Silliman's Blog

You're welcome. Is the tribly a part of your new "dashing" attire?
 

Trilby, like a fedora but with a narrower brim. I do own one, yes.

Tribly is one more than doubly,

Ron
 

Not knowing Seidel, I purchased a copy of his recently published Poems. Seidel, the last of the confessionalists, almost forgotten, has resuscitated himself with a new brutalism, reminiscent of Plath and Sexton.

Based on the poems I read at random, Mlinko's take on him is rather retro.

Is Mlinko's reading a sexist hatchet-job? Couldn't we use the same hatchet on Merrill? (Oh, I'm sorry, forgot that Merrill was Gay, exception noted. Maybe Jeff Clark gets a nod, after all, since he's so prosodically various.)

In the end, it doesn't matter--do we always have to keep reminding ourselves of this?--what subject-matter you choose, but what you do with it.

If Plath's technique was so frighteningly good, what about Seidel's use of it is bankrupt? Might we simply call it derivative, instead of implying that it's the mendacious drivel of a megalomaniac? Plath was nothing if not megalomaniacal.

Is Seidel unacceptable because he's rich and sexually aggressive? Oh, my. How old-fashioned. If Seidel were a leather boy, would Mlinko have written the same review? If this isn't a fair question, then why?
 

I just wanted to thank you for linking to my paper about Frank O' Hara. I hope your readers enjoyed it. I've linked to your blog on my own blog!
 

Oliver Hartwich's fascinating history of Neoliberalism (three from bottom) helped me situate F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. Hayek taught at the U. of Chicago and elsewhere (London and Heidelberg). In the 1940s he wrote his well-known book and it was excerpted in Reader's Digest by Whittaker Chambers (I think it was), and then went on to sell well over a million copies.

I'm about half-way through the book. It's rather hard at times to read. Hayek asserts that socialism always leads to Stalinism, which, he asserts, is not structurally different from Nazism, and that they both feature a one=party state that has total control over the economy and intellectual life.

Hayek is also against the Ayn Rand school of absolute laissez faire corporate greed, but it's hard to understand exactly what state controls would offer a brake for instance to rampant polluters.

Liberal is defined in the book as individualist, and socialism of any stripe is defined as collectivist.

The many attempts to create collectivist art movements in the 20s come out of the general collectivist notions of the period. Surrealism itself would be part of that movement, although it would retain a certain individualist flavor. It's fascinating to watch all these movements break on various shoals with Dali ultimately becoming a Monarchist in Spain, and his money apparently being used to bring back in the king after Franco.

The way the word "liberal" is now used by someone like Sean Hannity (as synonymous with collectivism) or by someone like Michael Berube (as synonymous with collectivism, while also using a sleight of hand trick to indicate that it also has something to do with the "liberal arts") is just perverse beyond belief, and it's salutary that Hartwich attempts to dive back into the wreckage and give us a sens eof the long history of our terminology, which is at present so confused.

It was also fascinatng to see that Bonhoeffer of all people was part of the liberal or neo-liberal school.

The essay illuminates a very strange period which is echoed in the creation of Lutheran "neo-liberal" states throughout Scandinavia whose genesis and creation owe a lot to the thought of that period, which is obscured by the difficulty of our reading their texts in the original. Part of it is certainly Lutheran, but part of this also comes out of many other contexts including the socialist branches named here.

Clarifying these branches, and getting through the thickets of nomenclature would help this virtually illiterate country get a handle again on its own economic terminology.

At any rate, thanks for this article. I'm reading Hayek now, and after that, I intend to read Theodore Burczak's Socialism After Hayek, in order to track down what Burczak sees as the next step (Burczak's work is drawing many many conferences around itself as a resuscitation of the middle way that neo-liberalism apparently once represented).
 

There's a lot that's great in Karl Young's essay -- written 25 years ago -- on reading, book production, and poetry, linked to at the top of today's list.

But Young's musings on dyslexia (found near the end of the essay, under the heading "North America, 1983") are unpersuasive, though imaginative.

He writes, "dyslexia is increasing among young people and I imagine one of the major reasons for this is the ephemeralization of reading. A disproportionately large number of dyslexic students have I.Q.'s above average and I suspect their refusal to learn to read is, on a human if not a practical level, an intelligent response to current attitudes toward reading."

I chafe, hard, at the notion that people with dyslexia are refusing to learn to read. I think most teachers, researchers, and experienced parents and kids would be similarly insulted.
 

Not linked here are two extensive and detailed responses (both of them really essays, more than posts) to Poetry's Conceptual/Flarf feature, by David Hadbawnik, editor of Kadar Koli journal and Habenicht Publications:

http://habenichtpress.com/index.php

and by Richard Owens, editor of Damn the Caesars journal and book series (for some reason, Ron, Owens is not listed on your blog roll).

http://damnthecaesars.blogspot.com/

Kent
 

Regarding Karl Young's essay:

I am comfortable with:
Writing is notation and reading is performance.

Not sure about
notation being less fluid in 1983
than it was in John Donne's time,
but I do think it is heading
toward being more fluid
since 1983.
It is for me anyway.
-
Google's word verification
is playing a part in this
as well as are experiments
in phonetics
and digital word compressions
and in the English language itself
such as: s/he, hir (for both his and her), dogs (as in the dogs ears).
 

plath and sexton? apparently i need to read some of this.

just os you know: I googled blogspot poetry and yours came out near the top. That seems like a good thing.

Anyway, I started a blog of my own, of which poetry will be amjor component.

http://visitsequalzero.blogspot.com
 

I've heard a lot of people lately in the 20 something generation refer to themselves as being "kinda dyslexic" etc.

I fear it's become, as the researcher is guessing, a sort of handy excuse for not reading, or not wanting to think hard enough to discern complexity in language.

Language is human--we're the only beasts which use it. True dyslexia is quite rare.

This is the same argument we're having about attention deficit disorder in kids--a creation of the psychiatric community in league with the drug companies.

People are not all equal. Trying to over-diagnose kinds of difference as illness is exploitation of difference.