Complaints about reading a Great Book
All posts by Phil
The Friday Fight: Rembrandt
A radically different image for today’s fight:
Rembrandt’s The Blinding of Samson, painted in 1636. Click the image to see the whole composition.
And Delilah said to Samson, “How can you say, ‘I love you,’ when your heart is not with me? You have mocked me these three times, and you have not told me where your great strength lies.” And when she pressed him hard with her words day after day, and urged him, his soul was vexed to death. And he told her all his heart, and said to her, “A razor has never come upon my head, for I have been a Nazirite to God from my mother’s womb. If my head is shaved, then my strength will leave me, and I shall become weak and be like any other man.” When Delilah saw that he had told her all his heart, she sent and called the lords of the Philistines . . .
More on That Product Safety Act
Good intentions, bad execution. Good news for libraries, if not anyone else.
Wouldn’t Report It
Serial killer Ted Bundy wanted to talk to James Dobson because he believed the regular media wouldn’t report his story.
Dr. Albert Mohler talks about the larger problem that Ted Bundy address in his new book, Desire and Deceit: the real cost of the new sexual tolerance. “What we face today are not individual, isolated issues, but rather a massive social transformation that has not happened by accident and that will not break apart on its own,” Mohler writes.
Public Art and Artists
More on That Poem
Frank links to one review saying Alexander’s inaugural poem was “history’s worst inaugural poem” and to another review saying, “It is what one expects from an earnest junior-high-school student with little gift for language, or from a professor at Yale.”
That second post quotes poet Geoffrey Hill, saying society has no use for poets. “The great poet has no social function. The mediocre, yes, he finds himself delivering fashionable platitudes to the public. The true poet is completely isolated.”
Longfellow’s Excelsior!
THE SHADES of night were falling fast,
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, ‘mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device,
Excelsior!
His brow was sad; his eye beneath,
Flashed like a falchion from its sheath,
And like a silver clarion rung
The accents of that unknown tongue,
Excelsior!
In happy homes he saw the light
Of household fires gleam warm and bright;
Above, the spectral glaciers shone,
And from his lips escaped a groan,
Excelsior!
“Try not the Pass!” the old man said;
“Dark lowers the tempest overhead,
The roaring torrent is deep and wide!”
And loud that clarion voice replied,
Excelsior!
Continue reading one of Longfellow’s many great American poems.
An Art President?
Mark Swed says Obama is probably an arts president, so he should do better than the “hokey” quartet by Yo Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Gabriela Montero, and Anthony McGill.
If he really wants change, he will have to have the courage to listen to artists who can’t be controlled, whose vision is greater than his and his handlers. We need artists not merely to sing our achievements but to communicate new ideas and to spread our voice through the land and the world. Obama must mobilize the arts to help him change the mood of our nation and raise our energy.
“Artists who can’t be controlled”? Politicians don’t usually go for lack of control.
Historical Inaugurations
Delancy’s Place has a couple excerpts from how Washington’s and Lincoln’s inaugurations went. At one point for Washington, “a chorus of white-robed girls tossed flowers from their baskets in his path while singing a tribute to ‘The Defender of the Mothers, The Protector of the Daughters'” For Lincoln, he wore a soft felt hat instead of his trademark stovepipe hat to avoid recognition while he slipped out of Harrisburg for the trip to Washington.
The Poem Read at the Inauguration
Elizabeth Alexander’s poem today was a bit difficult for me, in part because I didn’t hear it all, but I wonder if I just need more in a poem than a praise song for the day. Here’s how it ends:
“In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp — praise song for walking forward in that light.”
Did you hear the poem read? What did you think of it then or now when you read it?
Update: Many reviewers apparently didn’t like the poem either. David Ulin calls it “prosaic.” But her poetry books are selling well. (via ArtsJournal)