Southern Bookman

Give up plastics for Lent

My vow for Lent will be to give up, or reduce, the use of plastics. 

Britain's Anglican Church began the Lenten campaign against plastics, according to a New York Times story. The church is offering a Lenten calendar, not plastic I assume, suggesting a plastic product to give up each day.

The world's oceans are polluted with huge plastics islands because of the imperishable material's widespread use. The Church of England's popular campaign targets plastics used in floss containers, supermarket bags, straws, knifes, forks, plates, coffee cups, bottled water, grocery packages, garbage bags, and so on. 

The popularity of the BBC's Blue Planet show has driven the campaign, the story said.  The effort has gained support of a number of Conservative politicians, according to another news article.

I hope the Lenten anti-plastics campaign spreads to the United States, and plan to do my part. Some steps will be easy, like bringing reusable bags to the supermarket more often. We already recycle plastic water bottles by filling them with tapwater and placing them in the refrigerator. 

Other steps will be more difficult, such as finding floss not held in plastic containers. The neighborhood Publix only has plastic bags for fresh produce, and most other food products come in plastic packages. I've grown fond of Pellegrino fizzy water, and never refill its distinctive green bottles, although I do toss them into the city recycling bin. My three daily newspapers come in plastic bags, although I've noticed the carrier now often places them together in one bag. The deli at the Fresh Market also uses plastic containers. 

I'm sure there are many other uses of plastic I can target. Perhaps the easiest step will be giving up products that come in plastic jars or containers.

While challenging, giving up plastics for Lent offers a way to make a difference through personal action.

 

 

 

 

 

Lucian Truscott IV enhances Salon's writing

Lucian Truscott IV's reflections on the political scene and his recollections about his personal history represent a strong upgrade for Salon, the online news site.

Truscott, the descendant of a distinguished military family, in his latest Salon post draws on childhood memories to illuminate the revelations regarding Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner's Russian connections. 

When Truscott was a young teen, he spent summers with his grandfather, Lucian Truscott Jr., the noted World War II general whom President Eisenhower tapped to keep an eye on CIA director Allen Dulles. Truscott calls his grandfather Eisenhower's spy on the master spy Dulles.

In his article, Truscott recalls Friday afternoon gatherings at his grandfather's Washington home, sessions attended by high-ranking CIA, military and State Department officials. The young boy was given the task of keeping the martini pitchers coming. Dulles sometimes showed up for the drinking/discussion events. The piece opens a window on a sunny period when the United States dominated world affairs, despite its Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Truscott, himself an Army officer during the Vietnam era, receiving a dishonorable discharge for seeking help for addicted soldiers, cites Dulles' spy manual and its outlining of action similar to that the Russians reportedly took in reaching out to Kushner and former Trump national security chief Michael Flynn.

A best-selling novelist and trenchant journalist, Truscott brings a deeper level of sophistication to the shallow and inconsistent Salon. Truscott's work is among the best at making sense of Trump's America.

Times' Dwight Garner Takes a Spin in Eve Babitz's 'Hollywood'

The New York Times no longer runs a book review on Friday, the day it publishes a two-part arts section crammed with film, theater, art and music reviews.

Instead of reviewing a new book, the newspaper offers critic Dwight Garner's American Beauties column, in which he looks back at a forgotten American classic. World literature lovers will claim provinciality in the U.S. focus, and Garner would perform a worthwhile service giving attention to authors from other countries.

But in concentrating on American literature, Garner can explore a multitude of voices, reflecting the country's vibrant mix of cultures, ethnic backgrounds and literary genres. Combining critical depth and a witty, readable style, the column gives Garner the chance to roam outside of the book-review format.

Garner in his May 5 column gives an appreciation of  the wonderful Los Angeles writer Eve Babitz, concentrating on her racy, fluent memoir, "Eve's Hollywood." Babitz's style is like Nora Ephron by way of Joan Didion, with "more lust and drugs and tequila," Garner says. 

A Hollywood native who ran in LA rock and young film auteur circles - she designed album covers for Buffalo Springfield and Linda Ronstadt and dated Jim Morrison - Babitz with all of her flippancy and satirical flair also brings an underlying wistfulness to her writing, along with a deep fondness for her hometown. She understands the city's shallowness and facile worship of glamour and fame, while defending its creative spirit. Her work replicates the city's freeway style and social flash.

As Garner points out, Babitz was also a pioneer food writer, one of the first to appreciate the city's ethnic street dishes. She also vividly portrays the city's restaurant milieu, in which lunch and dinner dates blend business, gossip and pleasure. 

Babitz's book, along with other writings including the impressionistic "Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh and L.A.," was republished by the New York Review Book Classics series, which gives new life to significant books fallen out of print. The series includes foreign and American titles. Garner en route to his appreciation of Babitz's work salutes the New York Review's book publishing venture for bringing forgotten classics to a new generation.

 

 

 

Freedom and the artistic imagination

The literary world is astir over the revelation that Italian novelist Elena Ferrante is really Roman translator Anita Raja, according to an investigative article by reporter Claudio Gatti.

Many Ferrante fans are upset that the author's identity apparently has been exposed. They wanted her to remain a mysterious, magical author whose shadowy existence allowed them to imagine her, increasing the allure of her work.

Ferrante, who will publish a new book this month, is known for her wonderful series of novels depicting the friendship of two Neapolitan women from childhood through middle age. One remains mired in near poverty, while the other finds success.

Poet/critic Adam Kirsch in a New York Times op-ed article this week said that if Raja really is Ferrante, her novels are a worthy example of "cultural appropriation." Kirsch believes that because Raja is upper class and mostly grew up in Rome after her birth in Naples, she's imaginatively appropriated the lower-middle-class culture of Ferrante's books.

This is unconvincing; Raja is an Italian woman writing about Italian women of a similar cultural background. When members of an ethnic group complain about "cultural appropriation," they are talking about something different, a writer imagining a character from a separate culture, race or gender.

Author Lionel Shriver recently stirred up another controversy in a speech at a writers conference in which she criticized opponents of cultural appropriateness. She wore a sombrero during the speech, referencing an incident at an American university in which Latino students were offended by white students wearing Mexican costumes to a Halloween party.

While I agree with Shriver's support of artistic freedom, she errs in equating the wearing of costumes to a party with the creation of an artistic work. University parties and other events have different contexts and standards than a book, painting or play.

A person who reads a book might expect to have his or her sensitivities challenged, while a person going to a party might not be prepared for someone wearing an offensive costume. What if a black person shows up to find  someone in a Klan outfit or a native American a partygoer in an Indian costume? The feeling of shock would be on a more immediately personal level than that experienced through reading a book.

An artist should be allowed the maximum freedom of the imagination. Shakespeare's Othello and Shylock challenge sensitivities, but Western culture would be poorer without them. The playwright also created a gallery of wonderful women characters. Some women would deny his authority in creating them.

Faulkner's Dilsey and other black characters reveal the depths of our humanity. William Styron received  intense criticism from black intellectuals for his "Confessions of Nat Turner," considered by others a monumental achievement. (Curious, they are all named Bill).

Writing about the Los Angeles food critic Jonathan Gold, I wondered  if complaints about "cultural appropriation" extend to his work. Gold gained fame writing about exotic dishes in obscure corners of LA. His work inspired middle class whites to explore other parts of the city and try strange ethnic cuisine. 

Should Gold, a white Jewish intellectual, have not written about Korean barbecue, Mexican tacos, and Thai dishes? 

I understand ethnic groups' fears and sensitivities over stereotypes and inauthentic portrayals. The critical framework for examining such distortion might be frayed, as Cynthia Ozick discusses in a recent book, but the Internet and remaining print culture provide a variety of discussion forums.

The evidence of many great cross-cultural works shows that no limits can be placed on the human imagination.

 

Barack Obama Invites Justin Trudeau to Dinner

The New York Times' coverage of President Obama's state dinner for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau revealed how much the newspaper has retreated from its "newspaper of record" role.

In covering such affairs in the past, the Times traditionally ran a complete guest list, along with the menu. No such lists appeared along with the newspaper's articles on Thursday night's White House dinner honoring Trudeau. Instead of a complete list, the Times mentioned a few of the guests in general articles. 

Thanks to Internet searches, a fairly complete list emerged. The Canadian-born celebrities invited looked past prime time. Michael J. Fox? Sandra Oh? Mike Myers? Ryan Reynolds did appear, along with Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels. I suppose the White House didn't want to invite anyone who might outshine Trudeau's glamour. If faded Canadian stars were needed, what about Neil Young? I can imagine him singing, "Don't let it get you down, it's only castles burning."

Also strange was why the commissioners of the Natiional Hockey League and National Basketball Association were invited, but not the commissioner of baseball, Or soccer for that matter.

The menu included halibut - a puzzling choice following Trudeau and Obama's agreement to work together on climate change. With the oceans endangered and fish stocks depleted, the White House might have considered another choice. Lamb chops from Colorado were also served. Guess lambs don't vote Democratic.

The Times did run a confusing analysis of all the guests who've been invited to Obama state dinners over the years. Wall Street executives, including Goldman Sachs boss Lloyd Blankfein, have received the most invitations, the analysis found, showing that Bernie Sanders is right about Wall Street's influence in Washington. Some believe Wall Street execs should have been sent to jail for sinking the economy in 2008. Instead, they get to spend the evening with Michelle and Barack.

If Sanders is elected, the Wall Street invitations will end. The business tycoons probably won't mind - Sanders will likely serve hot dogs and Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream. Plus, they won't want to mingle with whatever socialist leaders Sanders rounds up.

Just imagine a Donald Trump state dinner. Would Russian leader Vladimir Putin be the guest of honor? The meal would feature Trump steaks, Trump desserts and Trump wine. Guests would be fired by Trump. Or roughed up by Secret Service agents.

A Ted Cruz state dinner? Chicken fried steak, perhaps. The prayer would be long. Marco would offer bottled water.

At least Hillary has experience in White House state dinners. She'd even have Bill around to serve as Master of Ceremonies. Trudeau would love coming back to the same White House couple who were hosts to his Dad. 

Since other Hillary campaign efforts don't seem to be working, perhaps she can win votes by pointing to her state dinner expertise. But no foreign dishes. That would be free trade.

 

Obama visit to Baton Rouge brings pride to this Red Stick native

Barack Obama's visit to Baton Rouge Thursday morning gave me a rush of pride for my hometown. The president is visiting McKinley High, the city's premier black high school when I was growing up. I'm sure it was shortchanged in comparison with Robert E. Lee, an all-white high school for most of my years there. Later, several of my relatives and friends stuck with the public schools and sent their children to McKinley when it was integrated under a crosstown busing plan much despised by most of the city's white citizens.

Now, according to a Baton Rouge Morning Advocate editorial, McKinley is a model for technology and educational innovation. A photo on the Advocate's web site of LSU's biracial basketball star and Australian immigrant Ben Simmons waiting to greet the president reflected the city at its best. 

I was also happy to see that Obama's visit to McKinley was catered by Louie's, the vintage Tigertown cafe that brings strong memories of my college days when I nursed many a  hangover with coffee, scrambled eggs and bacon, or a cheeseburger and natural fries, at the small spot on Chimes Street. The original Louie, a grumpy little white-haired man who always wore a tie, starched shirt and crisp white apron, worked the grill and counter by himself from early morning to early afternoon, sending several kids off to college. 

Louie passed away years ago, and the restaurant has long since moved to larger quarters around the block on State Street, still near LSU's Highland gates. The food remains excellent, as the president will discover.

Obama was expected to meet with new Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, who's launched a Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. The president was expected to announce a new plan to increase incentives for states to expand the health care coverage to the poor. 

Politico magazine recently placed Louisiana in last place among the 50 states, largely thanks to Gov. Bobby Jindal's wrecking of much of the state's public institutions. But the Medicaid expansion should give Louisiana a boost. Here in Georgia, the shady Nathan Deal, Jindal's fellow Republican, refuses to expand the health insurance coverage to the state's needy. 

Despite Louisiana's troubles, Baton Rouge has enjoyed a surge of prosperity over recent years, including an impressive resurgence of downtown. The state's capital city remains plagued by  severe poverty and soaring crime, but on this day, I'm going to feel proud of my hometown.

 

Times Book Review recycles New Orleans cliches

The Sunday New York Times Book Review marked the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's flooding of New Orleans with several reviews of disaster-related books, as well as features by noted authors Walter Issacson and Walter Mosley.

The two Walters represented two different sides of New Orleans culture. Mosley, the black writer best known for his Easy Rawlins detective series, cites the mass migration of blacks from Louisiana to Northern and Western cities and how they clung to their food, music and religion as means of surviving their new environments. Issacson, the head of the Aspen Insitute and now returned to New Orleans as head of the city's tricentennial celebration, avoids the city's past in giving an anodyne vision of the city's future.

Mosley focuses on the black culture transplanted from Louisiana to post World War II Los Angeles, where his Louisiana-born detective Rawlins builds his career as a private eye. At the end of the essay, Mosley in a visit to New Orleans reconnects with his Louisiana roots and how the city's creative but poverty stricken black culture contributed to his work.

That black culture, with French, Haitian and other influences, made multiple cultural contributions, especially with music and cuisine. Its literary influence is less noted, and Mosley deserves praise for doing so. Yet Mosley ignores the devastating effects of New Orleans' horrible poverty and crime, and the racial intolerance in other parts of Louisiana that led to the mass migration. His valid insights succumb to recycled cliches.

Issacson, a New Orleans native, writes about the Catholic novelist Walker Percy, an exemplar of a white, literary New Orleans culture often overshadowed by the black culture that shaped the old blues and slave rhythms into jazz. While sharing Creole influences, that uptown white culture held economic and political supremacy,  upholding a rigid segregated system while exhibiting more racial tolerance than other parts of the South. The sophisticated white literary culture nurtured the young Faulkner and produced Percy, the best-known Louisiana writer outside of 19th century feminist pioneer Kate Chopin. But while Percy's "The Moviegoer" examined the late 20th century crisis faced by New Orleans' old white power structure, he himself was a transplant from a separate, but related, segment of white culture that ruled the Mississippi Delta. 

While Percy's first novel "The Moviegoer" holds a place among late 20th century classics, and his "The Last Gentleman" and "Love in the Ruins" are major accomplishments, his later books were increasingly weakened by social moralizing. 

In discussing Percy's famed philosophical statement expressed  "The Moviegoer" and "The Last Gentleman" that people often feel better in disasters like hurricanes, Isaacson succumbs to a short-sighted, Chamber of Commerce view of New Orleans and its recovery from the disaster.

Percy's philosophy holds true when the impending disaster is relatively mild - Issacson cites a "Moviegoer" scene in which narrator Binx Bolling and his girlfriend experience joy in helping a diner owner replace a window shattered by a storm. But a person trapped on a rooftop in flood-ravaged New Orleans likely didn't feel too much happiness. Terror is more like it. 

Issacson evokes a vision of New Orleans joining together after the storm in a spirit of cooperation and unity. While such community feeling definitely was  exhibited, Isaacson ignores horrible examples of racial division and political corruption and the widespread depression and despair shared by whites and blacks.

Elsewhere in the Book Review, Nathaniel Rich, son of former Times columnist Frank Rich, reviews a book by former Times reporter Gary Rivlin that takes a more cold-eyed view, uncovering the racial tensions and political and corruption and incompetence that marred the recovery. Issacson  ignores the city's continued problems in his fatuous vision of economic and social vitality.

Mosley and Issacson both recycle cliches about New Orleans and its culture.  New Orleans' art and music developed because the city once had a real manufacturing  and trade economy, not the unsustainable one based on tourism. The city's future depends on its again building an economy of well-paying middle class jobs. Issacson sees a new influx of the young "creative class" as the progenitors of a vital economy, while others see them as threatening the black culture that Mosley celebrates.

History shows that New Orleans' future will be more complex and tragic than Issacson and Mosley envision. As Rich, himself a transplant to New Orleans, notes, the city's survival is hardly certain. Perhaps one day New Orleans will again discover the social cohesion, artistic creativity and economic power that once made it great. 

My Southern Heritage, Universal Outlook

I've sometimes wondered why I called this venture Southern Bookman, since that implies the regionalism and provincialism I deplore. In my literary interests, I consider myself a member of the Republic of Letters, the historical and enduring fellowship explored by Princeton historian Anthony Grafton in his recent book "Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West."

While I have an international, open-minded outlook, I instinctively and without much thought decided to use the title "Southern Bookman." I am a Southerner, irrevocably stamped by my upbringing in Southern Louisiana, in many ways different from the rest of the South because of its French and Catholic heritage. While I lack much patience for neo-Confederate Romanticism, or the Southern boosterism espoused by the Oxford American, I am in profound ways a provincial Southerner.

As an LSU graduate, I am deeply proud of the university's literary heritage, fostered by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks in the original incarnation of the Southern Review, and nurtured today with the continued excellence of the literary journal, and the LSU Press. I love the South's literary tradition, rooted in William Faulkner, but contributed to by so many others: Eudora Welty, Kate Chopin, Flannery O'Connor, Roy Blount, Barry Hannah, Tom Franklin, Donald Barthelme, Larry McMurtry, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon and on and on. Among my favorite writers, the quintessential Yankee, Robert Lowell, was strongly stamped by his association with Southerners and his time in the Deep South.

I consider myself as adding to the tradtion of Southern liberalism/progressism, with various branches reaching to Huey and Earl Long, William Faulkner, Ralph McGill, Eugene Patterson,  Walker and William Percy, Hodding Carter (a bitter Long foe in his Louisiana Days), Wendell Berrry and so many others. Like Berry, I respect the Agrarians, rejecting their racism, but seeing much of value in their espousal of  tradition and criticism of modern, monolithic capitalism.

While I revere Lincoln and the Union cause, I have a deeply engrained emotional bond with the soldiers of the South and military leaders like Lee and Jackson. I am an irrational and emotional partisan of LSU football and other sports, although for many years I tried to deny that tribal attachment.

For better or worse, I am a Southerner, a Louisianian, and I suppose, a Georgian, although I've resisted the latter attachement despite living in Georgia for now more than 30 years. I've had allegiances to Sewanee, Emory and the University of Florida. Along with other intellectual Southerners, I deplore the South's poverty, religious fundamentalism, suspicion of outsiders and fresh ideas, violence, self-destructive eating and drinking, and defensiveness, traces of all of which I possess like minerals in my bloodstream. I love the South's colorful language, storytelling, loyalty, sense of honor, love of nature and beauty, romanticism, family consciousness and love of eating, drinking, celebration and ceremony. As these conflicting statements indicate, the best and worst of the South are sides of the same cracked mirror, through which a clear image can be difficult to discern.

I'm not sure why I felt compelled to write this type of essay now, so many months into Southern Bookman. For some reason, I felt the need to orient myself to the site's mission, and give some insight into its purpose and outlook.

I've enjoyed doing the site's interviews with a variety of writers, and look forward to continuing this in 2010. I also look ahead to renewing my efforts to cover American and global writing and thinking. As a new year arrives, I am grateful for the many readers and supporters of this effort and happily anticipate the journey continuing. 

 

Emily Grosholz on Poetry, Mathematics, Philosophy ... and Garrison Keillor and Honey Crisp Apples

I met Emily Grosholz, professor of philosopy at Penn State University and a distinguished poet and essayist, at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, where I was in her poetry workshop in 1991 and 1992.  In the first year, the inaugural of the writers’ conference, she read my fledgling poems, and I was grateful for her kindness and instructive suggestions. Along with her deep learning in philosophy, poetry and matematics, I was delighted to discover that she is also well-versed in baseball, and if I remember correctly, tennis. We also shared anecdotes, stories and information about our then young families. I remember as well her calm, quiet presence in the workshops, which she conducted along with two roaring lions of American poetry, Howard Nemerov the first year, and John Hollander the second.

Over the years, I’ve followed Emily’s work in The Hudson Review, where she is an advisory editor. Her work in the the journal displays an astonishing versatility, including poetry, essays, criticism and travel pieces. The autumn 2009 issue includes Emily’s probing essay on the poet Anne Stevenson. The issue also includes a poignant poem by Stevenson about teaching her sons to swim at Walden Pond. I particularly enjoyed the poem because I  in the summer of 2008 visited the site of Thoreau's cabin on Walden Pond, amused and impressed to discover that the pond is a public swimming beach, as Stevenson evokes.

With my warm memories of Emily,  I asked her to participate in a Southern Bookman interview, and she graciously agreed. I have decided to run her response in two sections that to me constitute two separate essays that I am pleased to share with The Southern Bookman's growing group of readers. In the first, which apply to my first four questions, she intersperses personal experiences and witty observations with wide-ranging thoughts on poetry and philosophy. In the second section, she presents an in-depth consideration of the relationship between poetry and mathematics 

One other thought: In the spirit of Emily's allusions to different texts, her citation of Aristotle’s comment that “a swallow does not a summer make”  reminded me of Robert Lowell’s reference to this in his poem “Fall 1961,” which can be found in his “For the Union Dead.” Looking back at Lowell’s poem, I found it still relevant to this troubling “Fall 2009.”

 Part 1: On Philosophy and Poetry, and Walks Through Fields

1. As a philosopher and poet, what do you feel is the relationship between philosophy and poetry?

2. To follow up on the first question, you are also an accomplished editor, essayist and critic. Such varied interests are said to be rare in our age of specialization. What is the source and inspiration for your versatility?

3. Your comments in your essay on the poet Anne Stevenson in the current Hudson Review well-expressed my reactions to many of your poems. A quote stands out: “A lyric poem’s or a sonata’s action on the world and in the world has various effects; the circling back of time is one of them. Speak, memory, or sing.” In re-reading “Shores and Headlands” and reading some of your poems I found online, I was struck at how your poems often evoke a first-person narrator or self recalling events in the past in a present moment of seclusion; as you said in regard to Stevenson, your poems make the past present. How do you think your comments on Stevenson apply to your own poems?

4. After Sept. 11, 2001, many in the United States sought solace in poetry. Do you believe that philosophy can provide similar understanding and insight into such overwhelming events? One of my favorite poems of yours is “Nietzsche in the Box of Straws,” in which a cook understands the narrator’s explanation of Nietzsche, affirming the relevance of philosophy to average people.

 

Barnes & Noble has a new series of modestly priced hardcover books they call, “Rediscovers,” which “brings back into print books of special merit in history, literature, philosophy, religion, the arts and science.” One of them, no doubt included because of Darwin’s bicentenary, is “Darwin’s Century” by Loren Eiseley, whose meditations on natural history, “The Immense Journey,” forever changed my understanding of reality when I was still in high school. Only two books in the series are written by women, Suzanne Langer’s "Philosophical Sketches," and Frances Yates’ "Theatre of the World,"  though one, writings by Roland Barthes, is edited by Susan Sontag.  Finding them in the series led me to look for Langer in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where she is missing, though there is a nice essay on Ernst Cassirer, whose “Philosophy of Symbolic Forms”  inspired her best work.

The reason I mention this series is because it includes George Santayana's “Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, Goethe," which also inspired me in high school, though I have since lost my dog-eared paperback copy, and so was glad to pick up a new one at Barnes & Noble, where I went to buy Garrison Keillor’s latest book for my eldest son Benjamin, who is studying classics and mathematics at the University of Chicago. He wasn't home for Thanksgiving, so I sent him a book instead of a turkey, as well as two packages of  hawthorn-berry tea. The only place in town  where I can get that kind of tea is The Granary, a health food store run by Lena Scholton, a friend of mine who is Finnish and grew up in Helsinki. I just submitted a poem to George Core for The Sewanee Review about saying goodbye to my eldest son as he flew off to Chicago in September, after taking a long walk with him in the fields that happen to stretch between my house and Harner Farm (whose orchard produces the best apples in the world — honey crisp is the variety) and The Granary.

I gave Lena a copy of my “Letter from Helsinki” when it was published in The Hudson Review a couple of years ago, because I wrote it in part on the basis of good practical, architectural, and gastronomical advice Lena and Hudson Review Editor Paula Deitz gave me. I was also inspired by four philosophers whom I know and talked to there: Jakko Hintikka (also a logician), Matti Sintonen (also the father of a rock star and a businesswoman), Osmo Pekonen (also a mathematician) and Jyrki Siukonen (also an artist and former rock musician).

Finally, apropos this morning’s errands, a review of a new biography of Cassirer that Paula Deitz and Managing Editor Ron Koury persuaded me to write is coming out shortly in The Hudson Review, and so is a poem about walking in the fields at night with my other children, directly inspired by Loren Eiseley: it evokes the last ice age, and ends with a large tree completely covered in fireflies. Note that my prose style here echoes Garrison Keillor. It is after all Saturday (“Prairie Home Companion” day) and I've recently returned from the Twin Cities, where I visited my best friend from high school, Ruth Geyer Shaw, who is a botanist and an evolutionary geneticist, and whose novel statistical method expounded in her three latest co-authored papers (also inspired by her statistician brother Charlie and informed by her mathematician husband Frank) constitute the case study of a philosophy of science paper I'm giving in Louvain, Belgium. I wrote a poem about her and her plantlets (then Salvia lyrata, now Echinacea angustifolia, with Arabidopsis thaliana in between) that appeared in my second book "Shores and Headlands.” I spent all morning, before I went out to do errands, reading Charlie's newly minted essay “A Philosophical Look at Aster Models” written for people who only have some college level statistics. So you could say that I find solace in poetry and philosophy in everyday life.

However, following Keillor, I have wandered away from George Santayana. Over the years at Penn State, I have been able to teach the philosophical poems of Lucretius, Dante and Goethe, as well as Boethius, and quite a bit of Plato and Aristotle. Here is how I think the relation between poetry and philosophy shapes up in the work of those two Greek philosophers. (I won't give my speech about Lucretius, Dante and Goethe, however, because you can read about them in Santayana's book, though I do disagree with him here and there.) As everyone knows, Plato banished the poets from the ideal city described in “The Republic,” where the kings are philosophers, sort of like the United States ever since last winter, except that we elected ours and he’s from the law school at the University of Chicago, not the philosophy department. However, right in the middle of “The Republic,” Plato presents the famous simile of the Divided Line, which provides a schema for the structure of each dialogue, including the one it shows up in. Good philosophizing takes you (a small group of interested parties) up the Divided Line, from the realm of gossip and rumor, populated by shadows, echoes, and myths, to the realm of  common sense, populated by ordinary physical objects: stones, trees, cows, people, chairs, houses. Philosophy being what it is, we don’t stop there, but continue up from the realm of  Becoming into the Realm of Being, moving via the realm of mathematics (inhabited by figures and numbers) to the realm of philosophy (inhabited in one sense by the Ideas or Forms, though in

another sense they are off the Line). Because a Platonic dialogue does not end in a conclusion, you have to somehow connect the top of the line with the bottom and start all over, and what  connects the top and the bottom is… myths! The Platonic myths are the most gorgeously poetic parts of the dialogues, and the most important. So go figure. Also, Platonic dialogues are sprinkled with quotes from Homer.

Most of this I learned from my fellow University of Chicago philosopher, Paul Kahn, now director of the Schell Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. He was inspired in turn by his teacher Herman Sinaiko. (If you go to the University of Chicago magazine online (November-December 2009) you will see Herman wearing a “Herman Sinaiko is a Rock Star” T-shirt, which is the title of a Facebook group set up in 2005 by former students; wearing a T-shirt is completely atypical of him because he always wears turtlenecks and doesn't talk about himself when he's teaching.) Paul's wife, Cathy Iino, was my best friend in graduate school, when we were in the same poetry writing group, and is now the mayor (technically, the first selectman) of Killingworth, Connecticut! I hope that she is elected to a second term, and then runs for the Senate, ousting Joe Lieberman, and then for president, so she can be our first Asian-American and woman president. I also learned about the Divided Line from Jamie Redfield, who was my Greek professor at the University of Chicago, and is writing a book on Plato and Socrates, where he argues that Plato is not a philosopher in the ordinary sense because he never comes to conclusions, and perhaps not a philosopher at all! Perhaps he is a poet. There are poems for Cathy (homesick, from Germany) and Jamie (scholarly, from a library) in my first book of poems "The River Painter. "

Aristotle is another matter. I read the “Nichomachean Ethics” together with the "Rhetoric” and the “Politics" on the one hand, and the "Poetics" on the other. Another of my former teachers, Eugene Garver, has written a number of distinguished books on Aristotle, and in a recent e-mail wondered how I see connection between the "Nichomachean Ethics" and "the Poetics." The connection I see is only the obvious: poetry is (according to Aristotle) the imitation of human action, and he gives us the schema for narrative: beginning, middle, end, as he gives us the schema for argument: premise, premise, conclusion. And ethics is the study of how human action can be virtuous, which requires us to focus on character, the second most important term in “The Poetics,” after plot. (I wrote an essay about this in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, whose latest issue is devoted to poetry and philosophy, and begins with a poem by John Ashbery!)

Aristotle shows that when tragedy arises, the deed is either done or not done, and, done in ignorance or done knowingly; the main issue in “The Ethics” is the question of the relation between knowing and doing. Socrates claims that if I could only know what is right, I would do it; vice is ignorance. Aristotle shows at length that character is built up over a long period of time by repeated actions, taken in the midst of the repetitive patterns of social life, and changes just as slowly, so that though I may know the good, I may be unwilling to do it if my character is ill-formed. He also observes that happiness depends not only on virtue but also on good luck; tragic heroes are doomed not only by flawed character but also by misfortune. So for Aristotle, there’s not much tension between philosophy and poetry, though oddly he himself never writes poetically (and the textual basis for his philosophy is lecture notes), except occasionally: “One swallow doth not a summer make.” That reminds me of a philosophical poem I just wrote, and a good philosophical joke that I sometimes tell my undergraduates (usually I am the only one who laughs at it) because it is not off color; however, there is not enough room in the margin to write it here.

Part 2: On Poetry and Mathematics, Empson and Housman

 

5. According to your Penn State Web site, one of your projects is “mathematics and poetry” in which you say poetry stands in the same relation to the humanities as  mathematics stands to the sciences.” Could you go into this further?

When I applied to the University of Chicago 40 years ago, I said that my topic was poetry and mathematics, and almost as soon as I arrived, my adviser David Smigelskis put into my hands Scott Buchanan's wonderful "Poetry and Mathematics." It gave me permission to structure my intellectual life in the way I wanted, and has guided me ever since; the book I plan to write one of these years, "Mathematics and Poetry," will be an answer to his, one that has been in preparation for many decades.

 

My apprenticeship has been three monographs and an edited collection of essays on the history and philosophy of mathematics, and four books of poetry and more than 50 items of literary criticism —essays and essay-reviews. A couple of years ago, I wrote what will become one of the proposed book’s initial chapters, “The Uses of Periodicity in English Verse,” published in The Hudson Review, which like the “Letter from Helsinki,” can be found on FindArticles. One chapter may address texts written by Leibniz and Goethe (apropos the Italienische Reise that changed the life and work of each); another may be about the way in which abstract form brings the finite and the infinite into relation in the work of Rilke and Hilbert; another might be about temporality, and the way it both resists and lends itself to representation by mathematical form and by narrative.

In any case, the book “Mathematics and Poetry” must have two dimensions. One is epistemological. Human understanding hovers between the timeless realm of concepts, propositions, and arguments that stand in inferential relations tracked by logic and rhetoric, and the historical realm in which discoveries are made and projects framed on the basis of earlier results and in light of as-yet-unsolved problems. A name or concept pulls something that exists out of the flux of time, and by imposing the universal on the particular gives it a kind of local immortality. (This happens quite a bit in Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”)

 

Arguments organize thoughts so that they can be rehearsed and examined; narratives organize human actions so that they can be revisited and their meaning reconsidered. A scientific experiment on the one hand and a theatrical drama on the other deliberately represent situations both as having happened once — physically or dramatically real — and as meant to be repeated — universally true. In mathematics and poetry, the tension on this duality is especially strong. The study of mathematical knowledge and poetic knowledge is therefore central to philosophical epistemology; the dialogues of Plato testify to this. My work in the philosophy of mathematics take its inspiration from the 20^th century European tradition that begins with Poincaré, Hilbert, and early Husserl, and tries to explain mathematical rationality as an interplay between logical necessity and historical contingency. My literary work locates human action and utterance at the crossroads between the constraints of moral law and the fatal accomplishments of history, and the free play of artistic form and anarchic will, always imagining”what if...?”

The other dimension is aesthetic. Art (including poetic art) and mathematics characteristically generate beautiful forms that express human action on the one hand, and on the other hand the stable systems and dynamic processes of nature. In my book “Representation and Productive Ambiguity in Mathematics and the Sciences” (directly influenced by William Empson’s “Seven Types of Ambiguity”), I examine how demonstrations proceed when they occur, as they so often do, at the intersection of heterogeneous domains. When one domain is brought in to augment the resources of another, each with its own tradition of representation, the result is the combination, superposition and metamorphosis of a variety of modes of representation that often produce new mathematical entities. I call into question standard accounts of theory reduction (because I argue that reductive strategies do not reduce the number of idioms that express a problem situation, but rather multiply them, and that is why they work well), and moreover present striking examples of constructive ambiguity. What Empson shows so brilliantly, how poets exploit the semantic field of dictionary definitions or a given spectrum of cultural associations, also holds true for the mathematician.

So, for example, the ellipse in Proposition XI of Newton’s “Principia” must be read as a trajectory, as a figure derived from Euclid and Apollonius, as a dynamic nexus determined by a central force and (after the work of Leibniz inspired by Newton) as the solution to a differential equation; its internal articulation must also be read as both finite and infinitesimal. The proof of the proposition hinges on Newton’s exploitation of the controlled ambiguity of the ellipse.

In poetry, the line embedded in stanzas and organized by rules of meter and rhyme (or studied violations of them) creates a formal counterpoint of superimposed periodicities that deepens and complicates what it means. Thus in a poem a thought is suspended at the end of a line even if it is also continued, by enjambment and grammar, on to the next line, or by the logical structure of an argument to the next stanza. This formal construction of ambiguity, which exploits aural patterns of repeated sound and beat, grammatical structure, poetic lineation, metrical structure and logical structure, shows that a poem is not just a string of words but a two-dimensional, planar array which composes a rich plurality of modes of representation.

In the essay on Housman mentioned above,  “The Uses of Periodicity in English Verse,”  I show that this formal ambiguity mirrors the ambiguity of human intention: whenever we act, we are aware of what we might have chosen but in fact did not choose, and those unrealized possibilities remain with us as part of the meaning of  what we did. We act at the crossroads of necessity and freedom, and of the visible and the invisible. And poor Housman: his whole life was lived among the unrealized possibles that Spinoza denied and Leibniz multiplied, making them infinitely infinite in all those possible worlds that are not the best, like ours. This reminds me of a poem I wrote when I was in Jerusalem many years ago, visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and suddenly realized that Voltaire misunderstood Leibniz. Leibniz’s claim that this is the best of all possible worlds is not naïve optimism, but is rather a tragic insight: God had the choice to create this world, with all its suffering, or not to create anything at all. So he made us, because existence is better than nothingness, and then he had to live with and through us, our errors, our troubles, our tragedies, and our periodic beauties.