Anne Carson – XII. Here’s Our Clean Business Now Let’s Go Down the Hall to the Black Room Where I Make My Real Money

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

XII. Here’s Our Clean Business Now Let’s Go Down the Hall to the Black Room Where I Make My Real Money

You want to see how things were going from the husband’s point of view —
let’s go round the back,
there stands the wife
gripping herself at the elbows and facing the husband.
Not tears he is saying, not tears again. But still they fall.
She is watching him.
I’m sorry he says. Do you believe me.
Watching.
I never wanted to harm you.
Watching.
This is banal. It’s like Beckett. Say something!
I believe

your taxi is here she said.
He looked down at the street. She was right. It stung him,
the pathos of her keen hearing.
There she stood a person with particular traits,
a certain heart, life beating on its way in her.
He signals to the driver, five minutes.
Now her tears have stopped.
What will she do after I go? he wonders. Her evening. It closed his breath.
Her strange evening.
Well he said.
Do you know she began.
What.

If I could kill you I would then have to make another exactly like you.
Why.
To tell it to.
Perfection rested on them for a moment like calm on a lake.
Pain rested.
Beauty does not rest.
The husband touched his wife’s temple
and turned
and ran
down
the
stairs.

—Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband: a fictional essay in 29 tangos

Simone Weil & The Poem of Force

 Book Notes
Nov 192010
 

Quotations from Weil’s The Iliad, or the Poem of Force

To define force – it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.

The man who knows himself weaker than another is more alone in the heart of a city than a man lost in the desert.

“Two casks are placed before Zeus’s doorsill,
Containing the gifts he gives, the bad in one, the good in the other…
The man to whom he gives baneful gifts, he exposes to outrage;
A frightful need drives across the divine earth;
He is a wanderer, and gets no respect from gods or men.”
The Iliad

The man who is the possessor of force seems to walk through a non-resistant element; in the human substance that surrounds him nothing has the power to interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection. Where there is no room for reflection, there is none either for justice or prudence.

Those that have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed.

Ares is just, and kills those who kill.
-The Iliad

Heroes quake like everybody else.

Violence obliterates anybody who feels its touch.

Monoculture and the Risks of Crop Failure

 Tech Notes
Nov 192010
 

See: Martin L. Weitzman, “Economic Profitability Versus Ecological Entropy,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2000.

“The Risk of Catastrophic Crop Failure,” Economic Intuition, Summer 2001.

By cultivating a small number of crops over large areas, farmers can dramatically increase profitability. This is why monoculture, cultivation of a single crop over a large area, is increasingly common in agriculture. But despite its short-run advantages, monoculture may also impose a long-term risk of crop failure. Economist Martin Weitzman of Harvard University says the vulnerability of a crop to a pathogen is highest when the amount of the plant in cultivation is small – or when it is very large. The vulnerability of a small crop is obvious, but that of a widespread crop is less so. Weitzman explains why it may in effect be too much of a good thing:

1. Large, homogeneous crops enable parasites (bacteria, viruses, fungi and insects) to specialize on one specific host, increasing the chance they will mutate into a more pathogenic form.

2. Farmers tend to choose the same crop cultivated by neighboring farms because of efficiency gains (e.g. in spraying and seed storage); but this makes it easier for a disease to spread – for example, foot and mouth disease spreads more easily where neighboring farms raise the same species.

3. Weitzmam’s statistical modelling shows that once the size of a crop passes a certain threshold, crop extinction can be very abrupt.

Diversity makes sense, even if this entails lower yields, as matter of food security.

[Clipped from: Monoculture and the Risks of Crop Failure ]

Tom Stoppard

 Quotes
Nov 192010
 

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

Actors are the opposite of people.

If an idea’s worth having once, it’s worth having twice.

Life is a gamble at terrible odds. If it were a bet, you would not take it.

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music… and of aviation.

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

The days of the digital watch are numbered.

The truth is always a compound of two half-truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

Every exit is an entry somewhere.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?

Never believe in mirrors or newspapers.

I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it. [parodying the saying of Voltaire: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to death your right to say it.]

Matthew Arnold – Dover Beach

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; -on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

1867