E-Verse Radio

“A considerable proportion, if not an outright majority, of the medical profession is of conservative cast of mind: politically, that is, not technically. Perhaps a close and continuous acquaintance with human nature at its limits renders doctors, if not cynical exactly, at least circumspect about the prospects for human perfectibility. It is surprising, then, that the major medical journals these days, edited entirely by doctors, are riddled with — I almost said rotted by — political correctness. It isn’t easy to define political correctness with precision, but it is easy to recognize when it is present. It acts on me as the sound, when I was a child, of a teacher’s nail scraping down a blackboard because his piece of chalk was too short: it sends shivers down my spine. It is the attempt to reform thought by making certain things unsayable; it is also the conspicuous, not to say intimidating, display of virtue (conceived of as the public espousal of the ‘correct,’ which is to say ‘progressive,’ views) by means of a purified vocabulary and abstract humane sentiment. To contradict such sentiment, or not to use such vocabulary, is to put yourself outside the pale of civilized men (or should I say persons?).”

 

 - Theodore Dalrymple

 

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The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews
Amy Clampitt

 

An ingenuity too astonishing
to be quite fortuitous is
this bog full of sundews, sphagnum-
lines and shaped like a teacup.
                               A step
down and you’re into it; a
wilderness swallows you up:
ankle-, then knee-, then midriff-
to-shoulder-deep in wetfooted
understory, an overhead
spruce-tamarack horizon hinting
you’ll never get out of here.
                          But the sun
among the sundews, down there,
is so bright, an underfoot
webwork of carnivorous rubies,
a star-swarm thick as the gnats
they’re set to catch, delectable
double-faced cockleburs, each
hair-tip a sticky mirror
afire with sunlight, a million
of them and again a million,
each mirror a trap set to
unhand believing,
                 that either
a First Cause said once, “Let there
be sundews,” and there were, or they’ve
made their way here unaided
other than by that backhand, round-
about refusal to assume responsibility
known as Natural Selection.
                           But the sun
underfoot is so dazzling
down there among the sundews,
there is so much light
in that cup that, looking,
you start to fall upward.

 

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1. Virginia Woolf

2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman

3. Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr.)

4. Carolyn Heilbrun

5. Sylvia Plath

 

Honorable mention: “Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. She tried to commit suicide but failed, and as a consequence, became the grandmother of Frankenstein’s monster, a dead man brought back to life.”

 

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Mythomania (1977)

 

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1. Cinderella

2. Pretty Woman

3. Grease

4. My Fair Lady

5. Lady for a Day

 

Extra: Dogfight

 

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Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.

 

[Note, this has been proven untrue in recent tests. - E]

 

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“Many years ago, as a new undergraduate student at a state university, I attended fraternity parties. Much to my surprise, I noticed time and again that the residents’ rooms were decorated with posters for Quentin Tarantino’s early film “Reservoir Dogs.” I found it a mystery that these same posters – of slick suited gangsters in shades, strutting in black and white down an anonymous city street – adorned the walls of so many young upwardly mobile undergrads. What had resonated with them in a film about a bank robbery run amuck?”

 

 

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Q: What is the last book Mark Twain ever read?

A: Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.

 

“He became interested in Hardy’s Jude, and spoke of it with high approval, urging me to read it. He dwelt a good deal on the morals of it, or rather on the lack of them. He followed the tale to the end, finishing it the afternoon before we sailed. It was his last continuous reading.”

 

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[Yes, poet is on there, along with closet organizer. - E]

 

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Blue and white are the most common school colours.

 

The first Lifesaver flavor was peppermint.

 

The letter N ends all Japanese words not ending in a vowel.

 

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“Consider the word houyhnhnms for a moment. It is a word that is never typed or written other than anxiously. Its orthography resists complacency. It opposes the virtual invisibility that overtakes the familiar. Which is just as well, because this one word, on its own, demonstrates the power of language to equal the actual world. For literary theoreticians, it is axiomatic that language is unequal to the task of encompassing reality. Its failure is inevitable, a given. Then we consider Swift’s brilliant one-word encapsulation of the shuddering breath in a horse’s nostrils. Or mkgnao — Joyce’s more accurate word for the approximate and conventional miaow. Both words are triumphs of mimesis. Of course, you might object that neither of these words is words. Mkgnao is not a proper word, runs the objection. To which there is an answer: it is now. And so are Joyce’s two sharply observed and minutely differentiated alternatives: mrkgnao and mrkrgnao. Each of which is friendlier. Language is not limited to the hobbled, hideous, trammelled practice of the average theoretician. Or even the average writer.” – Craig Raine

 

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“Is 40% or more of Moby Dick, David Copperfield, Anna Karenina, or Vanity Fair mere padding? Can these novels be usefully cut?”

 

 

“Work does play an important role in literature. It just doesn’t mirror the importance or merit the attention it gets in real life”:

 

 

 

“The Send button, so easy to click, invites too-quick a response. In fact, ’Send’ may be the most dangerous four-letter word of the 21st century. Robert Fulford explains why”:

 

 

 

America’s Disappearing Book Reviews:

 

 

 

“Movie critics are held to a different standard than other critics. If a book critic were to pan a Jackie Collins novel, or a food critic were to point out that the Whopper isn’t Kobe beef, they wouldn’t be called ‘out of touch.’ Film critics, however, are expected to be cheerleaders”:

 

 

 

What the Pulitzer Says About State Of American Theatre:

 

 

The Most Expensive Movie Ever Made:

 

 

“Writers’ offspring tend to go into the family business with far less regularity than, say, the children of doctors or lawyers, and it seldom happens that over the long haul, and in the deepening shade, the younger equals or outstrips the elder — the way that Anthony Trollope, to take a famous example, bested his mother, Fanny. The exception these days is the curious writerly firm of Amis & Amis, founded by Kingsley, who died in 1995, and now run by his son Martin”:

 

 

What Granta’s List Of Best Writers Says About America:

 

 

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Ladies, not sure you want to go on a date with him? Check out:

 

 

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http://punkrockpenguin.net/waste/amuse/badcovers/sexbook.html 

 

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Flower, array of fertile and sterile leaves,
“forming the reproductive fabric of angiosperms,”
my friend, the botanist, says,
a tube inserted in her chest below the breast,
through a cleft and fixed to a pump
she calls Marion, after her doctor.
Marion doses her chemo, day and night-her stem,
tendril, style-the elongated unfertile portion of the pistil,
she explains, between the stigma and ovulary, her fruit.
She’s wildflower-pipewort, or carrion wort,
depending-false Solomon’s seal,
nodding mandarin, asphodel.
Ziggurat of marzipan? she asks,
producing delicate smoked salmon,
lifting a gold-plated butterfish to my mouth.
When it rains, she says in a soft, clear voice,
the waters come so hard, the desert earth
cannot absorb. Torrential. Useless.
Her pose is a diagram of gesture-weight forward
on left leg, right behind, toe brushing floor
in decorous point, palms open, turned front.
She’s learning a little Arabic from a phrase book:
“Uncle, may I take an apple and an orange?”
“Of course, help yourself, son; we have peaches, too.”
“Barbara, taste how sweet this peach is.”
(Taste the peach this, of Barbara, see tasty how.)
Yálla (come on)
Let’s cut a melon; they are very sweet.
íhna imbasát-na hína
(We enjoyed it here.)

 

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1. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (this one book could be the entire list. It’s so good, it counts as more than one book)

 

2. Fatherland by Robert Harris (it’s a book and a movie)

 

3. It Happened Here (movie, 1966)

 

4. After Dachau by Daniel Quinn (book)

 

5. Hitler Triumphant, edited by Peter Tsouras (collection of short stories)

 

 

Extra: The Wave, the most awesome ABC afterschool special ever. Blew my mind as a kid. But it doesn’t exactly fit this category, because it’s about how a California school teacher gets the students in a high school to unwittingly become Nazis.

 

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Umpire, Arkansas

 

[Styriiiiiiiiiiiike three. You're outta here! - E]

 

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“It’s spring of 1949, and a husband absentmindedly flips through The Saturday Evening Post. He stops at the headline, ’We Love to Catch Them on a Springmaid Sheet.’ It’s an ad for a fabric company, which is not something men in this particular era (or our own) care much about. But the woman being rescued is showing a bit of garter as she leaps to safety, her skirt flapping as she lands on a blanket stretched taut by four handsome firefighters. This is The Tease in action, and believe it or not, there is more here than meets the eye. Elliott White Springs, the president of Spring Mills, was the slightly dirty mind behind a series of incredibly popular ads featuring sly puns and double-entendres that ran from 1947 until his death in 1959. Springs even wrote his own ad copy, and along the way created the rules of advertising innuendo that remain relevant today.” – Ryan Bigge

 

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A belt of asteroids.

 

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“One of my journalism professors many, many years ago at the University of Texas was Robert Heard, who as it happens was one of the first on the scene of the Charles Whitman shooting and was himself shot by Whitman. Heard didn’t assign papers and when he gave tests, you had exactly 100 words to answer a question. (His policy was to drop your grade one letter grade for each word over a hundred — 104 words was an automatic F.) Eight or ten questions on the test and you pick four to answer, over the course of an hour. In journalism, Heard said, you have to be able to sort all the information you know about a subject and then identify the most important things about it and put them first (eg, in the so-called inverted pyramid.) And you probably would have constraints on space, so he could justify this technique. But this applies to more fields than journalism. Picking out the gold from the dross is valuable anywhere at anytime, and who cares how much peripheral and worthless information has also been accumulated? I think a teacher could assign very short essays to be written in-class, requiring the preparation to be done in advance (and allowing anyone to bring in their research material).”

 

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

 

Joan Didion and John Gregory Donne

 

Bill and Hillary Clinton

 

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (you have to admit that they’re talented!)

 

 

 

“I visited the Dull Men’s website (and survived) and noticed that one of the comments was sent in by someone living in Mack, Colorado. Now is that a place to visit or what?”

 

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E-Verse announcement:

 

The Center for the Humanities, At the Graduate Center, CUNY and The New Criterion invite you to a panel discussion. 

 

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

6:30 pm – 8:00 pm

Proshansky Auditorium

The Graduate Center, CUNY

365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street)

 

A panel discussion on the occasion of the publication of Counterpoints: Twenty-five Years of “The New Criterion” on Culture and the Arts. 

 

PANELISTS

 

Judge Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and the American Decline

Anthony Daniels, Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy

Roger Kimball, co-editor and publisher of The New Criterion, author, The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art

Eric Ormsby, Facsimiles of Time: Essays on Poetry and Translations

Mark Steyn, author of The New York Times bestselling America Alone

 

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

Questions? Call (212) 817-2005 or email ch@gc.cuny.edu

 

Subways: 6 to 33rd St., or N, R, Q, W, B, D, F, V to 34th St/ Herald Square

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Paul’s back from Australia, so we’ll have a brand new TV and Radio show for you. Thanks for all your patience while he’s been away.

 

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