"From the penthouse suspended silently so high above the winding traffic's iron lamentation, forty straight-down stories into those long, low, night-blue bars aglow below street-level, a lonely guilt pervades us all." - Nelson Algren in Nonconformity - Writing on Writing.

The book is a hotch-potch collection of essays from Nelson Algren, which were not published in the 1950s due to McCarthy's witch-hunt. (One particular essay (more about it later) really rings a bell in today's context of the "war on terrorism".) There are some really good essays in the book while some are really difficult to read and follow. The cover flap says it is full of quotable quotes and I sure enjoyed much of it, especially since he seems to share my penchant to quote others (definitely a "substitute for wit", in my case.)

For the time being, here is another gem from the first page of the book -- where Nelson quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald*

" ...that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are.. only adds to this unhappiness in the end..."

Reading this, I am reminded of my earlier post on tristesse and Amit Varma's post where he writes:

Both make me sad in different ways, and remind me of how futile this whole game is. And so, recursively, we progress.

* Note to self: I really should invest the time to go back and read the so-called great American novel - The Great Gatsby - instead of spending time reading a number of non-descripit books, as is my wont! There are so many 19th and 20th classics that I have not read... but have read many books from the last 20-25 years that perhaps no one will remember in another 20 years even, let alone a century or two later!

In the Foreword to the Best American Poetry 2005, the series editor, David Lehman writes about a study published in April 2004 in the Journal of Death Studies that revealed that poets tend to die younger (age 62, on average) than other writes (playwrights at 63, novelists at 66, and nonfiction writers at 68).

Ofcourse this was from a study of almost 2000 dead writers from different countries and different centuries...and so the conclusions of this "study" can perhaps be easily argued against but I say only a poet could come up with an appropriate riposte to this :)

Franz Wright, who learned earlier in the same month that he had won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, was asked to comment on Professor Kaufman's study. "Since in the U.S., the worse you write the better your chances of survival, it stands to reason that poets would be the youngest to die," he said gloomily.

Game, Set, Match... to the poets! :)

From the Best American Poetry 2005 comes this great insightful poem by Samuel Hazo, originally published in The Atlantic Monthly (subscription needed to access this link.)

Seesaws

The bigger the tomb, the smaller the man.
The weaker the case, the thicker the brief.
The deeper the pain, the older the wound.
The graver the loss, the dryer the tears.

The truer the shot, the slower the aim.
The quicker the kiss, the sweeter the taste.
The viler the crime, the vaguer the guilt.
The louder the price, the cheaper the ring.

The higher the climb, the sheerer the slide.
The steeper the odds, the shrewder the bet.
The rarer the chance, the brasher the risk.
The colder the snow, the greener the spring.

The braver the bull, the wiser the cape.
The shorter the joke, the surer the laugh.
The sadder the tale, the dearer the joy.
The longer the life, the briefer the years.

I especially liked what Hazo writes in the Contributor's notes.

"Seesaws almost created itself as a litany of balances, but all the balances seemed in conflict. Each of the things listed created its opposite, but there was always more there than simple opposition. The more I wrote, the more the irony became apparent to me. It was an irony that reminded me of a comment of Aristotle in the Poetics that the essence of drama (read: life) was the presence therein of a seeming contradiction: that the worst, for example, always happens when we think the worst is over; and that there is always a discrepancy between appearance and reality."

Started reading Best American Poetry 2005 and loved this poem by Sarah Manguso (originally published in Conduit)

Hell

The second-hardest thing I have to do is not be longing's slave.

Hell is that. Hell is that, others, having a job, and not having a
job. Hell is thinking continually of those who were truly great.

The kind of music I want to continue hearing after I am dead is
the kind that makes me think I will be capable of hearing it then.

There is music in Hell. Wind of desolation! It blows past the egg-
eyed statues. The canopic jars are full of secrets.

The wind blows through me. I open my mouth to speak.

I recite the list of people I have copulated with. It does not take long.
I say the names of my imaginary children. I call out four-syllable
words beginning with B. This is how I stay alive.

Beelzebub. Brachiosaur. Bubble-headed. I don't know how I stay alive.
What I do know is that there is a light, far above us, that goes out
when we die,

and that in Hell there is a gray tulip that grows without any sun.
It reminds me of everything I failed at,

and I water it carefully. It is all I have to remind me of you.

Also this poem (originally published in Image) by Garret Keizer was great, though admittedly I did not get it all.

Hell and Love

Hell is always grander to paint
Than the bliss of a resurrected saint;
More fun to show the lecher's doom
Tits and ass in the flicking gloom.

Yet love inspires more than hate,
A head caressed than on a plate,
And even should his colors wash,
I'd put Chagall in front of Bosch.

The passion is a painter's dream,
With hell and love a single theme --
The human body stripped to show
A death both merciful and slow.

What are you thankful for? Reading the Book of Gratitude can be an hour well spent....

1. What are you thankful for? Reading the Book of Gratitude can be an hour well spent....

2. Where are you on the Global Rich List?... (via Linkastic)

I wonder if there is a similar happiness meter and if one could plot a Happiness Index for individuals versus the Richness index, would there be a correlation? I think not....

Update: Seems people (specifically, the King of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck) have tried to define a Gross National Happiness (GNH) index for countries in "an attempt to define quality of life in more holistic and psychological terms than Gross National Product."

Others have defined a Happy Planet Index while others study the economics of happiness.

Also, via Mefi and wikipedia:

Meet Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi- author of the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience which "investigates the happiness of doing, how the balance between stress/anxiety and slack/boredom effect experience and happiness, and how we can all use it to our advantage."

Csikszentmihalyi is a Professor of Psychology and has "devoted his life's work to the study of what makes people truly happy, satisfied and fulfilled" and is one of the world's leading researcher on positive psychology.[1]

In an interview with Wired magazine, Csikszentmihalyi described flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost."[2]

And here is a Ask Mefi thread about finding flow in everyday life.

Another renowned name in the area of positive psychology is Barbara Fredrickson, who is Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina where she is also Director of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Laboratory.

Interesting post via BB

A new study suggests that there is a benefit to forgetting irrelevant or similar but less useful memories. According to Stanford University neuroscientist Brice Kuhl and his colleagues, suppressing certain memories reduces the cognitive load of remembering something else later on. Using fMRI to scan the brains of subjects as they performed memory tests, the researchers gained insight into the neural processing of competing memories. They published the results of the study in the current issue of the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience.

From New Scientist:

"Whenever you’re engaging in remembering, the brain adapts. It’s constantly re-weighting memories," says Kuhl. "In this simple test, we see it reverse memory to weaken competing memories. This is something that probably happens a lot in the real world."

A good example is the confusion that arises when we change passwords on our computers or email accounts. We often mix up old and new passwords at first, but through repetition we develop a strong memory of the new password and forget the old one.

Previously on BB:
• Naps improve declarative memory Link
• Better visual working memory stems from ignoring stuff Link
• Memory glasses Link

Listening to some music on Last.fm, I heard a song by Rachid Taha, an Algerian born singer, who sings mainly in Arabic.

You can see videos of him rocking here and here, a recording from a live concert with Khaled and Faudel ...and last but not least singing Rock-the-Casbah here!

Hearing him rock in arabic truly demonstrated to me how music is a universal language. Someone has to declare the freedom to enjoy music, a basic joy of life, a basic human right that should be available to every single individual. Ok.. maybe its a given.. no one has to declare anything... for the most part, music has been the refuge for human beings through trial and tribulations although totalitarian governments, like the Taliban, did try to curb and restrict it.

--

P.S. Khaled was very popular in India in the 90s with his song Didi a big-hit in clubs and on TV. I quite enjoyed Khaled's song Aicha (sung in concert by Khaled and Faudel in the 2nd link). You can also hear more arabic music at this blog. Another famous Franco-Algerian singer I quite enjoy is Cheb Mami and have enjoyed his album, Meli-Meli multiple times. But Rachid and Faudel are new names to me and names to look for in the future when I am scouring the internet for some good global music!

P.P.S. Damn...what a coincidence. Here I am listening to Cheb Mami and other Rai singers and just read at the above wiki link for Cheb Mami that he was in the news just this week --- the French government has issued an international warrant to arrest Cheb Mami for jumping bail after being charged of "voluntary violence" against an ex-girlfriend.

We read and learned the poem A PSALM OF LIFE by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as a kid and many phrases from the poem still tumble around in my head.

And so on this day, in celebration of the 90th birthday of a 'great' man.. my grand-father... a man who has lived life to its fullest and the personification of 'up and doing'....here is that gem of a poem. Wish there was reflected in me a small part of him...

---

A PSALM OF LIFE

WHAT THE HEART OF THE YOUNG MAN SAID TO THE PSALMIST

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,--act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;--

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

---

Note: A searchable database of his poems is here. Also, I did not realize that 2007 is Longfellow's bi-centennial year and that he lived for more than 45 years in Cambridge, MA and is buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetry, which I pass by often.

Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times claims “the meaning of poetry is to give courage.” In his critique of the book, David Orr say it’s not so: “That is not the meaning of poetry; that is the meaning of Scotch.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/books/review/13orr.html

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4155/is_20061231/ai_n17111397


http://www.nfsps.com/mo/ts/Poetry%20News%20001.htm
--
http://www.signandsight.com/
http://www.globalprovince.com/witandwisdom.htm

As I wrote a short while back, the introduction by Garrison Keillor to his collection of poems - Good Poems for Hard Times is a vigorous sell for the power of poetry, if one was ever written.

Although reading the introduction in its entirety is highly recommended to get the full scope, I transcribe here a paragraph that struck a chord with me.

The meaning of poetry is to give courage. A poem is not a puzzle that you the dutiful reader is obliged to solve. It is meant to poke you, get you to buck up, pay attention, rise and shine, look alive, get a grip, get the picture, pull up your socks, wake up and die right. Poets have many motives for writing . .

... but what really matters about poetry and what distinguishes poets from, say, fashion models or ad salesmen is the miracle of incantation in rendering the gravity and grace and beauty of the ordinary world and thereby lending courage to strangers. This is a necessary thing. At times life becomes almost impossible, and you curl up under a blanket in a dim room behind drawn shades and you despise your life, which seems mean and purposeless, a hoax and a cheat, your shining chances all wasted, pissed away, nobody can change this or make this better, love is lost, hope gone, nothing left but to pour a glass of gin and listen to weepy music. But it can help to say words. Moaning helps. So does prayer. God hears prayer and restores the souls of the faithful. Walking helps. Many people have pulled themselves up out of the pit by the simple expedient of rising to their feet, leaning slightly forward, and putting one foot ahead of the other. Poems help.

A few more sentences later in the introduction that were also interesting.

How often in the past week did anyone offer you something from the heart? It's there in poetry. Forget everything you ever read about poetry, it doesn't matter -- poetry is the last preserve of honet speech and the outspoken heart.

and later..

Poetry is church. What animates poetry is faith, the same faith that moves the builder and the butcher.

..ending the introduction with:

This is a book of poems that if I knew you better and if you were in a hard passage I might send you one or two of along with a note, the way people used to do, believing in the bracing effect of bold writing. Whether you stole the book, bought it used or remaindered, found it on the bus, got it from your son for Christmas, I hope it does you some good. That was the reason for putting the poems together. These poems describe a common life. It is good to know about this. I hope you take courage from it.

However, like I wrote before, he does sell (and sometimes over-sell) poetry and its power.... this para below being a clear case of overstating the case :)

America is in hard times these days, the beloved country awash to the scuppers in expensive trash, gripped by persistent jitters, politics even more divorced from reality than usual, the levers of power firmly held in the hands of a cadre of Christian pirates and bullies whose cynicism is stunning, especially their perversion of the gospel to blast the poor and the meek and subvert the tax system in favor of the rich, while public institutions are put in perpetual financial crisis meanwhile newspapers dwindle in sad decline, journalism is lost in the whirlwind of amusement, and the hairy hand of the censor reaches out -- what mustn't be lost in this dank time, is the passion of young people for truth and justice and liberty -- the spirit that has kept the American porch light lit through dark ages of history -- and when this spirit is betrayed by the timid and the greedy and the naive, then we must depend on the poets. American poetry is the truest journalism we have. What your life can be, lived bravely and independently, you can discover in poetry.

Like I had written before, I started reading Bill Moyers' The language of life - a festival of poets, a collection of interviews with different poets, and particularly enjoyed the interview with Donald Hall. Reading these interviews made me want to read some good poetry and so I picked up a book of poems - coincidentally also with links to public broadcasting - Good Poems for Hard Times - selected and introduced by Garrison Keillor; as heard on The Writer's Almanac.

I started reading the introduction by Garrison Keillor - a vigorous sell for the power of poetry, if one was ever written - at 4am this morning ... but more about the introduction elsewhere.

And while it was Donald Hall who captured my imagination with his words in reading his interview in the first book, it is perhaps appropriate that amongst the first few poems I read (all good, as the title of the book suggests, it was these lines from a Jane Kenyon poem that have captured me in my waking hours this morning...

for oblivion or some condition even more
extreme, which I intuit, but can't quite name.

Some days, one does feel like this. I could never have captured this feeling in words like Jane Kenyon has so beautifully done here.

The most painful longing comes over me.
A longing not of the body....

It could be for beauty --
I mean what Keats was panting after,
for which I love and honor him;
it coould be for the promises of God,
or for oblivion, nada; or some condition even more
extreme, which I intuit, but can't quite name.
- from the poem Ice Storm, by Jane Kenyon

Writing poetry for catharsis was something like this for me..

Literature has played a dual and contradictory role in my life. The act of writing appeases one’s memories and eases the act of forgetting. When I write, I make my memories tangible, and in this way I can get rid of them. On the other hand, writing is but a ploy to convulse memory back into life. And the more I write, the more my memories return to inhabit me. - Jorge Semprún, in a Paris Review interview, Spring 2007

I remember being viscerally moved by Without, a book of poems* by the current Poet Laureate of the US, Donald Hall, which I had read in one sitting a few years back - reading the whole book non-stop deep into the night. The book includes poems written by Hall after the loss of his wife, the poet, Jane Kenyon. I cannot remember any book that I have read - and there have been many over the years - which had evoked such a powerful emotional response from me.

I have since read a few other poems by him as well as perused through the Collected Poems of Jane Kenyon and my admiration for Donald's poems has only grown since then.

So it is with great pleasure that I am enjoying an interview with Donald Hall in Bill Moyers' The language of life - a festival of poets - a collection of interviews with various noted poets - and a good companion book to Moyers' PBS series The Power of the Word.

I am only half-way through the Hall interview and already found so many quotable quotes...that I am tempted to transcribe some here right away. The introduction to the book Bill Moyers also is chock-full of quotable quotes about reading and writing poetry but I'll get to that some other time.

Here then are some great excerpts from DH's interview. I'll add to it as I finish reading the interview. (Too bad that I do not take the time to sit back and read 20 pages at a stretch!)

DH = Donald Hall
BM = Bill Moyers

-

BM: "A successful poem is impulse validated by attention" -- your line. Is the attention at the desk there? Is that where you're sweating over it?

DH: It's twenty seconds of impulse and two years of attenion, but the impulse may be more important than the attention. # (wish Blogger had a way to do footnotes! Also subscripts/superscripts!)

--
BM: Why did you choose poetry as a way of life?

DH: I loved it so much. What other reason would you have for choosing poetry?

--
DH: When I make poems I'm consoling myself by making the poem out of loss, but I also have some notion that I'm talking to somebody else at any time now or in the future. The definition of a poem includes readers. I don't write a poem for myself.

BM: It's a very public experience.

DH: Young people feel as if they were writing for themselves, but that's only the beginning of the poem. When it's completed, the poem is a bridge from one to another.

--
BM: You keep notebooks, you write words down, then you leave them for a while to bubble and twist and turn, right?

DH: I do everything to words. I'd be happy to send them to Florida or buy them hot dogs, anything, if they'll just come through. THe work is prosaic, sitting at the desk every day and saying, "How can I make this better?" Such work is not, in itself, inspired, but by looking regularly at the poem I get so familiar with it that I'm working on it when I'm asleep. I wake up in the morning, look at the poem I worked on the day before, and see something I had not seen. Something has happened in between, probably sleep work. For that matter, something inside you is always working even when you're awake.

--
DH: ... Someone reminded me later of my advice to young writers, "Don't ever hold anything back. Put everything out that can possibly belong in that poem or story. Don't save anything for the next one." That's the only way to work. It's the only way to live, really.

---
#: Found an excerpt from another interview where Donald Hall expostulates a little bit more about what he means by "impulse validated by attention"

Myers: You speak of The One Day as something of a happy accident, "impulse validated by attention," though we know an imposing talent was behind it. But The One Day does read as though it was written in the way the long modernists poems were written: by a piecemeal process of composition, and with no deliberate intention. It succeeds, for me, through allowance of subject matter: You've permitted what came into it to stay.

Hall: When I used that phrase, "impulse validated by attention," I was not talking about a happy accident. I'm talking about working over the texture of its language. Impulsively, I set down a word or a phrase or even a series of lines; "impulsively" means I do it rapidly, in excitement, without malice aforethought, intuitively—in a manic state. By inspiration. But I don't just leave it there on the scattery page; I attend to it. I look at it every morning for one thousand mornings. After the eight-hundred-and-second morning, I find that I don't like this word, take it out and impulsively put in another. After the nine-hundred-and-sixty-second morning, I remove the new word and restore the old one. On the one-thousandth, two-hundred-and-thirty-second morning, I realize that two words here and two words there link up with seven words eight pages later in the manuscript . . . and I am pleased with myself.

Impulse is creation; attention is critical intelligence.

I always knew that being a writer is a very "risky business"...and being someone who has no specific training in writing, I am always plagued with self-doubt when the tangential thought arises about writing something and trying to get it published.

Well... Amit Varma points us to an article in the NY Times today: The Greatest Mystery: Making a Best Seller. Amit comments that 'writers are gambling chips', alluding to a statement from the article that says:

"People think publishing is a business, but it’s a casino."

The article discusses how there is not much data to support or help with this risk-taking - publishing has been and remains an exercise in educated (or actually, uneducated) guesswork. Like Professor of Marketing, Al Greco from Fordham University says in the article: the publishing business ..

...has run since 1640,” he says. That is when 1,700 copies of the Bay Psalm Book were published in the colonies. “It was a gamble, and they guessed right because it sold out of the print run. And ever since then, it has been a crap shoot.”

This "risky" business continues unabated - with thousands of books being published* every year on a myriad number of topics, some more popular than others - because it is indeed like gambling! The lure of hitting that jackpot - albeit a 1 in a million chance - and landing a surprise bestseller is too much to resist. Little wonder then that Oprah, with her book-club, was hailed as the Queen/King-maker to the world of publishing!

In my opinion, while some people undoubtedly have innate (or developed) talents for writing and perhaps are people who could not live if they did not write (a quote by Asimov - see below - comes to mind), I fear that a large percentage of books one sees flooding bookstores everywhere should never have seen the light of day! And so we see books being written by actors, sports-persons, celebrities and so-deemed celebrities who have attained their 15 minutes of fame through some act of notoriety or achievement and in collusion with the publishing industry looking for that big hit, are now writing books! And then there are people like me with a wannabe writer lurking within! Writing workshops and these days blogs and online forums have given everyone an opportunity to write, share opinions, express the 'breathings of our heart' and shamelessly show off our talents (or lack thereof) to millions ...and yet publishing a book and being an "author" still has that unfettered charm and sense of accomplishment attached to it.

(Thankfully, there are some people like me who do not really write anything but flirt with the idea simply because they love the idea of being 'writers' :) After talking about this topic with a fellow blogger recently, I have come to realize that while I do love to read books of all types, and love and appreciate good writing, it does not necessarily mean that I can be a good writer. I am perhaps only in love with the idea of being a writer... such are our delusions, our dreams.)

--
* Another interesting factoid gleaned from the article is:

In the case of hardcovers, a few books that the publishers think have best-seller potential are promoted with generous marketing and publicity campaigns. Others are considered long shots, with anticipated sales of maybe a few thousand copies. Most are considered midlist, with respectable sales of 15,000 to 20,000 copies, Mr. Greco says, but not breakout sales.

------
Some quotes about writing from those who did it really well!

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. - Albert Camus

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them. - Blaise Pascal

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. - Flannery O'Connor

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values. - Willa Cather

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers. - T. S. Eliot

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. - Isaac Asimov

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart... - William Wordsworth