Falconry 1: Thom Gunn - Tamer and Hawk

Tamer and Hawk by Thom Gunn

I thought I was so tough,
But gentled at your hands,
Cannot be quick enough
To fly for you and show
That when I go I go
At your commands.

Even in flight above
I am no longer free:
You seeled me with your love,
I am blind to other birds -
The habit of your words
Has hooded me.

As formerly, I wheel
I hover and I twist,
But only want the feel,
In my possessive thought,
Of catcher and of caught
Upon your wrist.

You but half civilize,
Taming me in this way.
Through having only eyes
For you I fear to lose,
I lose to keep, and choose
Tamer as prey.

The Known Universe

The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History.

Watch it widescreen if you can.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U

The Relative Price of Different Liquids

If it seems your printer is worth less than the ink you put in it, you could be right. This chart is via reflectionof.me.

The Lost Art of Reading

In my teens and twenties, I once calculated, I read and finished a book every three and a half days. With each decade, that number has diminished - severely so. My passion for reading has not dimmed in any real degree, but the time to pursue it seems to have been nibbled away. My mind digs less deeply into a text. Other things seem to draw my mind with greater ease. My head fills with nothing substantial, and yet there seems less space for a sustained involvement on which reading a book - particularly fiction - insists.

David L Ulin, in a piece for LA Times, describes this same experience:

I am too susceptible, it turns out, to the tumult of the culture, the sound and fury signifying nothing. These days. . . after spending hours reading e-mails and fielding phone calls in the office, tracking stories across countless websites, I find it difficult to quiet down. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page. Or I want to do these things but don't. I force myself to remain still, to follow whatever I'm reading until the inevitable moment I give myself over to the flow. Eventually I get there, but some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down.

What I'm struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it's mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age. Yet there is time, if we want it. Contemplation is not only possible but necessary, especially in light of all the overload. In her recent essay collection "The Winter Sun" (Graywolf: 196 pp., $15 paper), Fanny Howe quotes Simone Weil: "One must believe in the reality of time. Otherwise one is just dreaming."

That's the point precisely, for without time we lose a sense of narrative, that most essential connection to who we are. We live in time; we understand ourselves in relation to it, but in our culture, time collapses into an ever-present now. How do we pause when we must know everything instantly? How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?

This is where real reading comes in -- because it demands that space, because by drawing us back from the present, it restores time to us in a fundamental way. There is the present-tense experience of reading, but also the chronology of the narrative, as well as of the characters and author, all of whom bear their own relationships to time. There is the fixity of the text, which doesn't change whether written yesterday or a thousand years ago. St. Augustine composed his "Confessions" in AD 397, but when he details his spiritual upheaval, his attempts to find meaning in the face of transient existence, the immediacy of his longing obliterates the temporal divide.

"I cannot seem to feel alive unless I am alert," Charles Bowden writes in his recent book, "Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 244 pp., $24), "and I cannot feel alert unless I push past the point where I have control." That is what reading has to offer: a way to eclipse the boundaries, which is a form of giving up control. Here we have the paradox, since in giving up control we somehow gain it, by being brought in contact with ourselves.

"My experience," William James once observed, "is what I agree to attend to" -- a line Winifred Gallagher uses as the epigraph of "Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life" (Penguin Press: 244 pp., $25.95). In Gallagher's analysis, attention is a lens through which to consider not just identity but desire. Who do we want to be, she asks, and how do we go about that process of becoming in a world of endless options, distractions, possibilities? These are elementary questions, and for me, they cycle back to reading, to the focus it requires.

Another surfer who came across Ulin's article also quotes the above, and adds:

As I write this, I have about seven Firefox windows open to different websites. Now, I am certainly grateful for the gifts of technology, and I believe in its profound potential to keep improving our world. I love being in the constant process of creating this website; I've learned a great deal and made both friends and allies through social networking tools. But I've noticed, too, that flattening sense of distraction that Ulin describes. And it is particularly apparent when I sit down to read, or meditate. It's an unsettling itch. I read with my fingers ready to get on with it, to turn the next page. I don't like it. I'm neither mindful nor content.

A bit of affirmative action is in order. That is, a concerted effort to choose where I put my time and attention more carefully. Do I really need to refresh my email as frequently as I do? Mightn't I try out opening one internet window at a time and doing one task at a time, instead of creating this false sense of simultaneity where articles remain unread on some open tab, as if by being accessible it is being addressed? I've heard of folks who go on "media fasts" and "technology fasts." For me, I think a balanced diet is in order.

At stake is my mentality and my spirit. At stake is my ability to continue finding great joy in reading; to better seek and understand.

I have just re-read Mansfield Park at the moment. I was listening to an audio version in my car, excellently read by Harriet Walters, but, because the version was abridged, I found myself wanting to read the novel again and at Austen's pace, not the reader's or the abridger's. Of all Austen's novels, it is the one that speaks most obliquely to us, the one time damages most, its heroine alien to us: our empathy with her needs rehearsing and those who oppose her, obstruct her or misunderstand her or all too easy for a modern mind to prefer. I wanted to slow the novel down, to slow myself down while reading it. Of one gives in, surrenders to its moral world, it is, almost, Austen's greatest work, but surrendering is not an instant act.

In my twenties, I read the book with greater ease. I knew that the novel would make little sense and give little pleasure if one did not side with the heroine. I fell through its pages. My reading this time was less fluent, more stuttering. The problem wasn't simply that Fanny's stance seems irritatingly passive or that the Crawfords seem even more our contemporaries in their preference for personality over principle, but the prose demanded more attention than it did. Reading had become a more fractured and fracturing activity. I had to concentrate far more.

Interested that this was something which I had to tell myself to do - that I was not as match fit for reading the book as I once had been- I began to surf and Google the subject. I came across Ulin's article and others on the theme of the lost art of reading - the web, a space in which the Crawfords would have thrived, evidently still has its share of Fanny Prices too.

Mansfield Park itself was abandoned while I did this, and the rhythm necessary to reading it - and that I was aware of only just achieving - was lost.

Or so I thought, but perhaps the book and I - and time itself - had developed a more complicated rhythm than when I read the book twenty years before. Back then, I opened the book and might read uninterrupted for hours at a time, and, having read it, perhaps I would have read the foreword, its introduction and notes. I might, perhaps, have gone to a library to find a book on Austen or read another Austen with which to compare it: all this a slow and thoughtful procedure, the work of days.

Now, as I read it, some thought is occasioned by that reading. I put the book aside. I google the thought that arose from reading it. Having googled, I surf a little more - because surfing is not a linear movement - and then, sated or piqued, I return from the screen to the page, I move from skimming the web to that deeper immersion a book demands - and only minutes need pass while I do this.

The distraction of surfing is not a distraction, perhaps, but an amplification of what it means to read a book these days, an expansion of the reader's task.

As I was Googling this entry's title, I came across Gerald Stanley Lee's 1903 book, The Lost Art of Reading, available on google books and from Project Gutenberg. I won't ever read Lee's book - which illustrates my point perhaps - but its contents list has an Objectivist brio that makes it something of a 'found poem', and is now part of my experience of reading Mansfield Park.

BOOK I
INTERFERENCES WITH THE READING HABIT
CIVILISATION
     I--Dust
    II--Dust
   III--Dust to Dust
    IV--Ashes
     V--The Literary Rush
    VI--Parenthesis--To the Gentle Reader
   VII--More Parenthesis--But More to the Point
  VIII--More Literary Rush
    IX--The Bugbear of Being Well Informed--A Practical Suggestion
     X--The Dead Level of Intelligence
    XI--The Art of Reading as One Likes
THE DISGRACE OF THE IMAGINATION
     I--On Wondering Why One Was Born
    II--The Top of the Bureau Principle
THE UNPOPULARITY OF THE FIRST PERSON SINGULAR
     I--The First Person a Necessary Evil
    II--The Art of Being Anonymous
   III--Egoism and Society
    IV--i + I = We
     V--The Autobiography of Beauty
THE HABIT OF NOT LETTING ONE'S SELF GO
     I--The Country Boy in Literature
    II--The Subconscious Self
   III--The Organic Principle of Inspiration
THE HABIT OF ANALYSIS
     I--If Shakespeare Came to Chicago
    II--Analysis Analysed
LITERARY DRILL IN COLLEGE
     I--Seeds and Blossoms
    II--Private Road: Dangerous
   III--The Organs of Literature
    IV--Entrance Examinations in Joy
     V--Natural Selection in Theory
    VI--Natural Selection in Practice
   VII--The Emancipation of the Teacher
  VIII--The Test of Culture
    IX--Summary
     X--A Note
LIBRARIES. WANTED: AN OLD-FASHIONED LIBRARIAN
     I--viz.
    II--cf.
   III--et al.
    IV--etc.
     V--O

BOOK II
POSSIBILITIES
     I--The Issue
    II--The First Selection
   III--Conveniences
    IV--The Charter of Possibility
     V--The Great Game
    VI--Outward Bound

BOOK III
DETAILS. THE CONFESSIONS OF AN UNSCIENTIFIC MIND
I--UNSCIENTIFIC
     I--On Being Intelligent in a Library
    II--How It Feels
   III--How a Specialist Can Be an Educated Man
    IV--On Reading Books Through their Backs
     V--On Keeping Each Other in Countenance
    VI--The Romance of Science
   VII--Monads
  VIII--Multiplication Tables
II--READING FOR PRINCIPLES
     I--On Changing One's Conscience
    II--On the Intolerance of Experienced People
   III--On Having One's Experience Done Out
    IV--On Reading a Newspaper in Ten Minutes
     V--General Information
    VI--But----
III--READING DOWN THROUGH
     I--Inside
    II--On Being Lonely with a Book
   III--Keeping Other Minds Off
    IV--Reading Backwards
IV--READING FOR FACTS
     I--Calling the Meeting to Order
    II--Symbolic Facts
   III--Duplicates: A Principle of Economy
V--READING FOR RESULTS
     I--The Blank Paper Frame of Mind
    II--The Usefully Unfinished
   III--Athletics
VI--READING FOR FEELINGS
     I--The Passion of Truth
    II--The Topical Point of View
VII--READING THE WORLD TOGETHER
     I--Focusing
    II--The Human Unit
   III--The Higher Cannibalism
    IV--Spiritual Thrift
     V--The City, the Church, and the College
    VI--The Outsiders
   VII--Reading the World Together

BOOK IV
WHAT TO DO NEXT
     I--See Next Chapter
    II--Diagnosis
   III--Eclipse
    IV--Apocalypse
     V--Every Man His Own Genius
    VI--An Inclined Plane
   VII--Allons

Reading as A Writer - E.L. Doctorow on Herman Melville's Moby Dick

This is from a lecture on Moby Dick by E L Doctorow, and s developed further in one of a collection of essays, Creationists. In it, he imagines Melville's novel not as the complete and completed behemoth it might be to the academic or the general reader, as Melville might have thought of it while composing it, a frank acknowledgment that writing is a series of decisions, and that those decisions have consequences that determine the shape, grain and tenor of the novel. This is Doctorow very much reading as a writer.

E.L. Doctorow, “Composing Moby Dick: What Might Have Happened.”

I can claim a personal relationship to Melville and his works, having read MOBY-DICK three and a half times. The half time came at the age of ten when I found a copy in my grandfather’s library --- it was one of a set of great sea novels all bound in green cloth—and it was fair sailing until the cetology stove me in. I first read the book in its entirety, (and Typee, Omoo, Billy Budd and The Enchantadas , and Benito Cereno and Bartleby the Scrivener, for that matter) as an undergraduate at Kenyon College. Then, as a young editor at the New American Library a mass paperback publisher, I persuaded a Kenyon professor, Denham Sutcliffe to write an Afterword to the Signet Classic edition of Moby Dick, and so read the book again by way of editorial preparation. And now on the 150th anniversary of its publication (and after too many years) I have read it for the third time.

The surprise to me, at my age now, is how familiar the voice of that book is, and not merely the voice, but the technical effrontery, and not merely the technical effrontery, but the character and rhythm of the sentences…and so with some surprise, I’ve realized, how much of my own work, at its own level, hears Melville, responds to his perverse romanticism, endorses his double dipping into the accounts of realism and allegory, as well as the large risk he takes speaking so frankly of the crisis of human consciousness, that great embarrassment to us all that makes a tiresome prophet of anyone who would speak of it.

...

Literary history finds a few great novelists who achieved their greatness from an impatience with the conventions of narrative. Virginia Woolf composed Mrs. Dalloway from the determination to write a novel without a plot or indeed a subject. And then Joyce, of course: Like Picasso who was an expert draftsman before he blew his art out of the water, James Joyce proved himself in the art of narrative writing before he committed his assaults upon it.

The author of the sterling narratives Typee and Omoo precedes Joyce with his own blatant subversion of the narrative compact he calls Moby Dick. Yet I suspect that, in this case, the subversion may have been if not inadvertent, then only worked out tactically given the problem of its conception. I would guess that what Melville does in Moby Dick is not from a grand preconceived aesthetic (Joyce: I will pun my way into the brain’s dreamwork; I will respect the protocols of grammar and syntax but otherwise blast the English language all to hell.) but from the necessity of dealing with the problem inherent in constructing an entire 19th century novel around a single life and death encounter with a whale. The encounter clearly having to come as the climax of his book, Melville’s writing problem was how to pass the time until then --- until he got the Pequod to the Southern Whale fisheries and brought the white whale from the depths, Ahab crying “There she blows --- there she blows! A hump like a snow hill! It is Moby-Dick!” She blows, I note, not until page 537 of a 566 page book – in my old paperback Rhinehart edition.

A writer lacking Melville’s genius might conceive of a shorter novel, its entry point being possibly closer in time to the deadly encounter. And with maybe a flashback or two thrown in. A novelist of today, certainly, would eschew exposition as far as possible, let the reader work out for herself what is going on, which is a contemporary way of maintaining narrative tension. Melville’s entry point, I remind myself, is not at sea aboard the Pequod, not even in Nantucket: he locates Ishmael in Manhattan, and staying in scene every step of the way, takes him to New Bedford, has him meet Queequeg at the Spouter Inn, listen to a sermon, contrives to get them both to Nantucket, meet the owners of the Pequod, endure the ancient hoary device of a mysterious prophecy…. and it isn’t until Chapter 20 which begins “A day or two passed” that he elides time. Until that point, some ninety-four pages into the book, the writing has all been, a succession of unbroken real time incidents. Another ten pages elapse before the Pequod in Chapter 22 “thrusts her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves.”

I wouldn’t wonder if Melville at this point, the Pequod finally underway, stopped to read what he had written to see what his book was bidding him to do.

This is sheer guesswork of course. I don’t know what Melville himself may have said about the writing of Moby Dick beyond characterizing it as a “wicked book.” Besides, whatever any author says of his novel is of course another form of the fiction he practices and is never, never, to be taken on faith.

Perhaps Melville had everything comfortably worked out before he began, though I doubt it. Perhaps he had a draft completed of something quite conventional before his writer’s sense of crisis set in. The point to remember is the same that Faulkner made to literary critics: they see a finished work and do not dream of the chaos of trial and error and torment from which it has somehow emerged.

No matter what your plan for a novel --- and we know Herman was inspired by the account of an actual whaling disaster (the destruction of the ship Essex in 1819) and we know how this was a subject, whaling, he could speak of with authority of personal experience abetted by research, and we know he understood as well as the most commercial practitioner of the craft, that a writer begins with an advantage who can report on a kind of life or profession out of the ken of the ordinary reader --- nevertheless I say that no matter what your plan or inspiration, or trembling recognition for an idea that you know belongs to you, the strange endowment you set loose by the act of writing is never entirely under your control. It cannot be a matter solely of willed expression. Somewhere, from the depths of your being you find a voice: it is the first and most mysterious moment of the creative act. There is no book without it. If it takes off, it appears to you to be self-governed. To some degree you will write to find out what you are writing. And you feel no sense of possession for what comes onto the pages ---- what you experience is a sense of discovery.

“Excerpted from CREATIONISTS by E.L. Doctorow. Copyright © 2006 by E.L. Doctorow. Reprinted by arrangement with The Random House Publishing Group.”

Lola Montes

This is the trailer for Lola Montes, the last film made by Max Ophuls - a true genius of the cinema whose work becomes better and more moving with each decade that passes.

It was a troubled film, castigated and butchered on release - at least 40 minutes were cut. It isn't perfect, but it is a dream of a how perfect a film might be.

For this reason, it is a film best watched after the inestimable Le Plaisir, the fabulous La Ronde, the spellbinding Madame de, the exceptional Caught and, perhaps the best introduction to Ophuls, Letter from an Unknown Woman.

This doesn't mean that Lola Montes needs a primer to be enjoyed, rather that its beauty and its ambition is the greater for knowing the path that led to its making.


See these films because, unlike Lola Montez, they are wholly achieved pieces of cinema, and then see how Lola Montez is an attempt to transcend them. Don't see them if romance and emotion embarrass you, or if restraint means only common sense and sound judgement and not imprisonment, an impediment to motion to which all Ophuls characters are doomed or denied.

It's a movie aching with intent to summarise the maker's philosophy. It is epic in scale. It is in colour - the only Ophuls film that is - and it is an old man's dream of how life loops back on itself, a meditation of love, loss and fame, on freedom and imprisonment. Ophuls's use of the camera - those prowling tracking shots - is as eloquent as cinema gets.

In truth, and it hurts the film far more than any tales of botched editing, Martine Carroll is inadequate in the part. Any actress with whom Ophuls had worked previously would have succeeeded better, but, intellectually at least, her presence can be justified and made bearable if one thinks of the present day Lolas - the Jordans and the Paris Hiltons - oddly vacant and unexpressive women and yet about whom we seem unable to cease parading, circling, studying and interpreting - albiet less astsutely than Ophuls does Lola. Our current media prowl around and probe such women more lasciviously, insistently and with far greater cruelty, and yet, like Lola, they seem impelled to offer themselves up.

Anyway, praise the Lord, Lola Montez is available on DVD at last. One of my wishes granted. Next up, please - Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc - now that would be a great double bill with Lola

feet, room, poet

Continuing to Live

Continuing to live -- that is, repeat
A habit formed to get necessaries --
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
It varies.

This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise --
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it's chess.

And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.

And what's the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.

Philip Larkin