Talking with Hammagrael the other day, when we were comparing what we are reading, and I mentioned Hitchens' essays. "That atheist!" was the retort. How was I to know ... I don't remember ever reading anything which probably says a lot about my not regularly reading Vanity Fair, Slate and the Atlantic. I guess most honorable blog member remembers his god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything."
So picking up Hitchens (was he hitch-hiking) seems to run contrary to my last blog that said I was pursuing the need to write poetry with the human need to discover the divine. But thankfully, there is little religion baiting in this collection of essays, other than a rant against commercialized months long Christmas. But then again, maybe if I had read the back flap of awards he received, to wit, the Lennon-Ono Grant for Peace (oddly post-mortum) and his teaching at the New School and Berkeley, I might have returned the book unread to the library.
So there are essays herein that are dated, that opine on political events that still fail to pique my curiosity, but there are enough fantastic ones that I repeatedly passed it on to whichever family member was sitting across the table from me as I laughed out loud or commented on a right-on interpretation of something on subsequent history.
But first for the laughs: the book includes three personal essays On the Limits of Self Improvement. Part I Of Vice and Men which begins with his self assessment of his physical features at 59. I will quote the pieces and parts that cumulatively had me laughing out loud:
"...as glimpsed in the shaving mirror ... only a respectable minimum of secondary and tertiary chins ...the fabled blue eyes and long, curled eyelashes ... somewhat obscured by the ravages of rosacea ... which ... lend a flaky aspect to the picture ... and at other times give the regrettable impression of a visage that is actually crumbling to powder like a dandruffed scalp ...The fanglike teeth are what is sometimes called 'British:' ... unevenly spaced ... an alarming shade of yellow and brown, attributable perhaps to strong coffee as well as to nicotine, Pinot Noir, and other potations ... a thickly furred chest, that together with a layer of flab, allows the subject to face winter conditions with an almost ursine insouciance ... the upper part of this chest, however, has slid deplorably down to the mezzanine floor."
Sounding almost like I wanted to find in Dorothy Parker, Hitchens conitnues "Smoking is a vice, I will admit, but one has to have a hobby ... There now exists a whole micro-economy dedicated to the proposition that a makeover is feasible, or in other words to disprove Scott Fitzgerald's dictum that there are no second acts in American lives." Immediately, Hitchens starts to describe his adventures at spas: "... The trouble with bad habits is that they are mutually reinforcing. And just as a bank won't lend you money unless you are too rich to need it, exercise is a pastime only for those who are already slender and physically fit. It just isn't so much fun when you have a marked tendency to wheeze and throw up, and a cannonball of a belly sloshing around inside baggy garment. In my case, most of my bad habits are connected with the only way I know how to make a living. In order to keep reading and writing, I need the junk energy that scotch can provide, and the intense short-term concentration that nicotine can help supply." You see where this is not going. Yoga, smoking cessation programs, Brazilian wax treatments, facials and saunas and excuses galore. "I also take the view that it's a mistake to try to look younger than one is, and that the face in particular ought to be a register of a properly lived life. I don't want to look as if I have been piloting the Concorde without a windshield ..."
On to Part II - Vice and Versa, Hitchens begins ".... My keystone addiction is to cigarettes, without which cocktails and caffeine (and food) are meaningless." But this essay avoids smoking cessation (it will take many more quips and pages to reach that decision) and details his torture of getting dental veneers and depilation. Part III subtitled Mission Accomplished where he finally accedes that "... all cosmetic questions had become eclipsed by the need to survive in the very first place." Obviously Part III has taken on a much less flippant tone.
Before I hit page 169 however,and a few times thereafter, there were other essays I liked tremendously "Bring on the Mud" from 2004 about nasty politics followed by a 2005 Vanity Fair article about suspicious election results in Ohio which was timely given the coin flipping in Iowa; another article from The Atlantic in 2006, Blood for No Oil, which has me redrawing my six degrees of separation with The Devil's Chessboard and Interlock; a 2008 essay that should be republished monthly titled "The Case against Hillary Clinton;" another Atlantic essay from 2009 'Barack Obama: Cool Cat" which after his veiled reprisal against Chuckie Chuckie Chuckie by cutting New York's anti-terrorism funds and his appalling bad breeding in not attending Scalia's funeral makes the top feline qualities that emerge as those related to clawing, scratching, biting and otherwise spreading toxo coupled with the sphinxlike qualities of absolute reign, aloofness and caste superiority.
I hope dear Hammagrael that this review might spur you to thumb through And Yet. I hope to track down his National Book Critics awarded autobiography Hitch-22.
Sunday, February 21, 2016
The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney
After reading his translation of Antigone for the Abbey Theater, I found that the only other Greek tragedy Seamus translated was Sophocles' Philoctetes. As with Antigone, this is a slim book of beautiful poetry that, like an amuse bouche, is a pleasurable diversion from the tomes I typically carry around.
Of course, apologies to my classicist son, I had no idea who Philoctetes was (although I think my pronunciation of Greek names has improved tremendously under his tutelage). And his carrying around all of Homer as a teenager at least lets me recognize the cast of characters.
But what I enjoy most about these two short plays are: (1) Seamus' poetry. The thought just flitted through my head that he is sort of a precursor to the current hip hop version of Hamilton on the Broadway stage in that he seamlessly converts history into something that a contemporary audience can understand, appreciate and feel its relevance to their lives. Like Antigone, Philoctetes is a victim of war crimes and bad politicians ... what could be more au courant? Issues of forced isolation, betrayal of alliances, and conspiracies over powerful weapons unfortunately resonate now and someone unfamiliar with the Iliad and Odyssey could misread the story as contemporary anti-war propaganda. But back to the meter and rhyme: I'd love to see either play produced but on the blank page, his verses are beautiful.
The chorus introduces the theme "Between the gods' and human beings' sense of things. And that's the borderline that poetry operates on too, always in between what you would like to happen and what will -- whether you like it or not." I think these lines alone tipped the scale for me to order The Dawning Moon of the Mind, a book that translates the hieroglyphics of the pyramids. I peaked into the prologue yesterday to find "Poetry and religion arise from the same source, the perception of the mystery of life." Susan Rind Morrow notes the importance of how a writer says something as vital to what is said; of course, her work is overlaid with pictures as well. I am meandering here, but these thoughts are directing my readings beyond biographics this year into how things are written and expressed and why humans need to verbalize the common questions on life and death, loyalty and treachery, will and group reins, manhood and deity.
But back to Heaney quotes.moving freely between classic theatrical iambic pentameter, Seamus has the chorus shift into almost a doggerel of six beats to lines of five verses that almost seem like a syncopated rap:
"Human beings suffer
But not to this extent:
You would wonder if it's meant.
Why him more than another?
What is the sense of it?"
The more lofty lines of IP becomes more "street culture" and the audience sees themselves with the chorus trying to relate this tale of war to their own personal issues. Heany also drops in straight prose paragraphs so that Philoctetes curse of Odysseus sounds like a dictum, completely void of the finesse of poetry. I wish there were Heaney translated plays to read but I have been led to read his Nobel prize winning series of lectures at Oxford and also further explore the relationship between the need for poetry vis a vis the search for the spiritual.
Of course, apologies to my classicist son, I had no idea who Philoctetes was (although I think my pronunciation of Greek names has improved tremendously under his tutelage). And his carrying around all of Homer as a teenager at least lets me recognize the cast of characters.
But what I enjoy most about these two short plays are: (1) Seamus' poetry. The thought just flitted through my head that he is sort of a precursor to the current hip hop version of Hamilton on the Broadway stage in that he seamlessly converts history into something that a contemporary audience can understand, appreciate and feel its relevance to their lives. Like Antigone, Philoctetes is a victim of war crimes and bad politicians ... what could be more au courant? Issues of forced isolation, betrayal of alliances, and conspiracies over powerful weapons unfortunately resonate now and someone unfamiliar with the Iliad and Odyssey could misread the story as contemporary anti-war propaganda. But back to the meter and rhyme: I'd love to see either play produced but on the blank page, his verses are beautiful.
The chorus introduces the theme "Between the gods' and human beings' sense of things. And that's the borderline that poetry operates on too, always in between what you would like to happen and what will -- whether you like it or not." I think these lines alone tipped the scale for me to order The Dawning Moon of the Mind, a book that translates the hieroglyphics of the pyramids. I peaked into the prologue yesterday to find "Poetry and religion arise from the same source, the perception of the mystery of life." Susan Rind Morrow notes the importance of how a writer says something as vital to what is said; of course, her work is overlaid with pictures as well. I am meandering here, but these thoughts are directing my readings beyond biographics this year into how things are written and expressed and why humans need to verbalize the common questions on life and death, loyalty and treachery, will and group reins, manhood and deity.
But back to Heaney quotes.moving freely between classic theatrical iambic pentameter, Seamus has the chorus shift into almost a doggerel of six beats to lines of five verses that almost seem like a syncopated rap:
"Human beings suffer
But not to this extent:
You would wonder if it's meant.
Why him more than another?
What is the sense of it?"
The more lofty lines of IP becomes more "street culture" and the audience sees themselves with the chorus trying to relate this tale of war to their own personal issues. Heany also drops in straight prose paragraphs so that Philoctetes curse of Odysseus sounds like a dictum, completely void of the finesse of poetry. I wish there were Heaney translated plays to read but I have been led to read his Nobel prize winning series of lectures at Oxford and also further explore the relationship between the need for poetry vis a vis the search for the spiritual.
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