#eliot a. cohen

[quotesfrommyreading]

Much of the public discussion of Ukraine reveals a tendency to patronize that country and others that escaped Russian rule. As Toomas Ilves, a former president of Estonia, acidly observed, “When I was at university in the mid-1970s, no one referred to Germany as ‘the former Third Reich.’ And yet today, more than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we keep on being referred to as ‘former Soviet bloc countries.’” Tropes about Ukrainian corruption abound, not without reason—but one may also legitimately ask why so many members of Congress enter the House or Senate with modest means and leave as multimillionaires, or why the children of U.S. presidents make fortunes off foreign countries, or, for that matter, why building in New York City is so infernally expensive.

The latest, richest example of Western condescension came in a report by German military intelligence that complains that although the Ukrainians are good students in their training courses, they are not following Western doctrine and, worse, are promoting officers on the basis of combat experience rather than theoretical knowledge. Similar, if less cutting, views have leaked out of the Pentagon.

Criticism by the German military of any country’s combat performance may be taken with a grain of salt. After all, the Bundeswehr has not seen serious combat in nearly eight decades. In Afghanistan, Germany was notorious for having considerably fewer than 10 percent of its thousands of in-country troops outside the wire of its forward operating bases at any time. One might further observe that when, long ago, the German army did fight wars, it, too, tended to promote experienced and successful combat leaders, as wartime armies usually do.

American complaints about the pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive and its failure to achieve rapid breakthroughs are similarly misplaced. The Ukrainians indeed received a diverse array of tanks and armored vehicles, but they have far less mine-clearing equipment than they need. They tried doing it our way—attempting to pierce dense Russian defenses and break out into open territory—and paid a price. After 10 days they decided to take a different approach, more careful and incremental, and better suited to their own capabilities (particularly their precision long-range weapons) and the challenge they faced. That is, by historical standards, fast adaptation. By contrast, the United States Army took a good four years to develop an operational approach to counterinsurgency in Iraq that yielded success in defeating the remnants of the Baathist regime and al-Qaeda-oriented terrorists.

A besetting sin of big militaries, particularly America’s, is to think that their way is either the best way or the only way. As a result of this assumption, the United States builds inferior, mirror-image militaries in smaller allies facing insurgency or external threat. These forces tend to fail because they are unsuited to their environment or simply lack the resources that the U.S. military possesses in plenty. The Vietnamese and, later, the Afghan armies are good examples of this tendency—and Washington’s postwar bad-mouthing of its slaughtered clients, rather than critical self-examination of what it set them up for, is reprehensible.

The Ukrainians are now fighting a slow, patient war in which they are dismantling Russian artillery, ammunition depots, and command posts without weapons such as American ATACMS and German Taurus missiles that would make this sensible approach faster and more effective. They know far more about fighting Russians than anyone in any Western military knows, and they are experiencing a combat environment that no Western military has encountered since World War II. Modesty, never an American strong suit, is in order.

  —  Western Diplomats Need to Stop Whining About Ukraine

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Just as Andrei Sakharov was the most prominent late twentieth century exponent of the Westernizer school of Russian political and social thought, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was the best manifestation of the Slavophile school. This rehashing by Eliot A Cohen of Solzhenitsyn's Harvard commencement address from 1978 is the day's essential read. While clearing out a storage room filled with books, I came across a slim volume, A World Split Apart, the text of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard commencement address. I remember listening to the speech at the time and being disconcerted by the petulant commentary it elicited. Solzhenitsyn had been in the United States only three years, having been expelled by the Soviet government and living as a recluse in Vermont. The consensus—certainly among the great and the good of Cambridge, Massachusetts—was that he was an ultranationalist, a reactionary, and, above all, an ingrate. At the time, I thought the reaction peevish and beside the point. Rereading the speech, it seems even more urgent that we pay heed to his excoriating critique of Western liberalism.

Solzhenitsyn did misunderstand some of the key elements of Western, and specifically American, liberal democracy. He was no democrat, although he unreservedly opposed cruel and arbitrary government. It is true, too, that his deep religious faith and mystical belief in Russia’s destiny were and remain alien to most non-Russians. And it is true, as well, that he had cordial if cautious relations in the early 2000s with Vladimir Putin, although he was staunchly in favor of letting the Soviet Union’s subject nations, including even Ukraine, go their own way. But what matters now as it did then is his critique of us. We have just seen a feckless House of Representatives pass a ludicrous impeachment of a Cabinet secretary by one vote—and then skip town while avoiding a vote on aid to Ukraine. We have seen the West’s inability to prevent the murder, by direct or indirect means, of a heroic dissident, Alexei Navalny, and the gleeful insouciance of the Russian dictator hours after it was reported. We have seen a foreign war used as an excuse to hound Jews on campuses and in the streets, and we have the horrifying spectacle of a possible return to the presidency of one of the most corrupt and dangerous politicians in American history. Which makes it worthwhile to return to Solzhenitsyn’s speech, a dark reflection for a different dark time.

The speech begins with a slap to our face: “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.” That is as true now as it was then, possibly truer. At home, a great political party collapses in craven subservience to a demagogue. Abroad, we fear to arm Ukraine adequately to defeat a monstrous aggressor; we fear to punish an Iranian regime that has repeatedly sought to kill our people and occasionally succeeds; we fear to face the fact that all of us in the liberal-democratic world are spending way less than what we need to defend ourselves. Domestically, we fear to dissent from the orthodoxies of our respective subcultures. Nowhere is this more true than among those who should prize intellectual courage, as Solzhenitsyn did. “Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad.” When the nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression consistently rates America’s oldest and most prestigious university one of the very worst for freedom of speech, something is deeply amiss. And that is, of course, Harvard, the very university at which Solzhenitsyn spoke, whose motto is Veritas—“Truth.”

One is hard-pressed today to name more than a handful of truly courageous professors, deans, and university presidents willing to jeopardize their careers and their social standing by taking unpopular stands—unyielding opposition to DEI rules and bureaucracies, for example. The very notions that reasonable people can disagree on important matters, that one’s point of view reflects individual thought rather than identity or tribe, and that physical intimidation has no place in civilized politics are all at risk. Solzhenitsyn talked about intellectuals because, as a Russian of that ilk, he believed that writers were the conscience of their countries. For politicians he had little use, but surely courage is sorely lacking there as well. When Donald Trump sneered at John McCain, a heroic figure if ever there was one, who had suffered terribly for his country and loved it unreservedly, Trump paid no political price. Which means that the problem was not so much Trump as it is us. It has been a very long time since a rising young American politician, badly injured in his own war service, published Profiles in Courage and was acclaimed for it.

At the root of the West’s troubles, Solzhenitsyn believed, was the view that man is the measure of all things, that social problems of all kinds can be managed away, that evil is not embedded in human nature, and that the ultimate purpose of life is happiness. In large measure, we in the West still believe these things. Above all we talk endlessly about happiness, as measured by psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists. To which Solzhenitsyn observed, if “man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die.” And as he pointed out, if such a credo holds, “for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good?” Which may explain the struggles of many armies, including the American, to fill their ranks.

By Eliot A. Cohen

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Eliot A. Cohen

Published: Dec 23, 2023

Like many alumni of Harvard, I have been following the misadventures of President Claudine Gay—first her coolly calibrated reflections on arguments for the genocide of Jews, and now accusations about the intellectual integrity of her published work—with appalled fascination. It is the latter topic on which I can claim some expertise.

I learned about plagiarism at Harvard by an accident of academic politics. The department of government, where I had received my Ph.D., had an opening for an assistant professor in the field of international affairs, and it had (in the department’s opinion) two equally attractive candidates. With Solomonic wisdom, they divided the position in half, offering me and my competitor half-time administrative positions. Mine was as the Allston Burr Senior Tutor in Quincy House.

The Harvard houses are modified versions of Oxford or Cambridge colleges. They are residences but not dormitories. Associated with each house was a group of faculty and visiting fellows who regularly dined and spoke there, and who helped constitute each house’s Senior Common Room. There was a staff of resident tutors, mainly graduate students, who taught sections of major courses and advised students in a variety of ways. And then there were the master and the senior tutor, also resident. The former presided over the collective life of the house; the latter was responsible for the students as individuals.

I should note here that the term senior tutor connoted a function that was chiefly educational. Harvard now calls them resident deans, because they came to do everything but educate, including directing students to mental-health resources and responding to the varied crises of a student’s life in the pressure cooker that is the college.. Harvard dropped the term master in 2016 because it reeked of the antebellumplantation. (Oddly enough, this compunction has not prevented Harvard from continuing to offer master’s degrees, for which it charges very healthy tuition.)

Harvard then took plagiarism seriously—and in one way still does, disciplining dozens of students every year for this gravest of academic sins. Even transgressions falling short of plagiarism could still constitute “misuse of sources,” for which a year’s probation and suspension from participation in extracurricular activities were the usual response. Plagiarists, meanwhile—those who had lifted someone else’s language without quotation marks or citation—were bounced from the college for a year, during which time they were required to work at a nonacademic job (no year-long backpacking trip) and refrain from visiting Cambridge. They would be readmitted after submitting a statement that examined their original misdeed and reflected on it.

The senior tutor was the one who received any initial complaint from a faculty member, some of whom were (or feigned to be) shocked when they learned that plagiarism could have material consequences. They would assemble the dossier, counsel the student, and present the case to the administrative board, composed of all the senior tutors and a few faculty and deans, about 20 people in all. The senior tutor would present the student’s case to his or her colleagues, and we would deliberate.

If the board voted to rusticate the offender, the student could make a personal appeal, which was surprisingly rare. After long conversations with their senior tutor, most of the students understood that they had gone seriously astray, and left with a feeling of, if not relief, then of catharsis. They could return to school with the slate wiped clean, and with much greater maturity and sense of purpose. This was, in part, because most plagiarists are not depraved or even lazy, but simply insecure. They came back as much more independent and self-reliant characters, which was what we wanted.

It was a very good system. Harvard’s approach to plagiarism then rested on the notion that even a disciplinary process should be educational. At its heart was the importance of accepting responsibility for one’s actions. It was not enough to correct the errant document; it was necessary to look at oneself in the mirror and say, “I did this, and it was wrong.” I believe that this approach was rooted in Harvard’s lingering mission of developing leaders of integrity and courage.

A leader must begin with a deeply rooted sense of responsibility; from there one moves to accountability, the ability to own one’s organization’s failings. For example, if Jewish students are being harassed and threatened on the university campus where one is president, it means saying, “I own this. I will fix it,” in simple and unqualified terms.

The members of the administrative board were predominantly teachers and scholars, not administrators, and that was crucial. We did not bring in lawyers. We did not hire expensive plagiarism experts as consultants. We read the materials carefully (the dossiers could be quite thick), deliberated, and made a decision. If a senior tutor got carried away defending a student from their house, their colleagues would gently but firmly nail the case to the undisputed facts. And when faculty members tried to intercede, they were equally firmly told that they were responsible for the grading side of the education, and we were covering the disciplinary side.

It is undisputed that Claudine Gay used other scholars’ language, often with the slightest modification or none, and occasionally without even a footnote acknowledgment. Were that not so, she would not have recently requested corrections to work dating back to her dissertation. I have looked at the evidence presented in various places, none of which has been controverted, and it is clear to me that this is plagiarism. For example, as The Harvard Crimson reports, her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation includes this paragraph:

The average turnout rate seems to increase linearly as African-Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. (If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct’s racial mix, which is one way to think about bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatterplot. A linear form would only result if the changes in one race’s turnout were compensated by changes in the turnout of the other race across the graph.)

A 1996 scholarly paper by Bradley Palmquist and Stephen Voss reads as follows:

The average turnout rate seems to decrease linearly as African Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct’s racial mix, which is one description of bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatter plot (resulting only when changes in one race’s turnout rate somehow compensated for changes in the other’s across the graph).

It is a pretty complete steal, with the bizarre substitution of “increase” for “decrease.”

Even if, in the most tolerant and sympathetic of readings, this and similar copying merely constitute “misuse of sources,” it is disqualifying for a position of leadership at any university. Her failure to accept responsibility in stark and unqualified terms makes matters worse.

The Harvard Corporation has stood by President Gay, even as scandal has mounted. The New York Post reports that when it first raised the plagiarism accusations with Harvard, the response was not a comment on the evidence, but a 15-page letter from Harvard’s defamation lawyer. Instead of standing up for Harvard’s motto, Veritas, (“truth”), the corporation has hunkered down.

Students have a keen scent for the stink of hypocrisy; they understand Gay’s original misdeeds and the evasions of the Harvard Corporation. They may even realize that something has gone deeply awry with the university when a Harvard professor dismisses the claims as a right-wing attack and tells The New York Times,“If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting [the accusations] some credence,” as though the facts depend on the politics of those who point them out.

I have no idea how as a teacher at Harvard today I could look an undergraduate in the eye and hold forth about why plagiarism is a violation of the values inherent in the academic enterprise. They would laugh, openly or secretly, at the corruption and double standards. And I would not blame them for doing so.

President Gay is in a tough spot. The Harvard Corporation deserves to be in a much tougher spot, because it has betrayed the values that the university once cherished and that it still proclaims. In both cases, the remedy indicated is the one we senior tutors applied to many a student years ago: fess up, withdraw, and reflect.

[thatwritererinoriordan]

[mariailoveyou-guerin]

If y’all know Veronica Mars the oc and LoVe or Sethmer you’ll know exactly what I mean by this!

ofc pope is Veronica Seth Cohen and Alec

Cleo is Summer Roberts and Elliott

JJ is Logan Echolls and leverage Parker

no one knows them like I know them!

[yardsards]

music taste: jewish artists singing about the story of samson and delilah

they Understand. i can't articulate exactly what they understand but they definitely Understand.

(songs are "samson" by regina spektor, "hallelujah" by leonard cohen, and "with samson in washington state" by mal blum)

[dollarbin]

Dollar Bin #48:

Songs of Love and Hate, Part 2

Individual notes, verses, flashes of color and morsels can sum up all that is great about a given artist.

Joyce's heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit and Eliot's patient etherized on a table instantly encapsulate each author's vast oeuvre; Botticelli's cornered, puffing zephyrs sum up everything that dwells within his immense, canvassed, rushes of air.

Plus, you could dedicate a week or two straight to Dinosaur Jr's catalog or just get the whole thing done quick by letting J Mascis order you to get him a bucket.

Like J says, it's sometimes best to absorb the whole by ignoring it and staring instead, well, into the face of "ducket".

So let's follow J's advice and, after an initial post that focused largely on Jew's harps and orgies, dedicate this Part 2 to zooming in on Leonard Cohen's own, single, summation bucket: the opening track of Songs of Love and Hate, Avalanche.

All the vast riches hidden within Cohen's monstrous but sexy raincoat are on display in this track.

The opening verse goes a long way to sum up Cohen's art. "I stepped into avalanche: it covered up my soul." This isn't a guy with inherited hardships; he bought a house on a Greek island before he was famous with inherited funds; plus he was really, really good looking.

But one of the great things about the man is his ownership of his own sorrow: he knowingly and willingly stepped into a swirl of hardship and frozen water. It's his own damn fault, and he owns that. And when horrors covered up his soul, leaving him hunchbacked, crippled and befouled, he consistently pulled off the ultimate magic trick, transmuting his self-entrapment into a golden sleep of verse and art and song.

And we're the miners in Cohen's song, of course: we stumble into Cohen as we tunnel after more obvious and conventional beauty. I discovered him in the backseat of my teenage girlfriend's parent's suburban on a four hour drive through the mountains.

"Who is this?" I asked the car. I was already transfixed.

"Leonard Cohen!" chorused the entire family of 5, including an 8 year old with pigtails and a stuffed rabbit in her lap. Clearly, they all thought, this new boyfriend is an idiot.

There's a sonic summation at work in Avalanche too: Cohen's signature sinister and churning Spanish guitar, originally encountered on Avalanche's prequel, The Stranger Song, is met by equally sinister and strident strings that crowd him and then retreat time and again; often Cohen would bring in female vocalists to commune with him and contradict him on his records. But this song is too personal, too harrowing, to foist onto anyone else. He burdens the song's weight alone, letting it bury him deeper and deeper down beneath the hill.

We always want it darker when it comes to Cohen. With Avalanche he truly delivers.

And then there's the song's phrasing. Dylan did a real nice job of publicly honoring Cohen at the time of his passing and it occurs to me now that, consciously or unconsciously, the Bobster, after blowing out his voice altogether in the 80's, surely taught himself how to sing all over again in the 90's and Ought's by channeling Cohen's work on songs like this.

Every word in Avalanche is stretched for and clawed after; every phrase refuses to submit to convention and instead is determined by its owners own soulful sense of time. Cohen and the later day Dylan knew they couldn't sing like other men. So they stopped trying, focusing instead on pace and mood, transmuting their own grotesqueries into beautifully individualized truths.

If both songs are indeed utterly Bob and Leonard, how could anyone ever cover such songs? Now one is gonna enjoy reading anyone else's versions of Molly Bloom or Prufrock; Zephyr in anyone else's painting is just a fat baby who needs his diaper changed in a big way.

But music allows for tributes to become solid art. The Cowboy Junkies turned in a deft, Spanish-tinged cover of Give Myself Up To You almost instantly.

And Nick Cave did the same thing 40 years ago with Avalanche.

These covers don't upstage the originals. They kneel to them. And so do I.

[mariacallous]

Especially since it's Eliot Cohen making that bullshit argument

[sweetdreamsjeff]

The poetry that inspired Jeff Buckley

Aimee Ferrier

Sun 1 October 2023 21:15, UK

Voices as incredible as the one belonging to Jeff Buckley don’t come around too often. Unfortunately, after releasing one record, Grace, Buckley, with all his potential, was taken away too soon. At the age of 30, the singer went for a swim from which he never returned, drowning in the Mississippi River.

Yet, his legacy lives on as one of the most influential artists to emerge from the 1990s, and his music is widely celebrated today for its emotional and lyrical complexity. Not only did Buckley possess an otherworldly voice, but he was also an extremely gifted guitar player and writer, with all his talents combining to create a masterful body of work.

Even when Buckley was covering other artists’ songs, such as ‘Lilac Wine’, ‘The Other Woman’ and ‘Hallelujah’, he imbued the pieces with his own distinctive style. Yet, his penchant for covers wasn’t a reflection of an aversion to writing. Buckley knew how to pen a stunningly poetic track, with songs like ‘Lover, You Should’ve Come Over’ and ‘Morning Theft’ suggesting that even if Buckley didn’t have the vocal pipes he was gifted with, he’d get by just fine as a writer.

Buckley took inspiration from many different writers and musicians when writing his own songs. Musically, Buckley looked back to folk artists like Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and, of course, his own father, Tim Buckley, from whom he was estranged. Elsewhere, he loved the work of Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the rich tones of Nina Simone, and Led Zeppelin, calling Robert Plant “my man”.

However, when it came to his literary inspirations, Buckley had an extensive book collection, which he no doubt looked to for ideas when writing his lyrics. He owned a lot of poetry, with Rainer Maria Rilke proving to be a particular favourite. Not only did Buckley own Dunio Elegies, Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations Poems from the Book of Hours, but he also owned his epistolary collection Letters to a Young Poet.

Buckley was also a fan of the classic American poet Walt Whitman, owning Leaves of Grass and From the Soil. Of course, no poetry collection is complete without copies of Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell and Illuminations, alongside some Charles Baudelaire – Buckley-owned Paris Spleen. The singer also owned the Selected Poems of confessional poet Anne Sexton and modernist writer T.S Eliot.

Check out Buckley’s complete poetry collection below.

The poetry that inspired Jeff Buckley:

Dunio Elegies – Rainer Maria Rilke

Poems from the Book of Hours – Rilke

Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations – Rilke

Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman

From This Soil – Whitman

The Odyssey – Homer

Early Work, 1970-1979 – Patti Smith

You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense – Charles Bukowski

Selected Poems of Ezra Pound

The Complete Lyrics – Hank Williams

A Haiku Journey: Basho’s Narrow Road to a Far Province – Matsuo Basho

Paris Spleen – Charles Baudelaire

The Captain’s Verses – Pablo Neruda

Selected Poems – T.S. Eliot

A Season in Hell and Illuminations – Arthur Rimbaud

Writing and Drawings ��� Bob Dylan

Ode to Walt Whitman – Federico Garcia Lorca

New Poems: 1962 – Robert Graves

Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems – Jim Carroll

Selected Poems of Anne Sexton – Anne Sexton

Selected Poems – John Shaw Neilson

Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge – Demore Schwartz

The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara – Frank O’Hara

Poems – Pier Paolo Pasolini

Space: And Other Poems – Eliot Katz

Tim Buckley Lyrics

[imall4frogs]

“What will stick will be the videos of grandmothers dragged into captivity, children shot dead, young women stripped naked, corpses desecrated. For many Jews, the echoes are primal, and go back to the two-and-a-half-millennia-old Book of Lamentations: ‘Her virgins are afflicted … Her young children are gone into captivity … The youth and the old man lie on the ground in the streets … Thou has slaughtered unsparingly.’ The scenes are ones that scar so much of Jewish history, from the massacres of the Crusades to the pogroms of the 19th and early 20th centuries, to the ultimate horror of the Holocaust. They are deep and indelible in the psyche of even the Israeli who surfs on Saturday and doesn’t mind a ham sandwich; they will color everything that follows hereafter.”

—Eliot A. Cohen for The Atlantic

[justforbooks]

John Burnside

Poet, winner of the TS Eliot and Forward prizes and the Whitbread poetry award, memoirist, novelist and academic

Being John Burnside was a remorseless exercise in human resilience. Even after he left behind childhood deprivation and became a professor at an ancient university, there were always demons to be banished, myths to be busted and issues urgently to be addressed for Burnside, who has died aged 69 after a short illness. Writing was his best revenge, the means by which a sense of stability could be imposed on personal turbulence.

It was his abusive, alcoholic father George who taught him how to make a living by telling stories, though the stories his father told were more often than not lies. “No one,” recalled John in A Lie About My Father (2006), the first of three celebrated memoirs, “ever did find out where my father came from. He was really a nobody: a foundling, a throwaway. The lies he told were intended to conceal this fact, and they were so successful that I didn’t know, until after he died, that he’d been left on a doorstep in West Fife in the late spring of 1926, by person or persons unknown.”

John’s debut collection of poetry, The Hoop, appeared in 1988, and few were the following years when there was no new book from him. His poetry, like his prose, often drew on the past and his own experience, such as The Woman Taken in Adultery, from A Normal Skin (1997), and Memories of a Non-existent Childhood, from Still Life with Feeding Snake (2017): “For years I was lost in the details / heart like a flower, / tending towards the light, / the fog of the cursive, / the beauties of mistranslation.”

For his 2011 collection Black Cat Bone, he won the TS Eliot prize and the Forward prize; he was one of only four poets – the others being Ted Hughes, Sean O’Brien and Jason Allen-Paisant – to win both prizes for the same book. In 2000, The Asylum Dance won the Whitbread poetry award. A Lie About My Father was chosen as the Scottish Arts Council’s nonfiction book of the year and the Saltire Society Scottish book of the year.

Last year he was awarded the David Cohen prize for literature in recognition of his entire body of work. Previous winners include VS Naipaul, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing and Seamus Heaney.

Secrets, passed from father to son, defined John’s youth and obsessed his adulthood. He was born in Dunfermline, but was raised in a prefab in Cowdenbeath. Once a thriving mining community, nicknamed “the Chicago of Fife”, by the time of John’s birth it had lost its raison d’etre and everyone who could escape did.

For the Burnsides the hoped-for nirvana was the new town of Corby, Northamptonshire, which attracted so many unemployed Scots to its steelworks it was known as Little Scotland. By then, however, as John recalled in his memoir, his father had begun to fall apart, physically and mentally; his much-loved mother, Theresa, did her best to keep up appearances, attending mass and reading Mills & Boons by the yard.

For his part, John took to smoking dope and playing “childish pranks” for which he was expelled from school. By 16 he had progressed to LSD, which he found more rewarding than the communion host. “Acid did what the host failed to do,” he wrote. “Acid was the only real sacrament to which I had access … Here I was, the boy who had seriously thought about a vocation. Now, though the source wasn’t quite what I’d expected, I had one.”

Of an autodidactic tendency, he read deeply and widely, claiming he was “a Seneca nut into my 20s”. He attended Cambridge College of Arts and Technology (“for something to do”), thereafter becoming a computer software engineer. He began to publish poetry in the 1980s, and became a full-time writer, moving back to Fife in 1996 after a long period in Surrey.

In 1997 came The Dumb House, the first of John’s eight novels. Fantastical, disturbing, chilling, it is full of startlingly arresting sentences that provoked critics such as Karl Miller to describe the author as an “extraordinarily good writer”. Rereading it recently, I caught echoes of Proust: “For a long time, I refused to speak – or so my Mother told me.”

For John, his formative years in Cowdenbeath and Corby were the ore from which he sought to extract diamonds. In Living Nowhere (2003), for example, he returned to the Corby of the 70s, where the hope of a better future for its transplanted inhabitants and their offspring is dashed by violence that hangs over the town like the ash and stench from the steelworks.

His taste was catholic, his enthusiasms boundless and his curiosity infectious. In his third memoir, I Put a Spell on You (2014), he describes incidents from his life and muses on popular music, classical literature, old and foreign movies, Diane Arbus and Mel Lyman, the American folk musician and film-maker who provided a link between Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol.

The book’s title is taken from the much-covered song written by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, another maker of his own myths. The version John first heard as a nine-year-old was by Nina Simone and whenever he heard her or anyone else sing he was transported back to Cowdenbeath. There, as a teenage barfly, he heard a girl called Annie sing it in a cafe, not long after which she was murdered.

Burly, bespectacled, latterly bearded, John taught for many years in the English department at St Andrews University, where he became professor in creative writing in 2009. Among his colleagues were Douglas Dunn, Robert Crawford, Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson.

As my wife and I witnessed when we paid an annual visit to the university, John was an impassioned and eloquent educator and revered by his students. Not so long ago, he sent us a copy of his 2019 book The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century, generously inscribed and thanking us for “the criticism and the encouragement over many years”. Not many writers are so forgiving of reviewers.

In 2018, writing in the London Review of Books, John told how he was suffering from sleep apnoea, “a condition where the patient stops breathing while asleep, then starts awake and desperately gasps in some air, before settling down again, all in a matter of seconds”. Two years later, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, he suffered “huge heart failure”, as he described it, and was given a “do not resuscitate” order by doctors who feared he would not pull through. Somehow he did and continued to work at full pelt.

In Ruin, Blossom, his most recent collection of poetry, published earlier this year, John explored ageing, mortality and the parlous state of the environment. Having long since rejected organised religion, he labelled himself a “deep ecologist/anarchist”. He was particularly exercised about the building of a windfarm beside a nature reserve near his home a few miles south of St Andrews, not because it spoiled his view but because of the harm it would do to bats, birds and other wildlife.

He wrote regularly for publications including the New Statesman, the TLS, the New Yorker and the Guardian, and became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1998.

He is survived by his wife, Sarah (nee Dunsby), whom he married in 1996, their two children, Lucas and Gil, and their grandson, Apollo.

🔔 John Burnside, writer, born 19 March 1955; died 29 May 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[quotesfrommyreading]

Nor can the troops on the front line be sheltered from the brutal truths about their leaders and the war itself that Prigozhin uttered on his abortive march on the Kremlin. Someone at last has said it, and the someone who did, brute though he may be, is the kind of leader who visited the front lines, paid his men and their survivors well, and has a kind of thuggish charisma that Putin lacks. Presumably, Ukrainian psychological-warfare experts are spreading the Prigozhin videos and audio recordings far and wide among their enemies.

  —  The Three Logics of Russia's Prigozhin Putsch

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[U.S. Embassy Warsaw]  ::: A massive crowd turns out in Warsaw to hear President Biden

* * * *

“Symbols matter: a Kennedy or a Reagan at the Berlin Wall, a Churchill with a cigar and a bowler, for that matter a green-clad Zelensky growling, ‘I need ammunition, not a ride.’ Simply by taking the hazardous trip to Kyiv, Biden made a strategic move of cardinal importance.” 

— Eliot Cohen, the Atlantic

* * * *

President Biden, speaking to an enthusiastic crowd outside Poland’s Royal Castle, urged the world’s nations to recommit to a unified defense of Ukraine, saying global democracy was at stake and accusing Russia of committing crimes against humanity through its ���abhorrent” acts against civilians. A few hours earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin, addressing a joint session of the Russian parliament, reiterated his attacks on what he called Ukraine’s “neo-Nazi regime” and, in a surprise move, announced that Moscow was suspending its participation in New START, the last remaining U.S.-Russia nuclear arms agreement.

U.S. officials said that the timing of the two speeches was coincidental and that Biden had decided long ago to travel to the region for the first anniversary of the brutal war. But if the president did not plan his remarks as a response to Putin’s, they nonetheless often sounded like a rebuttal of the Russian president.Putin said during his televised state of the nation address that Western elites “started” the conflict in conjunction with Ukraine. 

Biden, in his address, responded that it was Putin who “chose this war,” adding, “The West was not plotting to attack Russia, as Putin said today.”Biden also used soaring terms to cast the war, as he has before, as one front in a worldwide struggle between autocracy and democracy. “When Russia invaded, it wasn’t just Ukraine being tested. The whole world faced a test for the ages,” Biden said before a large crowd on a cold night with a colorful backdrop. “Europe was being tested. America was being tested. NATO is being tested. All democracies are being tested. And the questions we face are as simple as they are profound: Would we respond, or would we look the other way?”

[Washington Post]

[april-is]

April 30, 2023: Oral History of Insatiability, Jason Myers

Oral History of Insatiability Jason Myers

I woke in the wreck of history

still drowsy, a dryness in my

bed, my bones. Would you

like fingers, the Lord asked,

& gave me plenty. There was

no music, no garden in them.

I wanted to be touched the way

I had touched, delicately, but

with great passion. If you want

another kind of lover, Leonard

Cohen crooned. Not my will,

Martin Luther King intoned,

but God's. I wanted a word

for every surface, for the belly

& the underbelly, the line between

the lines. There was a secret

name inside every living thing,

a song underneath every song.

What happened then, I asked,

meaning both before & next.

The Lord said Kabul. Said

manifest destiny. Said Rembrandt

said Bordeaux said Dakota

said Chelsea Hotel said Egyptian

cotton said Homer. The Greek

poet, I asked. No. Homer Plessy.

Oh, I said. I see. But I did not.

Lulls, curtains, continuations.

You want company, the Lord asked,

& made New Orleans, oceans,

rye bread, Cointreau. There

were some companions sent

by another party. There were

days smothered in solitude,

nights when I thought, if only

I could sleep, if only...but I

could not complete the sentence.

Are you hungry, the Lord asked.

Oh my. Oh yes. Oh my yes.

--

Also by Jason Myers: Hotel Orpheus

Jason is an excellent poet and human being. His first book was just published, and it’s gorgeous: Maker of Heaven &.

Today in: 

2022: Try to Praise the Mutilated World, Adam Zagajewski 2021: In Defense of a Long Engagement, Mairead Small Staid 2020: Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness, Mary Oliver 2019: Starlings in Winter, Mary Oliver 2018: Born Yesterday, Philip Larkin 2017: Thus, He Spoke His Quietus, Thomas Lux 2016: Trees, W.S. Merwin 2015: Today and Two Thousand Years from Now, Philip Levine 2014: from For a Long Time I Have Wanted to Write a Happy Poem, Richard Jackson 2013: Tear It Down, Jack Gilbert 2012: from An Atlas of the Difficult World, Adrienne Rich 2011: Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal, Naomi Shihab Nye 2010: from Pioneers! O Pioneers!, Walt Whitman 2009: from The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot 2008: from Five-Finger Exercises, T.S. Eliot 2007: Journey of the Magi, T.S. Eliot 2006: Preludes, T.S. Eliot 2005: A Song for Simeon, T.S. Eliot

-- 

I don’t know where this month went! As always, thanks for letting me spam you, and for your kind notes.

More to come in 11 short months. In the meantime, check it out, you can:

- Visit a random poem sent in the past at april-is.tumblr.com/random - Browse poems by topic - Or skim them chronologically

Until next time, mes amours.

Martha

[jewish-ship-showdown]

Ships that have already qualified (read before submitting):

Jude Lizowski/Jonesy Garcia

Tyler Kennedy "TK" Strand/Carlos Reyes

Peter Parker (Spider-Man)/Gwen Stacey

Willow Rosenberg/Winifred "Fred" Burkle

Francine Frensky/Muffy Crosswire

Susan Ivanova/Marcus Cole

Kate Kane (Batwoman)/Renee Montoya

Barry B. Benson/Vanessa Bloome

Jake Peralta/Amy Santiago

Willow Rosenberg/Tara Maclay

Jack Zimmermann/Eric "Bitty" Bittle

Justin "Ransom" Oluransi/Adam "Holster" Birkholtz

Danny/Reuven

Larissa "Lara" Bogdan/Jasmine

Kelsey Pokly/Isabella "Stacks" Alvarado

Rebecca Bunch/Audra Levine

Rebecca Bunch/Greg Serrano

Rebecca Bunch/Nathaniel Plimpton

Samantha "Sam" Manson/Danniel "Danny" Fenton

Bruce Wayne (Batman)/Selina Kyla (Catwoman)

Bruce Wayne (Batman)/Clark Kent (Superman)

Clark Kent (Superman)/Lois Lane

Harley Quinn/Pamela Isley (Poison Ivy)

Barney Guttman/Logan Nguyen

Leah/Chanan

Shay Goldstein/Dominic Yun

Marvin/Whizzer

Trina/Mendel Weisenbachfeld

Perchik/Hodel

Tzeitel/Motel

Monica Gellar/Chandler Bing

Molly McGee/Libby Stein Torres

Rachel Berry/Noah Puckerman

Fiddleford McGucket/Stanford Pines

Cristina Yang/Owen Hunt

Cristina Yang/Preston Burke

Levi Schmidt/Nico Kim

Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam

James Wilson/Gregory House

The Baker and/The Baker's Wife

Kim Possible/Ron Stoppable

The Jewish People/The Shabbat Bride

Alec Hardison/Parker

Max Eisenhardt (Magneto)/Charles Xavier (Professor X)

Steve Rogers (Captain America)/James "Bucky" Barnes

Arnold "Arnie" Roth/Michael Bech

Arnold "Arnie" Roth/Steve Rogers (Captain America)

Billy Kaplan (Wiccan)/Teddy Altman (Hulkling)

Bobby Drake (Iceman)/Hank McCoy (Beast)

Bobby Drake (Iceman)/Johnny Storm (The Human Torch)

Layla El Faouly/Mark Spector (Moon Knight)

Matthew Hawk (Two-Gun Kid II)/Clint Barton (Hawkeye)

Peter Parker (Spider-Man)/Betty Brant

Peter Parker (Spider-Man)/Eugene "Flash" Thompson

Peter Parker (Spider-Man)/ Felicia Hardy

Peter Parker (Spider-Man)/ Harry Osborn

Peter Parker (Spider-Man)/Katherine Anne "Kitty" Pryde

Peter Parker (Spider-Man)/Mary Jane "MJ" Watson

Peter Parker (Spider-Man)/Wade Wilson (Deadpool)

Steve Rogers/Bernadette "Bernie" Rosenthal

Wanda Maximoff/The Vision

Midge Maisel/Susie Myerson

Hal Emmerich (Otacon)/Solid Snake

Casey Goldberg-Calderon/Lunella Lafayette

Fran Fine/Max Sheffield

Ben Gross/Devi Vishwakumar

Winston Schmidt/Cece Parekh

David Jacobs/Jack Kelly

Seth Cohen/Summer Roberts

Scout Touzani/Elias Wyrick

KJ Brandman/Mac Coyle

Lavinia Asimov/Poison Oak

Phineas Flynn/Isabella Garcia-Shapiro

Anon's Mom/Dad

The person reading this & their partner

Jerry Seinfeld/Cosmo Kramer

Simon Lewis/Isabel Lightwood

Danielle/Maya

Bram Greenfeld/Simon Spier

Miryem Mandelstam/The Staryk King

David Rose/Patrick Brewer

James T Kirk/S'chn T'gai Spock

Worf Rozhenko/Jadzia Dax

Kanan Jarrus/Hera Syndulla

Brian Jeeter/Krejjh

Bobby Singer/Rufus Turner

Jonah Simms/Amy Sosa

Reish Lakish/Rabbi Yochanen

King David/Yonatan

Devorah/Barak

Moses/Tzipporah

Ruth/Naomi

Yaakov/The Angel

Rowan Roth/Neil Mcnair

Klaus Hargreeves/Dave Katz

Cecil Palmer/Carlos The Scientist

Josh Lyman/Donna Moss

Little Ash/Uriel

Lucille "Lucy" Kensington/Dr. Edison "Ed" Tucker

Fox Mulder/Dana Scully

Anshel/Avigdor

Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer

Wanda Maximoff (The Scarlet Witch)/Jericho Drumm

Bruce Wayne (Batman)/Shondra Kinsolving

Bruce Wayne (Batman)/Talia Al Ghul

Ben Grimm (The Thing)/Alicia Masters

Velma Dinkley/Daphne Blake

Velma Dinkley/Marcie Fleach

Didi Pickles/Stu Pickles

Velma Dinkley/Coco Diablo

Babushka (Tatiana)/Dedushka (Ivan)

Kitty Pryde/Illyana Rasputin

Natasha Romanoff/Wanda Maximoff

Marc Spector (Moon Knight)/Clint Barton (Hawkeye)

Hillel/Shammai

S'chn T'gai Spock/James T Kirk/Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy

S'chn T'gai Spock/Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy

Frankie Bergstein/Grace Hanson

Annie Edison/Jeff Winger

Maxine Myers/Paula Cohen

Baby Houseman/Johnny Castle

Tevye/Golde

Michael "Mike" Wazowski/Celia Mae

Talmudic couple having gay sex in the attic

Tim Drake/Kon El (Conner Kent)

Violet Baudelaire/Quigley Quagmire

Reuben Kent/Feliks Kaufmann

Anshel/Avigdor/Hadass

Amram/Zelikman

Anshel/Hadass

SUBMISSIONS ARE OPEN UNTIL MAY 8, 2023 @ 12:00 AM EDT

[reading-writing-revolution]

(via How to Navigate the Era of Trump - The Atlantic)

Many friends, Eliot A. Cohen has found, are despondent over Trump's victory. "I respect their points of view but have decided to look elsewhere for advice, and so have turned to a different set of friends—those sitting on my bookshelves.

Some of these friends have been with me for more than half a century; and they get wiser and more insightful with age. One of the first I turned to is only slightly older than I am: Motivation and Personality, by the academic psychologist Abraham Maslow. The book has a family history: Maslow summered at a lake in Maine in a cabin near one owned by my grandfather, a self-made shoe-factory owner who came to the United States with only the benefit of a grade-school education.“

From Orwell: