Poetic Justice

For the conclusion of John Van Doren's illuminating lecture, "Poetic Justice," as a part of the Law and Literature Series at the Loyola University of Chicago School of Law (April 5, 1995), Van Doren (then President of the Poetry Center of Chicago) remarked:

"I recall hearing that, years ago, the meetings of the English Department at a great university were always held at three o'clock on Friday afternoons. The younger, idealistic faculty members once asked the chairman why he scheduled them at such an hour, when everybody wanted to leave, when there was time only for administrative matters and none left to discuss literature. Should we not be discussing literature, he was asked? Oh, he said, if we did anything like that, we'd never get home in time for dinner.

"I do not know how it will be for you students in days to come, but I should like to think that, at least now and then, when you arrive home late to find that your meat has grown cold and your spouse asks you where on earth you have been, you will be able to present a straight face and say that you could not get away sooner, you were studying justice--that is, you were reading poetry. I wish you good luck."

A Place of Hard Hits, Timely Tackles, and Solid Sacks: You've Entered the 'End Zone'

“How lovely it is that there are words and sounds. Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart?” 

― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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In Don DeLillo's early novel, End Zone, there is much ado about something untellable, something unthinkable looming, not just for the protagonist, but for the author, his reader, and all of civilization, as well. Peek-a-book below:

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"I graduate," Deering said. "Talk about nothing happening, that's the biggest nothing there is. That's the ultimate nothing. I graduate in the spring."

"No more football," Billy Mast said.

I'm all through school. I graduate. I'm gone for good."

"No more football. No more hitting. No more sweat and pain. No more fear."

"I can't believe it."

"No more being yelled out and cursed by those insane coaches. No more running in the heat. No more two laps around the goal posts. No more getting kicked and elbowed and spat upon."

"It's awful. I can't accept it. It's a bitch."

.  .  .

Howard Lowry, Billy's roommate, came in and sat on the desk, addressing himself to Billy.

"People keep bringing up that course you're taking. The untellable. I keep hearing about that course. Nobody talks about it but I heep hearing."

"So do I," Ted Joost said.

"There's not much I can say about it," Billy said.

"You can tell us what goes on."

"We delve into the untellable."

"How deep?" Bobby Iselin said.

"It's hard to tell. I don't think anybody knows how deep the untellable is. We've done a certain amount of delving. We plan to delve some more. That's about all I can tell you."

"But what do you talk about?" Howard said. "There are ten of you in there and there's some kind of instructor or professor. You must say things to each other."

"We shout in German a lot. There are different language exercises we take turns doing. We may go on a field trip next week. I don't know where to."

"But you don't know German. I know damn well you don't. I'm your damn roommate. I know things about you."

"Unfortunately I've picked up a few words. I guess that's one of the hazards in a course like this. You pick up things you're better off without. The course is pretty experimental. It's given by a man who may or may not have spent three and a half years in one of the camps. He doesn't think there'll be a final exam."

"Why things in German?" Ted Joost said.

"I think the theory is if any words exist beyond speech, they're probably German words, or pretty close."

"What do I say to people who keep bringing up the untellable?" Howard said.

"It's a three-credit course. It's a very hard course, no matter how bright you are. And apparently there are field trips. I don't know what else you can tell them."

Joseph Pulitzer: "Indegoddampendent"

Precious: A précis of  Pulitzer's prizes.

The growth of money power in this country has been very fabulous and its connections with and interest in the Government alarming...Let us never have a Government in Washington owing its retention to the power of the millionaires rather than to the will of the millions.

Every issue of the paper presents an opportunity and a duty to say something courageous and true; to rise above the mediocre and conventional; to say something that will command the respect of the intelligent, the educated, the independent part of the community; to rise above fear of partisanship and fear of popular prejudice.

Always fight for progress and reform; never tolerate injustice or corruption; always fight demagogues of all parties; never belong to any party; always oppose privileged classes and public plunder; never lack sympathy for the poor; always remain devoted to the public welfare; never be satisfied with merely printing the news; always be drastically independent; never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.

To Hawkeyes With Love and Squalor

"The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they intrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests."

--Alexander Hamilton, 1788

A Trumpety Publican Primary Primate Anthem

ROAD SONG of THE BANDAR LOG

Here we go in a flung festoon,
Half-way up to the jealous moon!
Don't you envy our pranceful bands?
Don't you wish you had extra hands?
Wouldn't you like if your tails were -- so --
Curved in the shape of a Cupid's bow?
   Now you're angry, but -- never mind,
   Brother, thy tail hangs down behind!

Here we sit in a branchy row,
Thinking of beautiful things we know;
Dreaming of deeds that we mean to do,
All complete, in a minute or two --
Something noble and grand and good,
Won by merely wishing we could.
   Now we're going to -- never mind,
   Brother, thy tail hangs down behind!

All the talk we ever have heard
Uttered by bat or beast or bird --
Hide or fin or scale or feather --
Jabber it quickly and all together!
Excellent!  Wonderful!  Once again!
Now we are talking just like men.

Let's pretend we are . . . never mind,
Brother, thy tail hangs down behind!
This is the way of the Monkey-kind.

Then join our leaping lines that scumfish through the pines,
That rocket by where, light and high, the wild-grape swings,
By the rubbish in our wake, and the noble noise we make,
Be sure, be sure we're going to do some splendid things.

--Rudyard Kipling

1929: Not So Far From the Madding Fall

For All The King's Horses and
For All The King's Men...a

Petition

by W.H. Auden

Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all
But will his negative inversion, be prodigal: 
Send to us power and light, a sovereign touch 
Curing the intolerable neural itch, 
The exhaustion of weaning, the liar's quinsy, 
And the distortions of ingrown virginity. 
Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response 
And gradually correct the coward's stance; 
Cover in time with beams those in retreat 
That, spotted, they turn though the reverse were great; 
Publish each healer that in city lives 
Or country houses at the end of drives; 
Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at
New styles of architecture, a change of heart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peUb37SPX-M&app=desktop

Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm?

Peter L. Berger is a professor emeritus of sociology at Boston University. His most recent book is The Many Altars of Modernity: Towards a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age.

In his review of The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions, by Michael Walzer, he illustrates a point about the difficulty of cutting the ties that bind us to our traditional modes of being and believing. Berger happily notes:

"Rarely does a joke reveal a social and religious reality as sharply as this Israeli one: A woman and her young son are riding on a bus speaking Yiddish sometime in the 1950s. A staunch Labor Zionist fellow-passenger is annoyed and scolds her: "You are in Israel now, not in the diaspora. Why don't you speak Hebrew with your son?" To which she replies: "So that he won't forget that he is a Jew."