Thursday, June 30, 2016
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
Jacket Magazine
http://jacketmagazine.com/
Sappho, Callimachus, Catullus, Li Bai and John Donne all had small audiences for their poetry, and any serious poetry faces the same situation today - it’s not a profitable market anywhere in the world. Bookshops can only afford to stock popular verse. Canadian bookshops can’t afford to stock New Zealand poetry, and vice versa. Few Australian poets are found in the bookstores of Brooklyn; Scottish poets despair of big sales - any sales - in Normal, Illinois.
Enter the Internet: it’s relatively cheap, it reaches everywhere there’s a telephone line (or a satellite drifting overhead), and it costs the distributor almost nothing. In effect, the purchaser does the work of accessing the material and paying for its delivery.
Here’s an example of the reach of the Internet. In the first issue of Jacket, I published an interview I had recorded with the British poet Roy Fisher, and received an enthusiastic e-mail from a fan. The fellow was grateful for the chance to read an interview with his favourite poet, he said, and went on to explain: "It’s hard to find material on Roy Fisher, up here in Nome, Alaska."
Video and stereo sound are still difficult to send or receive on the Internet because they need a lot of bandwidth, and the telephone lines the Internet uses don’t have much bandwidth. We still don’t have video-phones, for that reason. But for simple text - poetry, or prose - it’s quick, cheap, and ubiquitous.
Some older people find the technology daunting. And it’s true that until a few years ago the Internet was hard work. You needed a degree in computer science to get a handle on it. Now, it’s easy to browse the Internet. Believe me.
The latest Windows and Macintosh systems, with their graphical interface and easy "click and do it" modus operandi, have made a tremendous difference. The Internet was designed to be cruised by browsers, and current browsers like Netscape (now given away for free) are designed to be logical and easy to use. Most contemporary word processors even come with a built-in program for constructing Internet Web pages. A child can do it; in fact, as most parents know, children are more at home with computers than many adults.
Are there problems? Of course.
For the consumer, the first problem is quality, or rather lack of it. You walk into a good bookshop and go to the poetry section: the books you see have each gone through a process of selection and editorial fine-tuning. Most of them are likely to be of reasonable quality, personal taste aside. But on the Internet, most of the poems you find are awful: uninteresting, unedited, and definitely not fine-tuned.
Anyone can publish anything at all on the Internet, and broadcast it all around the world, without the bothersome interference of censors, style police, or cantankerous editors. Cool!
But as it happens, the bothersome interference of editors is what most readers want. They don’t like having to wade through some amateur’s first draft. They would much rather read a final draft by a writer who’s talented enough to attract the interest of a publisher, and professional enough to listen to an editor’s advice.
Then from the other side of the screen, as a magazine editor, how do you find your audience? They’re all out there, but where? How do you reach that poetry fan in Nome Alaska and tell him about the Roy Fisher interview, when you don’t even know he exists?
You have to depend on word of mouth, mainly, and hope that your magazine is so good that people will hear about it, and look for it using one of the many free search engines, programs that trawl the Web looking for sites that contain a key word or words that you instruct the program to search for.
The third problem is money. The sad fact is that apart from selling pornography, no small organisation can make any money on the Internet; not even enough to pay the phone bill. For a magazine to be successful on the Internet, it has to be free.
Most sites are funded by advertising banners, those irritating, animated slabs of imagery that sit at the top of each site’s homepage and slow down the loading time. Advertising is so pervasive on the Internet now that it’s hard to remember how different things were in the early days.
The Internet was set up in the 1970s to facilitate scientific research among a string of US universities. Initially it was a black and white, text-only thing, about as interesting as a blackboard in a lecture room, or the message board in the hall outside - which is basically what it was.
The Left Hand of Capitalism:
…about Jacket magazine
Jacket is a quarterly literary magazine distributed to every town, city and country in the world via the Internet and given away free. Its publisher is the poet John Tranter. Here he muses on the revolutionary changes publishing has gone through in the last few years, the contradictions of the brave new electronic world, and why he decided to publish Jacket in this format.
This piece was first published in print, in a slightly different form, in the Poetry Review (London, UK) Spring 1999 issue, and in an abridged form in the Australian Weekend Review, 22 May 1999.
This piece was first published in print, in a slightly different form, in the Poetry Review (London, UK) Spring 1999 issue, and in an abridged form in the Australian Weekend Review, 22 May 1999.
I THINK THEY’RE RIGHT when they say that middle-aged men shouldn’t have children: they’re too old to manage the sleepless nights and the effluent disposal problems. But here I am, well over fifty, father to a demanding two-year-old.
The cute little fellow is called Jacket magazine, and I’m as proud as any dad. The other day (September 1999), the counter on the front page ticked over to 140,000.
That tells me that over one hundred and forty thousand visits have been made to the magazine’s Web site on the Internet (http://jacketmagazine.com/) since the first issue in October 1997.
This is not quite like having one hundred and forty thousand subscribers for a print magazine - a buyer has to buy the magazine, whether they want the whole thing or just one article, whereas a "visit" to Jacket might consist of a few minutes worth of browsing, say looking through a few book reviews in Issue # 4, or a whole evening spent reading through a number of issues.
The cute little fellow is called Jacket magazine, and I’m as proud as any dad. The other day (September 1999), the counter on the front page ticked over to 140,000.
That tells me that over one hundred and forty thousand visits have been made to the magazine’s Web site on the Internet (http://jacketmagazine.com/) since the first issue in October 1997.
This is not quite like having one hundred and forty thousand subscribers for a print magazine - a buyer has to buy the magazine, whether they want the whole thing or just one article, whereas a "visit" to Jacket might consist of a few minutes worth of browsing, say looking through a few book reviews in Issue # 4, or a whole evening spent reading through a number of issues.
“Give the dog a bone”
Graphic from Jacket # 1
Graphic from Jacket # 1
Many of my readers come back often for a regular literary hit; a few land there by accident (scanning the Internet for something smart in dinner jackets, perhaps) and leave immediately, never to return.
There’s another difference: magazine subscribers subscribe; that is, they pay money. My readers get Jacket for free. Obviously I’ll never get rich that way.
But it sure beats trying to edit, print, publish, distribute and sell a print edition of a literary magazine. I’ve been there, and done that.
In fact I’ve been involved in editing and publishing poetry books and magazines for over thirty years, on and off.
That was in the Age of Print: now, most of what I do ends up on the Internet.
There’s another difference: magazine subscribers subscribe; that is, they pay money. My readers get Jacket for free. Obviously I’ll never get rich that way.
But it sure beats trying to edit, print, publish, distribute and sell a print edition of a literary magazine. I’ve been there, and done that.
In fact I’ve been involved in editing and publishing poetry books and magazines for over thirty years, on and off.
That was in the Age of Print: now, most of what I do ends up on the Internet.
Australian poetJohn Forbes(1950–1998). Jacket # 3 is dedicated to the memory of John Forbes. Photograph copyright © John Tranter 1999
The shift to the Internet is the most significant change that publishing has seen this century. An earlier change, the move from metal type to photo-lithographic printing, was also important, but it wasn’t what the trendy pundits call a ‘paradigm shift’; the Internet is.
The Way We Were: Most of the poetry magazines that were around when I began writing in the early 1960s were printed using metal type and stereo plates on large and costly rotary printing machines weighing a couple of tonnes. In effect we were still in the age of Johannes Gutenberg, who invented moveable metal type over five hundred years ago. The processes were the same: all we had added was a degree of mechanisation.
It is costly to get things done like that. The skills were difficult to obtain, the machinery was expensive. It was also noisy, dirty and dangerous. The Linotype machines that were used to set type for most books and newspapers took a crane to shift them, and the type was cast from vats of poisonous molten metal: a mixture of tin, lead and antimony.
Then in 1961 the IBM Selectric golf-ball typewriter came along, and in 1964 the IBM Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter followed, with a magnetic tape data storage unit. It was small, clean and quiet, and a tenth the price of a Linotype machine, and a competent typist could learn to use it in half a day. Fitted with a carbon-film ribbon and a changeable type-ball that gave a range of typefaces in different sizes from eight to twelve point, it produced razor sharp output that was ideal for use on the new photo-litho offset printing presses that were becoming common.
By the middle of the 1960s small versions of these presses were appearing in many large offices, replacing the office duplicator. The Multilith 1250 litho press, for example, was inexpensive and relatively compact, and gave high-quality output on foolscap paper. These machines didn’t need metal type; they could reproduce anything that you could photograph or photocopy, including drawings, snapshots, a page of typed letters, or a page of handwriting.
So by the second half of the 1960s the equipment for producing an inexpensive poetry magazine was fairly easy to get hold of, and simple to use. This helped to start a flood of little magazines and gave a new generation of young poets a place to be heard, a venue for argument and experimentation, and a shot in the arm.
But it didn’t solve the main and the perennial problem of poetry publishing. This is the cost and difficulty of distribution. You can solve all the other problems, but that one is intractable.
Or it was, until the Internet.
The Way We Were: Most of the poetry magazines that were around when I began writing in the early 1960s were printed using metal type and stereo plates on large and costly rotary printing machines weighing a couple of tonnes. In effect we were still in the age of Johannes Gutenberg, who invented moveable metal type over five hundred years ago. The processes were the same: all we had added was a degree of mechanisation.
It is costly to get things done like that. The skills were difficult to obtain, the machinery was expensive. It was also noisy, dirty and dangerous. The Linotype machines that were used to set type for most books and newspapers took a crane to shift them, and the type was cast from vats of poisonous molten metal: a mixture of tin, lead and antimony.
Then in 1961 the IBM Selectric golf-ball typewriter came along, and in 1964 the IBM Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter followed, with a magnetic tape data storage unit. It was small, clean and quiet, and a tenth the price of a Linotype machine, and a competent typist could learn to use it in half a day. Fitted with a carbon-film ribbon and a changeable type-ball that gave a range of typefaces in different sizes from eight to twelve point, it produced razor sharp output that was ideal for use on the new photo-litho offset printing presses that were becoming common.
By the middle of the 1960s small versions of these presses were appearing in many large offices, replacing the office duplicator. The Multilith 1250 litho press, for example, was inexpensive and relatively compact, and gave high-quality output on foolscap paper. These machines didn’t need metal type; they could reproduce anything that you could photograph or photocopy, including drawings, snapshots, a page of typed letters, or a page of handwriting.
So by the second half of the 1960s the equipment for producing an inexpensive poetry magazine was fairly easy to get hold of, and simple to use. This helped to start a flood of little magazines and gave a new generation of young poets a place to be heard, a venue for argument and experimentation, and a shot in the arm.
But it didn’t solve the main and the perennial problem of poetry publishing. This is the cost and difficulty of distribution. You can solve all the other problems, but that one is intractable.
Or it was, until the Internet.
New York poet Frank O’Hara, from Jacket 6. Photograph copyright © Renate Ponsold Motherwell 1999
Sappho, Callimachus, Catullus, Li Bai and John Donne all had small audiences for their poetry, and any serious poetry faces the same situation today - it’s not a profitable market anywhere in the world. Bookshops can only afford to stock popular verse. Canadian bookshops can’t afford to stock New Zealand poetry, and vice versa. Few Australian poets are found in the bookstores of Brooklyn; Scottish poets despair of big sales - any sales - in Normal, Illinois.
Enter the Internet: it’s relatively cheap, it reaches everywhere there’s a telephone line (or a satellite drifting overhead), and it costs the distributor almost nothing. In effect, the purchaser does the work of accessing the material and paying for its delivery.
Here’s an example of the reach of the Internet. In the first issue of Jacket, I published an interview I had recorded with the British poet Roy Fisher, and received an enthusiastic e-mail from a fan. The fellow was grateful for the chance to read an interview with his favourite poet, he said, and went on to explain: "It’s hard to find material on Roy Fisher, up here in Nome, Alaska."
Video and stereo sound are still difficult to send or receive on the Internet because they need a lot of bandwidth, and the telephone lines the Internet uses don’t have much bandwidth. We still don’t have video-phones, for that reason. But for simple text - poetry, or prose - it’s quick, cheap, and ubiquitous.
Some older people find the technology daunting. And it’s true that until a few years ago the Internet was hard work. You needed a degree in computer science to get a handle on it. Now, it’s easy to browse the Internet. Believe me.
The latest Windows and Macintosh systems, with their graphical interface and easy "click and do it" modus operandi, have made a tremendous difference. The Internet was designed to be cruised by browsers, and current browsers like Netscape (now given away for free) are designed to be logical and easy to use. Most contemporary word processors even come with a built-in program for constructing Internet Web pages. A child can do it; in fact, as most parents know, children are more at home with computers than many adults.
Are there problems? Of course.
For the consumer, the first problem is quality, or rather lack of it. You walk into a good bookshop and go to the poetry section: the books you see have each gone through a process of selection and editorial fine-tuning. Most of them are likely to be of reasonable quality, personal taste aside. But on the Internet, most of the poems you find are awful: uninteresting, unedited, and definitely not fine-tuned.
Anyone can publish anything at all on the Internet, and broadcast it all around the world, without the bothersome interference of censors, style police, or cantankerous editors. Cool!
But as it happens, the bothersome interference of editors is what most readers want. They don’t like having to wade through some amateur’s first draft. They would much rather read a final draft by a writer who’s talented enough to attract the interest of a publisher, and professional enough to listen to an editor’s advice.
Then from the other side of the screen, as a magazine editor, how do you find your audience? They’re all out there, but where? How do you reach that poetry fan in Nome Alaska and tell him about the Roy Fisher interview, when you don’t even know he exists?
You have to depend on word of mouth, mainly, and hope that your magazine is so good that people will hear about it, and look for it using one of the many free search engines, programs that trawl the Web looking for sites that contain a key word or words that you instruct the program to search for.
The third problem is money. The sad fact is that apart from selling pornography, no small organisation can make any money on the Internet; not even enough to pay the phone bill. For a magazine to be successful on the Internet, it has to be free.
Most sites are funded by advertising banners, those irritating, animated slabs of imagery that sit at the top of each site’s homepage and slow down the loading time. Advertising is so pervasive on the Internet now that it’s hard to remember how different things were in the early days.
The Internet was set up in the 1970s to facilitate scientific research among a string of US universities. Initially it was a black and white, text-only thing, about as interesting as a blackboard in a lecture room, or the message board in the hall outside - which is basically what it was.
Military Eagle, Battery Park, New York City, Polaroid photo John Tranter.
Graphic from Jacket 2.
Graphic from Jacket 2.
But though it depended on telephone connections to link itself together, its structure was essentially different to that of a phone network, and this was the key to its future. It’s built on democratic, almost anarchistic principles. The electronic messages that are the nerve impulses of the Internet are designed to find their own way to their destinations; they route themselves through the network of computers that make up the Internet. There is no supervisor in charge of the message board.
This lack of central control meant that as well as the biological weapons researchers and nuclear physicists, other people in US universities- long-haired hippies, for example - could set up virtual communities of like minds on the Internet, and exchange recipes for marijuana cookies and terrorist bombs, and no one could stop them.
So a culture of free exchange and mutual help has come into being in cyberspace, an economic model based on the hippy ideal of the barter of intangible goods. If you have a problem understanding a computer program, say, and ask for assistance on the Internet, you’ll get a hundred replies, with no strings attached, except that you’ll feel an obligation to help others in the same way. As ye give, so shall ye receive. An anthropologist might call it a "gift culture".
Conversely, it’s costly and bothersome to set up credit-card payment mechanisms on the Internet. I feel if I asked for payment for Jacket, my readers would simply go elsewhere. There’s plenty of free stuff out there, and it’s useful to remember that all the successful news and weather sites and the best reference and search engines are free.
Even Microsoft with its millions was unable to buck that trend. It set up a magazine titled Slate. It was free for a while, to attract readers. When its circulation was healthy, it started to charge a modest subscription fee. Hardly anyone subscribed, and eventually they had to revert to giving it away.
Weird things happen to capitalism on the Internet. Think of one of those pink rubber kitchen gloves. If you pull a (pink) right-handed kitchen glove inside out, you get a (silver) left-handed glove. That’s what the Internet does to capitalism: it pulls it inside out.
In the so-called real world, you have to make sure your revenue is greater than your expenditure; what’s left is your profit, and the measure of your success. On the Internet, it’s the other way around.
So Jacket is free, and thus - sadly - the contributors don’t get paid.
This lack of central control meant that as well as the biological weapons researchers and nuclear physicists, other people in US universities- long-haired hippies, for example - could set up virtual communities of like minds on the Internet, and exchange recipes for marijuana cookies and terrorist bombs, and no one could stop them.
So a culture of free exchange and mutual help has come into being in cyberspace, an economic model based on the hippy ideal of the barter of intangible goods. If you have a problem understanding a computer program, say, and ask for assistance on the Internet, you’ll get a hundred replies, with no strings attached, except that you’ll feel an obligation to help others in the same way. As ye give, so shall ye receive. An anthropologist might call it a "gift culture".
Conversely, it’s costly and bothersome to set up credit-card payment mechanisms on the Internet. I feel if I asked for payment for Jacket, my readers would simply go elsewhere. There’s plenty of free stuff out there, and it’s useful to remember that all the successful news and weather sites and the best reference and search engines are free.
Even Microsoft with its millions was unable to buck that trend. It set up a magazine titled Slate. It was free for a while, to attract readers. When its circulation was healthy, it started to charge a modest subscription fee. Hardly anyone subscribed, and eventually they had to revert to giving it away.
Weird things happen to capitalism on the Internet. Think of one of those pink rubber kitchen gloves. If you pull a (pink) right-handed kitchen glove inside out, you get a (silver) left-handed glove. That’s what the Internet does to capitalism: it pulls it inside out.
In the so-called real world, you have to make sure your revenue is greater than your expenditure; what’s left is your profit, and the measure of your success. On the Internet, it’s the other way around.
So Jacket is free, and thus - sadly - the contributors don’t get paid.
British-born poet Mina Loy, Paris, circa 1905, from Jacket 5. Photograph courtesy Carolyn Burke.
At first I thought that very few writers would want to publish in Jacket without being paid, but so far that doesn’t seem to be a problem. The following are among the many kind souls who have given their work to Jacket for no tangible reward: John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Carolyn Burke, Tom Clark, Alfred Corn, Elaine Equi , Roy Fisher, Mark Ford, David Lehman, Harry Mathews, Ron Padgett, Bob Perelman, Marjorie Perloff, Carl Rakosi, John Redmond, Peter Riley, Ron Silliman, Nathaniel Tarn, Shamoon Zamir, and Eliot Weinberger.
But if Jacket is free - and it carries no advertising - where do I get the money to do all this?
Let’s look back to the days of Gutenberg for a moment.
A conventional literary quarterly usually has about three primary staff (say two editorial and a typist/office assistant), as well as having to pay for the work of a typesetter, layout or pasteup artist, platemaker, printer, binder and warehouse staff. That’s say ten people. You need to rent an office. Postage costs are a nightmare. The annual total cost - salaries, expenses, printing costs, postage - has to be minimum US$30,000 up to say a maximum of $100,000. You certainly can’t afford to print in colour; that adds another $20,000 a year at least. Then you find it’s almost impossible to get the magazine into New York or London, let alone into say Nome, Alaska.
Jacket has one staff - I’m it, there’s no one else - and no office. My own writing desk is the office. The main cost is my time; which means I don’t get much poetry written these days.
I pay around $1,000 per year for Internet access and fax and phone and stationery and postage et cetera. Those are my total costs - $1,000 instead of $100,000.
So, it’s cheap. But it takes up most of my waking life. Why do I do it?
Jacket is hard work, and I like hard work. I enjoy editing the poems and articles and taking photos of people and designing the pages, and I even enjoy writing the HTML (hypertext markup language) typesetting code that underlies the pages. Jacket exercises all my various talents - and it’s fun.
It has also enlarged my circle of friends by a factor of about ten. And I feel I’ve enabled a lot of writers to find a wider international audience for their work, especially younger poets. I received a lot of generous support and assistance when I was a young writer, and it’s good to be able to give something back.
To me, that’s what the Internet’s all about.
But if Jacket is free - and it carries no advertising - where do I get the money to do all this?
Let’s look back to the days of Gutenberg for a moment.
A conventional literary quarterly usually has about three primary staff (say two editorial and a typist/office assistant), as well as having to pay for the work of a typesetter, layout or pasteup artist, platemaker, printer, binder and warehouse staff. That’s say ten people. You need to rent an office. Postage costs are a nightmare. The annual total cost - salaries, expenses, printing costs, postage - has to be minimum US$30,000 up to say a maximum of $100,000. You certainly can’t afford to print in colour; that adds another $20,000 a year at least. Then you find it’s almost impossible to get the magazine into New York or London, let alone into say Nome, Alaska.
Jacket has one staff - I’m it, there’s no one else - and no office. My own writing desk is the office. The main cost is my time; which means I don’t get much poetry written these days.
I pay around $1,000 per year for Internet access and fax and phone and stationery and postage et cetera. Those are my total costs - $1,000 instead of $100,000.
So, it’s cheap. But it takes up most of my waking life. Why do I do it?
Jacket is hard work, and I like hard work. I enjoy editing the poems and articles and taking photos of people and designing the pages, and I even enjoy writing the HTML (hypertext markup language) typesetting code that underlies the pages. Jacket exercises all my various talents - and it’s fun.
It has also enlarged my circle of friends by a factor of about ten. And I feel I’ve enabled a lot of writers to find a wider international audience for their work, especially younger poets. I received a lot of generous support and assistance when I was a young writer, and it’s good to be able to give something back.
To me, that’s what the Internet’s all about.
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
Monday, June 27, 2016
Sunday, June 26, 2016
Saturday, June 25, 2016
Friday, June 24, 2016
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood - Wordsworth
I
THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
II
The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
III
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday;--
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy
Shepherd-boy!
IV
Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm:--
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
--But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
V
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
VI
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.
VII
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long
Ere this be thrown aside,
And with new joy and pride
The little Actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his "humorous stage"
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.
VIII
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul's immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,--
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!
IX
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest--
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:--
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
X
Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young Lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to-day
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
XI
And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
Thursday, June 23, 2016
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Monday, June 20, 2016
Sunday, June 19, 2016
Confusticate and Bebother these Dates! – The Durin’s Day Dilemma
Having read a number of articles on Durin’s Day, including various attempts to assign a date to it within the story, and to predict it in our modern world, I feel compelled to write my own brief (ha!) essay. My approach to this is two-fold: First – take Excedrin for the headache this issue is causing. Second – quote John D. Rateliff’s The History of the Hobbit until things begin to make sense.
“It was the start of the dwarves new year, when the last moon of autumn and the first sun of winter appeared in the sky together.” – Gandalf (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)
Many Tolkien enthusiasts estimate Durin’s Day of 2941 (which Thorin Oakenshield said happens towards the end of autumn, but not necessarily the last day of autumn, as Gandalf stated in the film) to have occurred in October. You can see how they arrived at this conclusion in the following articles:
The Moon and Duran’s Day – by Lalaith
Was Smaug Slain Oct 26, 2941 TA? – by Auraran
Durin’s Day 2013 – by Ask About Middle Earth
Is Durin’s Day Upon Us? – by The Dwarrow Scholar
Timeline/Chronology for “The Hobbit” – by Douglas Wilhelm Harder
Other authors calculate that Durin’s Day in our world would happen in December, based on our own definition of Autumn:
Observing Durin’s Day – by Kristine Larsen
Predicting Durin’s Day – by Iduna
The reason for the difference of approximately two months comes from the different interpretations of the term “autumn”. Astronomically speaking, the end of autumn is around December 21 (for those in the Northern Hemisphere). If you disregard the astronomical component of it, then you could argue autumn can mean different things to different cultures. It does in our world, so why not in Tolkien’s? Unfortunately Tolkien never created a calendar for the dwarves, and because he also says that the seasons of Middle-earth have no specific beginning or ending dates, it is possible the dwarves may view the beginning and ending of autumn as occurring on different dates than the hobbits, or elves, or men did. Unfortunately there is nothing I know of in the canon to confirm or deny this, but Tolkien did have this to say regarding the names of months used in The Lord of the Rings, “…the seasonal implications of our names are more or less the same, at any rate in the Shire. It appears, however, that Mid-year’s Day was intended to correspond as nearly as possible to the summer solstices. In that case the Shire dates were actually in advance of ours by some ten days, and our New Year’s Day corresponded more or less to the Shire January 9” (The Return of the King, Appendix D). This becomes important to our discussion further on, since Tolkien uses both the Shire calendar and the Gregorian calendar in his (unpublished) notes. We also know that, at least in The Lord of the Rings, events take place “‘in the Northern Hemisphere of this earth: miles are miles, days are days, and weather is weather'” (Rateliff 827).
The problems with Durin’s Day begin with the text itself, though you may not know it if you have a copy of The Hobbit printed after 1995. The first mention of Durin’s Day is the same in both early and later editions. While in Rivendell, Thorin declares:
“The first day of the dwarves’ New Year is, as all should know, the first day of thelast moon of Autumn on the threshold of Winter. We still call it Durin’s Day when the last moon of Autumn and the sun are in the sky together. But this will not help us much, I fear, for it passes our skill in these days to guess when such a time will come again.”
Oddly enough, Tolkien appears to have been of two minds about when Durin’s Day should occur. The first typescript of the book had the dwarven New Year beginning on “the day of the first moon of autumn. And Durin’s day is that first day when the first moon of autumn and the sun are in the sky together” (Rateliff 123). Rateliff speculates this was likely inspired by the Jewish calendar, “which is also lunar in nature and begins its new year in late September or early October…” (123). And prior to 1995, the second mention of Durin’s Day in chapter III has always been:
“They had thought of coming to the secret door in the Lonely Mountain, perhaps that very next first moon of Autumn— ‘and perhaps it will be Durin’s Day’ they had said. Only Gandalf had shaken his head and said nothing.”
Little wonder Gandalf is shaking his head – the silly dwarves can’t even remember when their most important holiday is supposed to happen. The “mistake”, if that is truly what it was, has been corrected in later editions to read “that very next lastmoon of Autumn”.
The third indirect mention of Durin’s Day occurs while the dwarves and Bilbo are sitting around on the doorstep of the secret door. They don’t know it yet, but they are one day away from Durin’s Day:
“‘Tomorrow begins the last week of Autumn,’ said Thorin one day.”
As it turns out, Durin’s Day of that year occurred on the first day of the last weekof Autumn, at least according to what Thorin said in the published book. In theoriginal draft, where Tolkien set Durin’s Day at the start of autumn, Thorin said, “Autumn will be in tomorrow” on the day before the door was opened (Rateliff 475).
Of course it was Bilbo who actually caught the event happening, and alerted the dwarves before it was too late:
“Soon he saw the orange ball of the sun sinking towards the level of his eyes. He went to the opening and there pale and faint was a thin new moon above the rim of Earth.
At that very moment he heard a sharp crack behind him. There on the grey stone in the grass was an enormous thrush, nearly coal black, its pale yellow breast freckled with dark spots. Crack! It had caught a snail and was knocking it on the stone. Crack! Crack!….The sun sank lower and lower, and their hopes fell. It sank into a belt of reddened cloud and disappeared. The dwarves groaned, but still Bilbo stood almost without moving. The little moon was dipping to the horizon. Evening was coming on. Then suddenly when their hope was lowest a red ray of the sun escaped like a finger through a rent in the cloud. A gleam of light came straight through the opening into the bay and fell on the smooth rock-face. The old thrush, who had been watching from a high perch with beady eyes and head cocked on one side, gave a sudden trill. There was a loud crack. A flake of rock split from the wall and fell. A hole appeared suddenly about three feet from the ground….’The key!’ shouted Bilbo. ‘The key that went with the map! Try it now while there is still time!’
Then Thorin stepped up and drew the key on its chain from round his neck. He put it to the hole. It fitted and it turned! Snap! The gleam went out, the sun sank, the moon was gone, and evening sprang into the sky.”
When the Thrush Knocks – by Ted Nasmith
The biggest problem with accepting a December date for Durin’s Day is that it leaves little time for the remaining tumultuous events after the opening of the door before Bilbo must be back at Beorn’s house to celebrate Yule-tide in chapter XVIII:
“Anyway, by mid-winter Gandalf and Bilbo had come all the way back, along both edges of the Forest, to the doors of Beorn’s house; and there for a while they both stayed. Yule-tide was warm and merry there; and men came from far and wide to feast at Beorn’s bidding.”
Tolkien had originally written Christmas instead of Yule-tide, but Yule has historically been celebrated at different times of the year and for different lengths by various cultures, which potentially allows more time for a December date for Durin’s Day. The Shire calendar states “Yuletide” was six days long, “including the last three and first three days of each year” (The Return of the King, Appendix D). But since Beorn is the one hosting the feast, it could be according to his own schedule, whatever that might be. The mention of “by mid-winter” is of less help in solving the issue than it appears since winter is no less relative a term thanautumn. Notice it is mid-winter, which could mean middle of winter, notmidwinter, a term which would most likely mean the winter solstice (the shortest day of the year) which happens around December 21 in our time. In contrast, in chapter III Tolkien used “midsummer eve” (without a hyphen) when referring to the day they deciphered the map in Rivendell, or a date between June 21-25 in our time. It should be noted that Rateliff treats mid-winter as “midwinter” in his explanation of the text, and defines it as the day of the winter solstice, thus making it impossible for Durin’s Day to have occurred around December 14 (Rateliff 481).
Tolkien was not entirely happy with certain aspects of The Hobbit when compared to The Lord of the Rings, including the imprecision of geographic distances, and the inaccuracy of the moon phases. He had once boasted “‘I don’t think the moons rise or are in the wrong place at any point in [The Lord of the Rings]'” but this was only accomplished “…during the book’s revision by drawing up many-columned sheets listing where each character was on each day of the story. No such charts exist for The Hobbit…” (Rateliff 827).
Tolkien made an attempt to rewrite The Hobbit in the 1960’s. This was ultimately aborted, in part due to the impossible task of reconciling the timing of the journey with the phases of the moon (Rateliff 813). In this rewrite Tolkien tried to make the story of The Hobbit fit the Shire Calendar (which did not exist at the time of its original publication). A note by Tolkien, written at the top margin of his revisions, sums up the problem: “‘Hobbit Time table is not very clear'” (Rateliff 821).
In those notes he wrote out a few possible timelines which had the Company leaving Rivendell “’on Midsummer morning: say June 24’” (Rateliff 821). This date is given in the Gregorian calendar, rather than the Shire Calendar. His attempt to pin down the dates of the journey start out productively, but begin to fall apart after Rivendell. The decision to make Bilbo’s birthday occur on September 22 inThe Fellowship of the Ring lock in part of the itinerary of The Hobbit, since Bilbo tells everyone at his 111th birthday that it is also the anniversary of the day he arrived in Esgaroth many years ago. Nowhere is this stated in the original Hobbit.
The relevant part of these revisions, in relation to the timing of Durin’s Day, begin with Tolkien working out the moon phases during the journey. With these dates he uses the Shire Calendar [my notes are in brackets]:
“’Company left Rivendell on Midsummer Day (=in SC [Shire Calendar]. June 30+2) The Moon on the previous day (Lithe: June 30+1) was a broad silver crescent: therefore 3 to 4 days old. NM [New Moon] must have been June 27/28.
NB This fits tolerably well with later narrative. For if NM occurred on June 28 it would occur next on July 23…since all months have 30 days [in the Shire calendar]: on Aug. 21, on Sept. 19, October 17th. There is probably time for the events after Bilbo’s Birthday (Sep 22) in Lake Town before the discovery of the Key-hole – Durin’s Day.’” (Rateliff 826)
In another note Tolkien gives the date of the new moons as occurring about June 26, and about October 19 of the Shire Calendar (Rateliff 830). He puts the departure from Lake Town around October 5th, and after two days of rowing it would be October 7, after which point “’their journey to the Mountain and the search for the Door could well take more than 12 days, but could be accomplished in that time.’”
Rateliff suggests “that Tolkien here is thinking of Durin’s Day as falling on thefirst new moon of autumn, as in the original manuscript, rather than on the last new moon before the start of winter as in the published book” (Rateliff 828). This would have solved the problem with events being crammed into the remainder of the year (however much remained of it before “mid-winter”). But it would also have necessitated “the re-writing of several descriptive passages vividly conveying the rapid onset of winter” which appear at various places in the published text ofThe Hobbit (Rateliff 828).Unfortunately, there are no revisions to dates given after the mention of a new moon on October 19. We are given no precise dates at all, either published or unpublished, until May 1st, when Gandalf and Bilbo arrive back in Rivendell at the start of chapter XIX, after having left Beorn’s house in the spring.
Tolkien’s penciled note on the final piece of his tentative revisions signal a reluctant surrender after the battle to make everything fit to his satisfaction: “Time table of journey will not work out?” (Rateliff 835). It is here that Tolkien’s attempt to rewrite The Hobbit ends.
So where does this leave us as far as determining when Durin’s Day is supposed to happen? I personally feel there are too many contradictions to make any estimate 100% accurate. If Tolkien was having trouble with it years after publication, then I believe we can be forgiven for not resolving the matter ourselves. Instead I advise choosing your favorite theory from the authors listed above (they have all gone to great efforts to develop them), or come up with your own. But if you want to be on the safe side (and enjoy yourself, instead of pouring over these bothersome dates), pick a day in both October and December, look to the skies, and celebrate Durin’s Day like you just cracked open the Lonely Mountain yourself!
————————————————————————————————————-
References:
Rateliff, John D. The History of The Hobbit Part One: Mr. Baggins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
Rateliff, John D. The History of The Hobbit Part Two: Return to Bag-end (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Return of the King. (New York: Ballantine, 1978).
Saturday, June 18, 2016
Friday, June 17, 2016
Thursday, June 16, 2016
Chinese Text Project
http://ctext.org/
The Chinese Text Project is an online open-access digital library that makes pre-modern Chinese texts available to readers and researchers all around the world. The site attempts to make use of the digital medium to explore new ways of interacting with these texts that are not possible in print. With over twenty thousand titles and more than three billion characters, the Chinese Text Project is also one of the largest databases of pre-modern Chinese texts in existence.
The Chinese Text Project is an online open-access digital library that makes pre-modern Chinese texts available to readers and researchers all around the world. The site attempts to make use of the digital medium to explore new ways of interacting with these texts that are not possible in print. With over twenty thousand titles and more than three billion characters, the Chinese Text Project is also one of the largest databases of pre-modern Chinese texts in existence.
Wednesday, June 15, 2016
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
Monday, June 13, 2016
Sunday, June 12, 2016
Saturday, June 11, 2016
Absalom and Achitophel
BY JOHN DRYDEN
In pious times, ere priest-craft did begin,
Before polygamy was made a sin;
When man, on many, multipli'd his kind,
Ere one to one was cursedly confin'd:
When Nature prompted, and no Law deni'd
Promiscuous use of concubine and bride;
Then, Israel's monarch, after Heaven's own heart,
His vigorous warmth did variously impart
To wives and slaves: and, wide as his command,
Scatter'd his Maker's image through the land.
Michal, of royal blood, the crown did wear;
A soil ungrateful to the tiller's care:
Not so the rest; for several mothers bore
To god-like David, several sons before.
But since like slaves his bed they did ascend,
No true succession could their seed attend.
Of all this numerous progeny was none
So beautiful, so brave, as Absalom:
Whether, inspir'd by some diviner lust,
His father got him with a greater gust;
Or that his conscious destiny made way,
By manly beauty to imperial sway.
Early in foreign fields he won renown,
With kings and states alli'd to Israel's crown:
In peace the thoughts of war he could remove,
And seem'd as he were only born for love.
Whate'er he did, was done with so much ease,
In him alone, 'twas natural to please:
His motions all accompani'd with grace;
And Paradise was open'd in his face.
With secret joy, indulgent David view'd
His youthful image in his son renew'd:
To all his wishes nothing he deni'd;
And made the charming Annabel his bride.
What faults he had (for who from faults is free?)
His father could not, or he would not see.
Some warm excesses, which the Law forbore,
Were constru'd youth that purged by boiling o'er:
And Amnon's murther, by a specious name,
Was call'd a just revenge for injur'd fame.
Thus prais'd, and lov'd, the noble youth remain'd,
While David, undisturb'd, in Sion reign'd.
But life can never be sincerely blest:
Heav'n punishes the bad, and proves the best.
The Jews, a headstrong, moody, murm'ring race,
As ever tri'd th'extent and stretch of grace;
God's pamper'd people whom, debauch'd with ease,
No king could govern, nor no God could please;
(Gods they had tri'd of every shape and size,
That god-smiths could produce, or priests devise:)
These Adam-wits, too fortunately free,
Began to dream they wanted liberty:
And when no rule, no precedent, was found
Of men, by laws less circumscrib'd and bound,
They led their wild desires to woods and caves,
And thought that all but savages were slaves.
They who, when Saul was dead, without a blow,
Made foolish Ishbosheth the crown forego;
Who banisht David did from Hebron bring,
And, with a general shout, proclaim'd him king:
Those very Jews, who, at their very best,
Their Humour more than loyalty exprest,
Now, wonder'd why, so long, they had obey'd
An idol-monarch which their hands had made:
Thought they might ruin him they could create;
Or melt him to that golden calf, a state.
But these were random bolts: no form'd design,
Nor interest made the factious crowd to join:
The sober part of Israel, free from stain,
Well knew the value of a peaceful reign:
And, looking backward with a wise afright,
Saw seams of wounds, dishonest to the sight:
In contemplation of whose ugly scars,
They curst the memory of civil wars.
The moderate sort of men, thus qualifi'd,
Inclin'd the balance to the better side:
And, David's mildness manag'd it so well,
The bad found no occasion to rebel.
But, when to sin our bias'd nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently pimps for ill desires:
The good old cause reviv'd, a plot requires.
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up common-wealths, and ruin kings.
Before polygamy was made a sin;
When man, on many, multipli'd his kind,
Ere one to one was cursedly confin'd:
When Nature prompted, and no Law deni'd
Promiscuous use of concubine and bride;
Then, Israel's monarch, after Heaven's own heart,
His vigorous warmth did variously impart
To wives and slaves: and, wide as his command,
Scatter'd his Maker's image through the land.
Michal, of royal blood, the crown did wear;
A soil ungrateful to the tiller's care:
Not so the rest; for several mothers bore
To god-like David, several sons before.
But since like slaves his bed they did ascend,
No true succession could their seed attend.
Of all this numerous progeny was none
So beautiful, so brave, as Absalom:
Whether, inspir'd by some diviner lust,
His father got him with a greater gust;
Or that his conscious destiny made way,
By manly beauty to imperial sway.
Early in foreign fields he won renown,
With kings and states alli'd to Israel's crown:
In peace the thoughts of war he could remove,
And seem'd as he were only born for love.
Whate'er he did, was done with so much ease,
In him alone, 'twas natural to please:
His motions all accompani'd with grace;
And Paradise was open'd in his face.
With secret joy, indulgent David view'd
His youthful image in his son renew'd:
To all his wishes nothing he deni'd;
And made the charming Annabel his bride.
What faults he had (for who from faults is free?)
His father could not, or he would not see.
Some warm excesses, which the Law forbore,
Were constru'd youth that purged by boiling o'er:
And Amnon's murther, by a specious name,
Was call'd a just revenge for injur'd fame.
Thus prais'd, and lov'd, the noble youth remain'd,
While David, undisturb'd, in Sion reign'd.
But life can never be sincerely blest:
Heav'n punishes the bad, and proves the best.
The Jews, a headstrong, moody, murm'ring race,
As ever tri'd th'extent and stretch of grace;
God's pamper'd people whom, debauch'd with ease,
No king could govern, nor no God could please;
(Gods they had tri'd of every shape and size,
That god-smiths could produce, or priests devise:)
These Adam-wits, too fortunately free,
Began to dream they wanted liberty:
And when no rule, no precedent, was found
Of men, by laws less circumscrib'd and bound,
They led their wild desires to woods and caves,
And thought that all but savages were slaves.
They who, when Saul was dead, without a blow,
Made foolish Ishbosheth the crown forego;
Who banisht David did from Hebron bring,
And, with a general shout, proclaim'd him king:
Those very Jews, who, at their very best,
Their Humour more than loyalty exprest,
Now, wonder'd why, so long, they had obey'd
An idol-monarch which their hands had made:
Thought they might ruin him they could create;
Or melt him to that golden calf, a state.
But these were random bolts: no form'd design,
Nor interest made the factious crowd to join:
The sober part of Israel, free from stain,
Well knew the value of a peaceful reign:
And, looking backward with a wise afright,
Saw seams of wounds, dishonest to the sight:
In contemplation of whose ugly scars,
They curst the memory of civil wars.
The moderate sort of men, thus qualifi'd,
Inclin'd the balance to the better side:
And, David's mildness manag'd it so well,
The bad found no occasion to rebel.
But, when to sin our bias'd nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently pimps for ill desires:
The good old cause reviv'd, a plot requires.
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up common-wealths, and ruin kings.
Friday, June 10, 2016
Thursday, June 9, 2016
‘n boer maak ‘n plan
Literally means 'the farmer makes a plan', but it is used in the instance where one must think on their feet and devise a new way of looking at something
