Posts Tagged ‘poetry’
“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance”*…
If only it were that simple. Trevor Klee unpacks the travails of Galileo to illustrate the way that abstractions become practical “knowledge”…
… We’re all generally looking for the newest study, or the most up-to-date review. At the very least, we certainly aren’t looking through ancient texts for scientific truths.
This might seem obvious to you. Of course you’d never look at an old paper. That old paper was probably done with worse instruments and worse methods. Just because something’s old or was written by someone whose name you recognize doesn’t mean that it’s truthful.
But why is it obvious to you? Because you live in a world that philosophy built. The standards for truth that you imbibed as a child are not natural standards of truth. If you had been an educated person in 1200s Europe, your standard for truth would have been what has stood the test of time. You would have lived among the ruins of Rome and studied the anatomy texts of the Greek, known that your society could produce neither of those, and concluded that they knew something that your society could not. Your best hope would then be to simply copy them as best as possible.
This was less true by the time Galileo was alive. This is why an educated man like Galileo would have entertained the idea that he knew better than the ancient Greeks, and why his ideas found some purchase among his fellow academicians (including the then Pope, actually). But still, there was a prominent train of thought that promoted the idea that a citation from Aristotle was worth more than a direct observation from a telescope.
But you live in a different world now. You live in a world in which the science of tomorrow is better than the science of today, and our societal capabilities advance every year. We can build everything the ancients did and stuff they never even imagined possible. So you respect tradition less, and respect what is actually measured most accurately in the physical world more.
Today, this battle over truth is so far in the past that we don’t even know it was ever a battle. The closest we come to this line of reasoning is when new age medicine appeals to “ancient wisdom”, but even they feel compelled to quote studies. Even more modern battles are mostly settled, like the importance of randomized, double-blinded controlled studies over non-randomized, non-controlled studies.
The reason we mark battles is not just for fun or historical curiosity. It’s to remind us that what we take for granted was actually fought for by generations before us. And, it’s to make sure that we know the importance of teaching these lessons so thoroughly that future generations take them for granted as well. A world in which nobody would dream of established theory overturning actual empirical evidence is a better world than the one that Galileo lived in…
On the importance of understanding the roots of our understanding: “You live in a world that philosophy built,” from @trevor_klee via @ByrneHobart.
Apposite (in an amusing way): “Going Against The Grain Weevils,” on Aristotle’s Generation of Animals and household pests.
* Socrates, from Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (probably early third century BCE)
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As we examine epistemology, we might send elegantly phrased and eclectic birthday greetings to Persian polymath Omar Khayyam; the philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, epigrammatist, and poet was born on this date in 1048. While he’s probably best known to English-speakers as a poet, via Edward FitzGerald’s famous translation of (what he called) the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Fitzgerald’s attribution of the book’s poetry to Omar (as opposed to the aphorisms and other quotes in the volume) is now questionable to many scholars (who believe those verses to be by several different Persian authors).
In any case, Omar was unquestionably one of the major philosophers, mathematicians and astronomers of the medieval period. He is the author of one of the most important treatises on algebra written before modern times, the Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra, which includes a geometric method for solving cubic equations by intersecting a hyperbola with a circle. His astronomical observations contributed to the reform of the Persian calendar. And he made important contributions to mechanics, geography, mineralogy, music, climatology and Islamic theology.
“The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen”*…
… and used. Consider, for example, this affecting example of literary collage from Jez Burrows…
The valley was enclosed by rugged peaks, security fencing and annihilative firepower—a state secret. Nothing for miles around. They sat opposite one another they sat in the shade of a tree.
“Repeat the words after me: A fish is an animal.”
“A fish is an animal.”
“A cow is an animal.”
“A cow is an animal.”
“We go to the zoo to see the animals.”
“We go to the zoo to see the animals.” She nodded in affirmation.
“Very good.”
“Very good.” She looked up with an absent smile and burst out laughing. Its mouth snapped into a tight, straight line and there was a fraught silence. Her body tensed up.
“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to insult you!” She leaned forward to take its hand and a cross-current of electricity seemed to flow between them. She felt guilty now, and a little uneasy. She looked at it warily, this naive, simple creature, with its straightforward and friendly eyes so eager to believe appearances—a shimmering evanescent bubble of cycloid scales and yellow fur agleam in the sun. Circuitry that Karen could not begin to comprehend. Since Parker’s research did not pan out too well, now she was the linchpin of the experiment. Her voice wobbled dangerously, but she brought it under control.
“I’m really sorry if I hurt your feelings.”
To her astonishment, it smiled and emitted a sound like laughter. She felt an inward sense of relief.
“I want an apple.”
“When you ask for something you should say, ‘Please.’”
“Please give me an apple.” It rolled the word around its mouth. She smiled distantly.
“I’ll think about it, amigo.”
Collins COBUILD Primary Learner’s Dictionary
Collins English Dictionary
Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary
My First Dictionary
New Oxford American Dictionary
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
More very short stories composed of example sentences from dictionaries: “Dictionary Stories” from @jezburrows.
Apposite: Austin Kleon‘s newspaper blackout poetry. For example…
(Image at top: source)
* Charles Simic
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As we juxtapose, we might send carefully constructed birthday greetings to Gertrude Stein; she was born on this date in 1874. An American ex-pat in Paris, Stein was an author, poet, and memoirist (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas). But she is probably best remembered as the host of a Paris salon where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art– including Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, and Henri Matisse– regularly met.
Hemingway described her role as both a host and a mentor to a generation of artists in in A Moveable Feast. The Mother of Us All was the title of a Virgil Thomson opera for which Stein wrote the libretto. While the subject of the opera, Susan B. Anthony, certainly deserves the epithet, so, many have observed, did its author.
“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings”*…
Can artificial intelligence have those feelings? Scientist and poet Keith Holyoak explores:
… Artificial intelligence (AI) is in the process of changing the world and its societies in ways no one can fully predict. On the hazier side of the present horizon, there may come a tipping point at which AI surpasses the general intelligence of humans. (In various specific domains, notably mathematical calculation, the intersection point was passed decades ago.) Many people anticipate this technological moment, dubbed the Singularity, as a kind of Second Coming — though whether of a savior or of Yeats’s rough beast is less clear. Perhaps by constructing an artificial human, computer scientists will finally realize Mary Shelley’s vision.
Of all the actual and potential consequences of AI, surely the least significant is that AI programs are beginning to write poetry. But that effort happens to be the AI application most relevant to our theme. And in a certain sense, poetry may serve as a kind of canary in the coal mine — an early indicator of the extent to which AI promises (threatens?) to challenge humans as artistic creators. If AI can be a poet, what other previously human-only roles will it slip into?…
A provocative consideration: “Can AI Write Authentic Poetry?” @mitpress.
Apposite: a fascinating Twitter thread on “why GPT3 algorithm proficiency at producing fluent, correct-seeming prose is an exciting opportunity for improving how we teach writing, how students learn to write, and how this can also benefit profs who assign writing, but don’t necessarily teach it.”
* W. H. Auden
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As we ruminate on rhymes, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Michael Gazzaniga; he was born on this date in 1939. A leading researcher in cognitive neuroscience (the study of the neural basis of mind), his work has focused on how the brain enables humans to perform those advanced mental functions that are generally associated with what we call “the mind.” Gazzaniga has made significant contributions to the emerging understanding of how the brain facilitates such higher cognitive functions as remembering, speaking, interpreting, and making judgments.
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”*…
On its publication in 1922, T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” was not so well received: “so much waste paper,” opined The Guardian. But of course since then it has ascended into the canon. Four writers and scholars– Beci Carver, Jahan Ramazani, Robert Crawford, and David Barnes— explain why now “the poem is such a key landmark that all modern poets know it, whether they swerve around it, crash into it, or attempt to assimilate it.”
Though I do understand why people often see—and hear—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as inventing modern poetry in English, I think The Waste Land does so more comprehensively. It’s as if this poem can give anything—a cry, a list of place-names, a snatch of conversation, a Sanskrit word, a nursery rhyme, an echo—an almost infinite and carrying resonance that brings with it unforgettable intensity. Ezra Pound who, prior to editing The Waste Land, had just been editing an English translation of an avant-garde collage-style French poem by Jean Cocteau, helped give the poem its intensity; but the words were Eliot’s.
… Pound’s editing was highly ethical in that he did not add or substitute words of his own; he just honed what Eliot had written. Eliot had learned from Pound’s bricolage style, but where Pound went on to go on and on and on, Eliot (with Pound’s editorial help) learned as a young poet just when to stop. That’s a great gift. So the poem exemplifies at once the way in which poetry can incorporate all kinds of diverse materials; yet it also constitutes a supreme example of poetic intensity. It’s quite a combination—and one from which innumerable poets (from Auden to Xu Zhimo and from MacDiarmid to Okigbo and beyond) have learned…
Robert Crawford
The appreciation in full at “The Most Important Poem of the 20th Century: On T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ at 100,” in @lithub.
* T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”
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As we muse on modernism, we might recall that it was on this date in 1966 that It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” premiered on CBS. The special, based on Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip and produced/animated by Bill Melendez, pre-empted My Three Sons and tied Bonanza as the top-rated program of the week. It has aired every year since, on network television until 2020, when Apple TV won the exclusive rights to the show.
“Your memory and your senses will be nourishment for your creativity”*…
On which senses do great creators rely? Randall Collins investigates…
Beethoven started going deaf in his late 20s. Already famous by age 25 for his piano sonatas, at 31 he was traumatized by losing his hearing. But he kept on composing: the Moonlight Sonata during the onset of deafness; the dramatic Waldstein Sonata at 32; piano sonatas kept on coming until he was 50. In his deaf period came the revolutionary sounds of his 3rd through 8th symphonies, piano and violin concertos (age 32-40). After 44 he became less productive, with intermittent flashes (Missa Solemnis, Diabelli variations, 9th symphony) composed at 47-53, dying at 56. His last string quartets were composed entirely in his head, left unperformed in his lifetime.
Handel went blind in one eye at age 66; laboriously finished the oratorio he was working on; went completely blind at 68. He never produced another significant work. But he kept on playing organ concertos, “performing from memory, or extemporizing while the players waited for their cue” almost to the day he died, aged 74.
Johann Sebastian Bach fell ill in his 64th year; next year his vision was nearly gone; he died at 65 “after two unsuccessful operations for a cataract.” At 62 he was still producing great works; at 64 he finished assembling the pieces of his B Minor Mass (recycling his older works being his modus operandi). At death he left unfinished his monument of musical puzzles, The Art of the Fugue, on which he had been working since 55.
Can we conclude, it is more important for a composer to see than hear?…
And given examples like Milton, that it’s more critical to poets and writers to hear than see? More at “Deaf or Blind: Beethoven, Handel,” from @sociologicaleye.
* Arthur Rimbaud
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As we contemplate creativity, we might recall that it was on this date in 2013 that Google– Google Search, YouTube, Google Mail, and Google Drive, et al.– went down for about 5 minutes. During that brief window, internet traffic around the world dropped by 40 percent.
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