Expedition

Louise Gluck: "Task"

The profundity of our ignorance concerning the merit of what we do creates despair; it also fuels hope.  Meanwhile, contemporary opinion rushes to present itself as the intelligent alternative to ignorance: our task is to somehow insulate ourselves from opinion in its terminal forms, verdict and directive, while still retaining alert receptiveness to useful criticism.

--Louise Gluck

from "Education of the Poet,"
Proofs and Theories:
Essays on Poetry,
The Ecco Press,
1994

University-Level Reading: Vision and Design

My English Department will need to re-design our Reading & Composition sequence to meet the new California laws requiring only One Year of courses to meet Transfer/AA requirements.  As we compose the new course outlines, I have one key question: Does our new sequence create, foster, and support university-level readers?  Writing follows reading; writing skills are dependent upon reading skills.  Will we train our students for competence and excellence at reading in sprints, in middle distance, and in long distance?  Will we be properly preparing City students for the demands of university work?  Can we not design with ambition and integrity and utility—all in the best sense—for our students?

Pirate Xmas: A Song

Here’s a bit of doggeral for singing:
"Pirate Xmas" --  

Ran out of Irish --
Drinking rum --
Pirate Xmas

Futility feeds into despair
Lack of hope fills that empty chair
Friends and family in disarray
Dead, distant,
Dreadfully dismayed
Under sentence
Ducking attack
Don’t count the blessings that we lack
Don’t count the blessings in arrears
Just bless, just bless
Find the needy and just bless
Pirate Xmas

Look beyond
Look beyond
Feed whom you can
Toast the rest
Pirate Xmas

Ran out of Irish –
Drinking rum –
Pirate Xmas

X marks the spot . . . .

--MD

I expect to revise this one, but the tune's in my head.
Feel free to sing as you wish.

Flotsam: Beach Rescue

 The poor fellow was lying on the sand, obviously washed up with the morning tide.  I couldn't help but think of some poor child bereft of his or her friend.

So I placed the elephant on a rock in a spot that would keep him above the rising tide and at a good eye-level for any adults walking the beach.  Of course, anyone seeking a lost friend like this would have their eyes glued to the sand . . . so here's hoping.

I think his name is Hannibal, by the way.

In The Fog

Four Friends Fog-Fishing,
Hope and a Hook,
or Existential Crisis #4?

Solnit: "Counter-Criticism"

"There is a kind of counter-criticism that seeks to expand the work of art, by connecting it, opening up its meanings, inviting in the possibilities. A great work of criticism can liberate a work of art, to be seen fully, to remain alive, to engage in a conversation that will not ever end but will instead keep feeding the imagination. Not against interpretation, but against confinement, against the killing of the spirit. Such criticism is itself great art."

"This is a kind of criticism that does not pit the critic against the text, does not seek authority. It seeks instead to travel with the work and its ideas, invite it to blossom and invite others into a conversation that might have previously seemed impenetrable, to draw out relationships that might have been unseen and open doors that might have been locked. This is a kind of criticism that respects the essential mystery of a work of art, which is in part its beauty and its pleasure, both of which are irreducible and subjective."

--from Rebecca Solnit's "Woolf's Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable"

Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things To Me,
Chicago, Il.: Haymarket Books,
2014

Gathering Luck

Robert Graves: Sharpness, Olives, Cure

THE SHARP RIDGE

Since now I dare not ask
Any gift from you, or gentle task,
Or lover's promise--nor yet refuse
Whatever I can give and you dare choose--
Have pity on us both: choose well
On this sharp ridge dividing death from hell.


UNDER THE OLIVES

We never would have loved had love not struck
Swifter than reason, and despite reason:
Under the olives, our hands interlocked,
We both fell silent:
Each listened for the other's answering
Sigh of unreasonableness --
Innocent, gentle, bold, enduring, proud.

THE CURE

No lover ever found a cure for love
Except so cruel a thrust under the heart
(By her own hand delivered)
His wound was nine long years in healing,
Purulent with dead hope,
And ached yet longer at the moon's changes . . .
More tolerable the infection than its cure.

--Robert Graves