tell us of a better world to come? The account of the Resurrection, and the short period after in which Christ revisited his disciples: why would a group make up such a story? I see no reason to believe that these men were liars.

I don't think that people lie without a reason. A criminal might do this. Criminals might even think it was justified to do it. They don't care about the truth. They are lost in the wilderness. They have no path. Marxists will do it because they think that there is only power. And that anything justifies getting that power. And because they believe that might makes right. But such might can't last! Only truth lasts.

The men of the Gospels who walked in the truth believed that right is might. Women who walk in the truth also believe that without truth, there can only be weakness and a lack of trust, and sorrow. The women who helped prepare Christ's body for the funeral services did so because they believed in Him. The men who walked with Christ on earth and were prepared to sacrifice themselves with Him (three of the four Gospel writers were martyred, and St. Paul was martyred -- why would they have been willing to endure this, if they did not believe that everything they were writing was true?). Why would they turn out to be liars? What earthly gain would there have been to be had? Why would so many people, in so many different walks of life, just simply up and lie? Why would a billion and more people today believe such a lie much less go on spreading it?

It must be true, not just because so many people believe it, but also because there is no reason for it to be a lie in the first place. None of the gospel writers were criminals. They had an interest in telling the truth. None of them were "creative writers," and they weren't Marxists (who believe that any means justify the ends).

The likelihood is that God really does exist, and that Jesus Christ came to tell us this good news.

Affect Vs. Effect: and the Question of Larry Eigner

Last week I was lambasted by Ron Silliman for not knowing the work of the poet Larry Eigner. I remember Eigner had been brought up in Larry Fagin's class at Naropa University in 1977. That was the only time I had heard the name. I remember too hearing that he had a disease or a disorder of some kind, and I didn't know what to make of it. I think it's cruel somehow to think that a defective mind that is unable to process words properly is therefore "poetic." On the other hand, Eigner apparently really thought of himself as a poet. And he was actually involved in the Charles Olson circle. Still apparently not well known, Silliman and Charles Bernstein and some others (including Curtis Faville, who is now contributing more and more to the comments section of this blog) think he is a fine and interesting poet. Eigner lived from 1927-1996. He had something called Cerebral Palsy. I wikipedia'd this condition and it said it was a non-progressive disorder that may stem either from a brain injury in childhood (including Shaken Baby Syndrome), or another traumatic injury, including encephilitis. There is apparently a wide range of possible outcomes. Some who are thus affected can be considered mentally retarded (the word now is challenged, or gifted!), and some have very marginal mental discombobulation. Josh Blue, winner of the Last Comic Standing, is an example of an individual with Cerebral Palsy. When I had originally attended the Fagin lecture 30+ years ago, I thought that this was a progressive condition (like Lou Gehrig's), and that Eigner had already died! Lo and behold, Eigner lived until 1997, and there are great numbers of contemporary poets who know his work, and even knew HIM!

I think I remember Fagin saying that he didn't have a lot of mobility, but sat by his front window and wrote. The whole thing was too much for me, and I couldn't bear it. I never read him again, and deep-sixed him. I just can't bear too much illness, as it just seems too awful. However, I guess I ought to rethink this aversion. Here is one of Eigner's poems (The typography won't come out as it's supposed to, and that's apparently important, but try as I might when I push Publish, the words are slammed together. Just google his work and see what you think for yourself):

September 16 92

so years been passing the road quiet
still often enough night and then day light up in the sky
behind a towering tree shadowed dense

That poem was written just 16 years ago. Is it any good? If you stack it next to Shakespeare or Shelley, Corso, or Emily Dickinson, does it hold up? If this was a poem by William Faulkner, would we think it among his best? In the victim canon, you now have not only race, gender, class, but also disability. Could the poem be said to have a universal appeal? I still think that a poem has to have universal appeal. That is, just as we have to have a set of universal laws, that apply to everyone equally, so should we have universal modes of aesthetic appreciation, that apply to everyone equally. But there are other critical schools who believe that critical appreciation is too often a majoritarian ideal, in which those who are in power back the work of their homies, and that is all there is to it. If critical appreciation is just a matter of what kind of power-mad critics you have on your side, then it turns out, ironically, that even in the Victim Canon, might is right. I believe rather that we must reverse that, and decide that right is might. Is Eigner's poem aesthetically right, is it tight? If it appeared without attribution in a text of poems, would it stand out as one of the great ones that you want to memorize? The theorists of the sixties discounted the author (Foucault and Barthes did this) in order to generate a study of the work of poetry or a novel as a genre. If however it is the author that is interesting, and if we now have hundreds of thousands of authors, which ones do we pay attention to, and on what basis? I still think it has to be based on a universal aesthetic appeal. Oddly, the poem DOES move me, but partially it's the YEARS he's sat at the window, that moves me, I think, and that he remains attentive.

But is it because of what we know about the author, or is it because of the poem itself? Can we separate these? I am not sure that I can. And yet, just as in a court of law, we have to judge the crime, not the criminal, so I think in aesthetics we have to judge the poem, not the poet. Therefore, even if it's our family member who committed a murder, we still have to be willing to send them to prison. And just because it's someone that we love who wrote a poem, we don't have to love the poem for that reason. The poem has to work on its own terms. But many are now arguing that institutional affiliation affects the reception of a work of art, or in this case, a poet's reception. Eigner's complete poems are shortly to be published by the University of California Press. Such an impressive venue must mean that he's an important poet, right? And yet there are other poets whose work I really like who didn't get much of anywhere. Is it who you know? Another poet that Silliman dredged up about three years ago named Seymour Faust struck me as one of the best poets I had ever read. Aside from a few pamphlets that one can find used, Faust's out of print, and out of business, apparently because he was on the wrong side of the Vietnam War back in the day. Faust is now a retired science teacher living on Long Island.

It's hard to see the difference when one is a lauded poet and one is totally forgotten. And in this case, I can't figure out why one was raised, and one was shuttled down into the bowels of the forgotten only to be pooped into the toilet of history and recycled at the waste plant, unless it's for something as seemingly irrelevant to aesthetic criteria as political affiliation. On a smaller level, I've run into many other look-alikes this week, and it's struck me how hard it is to find the difference even in such tiny matters as word usage.

As I'm going through student papers, I realize how many look-alikes there are in English. It's versus its. This one's easy, because the first one is always a contraction for "it is." Everything else is spelled "its." They're, their, and there, are easily confused, too. One of the weirdest things I've ever read in a paper is 15 years ago when a student said her cat had "instinks." I stared at the word for a while and wondered if she was saying that her cat stank. Then, I realized that the word was instincts!

But one of the truly puzzling distinctions in English is "affect" vs. "effect." This one still causes me to scratch my head. It's easy when someone says, "The European man's face demonstrated that he was affected and pretentious." Because in this case you clearly don't mean that there was any effect. However, a pretentious person can cause certain effects. We might run backwards screaming, for instance, in silent bewilderment.

Or check out these sentences (both accurate):

How does the murder rate affect hiring levels by creative writing departments?
The bad weather may affect the number of people who come to the poetry reading this year.

In general, "affect" is used as a verb. Except when it isn't.

And in general, effect is used as a noun. Except when it isn't.

They have different etymologies, which might help us to keep them straight (back to that later).

"Affect" apparently has something to do with influencing a situation. As in bad weather "affecting" attendance at an outdoor poetry festival.

In this case, "affecting" is a gerund, I think! It names an action! Grammatical terms in English often strike me as batty, since they come from Latin, and often don't really quite fit what we're doing in English.

"Effect," on the other hand, is often used as a noun. As in, "his nasally reading of his own poems had an unpleasant effect."

Does anybody have a clear way to keep "affect" and "effect" separate? At this point, they are like a Venn diagram, except I don't think they are EVER supposed to overlap. That is, there is a clear use of one or the other in every instance. But which is which? In some cases I'm sure of which one I want to use, in others, I'm really not. I'm sure there are other words in English that are even worse, but lately I've run into this problem several times and have wondered to myself how I can be a professor of English and not know the difference. So I decided this morning to clarify it. There is so much yet that I need to clarify! And so little time left.

Which reminds me. There is now a choice going on where we are supposed to use that in the place of which.

Whenever we went to the store WHICH we used to go to in childhood we bought poetry.
Whenever we went to the store THAT we used to go to in childhood we bought poetry.

Which is preferable to which? Many style manuals used to prefer the former, but now I'm increasingly seeing the latter. I read the rationale, and can't generally get it. But now the computer software will force you to use THAT. So I just go with the flow.

But back to the main problem: affect appears to derive from the same word as affection (affectus), and generally has something to do with emotion. Effect appears to derive from the same word as effective (effectus), and generally has something to do with results. In that case, which word would be used in this sentence (this is your test!):

Did cerebral palsy __________ the poet Larry Eigner's limbs?

A. Affect
B. Effect

Christmas Poetry Contest

This post is an invitation to a Christmas poetry contest. Anyone can enter. The idea is that everyone who enters a poem, or who is a regular reader here, gets one vote to decide the best poem. You can't vote for your own poem. I will place one of my own poems in the comments box so as to inspire others to try their hand at Christmas poetry. It also constitutes one of my entries in the contest (everyone is allowed two poems). The other one I'll post later on in the comments box. The contest will end on the day after Christmas, and votes will be tallied through midnight December 27, 2008. Best wishes, and Merry Christmas to everyone!

TOWN & CITY

I came from a small town in eastern Pennsylvania. The magical part of the week was Sunday School. To some extent, church still feels like home. It provides continuity. I've lived now in Seattle, France, Finland, but coming back to the Appalachians & living again along the Delaware River feels like home.

The world of E.A. Robinson is where I grew up. My parents were from even smaller towns out in Iowa. I've travelled, but that was travelling. The mountains are my home. Even in the sophisticated countries such as Denmark there are still rural areas where churches rise and citizens gather to worship. The values are clear and affirmative and simple.

The red state values fit the rural areas. You work hard, families stay together, transcendent truth is found in the church.

In the cities everything is in motion: nothing is affirmed. Ashbery's poetry circulates in the cities. It is parody upon parody of a lost original, with nothing affirmed. Underneath it is a quiet sadness: the mourning of the unmoored.

In E.A. Robinson or in Frost on the other hand you have the quiet happiness of someone who knows their community and affirms its values. God, family, the work ethic. Fog burns off the river and reveals a fisherman standing in waders since dawn. He's not a tourist. He's planning to eat the fish with his family at supper after saying grace.

POETRY CONTESTS?

Poetry doesn't make any money, and so most for-profit publishers won't touch it. Literary agents won't touch it. It's a prestige publication at best. Even if you published a poem in the New Yorker every week of the entire year (which nobody does), you probably still couldn't make much of a living at it.

I've gotten 50 dollars here and there for poems. Sometimes 60. That's not even dinner unless you're eating alone and aren't ordering wine, and haven't got a babysitter to pay.

So the way that it works now is you send your manuscript to contests. Usually about 900 people apply. Only one wins. The one who wins is not generally the lover of the contest judge, but according to Foetry, this happened regularly in the past. Today, who knows? You're not even supposed to enter a contest if you know the judge. Fortunately, I don't know anybody in poetry. I can't stand poets. If I meet with someone to talk, it's generally about a specific topic, and when the topic is covered, I go home. I also have lunch with people who are in different disciplines, but generally I do this to cherry pick their ideas. It seems on the other hand that some people go to parties, and smoke cigarettes, and drink (only smoked one cigarette, and got drunk once, and didn't enjoy either experience) but there are some who actually enjoy all that into all hours of the morning. I can't imagine such a thing. I do play games with the kids, but the kids aren't poets, and aren't publishers. So I can enter any poetry contest I like, and I always lose. Sometimes I do get nice notes from a judge, or from a reader. In fact, I generally do. But that's it. I doubt if I would even win a Lutheran Surrealist poetry contest even if I was the judge and the only entrant, because I'm not sure I would like my poems that much. As for other Lutheran Surrealists, they don't seem to exist in large numbers. I look through the backs of P & W but no one has ever asked for a Lutheran Surrealist manuscript. I don't even like other people much, at least not in the quantities of time that the New York School for instance spent with one another, or that the surrealists spent hanging out in bars. I see no point in spending night after night with other people, when I could be watching television. With a television, you can switch the channel. Last night I watched a great flick called Heat that had Al Pacino stalking Robert DeNiro, and finally killing him! I was also flipping between three math books, and Isaiah Berlin's Roots of Romanticism. You can't do that when other people are present! You would be considered socially abnormal!

It amused me to read, therefore, about a famous literary contest winner of the 1950s. John Ashbery won the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1956. Famously, the contest judge was W.H. Auden. Auden hadn't liked any of the entries, and had asked Ashbery to submit to the contest some months after the deadline. The story is anecdotal, and yet legendary. Auden and Ashbery had known one another for a decade, and circulated in the same party scenes. Ashbery submitted a manuscript directly to Auden, and won, and the rest is literary history. Back in the day, winning the Yale prize was tantamount to winning the lottery. If you won, you were famous.

In Silliman's blog yesterday, he highlighted a link to a letter that had been published on another blog, with a link to the TLS letter that appeared last week by Jascha Kessler, as well as to Ashbery's response. Kessler had been shortlisted for the Yale Prize, but was ousted due to Auden's personal preference for Ashbery's work. Here's the direct link to the TLS letters page (scroll down, it's second).

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article5235921.ece

Ashbery is a talented poet, but so is Kessler. The original manuscript by Kessler is now online. Kessler thought that Auden had been turned on by Ashbery at a dinner party, and so he had won by sexual preference. Ashbery responds that no, they had known one another for a decade and there wasn't anything like that, they just knew each other. In Foetry's terms, which of these would be worse?

If you go through Kessler's early manuscript, it has many Jewish reference points. It's solid, and some of the poems are very good. But it was perhaps too Jewish for Auden?

I wouldn't know. Back in that day, the stories of anti-Semitism are notorious. You couldn't get into a fraternity at Harvard. There was a lot of this feeling in cultural circles. Did it play any part?

It just made me wonder if judges need to share almost your exact same cultural coordinates. They have to have a map of your thinking, such that you share common symbols, and common points of reference. An anti-Semite, for instance, would never choose a Jewish poet's work. Kessler's wife was Hungarian, and some of the poems touched upon that legacy. I like Eastern European history (it's part of my anti-communism project) so I felt moved by some of this poetry. It had a strong feel to me. Judaic poets like Reznikoff are deeply meaningful to me because I share in their sense of piety. I even like lapsed Jews. Some residue of the original Judaic culture hangs around for a generation or two. I like the emphasis on books, and the emphasis on argument. It makes things fun for me. I grew up with many Jews in my neighborhood, and always enjoyed them.

Ashbery's work has never done anything much for me, unlike his colleague Frank O'Hara (whose work I really liked when I was about twenty because of the way it allowed me to walk through the Manhattan art world although I lived about an hour away).

If you think about the project of Lutheran Surrealism it is doomed, at least insofar as it is a poetic movement, because we don't have a publisher who shares our tastes, or who would not have trouble with our cultural references!

There have been a few very good Christian poets, like Denise Levertov. But she made her name with the anti-war movement, for which there were publishers. When she later on became Christian her name was big enough that she could still do what she wanted. Ditto with Bob Dylan. He made his name in the culture clashes of the 60s. When he went to the right and became a Christian, his name was big enough that he could still put out albums. Imagine if his FIRST album, however, had been Slow Train. No one would have heard of him outside of a small coterie without access to big cultural organs like Rolling Stone and NME.

And no one has heard of Jascha Kessler, once shortlisted for the Yale Prize (and now too old by about 35 years of age, to be still eligible). Well, at least I'd never heard of him. I looked through his books at Amazon, and there are books of short stories, two older collections of poetry, and one book that I would really like: it is a translation of a Finnish woman poet named Simonkuuri, which I put on my wish list (it's too expensive).

MLA: Profession 2008

Every year about this time a book comes from the Modern Language Association of America that has rather relaxed autobiographical articles in it. I don't know when "engaged reading," became "enraged reading," but I suppose it did this in something like 1975. This book(265 pages in length), has some 25 articles on the state of reading in various university departments and nations around the world. I expected the volume to enrage me with its engagement (another term for grilling a text as to the correctness of its political stance), but I actually found the book engaging, and full of interest.

I read through about half the volume last night.

The initially most interesting essay was by Peter Kerry Powers, and is entitled, "A Clash of Civilizations: Religious and Academic Discourse in the English Classroom."

Powers argues that professors should attempt to draw out Christians in the classroom, and allow them to read texts in a Christian fashion. This probably doesn't seem outrageous. But to me it was practically Glasnost. (I hope this doesn't turn into "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom," on the other hand, when it comes time to grade the students.)

The essay opens:

"A colleague teaching at a public university recently told me of a conversation with her chair as he lamented the large number of fundamentalist students on his campus and in his classes. He informed my stunned colleague, a Christian, that part of their job as professors of English was to move these students away from their faith" (66).

Powers goes on,

"On the surface such candor seems to confirm what a great many cultural and religious conservatives believe already: that higher education as it exists in the United States purposefully erodes the fundamental values of those it seeks to educate. Indeed, conservative religious people can view themselves as a threatened minority. According to the First Amendment scholar J.M. Balkin, conservative students increasingly articulate this sense of embattlement in terms of broad First Amendment protections and view their inability to speak in class as a form of censorship" (66).

Powers blames this to some degree on the narrow parochialism of the professoriate, few of whom are versed in the Bible or in the deep traditions of Christianity.

"When culturally illiterate, we reduce the unfamiliar to the simplest and perhaps most egregious stereotypes, missing the complexity of different cultural and subcultural formations" (68).

If some 80% of Americans are Christian, or identify themselves as religious (only 3% are atheists), then "Research suggests that religious convictions and religious curiosity are important to student self-conception as students enter our college classrooms, that students in general -- not only those who are fundamentalist -- want to understand how our subject matters to their religious lives" (68).

Powers says that although a number of scholars have turned toward religion as something of interest, few know how to engage the actual religious commitments of those sitting in front of them.

Professor Richard Rorty simply viewed any form of religious commitment as evil, and something to be rooted out and destroyed in his students:

"It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ ... It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own ... The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students ... When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank... ‘Universality and Truth,’ in Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 21-2.

Such an attitude would hardly be likely to result in any kind of classroom illumination. Those who were religious would go deeply underground, while Professor Rorty railed on, completely oblivious to how he was being perceived as an intolerant, violently abrasive and totally unfair bigot who had seized all power in the classroom and forced his students into outward conformity with his rigid notion of teaching as political indoctrination.

Powers argues that such abrasive behavior on the part of professors leads to a large drop-out rate among fundamentalists, which means that they retreat from college, and are equally unlikely to have any sympathy for the secular elite who have taken over the Ivory Tower.

"While we've come to recognize and even celebrate the ways in which students' ethnicity or gender inflects their understanding of a text and contributes to our public knowledge of its action in the world, we don't readily transfer this understanding to students' religious identity -- even in classrooms focused on religious subject matter" (69).

Not only should this information be accessed as crucial to student understanding of a text whether the student be Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, or any other religion, but we should see it as fundamental to full engagement of students, and allowing them to participate fully in the classroom.

Powers closes his brilliant essay arguing that poets and religious people have for centuries been forced out of the rationalist polis but for some reason they never really leave. They're always going to be with us.

"Our good republic may be better served by a pedagogy that gropes, even if half blindly, toward a discourse that recognizes rather than regrets their presence" (72).

I read the essay in amazement. This notion of a pedagogy open to other viewpoints than race and gender and class, offers an almost endless opening of the classroom. Not only does it challenge the secular elite, but it challenges mainline Protestants such as myself who are not familiar with fundamentalist or Catholic viewpoints, much less Islamic or Hindu viewpoints. One question remains: do Satanists get to speak in class?

I then read through other essays in the volume. There is an essay on how we should allow the military-minded to speak in our classroom (it's a quite good essay on teaching Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now in a military classroom in Colorado).

Another essay, by Nancy Miller, a feminist, is called "On Being Wrong." It discusses a short story by Tama Janowitz that makes fun of her feminism (she is personally pilloried), and how hurt she felt when she read it in The New Yorker 20 years ago. Miller even says that the reception of the older feminists by the younger women writers led a top feminist theorist called Carol Heilbruner to commit suicide. Miller doesn't seemingly judge Heilbruner for having committed suicide, but judges the younger women writers for having pushed her to it. Janowitz's story is called "Engagements." It appeared in the 2 September 1985 New Yorker.

There is an essay called "Stopping Cultural Studies," which provides a history of the Marxist engagement of the field, and says toward the end that the whole theoretical apparatus is ruinous and self-contradictory and we ought to just stop doing it, just as William Wordsworth decided to stop putting Greek gods and goddesses and tortuous syntax into his poetry. He just stopped. We should just stop, too, the essay says, and do something else (it doesn't really say what).

What I like about the Profession 2008 is that the articles have an autobiographical "I", and relate to problems of teaching in the classroom that have been personally as well as theoretically experienced. This publication can be found in almost every university library around the world. Most of the articles are mercifully short, and jargon-free, so that they can be read by outsiders to the profession as well. If you want to order a copy, google The Modern Language Association of America and see how you do this. It comes as part of my membership in the MLA, and I don't think it's available in bookstores. This is a wonderful issue!

MONOPOLY

The long weekend with the kids was highlighted by a visit from my mother and father who brought with them a variety of new games for us to play.

There was a Stacking Uno game (very fun!), and a game based on Scrabble, but with dice. The most interesting in a sense was Monopoly.

Monopoly takes a long time to play, and my five-year-old bitterly resented being sent to jail, and ran away from the board, screaming, "I'm NOT going to jail! I'm NOT going!"

The seven-year-old was also non-plussed when he had to pay exorbitant sums to his older sister when he landed on her hotel. Screeching ensued.

Finally, it was just me and the nine-year-old, although in fact the five-year-old was way ahead in terms of properties and money count. He just couldn't handle the emotional stress of being sent to jail without passing go, especially insofar as he hadn't really done anything wrong. He insisted on this fact.

So while the two boys went off to play on some Webkinz site, my daughter and I played on.

Monopolies are actually illegal, I believe, in America. Nevertheless, there are a few companies that have state monopolies. NYSEG, for instance, has a monopoly on electrical supply in New York State. This is a terrible company whose rates are through the roof to support the lavish lifestyles of their retired electricians. They have no competition by law, and therefore they can charge anything they like.

I'm against monopolies, and I realized while playing the game that it taught something evil. The idea is to control all the properties on the board, and squeeze the viability out of your playing partners until you win, by forcing them all out of business. Perhaps my two boys knew something, or sensed something, after all, about the game.

It's a wicked, wicked game.

An economy should try to spread wealth to its perimeters and bring in more and more players. That's what a healthy economy should do.

A literary economy should also try to spread away from its center. That is, the canon should not be absolute, but always be open to challenge from the outside. That is healthy. And to that extent, the notion of de-canonizing dead white males is salubrious. Except that it isn't.

Because what's replacing those authors is not a monopoly of race and gender and class, but instead a monopoly based on groupthink ideology steeped in Marxist resentment based on race, gender and class. Toni Morrison is representative, and no better than most. Think of it this way: she couldn't write a poem to save her life, and anyone who cannot write a poem should not be canonical, especially if the only reason they are canonical is that their intellectual blueprint can be laid on top of Marxism, and found not to differ in any significant points (change black for proletariat and they are structurally identical).

The race, gender, class movement is purportedly about decentering western culture and allowing in something new. But it is in itself creating a new monopoly.

It is not race, gender and class that needs to be de-centered. It's any one ideology.

Right now, there is a monopoly based, ironically, on race, gender and class.

Its legitimation is that it is meant to remove a monopoly. But it creates another one based not on talent, but on ideology.

I'm all for decentering the canon. I want to see -- in particular -- more ludic surrealists attain canonical status. The old canon didn't allow poets such as Mike Topp or William McGonagall to attain canonical status. The new canon based on ideology doesn't either. My move in English studies has been to shoot Goofy Gus types toward the center -- Edward Lear, Philippe Soupault, Gregory Corso, Andrei Codrescu, and others, I've used them all as cueballs to shoot at the triangulation of race, gender, and class as well as the traditional vertical notion of talent and to send the balls spinning all over creation.

I wouldn't want a monopoly of humorists at the center of the canon. I think there is a place in life for seriousness. Funerals, for one thing, are not that funny. When you see your beloved family members departing for infinity and you can no longer hold them or see them or speak with them, it's natural to cry, just as you cry at a train station. When the train is headed on parallel lines to infinity such that you will never again encounter your loved ones (unless the Gospel is right) it is natural to weep.

But there's a place for many different emotions.

At the very top, humorists did not get very far in either the classical liberal canon, or in the new canon of the politically correct. Under postmodernism (ever so brief a period), Edward Lear did attain something like canonicity. As did Slavoj Zizek (whose principal merit is his humor). Wittgenstein was perhaps partially responsible, too. And surrealists generally got some nods from the likes of Deleuze and Lyotard (and even from Foucault who liked Magritte's Pipe That Isn't One).

Lutheran Surrealism proposes a new canon that has nothing to do with the reigning three. It is not the classical liberal canon (as exemplified by Shakespeare). Nor is it the politically correct canon (as exemplified by Toni Morrison). Nor it is the postmodern canon (as exemplified by Edward Lear).

Lutheran surrealism proposes an entirely new set theory, for which the principles themselves have not yet been pounded in stone, and for which there are no exemplars. It's neither Lutheranism, nor is it surrealism. It's a blend, using the notions of the marvelous and of humor as criteria out of surrealism, but combining these with the Ten Commandments as they are defined by Martin Luther.

We do not believe in monopolies and we do not want a monopoly. We simply want to set up a modest new business on the market square of literary and artistic criteria. We don't intend to take over. We simply intend to create another alternative to the canons that be. When we find or create works that exemplify our tendency, we'll probably say something. But we don't want everyone to listen. We only want about 3% of the overall market share. No more than that!

PENTECOSTAL HISPANICS, ANYONE?

We haven't said much about odd groups within groups. There are wimpy Hispanics who wear high-water pants, and have big glasses, and read books on physics in 7th grade for fun.

I've never personally seen this, but a student in one of my classes who's a Pentecostal Hispanic was laughing about this sub-culture within the Hispanic community after my class today as we went up the elevator talking about his Corso paper. We think of Mexicans generally as macho, and boxers and gang members come to my mind.

Wimpy Hispanics with high water pants who read books about physics sound great. One of my hidden problems with illegal immigration is the lack of -- nerdiness -- in what I perceive as the incoming Hispanics. I love nerds. I can't stand football player types. I think we have enough of those in this culture already without twenty million more of them showing up without a passport, uninvited.

If I was the head of the INS I would order them to let nerds in from other countries and to turn away anybody who might make a good football player. People who read big books for fun and stay up all night concocting new theories, those people I'd let in, people who would make excellent linebackers, I'd want out. Of course we'd need a certain number of linebackers to kick out the redundant linebackers.

Call it discrimination, I guess, but I'm in favor of nerds. I can identify with them.

Inside of race, gender, and class, (which aren't descriptive or discriminatory enough for me) I want a NERD INTERNATIONAL party. Up, up with nerds! And effeminate men!

Badminton players, and chess and shuffleboard players. We need more of those. And incoming people should be able to read and write poetry.

I've always hated American football. I weighed 90 pounds in 10th grade, and couldn't last a single play when I tried out for football. I was hit by a guy weighing 270 pounds, and spent the next thirty minutes crying and trying to catch my breath. If I was to change American culture, I wouldn't do it along the lines of race, gender, and class. I'd do it along the nerd/football player division.