Posted on by the coffee philosopher · 2 Comments

Barbour Is Out


Haley Barbour, my one-time nemesis, is not running for president.

Nate Silver says bluntly that this was almost certainly because he realized that he wasn’t going to win.

I can’t say he’s wrong, though I was also one of those who talked up his chances in my own small way. Mainly to point out that, whatever his flaws and missteps, he was, until the end, the best political strategist in the field.

Some folks are saying that this creates an opening for Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels to jump in.

That, my friends, is pure hogwash. Haley Barbour’s electoral strength was in the South. His other strengths were the above mentioned strategic mind and his deep connections to national donors.

While his political acumen could be lent to Daniels in the form of advice, that’s not the same as being one of the GOP’s finest political minds. And even if he handed Daniels his entire rolodex, Daniels couldn’t replicate to relationships Barbour formed with the donors and while Barbour might provide some help, he’s not going to singlehandedly raise tens of millions of bucks for a longshot primary candidate – not and risk pissing off more likely winners.

Posted on by the coffee philosopher · 2 Comments

Ezra Pound: Canto VII


I suspect this will become a pattern, but once again, I am understanding less of what Pound is saying. And I am not taking the time really study up on the references he drops nor to translate all the lines written in Italian, French, and ancient Greek.

But despite it all, without such labors, one also finds passages of great transcendence:

And the life goes, mooning upon bare hills;
Flame leaps from the hand, the rain is listless,
Yet drinks the thirst from our lips,
                   solid as echo,
Passion to breed a form in shimmer of rain-blue;
But Eros drowned, drowned, heavy-half dead with tears
                  For dead Sicheus. 

I’m also seeing more and more contrapositions of the ancient and medieval past with contemporary language and objects (jazz, for example, rears its head).

Posted on by the coffee philosopher

Watching “Atlas Shrugged: Part I”


I dragged Mu with me to catch a Monday afternoon matinée of that Tea Party monstrosity: Atlas Shrugged, Part I.

And it was every bit as famously and hilariously bad as we had been led to believe.

It followed the events of the book (at least the first third of it, for this is a trilogy) with exacting, religious devotion (taking into account that the action was moved from the fifties to the year 2016 – not coincidentally, I imagine, coinciding with the end of Obama’s second term). This devotion extends so far as to turn Ayn Rand’s embarrassingly awful literary sex scenes into embarrassingly awful cinematic sex scenes. In fact, the sex is so awful to behold that you might almost suspect it of being self-conscious parody were the filmmakers not obviously being so painfully earnest.

I don’t (or shouldn’t) need to tell you about Atlas Shrugged‘s (the novel and the movie) painful didacticism and ridiculously constructed straw men nor how the first quality makes for a turgid novel and how the second makes for a poor excuse for “philosophy.”

What I do want to tell you is my dream, wherein Atlas Shrugged turns into a midnight movie cult classic, with people shouting something or doing shots whenever some painfully unrealistic villain appears or when the people on screen are pouring themselves a drink (the world of Atlas Shrugged: The Movie is filled with people who drink so much alcohol [mainly what is supposed to expensive looking scotch] that you’d think the ghost of Hunter Thompson had helped write the stage directions).

Some small part of this dream came true as one of our fellow moviegoers (there only five or six of us) was constantly laughing or exclaiming “Who is John Galt.” I can’t be sure whether he was a liberal parodying the ripe for parody dialogue or whether he was a true Tea Partier expressing his deep appreciation for all that grand, Randian genius on screen. Either way, he acted like a brilliantly senile Greek chorus to the proceedings. Mu was not amused, but I felt he added a real touch of meta to the experience.

Posted on by the coffee philosopher

Southern Poetry Review


I don’t subscribe to Southern Poetry Review, but I do make a point of picking it up at bookstores and browsing through it. But I never buy it because, inevitably, I am disappointed.

I want to like a magazine that specializes in poetry and comes at it from a Southern perspective. I love poetry. The literary magazines I read are almost invariably focused on poetry. I am also, in my own small way, a bit of a Southerner (my mother, herself an inarguable Southern gentlewoman, and others, might disagree). And because the South is well known for its fiction and prose, but is seen as second rate region for poetry compared to New England, Chicago, and Northern California, I want to see this magazine prove that skilled poesy exists in the South.

But the writing found in Southern Poetry Review almost always seems to fall into the same kind of lazy shorthand that plagues most Southern literature.

The great southern writers had a genius for bringing something innovative to their compositions. Faulkner introduced (and expanded upon) the tools and forms of European high modernism in the service of the Southern obsessions with family, place, and history. Flannery O’Connor’s application of Catholic symbolism and a lurid, gothic sensibility. More recently, I think of Harry Crews’ sudden flashes of nihilistic violence (less so, his extravagantly pornographic sex scenes).

Too many so-called Southern writers use lazy tropes (like “look at all these wacky small town character and there wacky ways,” used either in the service of cheap comedy or in the service of something more serious, but either way they are always of less interest than David Lynch’s middle American vision in Blue Velvet or his northwestern television epic Twin Peaks).

Southern Poetry Review always seems filled with writing that reads like a compendium of “lazy Southern lit tropes as applied to poetry.”

Posted on by the coffee philosopher

Ezra Pound: Canto VI


I’m not ashamed to admit that I understand less and less as we move on (and we are only a tiny fraction of the way through the Cantos).

The Sixth Canto features references to Eleanor of Aquitaine and her first husband, King Louis II of France (as did the Fifth Canto) and to her husbands’ (she had three – including King Henry II of England) and children’s (including King Richard I, Coeur-de-Lion, of England) relationship to the Outremer and the Crusades, including to Acre, the last of the cities held by western Crusaders to fall.

In fact, insofar as I comprehend this, it seems to be entirely about the fascinating life of Eleanor.

Posted on by the coffee philosopher

Borders Restructuring


Supposedly, Borders needs $50 million in additional financing to emerge from its restructuring – and this in addition to the $505 million “debtor in possession” loan they already have access to. Their fear is that, following closing over a third of their stores, their annual sales will drop to half of what it was just two years ago (has the ebook revolution really moved so quickly?).

It’s been almost a week since I gave up on Borders and my anger is starting to fade. I still hope they succeed in surviving and I will still browse their shelves and even sometimes purchase something  from them when I find myself near one (which happens fairly often; my better half often shops for business supplies next to a Borders and I often drive her there, which means I meander over to see what’s new on their poetry shelf).

Posted on by the coffee philosopher

Ezra Pound: Canto V


Pound is starting to hit his stride here, with the archaic and arcane mixtures one expects: Ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt mixed with Italy and even a little bit of medieval England. But we don’t yet see those stanzas or turns of phrase that simply blow your mind yet.

I did, though, appreciate the lines:

Is smothered beneath a mule,
                      a poet’s ending. 

Posted on by the coffee philosopher

Apologies to Atheists


I titled an earlier post A Recovering Atheist’s Take on the Rob Bell “Controversy”. Now, I would like to apologize to atheists and agnostics for using the term “recovering.” I should have simply said “former.”

Recovering atheists implies that atheism is some adolescent stage that a healthy person should advance from.

That is simply not the case. I am not an atheist anymore, but I respect both atheism and agnosticism as valid, mature, and rational choices.

Posted on by the coffee philosopher

Ezra Pound: Canto IV


The Fourth Canto begins to truly look like what one expects of the Cantos. Though the lines often seem to refer to some sort of narrative, they rarely refer to the same narrative.

This is where we see Pound’s obsession with words as individual objects and his use of words for their qualities, in and of themselves, rather than, necessarily, in relation to each other (as in coherent sentences, stanzas, or paragraphs).

He also starts digging deeper into his bag or erudition. For example, referring to the church at “Poictiers” – “Poictiers” being an old English way of spelling the French town of Poitiers.

And, for the first time, he starts mixing Chinese names and influences from Pound’s own studies and translations of Chinese poetry.

Posted on by the coffee philosopher · 2 Comments

Literary Magazines Are Alive & Well


The New York Times gave me a nice morale boost the other day (the article came out on April 7, but I don’t think I saw it until the next day).

Entitled, “Literary Journals Thrive, on Paper and Otherwise,” it gives us all a bit of hope. With all the articles about the decline of literature and poetry and the printed word and the institutions that support them, it was nice to see the other side of the coin.

The argument I liked most, was that so many lit mags are labors of love. As such, the publishers are driven to produce them as irrespective of financial success as possible.