Category: Blog Post

As far as tempests in teacups go, this is pretty good—and we’ll just assume that the tea party is now permanently adjourned. We’d link to them to show you just how idiotic and desperate they have become (Last post: “Could We Have Some Facts, Please?”—no shit) but we’ve pledged never to do that again.

See, these people still don’t understand just how odious it was to have an allegedly conservative government arrogantly insinuate itself between husband and wife (“this judiciary is out of control!” Um… wrong branch, fella)—seeing it first as a political opportunity, and then (even worse) trying to blame the politicization on a non-existent partisan conspiracy.

Boys: A turd is a turd, and you’ve got it all over yourselves, which is a pretty neat trick, given where you live in that impregnable hall of mirrors. Begob, there’s our bus. Goodbye.

And time to think of more than death. So, here’s to love today. Go home early, enjoy the weather and a comely companion.

I Knew a Woman
By Theodore Roethke

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin:
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing did we make.)

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved.)

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I’m martyr to a motion not my own;
What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)

Ok, that’s two from Roethke in the last three days, but I seem to have two Roethke devotees among my more adamant correspondents. Tomorrow, for the lusty weekend, a selection from the greatest (and some say first) of love poets–Gaius Valerius Catullus.

It’s the first we heard, but apparently Dan Kennedy is leaving his post as media critic at the Boston Phoenix. Over the years, we’ve enjoyed reading him—especially his smart, clean copy about the rivalry between the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald.

One of the best things about the alternative press is its self-conferred (and now somewhat disingenuous) outsider status, which you can always recognize by its generally relentless advocacy and polemicism. It also allows a paper to write about “big media” competitors without pulling any punches, and in a town like Boston, that is certainly the least readers expect. The Phoenix has been around long enough that both of Beantown’s daily papers keep a close eye on it, and have not missed their own opportunities to shake Steve Mindich’s tree to see what sort of rotten fruit falls down.

Here in our genteel berg, we have no good counterpart to Dan Kennedy. The serious media beat seems to be a dying breed, which we think is a mildly frightening canary-in-the-coal-mine omen. Despite the financial health of the Star Tribune, the reinvigorated anger of City Pages, and the terminal stasis of the Pioneer Press, no one in print is writing about print with any regularity. Of course, we have our own selfish reasons for wishing it were otherwise—and we certainly wish to count our blessings. But it is a somewhat odd consequence of Minnesota Nice that there seems to be a gentleman’s agreement among all parties to go easy on each other—that is, to not write about each other at all.

Tronnes and Levine had, for some time, been keeping a lively grip on the neck of all local media, and those silly men at Powerline have their little spats with Nick Coleman, and someone named Hugh or Howard something-or-other claims to be hosting a permanent “swarm” on the Strib, and City Pages admits to reading the daily papers each day, so there is some hope—we suppose—for the world of media criticism as it pertains to print.

But when we point our finger, of course, three fingers point back at us, and we have to admit that this here blog may be the best place for regular hit-and-run commentary of an industrial sort. We have always had a strong feeling that readers care a lot less about us as people—working at desks in our shoes with our petty complaints and triumphs—than we think they do, and we have never seriously thought about migrating regular print-media criticism to the pages of the magazine.

That doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t be doing it. To pretend that “media criticism” should be limited to TV, with the occasional bit on Tom Barnard or Gary Eichten—that is being part of the problem, not the solution.

A very funny bit from today’s NY Times on the problems of the poet laureate of England having to write a marriage poem for Charles and Camilla. Aside from having to compete for headlines with the funeral of the Pope, imagine Camilla having to endure the jibes that John Paul, even today, looks better in white than she does.

So, two marriage poems today. One short and sweet, another more, more…

Epithalamium
By John Gardiner Calkins Brainard

I SAW two clouds at morning,
Tinged with the rising sun,
And in the dawn they floated on,
And mingled into one:
I thought that morning cloud was blest,
It moved so sweetly to the west.

I saw two summer currents
Flow smoothly to their meeting,
And join their course, with silent force,
In peace each other greeting: 10
Calm was their course through banks of green,
While dimpling eddies played between.

Such be your gentle motion,
Till life’s last pulse shall beat;
Like summer’s beam, and summer’s stream,
Float on, in joy, to meet
A calmer sea, where storms shall cease—
A purer sky, where all is peace.

Epithalamion
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

HARK, hearer, hear what I do; lend a thought now, make believe
We are leafwhelmed somewhere with the hood
Of some branchy bunchy bushybowered wood,
Southern dene or Lancashire clough or Devon cleave,
That leans along the loins of hills, where a candycoloured, where a gluegold-brown
Marbled river, boisterously beautiful, between
Roots and rocks is danced and dandled, all in froth and waterblowballs, down.
We are there, when we hear a shout
That the hanging honeysuck, the dogeared hazels in the cover
Makes dither, makes hover
And the riot of a rout
Of, it must be, boys from the town
Bathing: it is summer’s sovereign good.

By there comes a listless stranger: beckoned by the noise
He drops towards the river: unseen
Sees the bevy of them, how the boys
With dare and with downdolphinry and bellbright bodies huddling out,
Are earthworld, airworld, waterworld thorough hurled, all by turn and turn about.

This garland of their gambols flashes in his breast
Into such a sudden zest
Of summertime joys
That he hies to a pool neighbouring; sees it is the best
There; sweetest, freshest, shadowiest;
Fairyland; silk-beech, scrolled ash, packed sycamore, wild wychelm, hornbeam fretty overstood
By. Rafts and rafts of flake-leaves light, dealt so, painted on the air,
Hang as still as hawk or hawkmoth, as the stars or as the angels there,
Like the thing that never knew the earth, never off roots
Rose. Here he feasts: lovely all is! No more: off with—down he dings
His bleachèd both and woolwoven wear:
Careless these in coloured wisp
All lie tumbled-to; then with loop-locks
Forward falling, forehead frowning, lips crisp
Over finger-teasing task, his twiny boots
Fast he opens, last he offwrings
Till walk the world he can with bare his feet
And come where lies a coffer, burly all of blocks
Built of chancequarrièd, selfquainèd rocks
And the water warbles over into, filleted with glassy grassy quicksilvery shivès and shoots
And with heavenfallen freshness down from moorland still brims,
Dark or daylight on and on. Here he will then, here he will the fleet
Flinty kindcold element let break across his limbs
Long. Where we leave him, froliclavish while he looks about him, laughs, swims.
Enough now; since the sacred matter that I mean
I should be wronging longer leaving it to float
Upon this only gambolling and echoing-of-earth note—
What is … the delightful dene?
Wedlock. What the water? Spousal love.

Today, the New York Observer pulls a nifty stunt. Media writer Tom Scocca recreates the masthead of The New Yorker, which has never published such a thing in its seventy-five years of publishing. We wish we’d thought of that. (We’re thinking Spy magazine must have thought of it before, too; they used to publish the hilarious and informative “Letters to the Editor of the New Yorker” at a time when The New Yorker still did not publish letters from readers, either.) Then we realized what a Herculean task of research it must have involved, poring through contributors notes—also added just a few years ago under the reign of Tina Brown and her celebrity editorship—book jackets, lecture flyers, and so forth.

People who are obsessed with magazines often wonder why The New Yorker does things in such an odd, backward way. There have been lots of other examples, though most have slowly been evolved to resemble how other magazines are built. For example, for more than fifty years, the magazine had no Table of Contents. Bylines came at the end of long articles, and most shorter items had no byline at all.

When they were asked about this sort of thing, editors Harold Ross and William Shawn usually said they did these things simply because that’s the way they had always been done. Famously, Ross said of the TOC that no one ever thought to do it in the early years, and the oversight just seemed to gain momentum. But we have a sense that this was just a deflection, and that in the star chamber of the editor’s offices, there were plenty of justifications for marching to the beat of their own drummer.

There are three very good, old-fashioned reasons not to publish a masthead. First is to subsume the egos of all who contribute and participate in the magazine to the larger project, to the sum of its parts. We live in an age of self-aggrandizement and instant gratification; the age of Me as a personal brand, free of loyalties to anything larger than ourselves. The New Yorker’s non-masthead is a reminder, if anyone needs one, that the magazine comes before any of the individuals responsible for producing it. Second, one of the subtle services a masthead performs is to sustain the longterm employability of its staff—other people in the industry tend to obsess about mastheads, and they poach from each other, and often times it’s the only public credit a hardworking editor gets. Anyone who has ever worked at The New Yorker does not have this worry; they are at the top of their game at the top team in the league, and they subsit on prestige. Don’t call them, they’ll call you. And that’s the third reason: the moment you make public a handful of names at your magazine is the moment you are inundated, by name, with dozens and dozens of queries from writers, press releases from record companies, and fat promotional folders from Manhattan crystal shops.