2012年8月14日 星期二
2012年6月17日 星期日
2012年6月12日 星期二
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Imaginary Concerts
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Imaginary Concerts
In Search of Lost Time traverses much of the same territory with far greater authority. Proust understood acutely both the realities of musical culture and the internal life of listening. His salons are thronged with wellheeled music lovers, although their appreciation sometimes goes no deeper than that of the philistines in Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana. At one of Madame Verdurin’s salons, the adored young violinist Morel attempts to play Debussy’s "Fêtes" and, after forgetting how it goes, switches to Meyerbeer. The connoisseurs, who ordinarily would have dismissed Meyerbeer as a relic, don’t notice, and exclaim, “Sublime!” For Proust, Debussy was the supreme living composer. At one point, Proust subscribed to a rudimentary broadcast service that allowed him to monitor performances from Paris opera houses and concert halls over a telephone line. In his cork-lined room, he listened to Pelléas et Mélisande night after night, placing it beside Wagner’s Parsifal in his gallery of transcendent works.
The composer Vinteuil, an unheralded genius who finds posthumous renown, is threaded through In Search of Lost Time, although we never find out much about him. When the narrator first encounters him, in the mythic landscapes of Combray, he cuts a pathetic figure, “timid and sad.” He spends his time mourning the loss of his wife and ignoring the behavior of his daughter, who has formed a lesbian attachment to her music teacher. He seems a nullity of a person. Yet, when the music teacher undertakes the task of bringing Vinteuil’s oeuvre to light, deciphering and making fair copies of his sketches—“the modest pieces, we imagined, of an old piano teacher, a retired village organist, which we assumed were of little value in themselves”—a major body of work emerges. A cultish admiration for Vinteuil’s Sonata in F-Sharp, the piece that mesmerizes Swann, gives way to general adulation for the Septet, which transfixes and transforms the narrator when he first hears it, at the Verdurins’. By telling us so little about Vinteuil—we don’t even know his first name—Proust shows his disdain for biographical approaches to art (and for heroic sagas such as Jean- Christophe). The Septet is a masterpiece that comes from nowhere. In The Captive, Marcel marvels that “the boldest approximation to the bliss of the Beyond should have materialized precisely in the melancholy, respectable little bourgeois whom we used to meet in the Month of Mary at Combray!”
What does Vinteuil’s Septet sound like? Scholars have suggested various sources: one passage or another might echo the music of late Beethoven, César Franck, Debussy, or Proust’s onetime lover Reynaldo Hahn. The chamber works of Gabriel Fauré may resemble most closely the cultivated, compressed music that Proust describes—in particular, the “violet mist” that Vinteuil summons with certain of his textures, “so that, even when he introduced a dance measure, it remained captive in the heart of an opal.” (When I read of the “little phrase” in Vinteuil’s Sonata, I think of the wistful motif—a filigree around an octave descent—that appears several times in the slow movement of Fauré’s Piano Quintet in D Minor. Proust himself named Saint-Saëns's First Violin Sonata as the principal source.) Wagner also lurks behind the scenes. Jean- Jacques Nattiez, in his book Proust as Musician, notes that the narrator was originally supposed to undergo a series of epiphanies while listening to Wagner operas, but Proust then decided that Marcel should “experience his revelation through an imaginary work of art, for according to the logic of the novel a real work always disappoints: attainment of the absolute could only be suggested by a work that was unrealized, unreal, and ideal.” Thus, a passage that in an early draft was intended to describe the Good Friday Spell in Parsifal—“like an iridescent bubble that had not yet burst, like a rainbow that had faded for a moment only to begin shining again with a livelier brilliance”—was reassigned to Vinteuil. This blend of French refinement and German grandeur is, as Nattiez says, a blueprint for In Search of Lost Time. Like Rolland, but far more evocatively, Proust is fantasizing a fusion of his favorites.
For the narrator, the Septet becomes an allegory of his life; phrases recurring from the Sonata remind him of past loves as well as of the sorrows of the now deceased Swann. Still, Vinteuil’s works escape Marcel’s interpretation of them, just as they would defeat the mundane biographer. They attain a higher reality precisely because the novel addresses them from so many angles, filtering them through the distracted ears of various listeners—not unlike Forster’s treatment of Beethoven in Howards End. As Vinteuil’s music is played at intervals through the cycle of novels, the Verdurins spew sophisticated platitudes, Swann keeps trying to pin down the significance of five fugitive notes, and the narrator savors the gradual evolution of phrases over time. Uncertainty about what the music means convinces us that it really exists. The ending of the Septet proclaims Vinteuil’s independence even from his creator. The fragrant little phrases drop away, and all that remains is a roughly joyful theme, like a “lurching and riotous clangour of bells.” This is the anthem of Vinteuil’s “lost fatherland”— the native country that takes shape only in sound.
At one point, the narrator asks, “Was there in art a more profound reality, in which our true personality finds an expression that is not afforded it by the activities of life?” The sentence paints a picture of European civilization in majestic repose, with music shining at its center. Yet Proust lets a question mark hang in the air, as if he did not quite believe the image. He adds another tinge of doubt in Time Regained, the coda of the cycle. Earlier, the narrator praised Wagner’s ability to generate an “outward and absolutely precise reality”—a terrain over which listeners are borne aloft, as in an airplane. But that metaphor of the ecstatic wedding of art and power darkens when the First World War shatters the aristocratic idyll. Paris comes under attack from a zeppelin, and when the narrator’s friend Robert de Saint-Loup hears the air-raid sirens wailing he compares them to Wagner, saying, “What could be more appropriate as a salute to the arrival of the Germans? . . . The Germans have to arrive before you can hear Wagner in Paris.” Debussy, as it happens, died during one of the most brutal bombardments of Paris, his gossamer dreams buried in twentieth-century noise.
In Search of Lost Time traverses much of the same territory with far greater authority. Proust understood acutely both the realities of musical culture and the internal life of listening. His salons are thronged with wellheeled music lovers, although their appreciation sometimes goes no deeper than that of the philistines in Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana. At one of Madame Verdurin’s salons, the adored young violinist Morel attempts to play Debussy’s "Fêtes" and, after forgetting how it goes, switches to Meyerbeer. The connoisseurs, who ordinarily would have dismissed Meyerbeer as a relic, don’t notice, and exclaim, “Sublime!” For Proust, Debussy was the supreme living composer. At one point, Proust subscribed to a rudimentary broadcast service that allowed him to monitor performances from Paris opera houses and concert halls over a telephone line. In his cork-lined room, he listened to Pelléas et Mélisande night after night, placing it beside Wagner’s Parsifal in his gallery of transcendent works.
The composer Vinteuil, an unheralded genius who finds posthumous renown, is threaded through In Search of Lost Time, although we never find out much about him. When the narrator first encounters him, in the mythic landscapes of Combray, he cuts a pathetic figure, “timid and sad.” He spends his time mourning the loss of his wife and ignoring the behavior of his daughter, who has formed a lesbian attachment to her music teacher. He seems a nullity of a person. Yet, when the music teacher undertakes the task of bringing Vinteuil’s oeuvre to light, deciphering and making fair copies of his sketches—“the modest pieces, we imagined, of an old piano teacher, a retired village organist, which we assumed were of little value in themselves”—a major body of work emerges. A cultish admiration for Vinteuil’s Sonata in F-Sharp, the piece that mesmerizes Swann, gives way to general adulation for the Septet, which transfixes and transforms the narrator when he first hears it, at the Verdurins’. By telling us so little about Vinteuil—we don’t even know his first name—Proust shows his disdain for biographical approaches to art (and for heroic sagas such as Jean- Christophe). The Septet is a masterpiece that comes from nowhere. In The Captive, Marcel marvels that “the boldest approximation to the bliss of the Beyond should have materialized precisely in the melancholy, respectable little bourgeois whom we used to meet in the Month of Mary at Combray!”
What does Vinteuil’s Septet sound like? Scholars have suggested various sources: one passage or another might echo the music of late Beethoven, César Franck, Debussy, or Proust’s onetime lover Reynaldo Hahn. The chamber works of Gabriel Fauré may resemble most closely the cultivated, compressed music that Proust describes—in particular, the “violet mist” that Vinteuil summons with certain of his textures, “so that, even when he introduced a dance measure, it remained captive in the heart of an opal.” (When I read of the “little phrase” in Vinteuil’s Sonata, I think of the wistful motif—a filigree around an octave descent—that appears several times in the slow movement of Fauré’s Piano Quintet in D Minor. Proust himself named Saint-Saëns's First Violin Sonata as the principal source.) Wagner also lurks behind the scenes. Jean- Jacques Nattiez, in his book Proust as Musician, notes that the narrator was originally supposed to undergo a series of epiphanies while listening to Wagner operas, but Proust then decided that Marcel should “experience his revelation through an imaginary work of art, for according to the logic of the novel a real work always disappoints: attainment of the absolute could only be suggested by a work that was unrealized, unreal, and ideal.” Thus, a passage that in an early draft was intended to describe the Good Friday Spell in Parsifal—“like an iridescent bubble that had not yet burst, like a rainbow that had faded for a moment only to begin shining again with a livelier brilliance”—was reassigned to Vinteuil. This blend of French refinement and German grandeur is, as Nattiez says, a blueprint for In Search of Lost Time. Like Rolland, but far more evocatively, Proust is fantasizing a fusion of his favorites.
For the narrator, the Septet becomes an allegory of his life; phrases recurring from the Sonata remind him of past loves as well as of the sorrows of the now deceased Swann. Still, Vinteuil’s works escape Marcel’s interpretation of them, just as they would defeat the mundane biographer. They attain a higher reality precisely because the novel addresses them from so many angles, filtering them through the distracted ears of various listeners—not unlike Forster’s treatment of Beethoven in Howards End. As Vinteuil’s music is played at intervals through the cycle of novels, the Verdurins spew sophisticated platitudes, Swann keeps trying to pin down the significance of five fugitive notes, and the narrator savors the gradual evolution of phrases over time. Uncertainty about what the music means convinces us that it really exists. The ending of the Septet proclaims Vinteuil’s independence even from his creator. The fragrant little phrases drop away, and all that remains is a roughly joyful theme, like a “lurching and riotous clangour of bells.” This is the anthem of Vinteuil’s “lost fatherland”— the native country that takes shape only in sound.
At one point, the narrator asks, “Was there in art a more profound reality, in which our true personality finds an expression that is not afforded it by the activities of life?” The sentence paints a picture of European civilization in majestic repose, with music shining at its center. Yet Proust lets a question mark hang in the air, as if he did not quite believe the image. He adds another tinge of doubt in Time Regained, the coda of the cycle. Earlier, the narrator praised Wagner’s ability to generate an “outward and absolutely precise reality”—a terrain over which listeners are borne aloft, as in an airplane. But that metaphor of the ecstatic wedding of art and power darkens when the First World War shatters the aristocratic idyll. Paris comes under attack from a zeppelin, and when the narrator’s friend Robert de Saint-Loup hears the air-raid sirens wailing he compares them to Wagner, saying, “What could be more appropriate as a salute to the arrival of the Germans? . . . The Germans have to arrive before you can hear Wagner in Paris.” Debussy, as it happens, died during one of the most brutal bombardments of Paris, his gossamer dreams buried in twentieth-century noise.
2012年5月21日 星期一
Common Language: Robert Hass in Conversation- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More
Common Language: Robert Hass in Conversation- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More
American Poet: Some poets and critics have disparaged the emergence of new media on the literary scene, saying it marks the death of the written word. How would you respond to that?
Hass: First of all, let me say that the written word is far from dead. The situation that we re in is curious, because in many ways the written word is thriving as it has never thriven before. I mean--if you take a somewhat longer historical view--hardly anyone could read before 1800. Hardly anybody could read, and hardly anyone got a college education, or was able to study very much literature. And then, during the nineteenth century, there was a concerted campaign in the United States and Europe to teach people to read, and by the twentieth century many people could read, although very few received college educations, and even fewer had access to education in the arts. Now--although it's evident in just these last two generations that the number of children that are learning to read is declining--there are still an extraordinary number of literate people. Far more people than ever before are entering universities. There's more training in the arts, particularly in creative writing and in literature, available at every level. There's hardly a community college in the country that doesn't have an active and lively creative writing program. There are more bookstores, the bookstores carry more books, and more books are being published. More books of poetry, I'm sure, are being sold and read--even if you adjust for increase in population--than ever before in American history. And yet, we have this fixed idea that the written word is dead, and that it's declining. So the really interesting question is "Where does this idea come from?"
American Poet: And where do you think it comes from?
Hass: I think it has three sources. One is that during the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries, the print medium had a monopoly on information and, until about 1910, a monopoly on entertainment, or at least the kind that could be disseminated nationally, as opposed to theaters. The print media were the creators of celebrity. We have in our collective consciousness the idea that we've lost a great readership for poetry since the days of Frost and Hemingway and Eliot and so on, when what's really happened is that radio and television became the media of celebrity creation. We remember a time when the magazines created the cultural stars, who were often to some extent writers. The engines that create fame are always interested in their own kind. Now, writers are practically nonexistent as stars.
A second reason has to do with the fact that as more people have gone to college, education has become far more specialized. There are more and more people who go through school without getting a literary education, so we don't have that in common in the same way. A much smaller percentage of the population received an advanced education in the past. There are more lawyers and doctors who haven't read poetry then ever before. It's a bad thing when a country doesn't know its own poets, doesn't know the words of its own poetic tradition.
Number three, I think, is that all during the nineteenth century (when poetry and serious fiction were an important part of what people aspire to through literacy), poetry was published widely in newspapers and magazines, and it was geared to its audience: bourgeois, sentimental, and didactic, for the most part. Modernism was born in some ways as a reaction against that kind of writing (we may have lost our historical sense of this) so in a way Modernism was notoriously anti-popular. You could say it wasn't true of Williams, but at the same time he did want to publish in all those hot New York experimental magazines. I think that the papers and the magazines stopped publishing poems partly because the poems that they were publishing weren't hip anymore, and the new poems were too hard to understand.
American Poet: In a sense, poetry closed itself off from the world.
Hass: Yes, I think in a way it did. I think the modernists rose up to bite the hand that was feeding them just at the moment that the hand was being withdrawn. Pound was in that way kind of missionary--he really thought that he was going to change the reading habits of a country. But I also think that they had a more "classist" idea of who was going to read and who wasn't going to read. We feel like fewer people are reading because we really imagine that everybody should. But the modernists imagined a small upper-middle class as their audience, and they were trying to improve the taste of that small upper-middle class. There were writers like Sandburg, of course, of whom that wasn't true.
American Poet: Overall, do you feel that this was a mistake--something we should now be trying to address?
Hass: Well, it's hard to say that such a rich and inspired tradition of writing was a mistake. It's a tradition I belong to and a tradition that I pledged myself to. So, no, I don't feel that. Milosz, in his eighties, looks back across all the generations of experimental writing that he's lived through, from Valéry and symbolist writing and the early surrealist writing of his youth, through many of the forms of modernism, and as an old man, having seen an awful lot of the horror of the twentieth century, has an ideal of writing poems that are as plain and accessible as possible. So it's interesting to me to have been in Berkeley at a time when there was this terrifically interesting postmodern poetics that was if anything even more difficult for ordinary readers than modernism, at the same time that I was translating this old poet who had tried on every avant-garde movement of his time and had come to the conclusion that they were mostly the vanity of wounded artists who hated the middle class that they grew up in.
I think that an awful lot of American writing since the 1950s was in some ways anti-modernist, and that one of the reasons that poetry is undergoing this small boom is that people are turning to it and finding it surprisingly accessible, despite many years of education by teachers trained by New Critics to think that poetry was the best way to teach children analytic and interpretive skills in school--which could certainly kill off anything, you know? Somebody did a survey of college freshman and asked what was the single poem that they hated most in high school, and by a great measure the single most hated poem was Williams's "Red Wheelbarrow." What does that tell you? It tells me that such an innocent poem has been used by thousands of schoolteachers who asked "why does he say glazed with rainwater?" and "why are the chickens white?" So I'm sure there's also a pedagogy issue. Still, there's no reason that we should not have a difficult and demanding art.
But back to the question of the spoken word movement--I think it's very healthy for an art to have strong popular roots. Any art. I'm glad that people are reading all those terrible novels on airplanes. It means that people are reading. When Brodsky died, many people were quoting him when they would call me for statements, as saying "poetry is the last defense against the vulgarity of the human heart." And I know what he means--but at the same time, literature needs to be rooted in a vulgarity. Then it can act like a Jacob's ladder to other things. Basho's definition of aestheticism: it's like a tree that bears blossoms but no fruit. You want to make sure that your art is fruit-bearing.
American Poet: Some poets and critics have disparaged the emergence of new media on the literary scene, saying it marks the death of the written word. How would you respond to that?
Hass: First of all, let me say that the written word is far from dead. The situation that we re in is curious, because in many ways the written word is thriving as it has never thriven before. I mean--if you take a somewhat longer historical view--hardly anyone could read before 1800. Hardly anybody could read, and hardly anyone got a college education, or was able to study very much literature. And then, during the nineteenth century, there was a concerted campaign in the United States and Europe to teach people to read, and by the twentieth century many people could read, although very few received college educations, and even fewer had access to education in the arts. Now--although it's evident in just these last two generations that the number of children that are learning to read is declining--there are still an extraordinary number of literate people. Far more people than ever before are entering universities. There's more training in the arts, particularly in creative writing and in literature, available at every level. There's hardly a community college in the country that doesn't have an active and lively creative writing program. There are more bookstores, the bookstores carry more books, and more books are being published. More books of poetry, I'm sure, are being sold and read--even if you adjust for increase in population--than ever before in American history. And yet, we have this fixed idea that the written word is dead, and that it's declining. So the really interesting question is "Where does this idea come from?"
American Poet: And where do you think it comes from?
Hass: I think it has three sources. One is that during the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries, the print medium had a monopoly on information and, until about 1910, a monopoly on entertainment, or at least the kind that could be disseminated nationally, as opposed to theaters. The print media were the creators of celebrity. We have in our collective consciousness the idea that we've lost a great readership for poetry since the days of Frost and Hemingway and Eliot and so on, when what's really happened is that radio and television became the media of celebrity creation. We remember a time when the magazines created the cultural stars, who were often to some extent writers. The engines that create fame are always interested in their own kind. Now, writers are practically nonexistent as stars.
A second reason has to do with the fact that as more people have gone to college, education has become far more specialized. There are more and more people who go through school without getting a literary education, so we don't have that in common in the same way. A much smaller percentage of the population received an advanced education in the past. There are more lawyers and doctors who haven't read poetry then ever before. It's a bad thing when a country doesn't know its own poets, doesn't know the words of its own poetic tradition.
Number three, I think, is that all during the nineteenth century (when poetry and serious fiction were an important part of what people aspire to through literacy), poetry was published widely in newspapers and magazines, and it was geared to its audience: bourgeois, sentimental, and didactic, for the most part. Modernism was born in some ways as a reaction against that kind of writing (we may have lost our historical sense of this) so in a way Modernism was notoriously anti-popular. You could say it wasn't true of Williams, but at the same time he did want to publish in all those hot New York experimental magazines. I think that the papers and the magazines stopped publishing poems partly because the poems that they were publishing weren't hip anymore, and the new poems were too hard to understand.
American Poet: In a sense, poetry closed itself off from the world.
Hass: Yes, I think in a way it did. I think the modernists rose up to bite the hand that was feeding them just at the moment that the hand was being withdrawn. Pound was in that way kind of missionary--he really thought that he was going to change the reading habits of a country. But I also think that they had a more "classist" idea of who was going to read and who wasn't going to read. We feel like fewer people are reading because we really imagine that everybody should. But the modernists imagined a small upper-middle class as their audience, and they were trying to improve the taste of that small upper-middle class. There were writers like Sandburg, of course, of whom that wasn't true.
American Poet: Overall, do you feel that this was a mistake--something we should now be trying to address?
Hass: Well, it's hard to say that such a rich and inspired tradition of writing was a mistake. It's a tradition I belong to and a tradition that I pledged myself to. So, no, I don't feel that. Milosz, in his eighties, looks back across all the generations of experimental writing that he's lived through, from Valéry and symbolist writing and the early surrealist writing of his youth, through many of the forms of modernism, and as an old man, having seen an awful lot of the horror of the twentieth century, has an ideal of writing poems that are as plain and accessible as possible. So it's interesting to me to have been in Berkeley at a time when there was this terrifically interesting postmodern poetics that was if anything even more difficult for ordinary readers than modernism, at the same time that I was translating this old poet who had tried on every avant-garde movement of his time and had come to the conclusion that they were mostly the vanity of wounded artists who hated the middle class that they grew up in.
I think that an awful lot of American writing since the 1950s was in some ways anti-modernist, and that one of the reasons that poetry is undergoing this small boom is that people are turning to it and finding it surprisingly accessible, despite many years of education by teachers trained by New Critics to think that poetry was the best way to teach children analytic and interpretive skills in school--which could certainly kill off anything, you know? Somebody did a survey of college freshman and asked what was the single poem that they hated most in high school, and by a great measure the single most hated poem was Williams's "Red Wheelbarrow." What does that tell you? It tells me that such an innocent poem has been used by thousands of schoolteachers who asked "why does he say glazed with rainwater?" and "why are the chickens white?" So I'm sure there's also a pedagogy issue. Still, there's no reason that we should not have a difficult and demanding art.
But back to the question of the spoken word movement--I think it's very healthy for an art to have strong popular roots. Any art. I'm glad that people are reading all those terrible novels on airplanes. It means that people are reading. When Brodsky died, many people were quoting him when they would call me for statements, as saying "poetry is the last defense against the vulgarity of the human heart." And I know what he means--but at the same time, literature needs to be rooted in a vulgarity. Then it can act like a Jacob's ladder to other things. Basho's definition of aestheticism: it's like a tree that bears blossoms but no fruit. You want to make sure that your art is fruit-bearing.
2012年3月11日 星期日
How a Poem Happens: Robert Hass
How a Poem Happens: Robert Hass
THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION
When I was a child my father every morning—
Some mornings, for a time, when I was ten or so,
My father gave my mother a drug called antabuse.
It makes you sick if you drink alcohol.
They were little yellow pills. He ground them
In a glass, dissolved them in water, handed her
The glass and watched her closely while she drank.
It was the late nineteen-forties, a time,
A social world, in which the men got up
And went to work, leaving the women with the children.
His wink at me was a nineteen-forties wink.
He watched her closely so she couldn’t “pull
A fast one” or “put anything over” on a pair
As shrewd as the two of us. I hear those phrases
In old movies and my mind begins to drift.
The reason he ground the medications fine
Was that the pills could be hidden under the tongue
And spit out later. The reason that this ritual
Occurred so early in the morning—I was told,
And knew it to be true—was that she could,
If she wanted, induce herself to vomit,
So she had to be watched until her system had
Absorbed the drug. Hard to render, in these lines,
The rhythm of the act. He ground two of them
To powder in a glass, filled it with water,
Handed it to her, and watched her drink.
In my memory, he’s wearing a suit, gray,
Herringbone, a white shirt she had ironed.
Some mornings, as in the comics we read
When Dagwood went off early to placate
Mr. Dithers, leaving Blondie with crusts
Of toast and yellow rivulets of egg yolk
To be cleared before she went shopping—
On what the comic called a shopping spree—
With Trixie, the next-door neighbor, my father
Would catch an early bus and leave the task
Of vigilance to me. “Keep and eye on Mama, pardner.”
You know the passage of the Aeneid? The man
Who leaves the burning city with his father
On his shoulders, holding his young son’s hand,
Means to do well among the flaming arras
And the falling columns while the blind prophet,
Arms upraised, howls from the inner chamber,
“Great Troy is fallen. Great Troy is no more.”
Slumped in a bathrobe, penitent and biddable,
My mother at the kitchen table gagged and drank,
Drank and gagged. We get our first moral idea
About the world—about justice and power,
Gender and the order of things—from somewhere.
THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION
When I was a child my father every morning—
Some mornings, for a time, when I was ten or so,
My father gave my mother a drug called antabuse.
It makes you sick if you drink alcohol.
They were little yellow pills. He ground them
In a glass, dissolved them in water, handed her
The glass and watched her closely while she drank.
It was the late nineteen-forties, a time,
A social world, in which the men got up
And went to work, leaving the women with the children.
His wink at me was a nineteen-forties wink.
He watched her closely so she couldn’t “pull
A fast one” or “put anything over” on a pair
As shrewd as the two of us. I hear those phrases
In old movies and my mind begins to drift.
The reason he ground the medications fine
Was that the pills could be hidden under the tongue
And spit out later. The reason that this ritual
Occurred so early in the morning—I was told,
And knew it to be true—was that she could,
If she wanted, induce herself to vomit,
So she had to be watched until her system had
Absorbed the drug. Hard to render, in these lines,
The rhythm of the act. He ground two of them
To powder in a glass, filled it with water,
Handed it to her, and watched her drink.
In my memory, he’s wearing a suit, gray,
Herringbone, a white shirt she had ironed.
Some mornings, as in the comics we read
When Dagwood went off early to placate
Mr. Dithers, leaving Blondie with crusts
Of toast and yellow rivulets of egg yolk
To be cleared before she went shopping—
On what the comic called a shopping spree—
With Trixie, the next-door neighbor, my father
Would catch an early bus and leave the task
Of vigilance to me. “Keep and eye on Mama, pardner.”
You know the passage of the Aeneid? The man
Who leaves the burning city with his father
On his shoulders, holding his young son’s hand,
Means to do well among the flaming arras
And the falling columns while the blind prophet,
Arms upraised, howls from the inner chamber,
“Great Troy is fallen. Great Troy is no more.”
Slumped in a bathrobe, penitent and biddable,
My mother at the kitchen table gagged and drank,
Drank and gagged. We get our first moral idea
About the world—about justice and power,
Gender and the order of things—from somewhere.
Guernica / The Consequences
Guernica / The Consequences
Poet Robert Hass has a bright face. Alert, keen, present in a room, he disarms with a wide grin, frequent hand gestures, and an occasional burst of high-pitched giggling. He looks directly, almost insistently, at whoever is speaking to him, and then waits a beat after they’ve finished, as though considering the full implications of what they’ve said. This inquisitiveness, or perhaps acquisitiveness, is belied by a slightly disheveled appearance: his hair somewhat mussed, his eyebrows in need of a trim. But his gaze contradicts any pretense of clutter.
Poet Robert Hass has a bright face. Alert, keen, present in a room, he disarms with a wide grin, frequent hand gestures, and an occasional burst of high-pitched giggling. He looks directly, almost insistently, at whoever is speaking to him, and then waits a beat after they’ve finished, as though considering the full implications of what they’ve said. This inquisitiveness, or perhaps acquisitiveness, is belied by a slightly disheveled appearance: his hair somewhat mussed, his eyebrows in need of a trim. But his gaze contradicts any pretense of clutter.
Robert Hass - Bookworm on KCRW
Robert Hass - Bookworm on KCRW
Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005 (Ecco)
If it can still be said that a poet can have a humanizing influence on his culture, Robert Hass is such a poet. Here, as we discuss the poems in his National Book Award-winning collection, the beautiful, moving humanity of Hass' voice emerges, making us wish we were better people.
Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005 (Ecco)
If it can still be said that a poet can have a humanizing influence on his culture, Robert Hass is such a poet. Here, as we discuss the poems in his National Book Award-winning collection, the beautiful, moving humanity of Hass' voice emerges, making us wish we were better people.
UC Berkeley English
UC Berkeley English
Distinguished Professor in Poetry and Poetics
405 Wheeler
Please contact directly for office hours.
bobhass@berkeley.edu
Robert L. Hass
ProfessorDistinguished Professor in Poetry and Poetics
405 Wheeler
Please contact directly for office hours.
bobhass@berkeley.edu
Poets Q&A | Smartish Pace (a poetry review)
Poets Q&A | Smartish Pace (a poetry review)
Robert Hass was born in San Francisco on March 1, 1941. He attended St. Mary's College in Moraga, California and received both an MA and Ph.D. in English from Stanford University.
His books of poetry include Time and Materials (Ecco Press, 2007), which won the 2007 National Book Award; Sun Under Wood: New Poems (1996); Human Wishes (1989); Praise (1979); and Field Guide (1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. About Hass's work, Kunitz wrote, "Reading a poem by Robert Hass is like stepping into the ocean when the temperature of the water is not much different from that of the air. You scarcely know, until you feel the undertow tug at you, that you have entered into another element."
Hass has also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Czeslaw Milosz, most recently Facing the River (1995), and is author or editor of several other collections of essays and translation, including The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994), and Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984).
Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
Q&A with Robert Hass
Robert Hass was born in San Francisco on March 1, 1941. He attended St. Mary's College in Moraga, California and received both an MA and Ph.D. in English from Stanford University.His books of poetry include Time and Materials (Ecco Press, 2007), which won the 2007 National Book Award; Sun Under Wood: New Poems (1996); Human Wishes (1989); Praise (1979); and Field Guide (1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. About Hass's work, Kunitz wrote, "Reading a poem by Robert Hass is like stepping into the ocean when the temperature of the water is not much different from that of the air. You scarcely know, until you feel the undertow tug at you, that you have entered into another element."
Hass has also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Czeslaw Milosz, most recently Facing the River (1995), and is author or editor of several other collections of essays and translation, including The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994), and Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984).
Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
2012年3月9日 星期五
系統学 - Wikipedia
系統学 - Wikipedia
表形分類学（phenetics）とは、生物の多くの形質を 同時に比較し、近いもの・遠いものを定量的に明らかにする考え方である。これは分類を客観的に行うことに主眼を置き、進化系統は必ずしも考慮していない。 この考え方は現在はあまり重視されないが、分子系統学は塩基配列などの表形分類的な比較から始まっている（現在は分岐論的あるいは種々の統計学的方法も用 いている）。
一方、分岐学（cladistics） とは、進化に伴う分岐パターンを正確に明らかにしようとする考え方で、（分岐分類学という言い方もされるが）どちらかといえば系統学の方法論である。これ は生物の多くの形質を同時に比較する点では表形分類学と共通するが、想定されるいろいろな進化の道筋から、分岐回数がなるべく少ないものを正しいと考える （最節約の原理）のが特徴である。この考え方はその後次第に分類学にも取り入れられ、恐竜など化石生物の研究で主流となっている。現在では特に分子系統学に基づく分類においても重要な考え方である。
表形分類学（phenetics）とは、生物の多くの形質を 同時に比較し、近いもの・遠いものを定量的に明らかにする考え方である。これは分類を客観的に行うことに主眼を置き、進化系統は必ずしも考慮していない。 この考え方は現在はあまり重視されないが、分子系統学は塩基配列などの表形分類的な比較から始まっている（現在は分岐論的あるいは種々の統計学的方法も用 いている）。
一方、分岐学（cladistics） とは、進化に伴う分岐パターンを正確に明らかにしようとする考え方で、（分岐分類学という言い方もされるが）どちらかといえば系統学の方法論である。これ は生物の多くの形質を同時に比較する点では表形分類学と共通するが、想定されるいろいろな進化の道筋から、分岐回数がなるべく少ないものを正しいと考える （最節約の原理）のが特徴である。この考え方はその後次第に分類学にも取り入れられ、恐竜など化石生物の研究で主流となっている。現在では特に分子系統学に基づく分類においても重要な考え方である。
2012年3月6日 星期二
CHAPTER I (from Anton Chekhov's book: My Life - The Story of A Provincial)
CHAPTER I (from Anton Chekhov's book: My Life - The Story of A Provincial)
"What do you think about yourself?" my father went on. "By the time they are your age, young men have a secure social position, while look at you: you are a proletarian, a beggar, a burden on your father!"
And as usual he proceeded to declare that the young people of to-day were on the road to perdition through infidelity, materialism, and self-conceit, and that amateur theatricals ought to be prohibited, because they seduced young people from religion and their duties.
"To-morrow we shall go together, and you shall apologize to the superintendent, and promise him to work conscientiously," he said in conclusion. "You ought not to remain one single day with no regular position in society."
"I beg you to listen to me," I said sullenly, expecting nothing good from this conversation. "What you call a position in society is the privilege of capital and education. Those who have neither wealth nor education earn their daily bread by manual labour, and I see no grounds for my being an exception."
"When you begin talking about manual labour it is always stupid and vulgar!" said my father with irritation. "Understand, you dense fellow--understand, you addle-pate, that besides coarse physical strength you have the divine spirit, a spark of the holy fire, which distinguishes you in the most striking way from the ass or the reptile, and brings you nearer to the Deity! This fire is the fruit of the efforts of the best of mankind during thousands of years. Your great-grandfather Poloznev, the general, fought at Borodino; your grandfather was a poet, an orator, and a Marshal of Nobility; your uncle is a schoolmaster; and lastly, I, your father, am an architect! All the Poloznevs have guarded the sacred fire for you to put it out!"
"One must be just," I said. "Millions of people put up with manual labour."
"And let them put up with it! They don't know how to do anything else! Anybody, even the most abject fool or criminal, is capable of manual labour; such labour is the distinguishing mark of the slave and the barbarian, while the holy fire is vouchsafed only to a few!"
To continue this conversation was unprofitable. My father worshipped himself, and nothing was convincing to him but what he said himself. Besides, I knew perfectly well that the disdain with which he talked of physical toil was founded not so much on reverence for the sacred fire as on a secret dread that I should become a workman, and should set the whole town talking about me; what was worse, all my contemporaries had long ago taken their degrees and were getting on well, and the son of the manager of the State Bank was already a collegiate assessor, while I, his only son, was nothing! To continue the conversation was unprofitable and unpleasant, but I still sat on and feebly retorted, hoping that I might at last be understood. The whole question, of course, was clear and simple, and only concerned with the means of my earning my living; but the simplicity of it was not seen, and I was talked to in mawkishly rounded phrases of Borodino, of the sacred fire, of my uncle a forgotten poet, who had once written poor and artificial verses; I was rudely called an addlepate and a dense fellow. And how I longed to be understood! In spite of everything, I loved my father and my sister and it had been my habit from childhood to consult them-- a habit so deeply rooted that I doubt whether I could ever have got rid of it; whether I were in the right or the wrong, I was in constant dread of wounding them, constantly afraid that my father's thin neck would turn crimson and that he would have a stroke.
"To sit in a stuffy room," I began, "to copy, to compete with a typewriter, is shameful and humiliating for a man of my age. What can the sacred fire have to do with it?"
2012年2月5日 星期日
Vygotsky
Vygotsky
"We can formulate the genetic law of cultural development in the following way: any function in the child's cultural development appears on stage twice, on two planes. First it appears on the social plane, then on the psychological, first among people as an interpsyhical category and then within the child as an intrapsychical category".
2012年1月19日 星期四
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