birches, by robert frost

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy's been swinging them.

But Swinging doesn't bend them down to stay

As ice storms do. Often you must have seen them

Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning

After a rain. They click upon themselves

As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored

As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells

Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust --

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away

You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,

And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed

So low for long, they never right themselves:

You may see their trunks arching in the woods

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

But I was going to say when Truth broke in

With all her matter of fact about the ice storm,

I should prefer to have some boy bend them

As he went out and in to fetch the cows --

Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,

Whose only play was what he found himself,

Summer or winter, and could play alone.

One by one he subdued his father's trees

By riding them down over and over again

Until he took the stiffness out of them,

And not one but hung limp, not one was left

For him to conquer. He learned all there was

To learn about not launching out too soon

And so not carrying the tree away

Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise

To the top branches, climbing carefully

With the same pains you use to fill a cup

Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,

Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

And so I dream of going back to be.

It's when I'm weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig's having lashed across it open.

I'd like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:

I don't know where it's likely to go better.

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

From The Poetry of Robert Frost Edward Connery Lathem ed., 1969, Henry Holt and Company

pitch 'n' putt with joyce 'n' beckett

NSFW

ulysses in RL

Super cool Bloomsday article at the Irish Times, thanks to Crooked Timber. Here's a particularly hilarious excerpt (actually I'm not sure why I found this so funny):

I became aware of the range of historical characters in Ulysses when working on the Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB), recently published by Cambridge University Press. Like most staff contributors, I started coming across people who featured in Ulysses , either as themselves or as models for fictional characters. For instance Con Curran, lawyer and writer, appears as himself when Stephen Dedalus remembers that he owes him 10 guineas. Curran was a college friend of Joyce’s, who took the well-known photograph of the becapped Joyce with his hands in his pockets; asked what he was thinking at that moment, Joyce said he was wondering if Con would lend him five shillings.

thought of the day - murakami on writing

Haruki Murakami in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:

As I suspect is true of many who write for a living, as I write I think about all sorts of things. I don't necessarily write down what I'm thinking; it's just that as I write I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths. No matter how much I write, though, I never reach a conclusion. And no matter how much I rewrite, I never reach the destination. Even after decades of writing, the same still holds true. All I do is present a few hypotheses or paraphrase the issue. Or find an analogy between the structure of the problem and something else. (120)

Overall, I didn't find this memoir to be very interesting, but it has its good parts and is a well-articulated statement of Murakami's philosophy on life, told through the perspective of his favorite hobby. I choose this paragraph to share as "thought of the day" because it is the best statement of his writing style; it is also a point which is brought up by his critics: the incompleteness which is glaring in his longer novels but is also present in his shorter ones. I mean "incompleteness" in a very specific sense. Murakami likes to introduce metaphysical ideas and themes into his novels, and these are rarely explained fully, or drawn out completely (in the case of themes). This leaves the reader frustrated at times since there is a lack of closure to some subplots or characters.

In addition, I believe in Kafka on the Shore he has a passage where he talks about the beauty of this incompleteness; if I can find that passage I will definitely post that here too. But I still would say this is the best summary of this central aspect of his writing style.

link roundup - more on how kafka stimulates your brain, some comments on classical music, and more

First, here is a followup to the previous discussion on this blog about a psychological study which showed through an experiment how Kafka stimulates your brain.

As I noted in the comments to this post, there is more to this study than simply showing a relationship between the experience of the absurd and intellectual activity: a psychologist working on this project notes "We're so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere.... We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning" such as mathematical understanding.

Another quote, just because I find this idea so fascinating: "Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. After thinking about their own inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less tolerant of outsiders, studies find. When insulted, they profess more loyalty to friends — and when told they’ve done poorly on a trivia test, they even identify more strongly with their school’s winning teams."

Here we find some interesting comments by former conductor Alfred Brendel who has recently retired and taken up writing. He talks about his revelation that life is "grotesque and absurd" -- but it's more uplifting than that, I promise! Includes an interesting perspective on Rachmaninov and classical music in general.

Roberts makes some comments on who should win the Nobel Prize in economics.

Arthur Krystal in the New York Times on "When Writers Speak"

And, for good measure here are movements 1, 2, and 3 of Beethoven's Piano Sonata 31 in A flat major, Op. 110 for two reasons: first, I've been listening to his piano sonatas a lot lately and find them absolutely amazing (particularly I've listened to no. 32 an uncountable number of times); second, so you can see for yourself about the end of the third movement and whether it inspires laughs, as Brendel says in his piece linked to above.

My apologies, but one more on classical music: Glenn Gould talks about how he plays Mozart in an age of "super recording techniques", etc., basically defending his unique artistic style. Only 3.5 minutes, highly recommended.

Gould, brilliant quote: "I think that all the basic statements have been made for posterity now, I think what we must do is try to find our way around these things [the super recording techniques and so on], try to find a raison d'etre, that is somehow different and yet still somehow right, that makes sense. I think if it does not, if it does not really make sense one must chuck it out and indeed I would have said that two days after having made that record had I not listened to it in a playback booth and thought it really is fun and it really does make sense and it really does say something about the architecture of that particular work then I would have chucked it out and gone back and done it as Hollywood would prefer."

Enjoy, and happy Sunday!

library thing

Check out this site: http://www.librarything.com/

It's a space you can use to catalog what you've read, find related authors you may find interesting, and read others' comments and reviews.

It seems like a great site. In addition to the above, their "author" pages contain a wealth of information about the author as well as popular links associated with them. For example, here is the entry on Murakami.

Enjoy!

literature based videogames

GameFaq's top 10 list: Top Literature Based Games

(Anyone read #1?)

catcher in the rye and its relevance today

An interesting and well-written article on Catcher in the Rye, with reflections on the current generation of young adults (yanked from 3 Quarks Daily a while back):

http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article06300901.aspx

I have to agree with the sentiments of Meis. While it's natural for teenagers to react to Holden by saying "shut up and take your Prozac," what I've found after numerous conversations with my 15 year old sister is that the attitudes toward being "fake" are no different now than they were when I read the book, or when my Dad read it...