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More from Ben Borgers

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a month ago 33 votes
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More in literature

Family/History

David Levering Lewis digs into his own origin story The post Family/History appeared first on The American Scholar.

21 hours ago 2 votes
'The Soul None Dare Forgive'

You know what you’re in for just by reading the title and acknowledging the author: “A Love Song in the Modern Taste” (1733) by Jonathan Swift. For once, the excremental stuff is absent. The poem amounts to a catalog of clichés about love, a sort of anti-Valentine’s Day card. Here is the first of its eight stanzas:  “Fluttering spread thy purple pinions, Gentle Cupid o’er my heart; I a slave in thy dominions; Nature must give way to art.”   No scatology. Just the beau of Vanessa and Stella mocking the conventional romantic sentiments of the day. Pat Rogers, editor of Swift’s Complete Poems (1983), likens the poem to one of his prose works, Polite Conversation (1738), in which he mocks the banality and garble of so much talk, as in “I won’t quarrel with my bread and butter” and “I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world.” Rogers notes of the poem: “The joke lies in slotting together so many familiar ideas in a more or less coherent sequence.”     Swift’s most notorious exercise in scatology, “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” written in 1732, was his most popular poem with the public during his lifetime, reproduced as a pamphlet and reprinted in newspapers in both England and Ireland. Readers familiar with Swift’s “cloacal obsession” (a phrase once applied by critics to another Irishman, James Joyce) will know what to expect. Strephon is investigating the dressing room of his “goddess,” Celia, after she has spent five hours at her toilette: “And first a dirty Smock appear’d, / Beneath the Arm-pits well besmear’d . . .”  . Swift devotes 144 octosyllabic lines to Strephon’s inventory. His growing sense of disgust mirrors the reader’s. When he spies a “reeking chest,” he lifts the lid and the contents    “Send up an excremental Smell To taint the Parts from whence they fell. The Pettycoats and Gown perfume, Which waft a Stink round every Room.”   Some poets might conclude the poem with those lines, but not Swift. He continues:   “Disgusted Strephon stole away Repeating in his amorous Fits, Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!”   Swift the lover, writer and man is the subject of J.V. Cunningham’s “With a Copy of Swift’s Works” (written in 1944; published in The Judge is Fury, 1947; collected in The Poems of J.V. Cunningham, edited by Timothy Steele, 1997):   “Underneath this pretty cover Lies Vanessa’s, Stella’s lover. You that undertake this story For his life nor death be sorry Who the Absolute so loved Motion to its zero moved, Till, immobile in that chill, Fury hardened in the will, And the trivial, bestial flesh In its jacket ceased to thresh, And the soul none dare forgive Quiet lay, and ceased to live.”   “The soul none dare forgive” complements Swift’s self-penned epitaph: “Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit” (“Where savage indignation no more can lacerate his heart”). In his gloss on the poem Steele writes: “Because of the rebarbative nature of his satire, Swift was reviled as no other major English author had been or has been since.” Nor was Cunningham a writer of conventional love lyrics. Here’s an epigram Swift might have signed his name to:   “Here lies my wife. Eternal peace Be to us both with her decease.”   And this:   “I married in my youth a wife. She was my own, my very first. She gave the best years of her life. I hope nobody gets the worst.”

20 hours ago 2 votes
How can the economy work better for us?

An interview with Kathryn Anne Edwards.

2 days ago 2 votes
'As a Token of Reverence or Humility'

In 1993, I was assigned to write about the opening of a Buddhist “peace pagoda” in Grafton, about twenty miles east of Albany, N.Y. A photographer accompanied me, a Marine Corps veteran of the Korean War and decades of work at the newspaper. We parked and approached the stupa, a dome-shaped structure that resembles an oversized pith helmet with a spike on top. I was greeted at the door by one of the monks who asked me to remove my shoes before entering. While I was taking them off, the monk asked the same courtesy of the photographer, who refused and started an argument. Soon he was shouting and refusing to enter the building. I asked him to cool off and photograph the exterior of the temple while I went inside and talked to people. I apologized to the monks, did my interviews and we drove back to the office where I wrote my story. I never had a solid explanation for the photographer’s behavior.  I’ve been reading Sir Thomas Browne again and remembered the embarrassing incident described above in Book V, Chapter VI of his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Vulgar Errors (1646). The passage describes ancient customs associated with Passover: “The custom of discalceation, or putting off their shoes at meals, is conceived to have been done, as by that means keeping their beds clean.” Here is the OED’s definition of the rare word: “The action of taking off the shoes, esp. as a token of reverence or humility.” Some Masonic organizations also require discalceation during certain rituals.   A coda of sorts: One morning I had to work an early shift at the newspaper. While still in the hall outside the newsroom I heard shouting – not an unusual event around the city desk. The photographer I mentioned above and a reporter, also a Korean War veteran, were hollering at each other – very loud and angry. I walked over to referee. They quickly settled down and I asked what the problem was. They explained that they had a difference of opinion over the proper operation of a flamethrower. Even they had to laugh.

2 days ago 4 votes