Notable Books of 2005

Here are some interesting books from 2005. Some I've read, some I've read of, all of them worth checking out.


Saturday, by Ian McEwan
Got the Booker prize, it can't be that bad.

Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a true Story, by Chuck Klosterman
While this moving meditation follows Klosterman visiting the graves of rock stars across the United States, the narrative force of the book is highly original. An interesting read, especially for music nerds.


Beasts of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala.
I was caught by the title, wondering if it was a referenece to Fela Kuti's music, and it may be. Fela's album was a righteous bird-flipping statement to oppressive African regimes, while Iweala's book looks closely at the psychology involved in muder and rape through the eyes of a single character's story, evoking the violence of African countries such as Rwanda and Uganda. This book has won over many critics, particularly as the author is only twenty-two years old.

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
An unnerving look at an English boarding school where clones are raised to donate their organs. Totally scary!


Mission to America, by Walter Kirn
A funny pop-culture novel about a man named Mason, member of the Aborigional Fulfilled Apostles, a close-knit tribe that goes back generations...in Montana. One member of his clan grows suddenly rich due to a reality TV game show, and the members set out to visit "Terrestria," the world outside their compund.

The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion
I haven't read this, but it crops up everywhere. Who is this Joan Didion? What does she write about? Here are some clues: "he writer who famously cut to passages from her psychiatric report here splices in her husband's autopsy and her daughter's CT scan. "(Village Voice); "Though it spares nothing in describing Didion's confusion, grief and derangement, is a work of surpassing clarity and honesty. It may not provide "meaning" to her husband's death or her daughter's illness, but it describes their effects on her with unsparing candor."(Washington Post); also it's apparently about 9-11.


Extremely Loud and Incredibley Close, by Jonathan Safran Froer
I almost saw JSF read at a bar in Seattle, but by the time I had got there, half an hour before the reading was scheduled, the place was packed and the line to get in stretched around the block. I was blown away by the intense interest this reading drew. Why don't popular younger authors like JSF do readings in bars more often? If done reasonably well, as this event was, it could be smashing. I did go back to the bar and caught a look at Jonathan from across the room as I had a drink. He was dressed neatly in a blazer and glasses and looked attentively as someone spoke to him whose book he was holding. The place was undergoing an odd shift, attempting to morph from reading into dance-party, but no one was drinking much and the music sounded like Balinese lounge music. A woman in a sequin dress kept starting to dance, getting embarrassed, and going back to her friends. She did it thrice while I was there for five minutes, perhaps she eventually succeeded in inspiring a Balinese blockparty. I'll never know, because my friend and I walked a block down to another bar to see if any bands were playing. I was pretty dissapointed at missing the reading, but bands at the second bar turned out to be Frog Eyes and Black Mountain, and the night was saved!

Poems of Catullus (Trans: Peter Green)
Only the best in bawdy Latin Lyrical poets.
Speaking of...here is a page of obscene Latin:
http://www.obscure.org/obscene-latin/vocabulary.html

Lolita Turns 50

Vladamir Nabokav's novel Lolita was published fifty years ago today. Here are some articles in Slate and Alternet that discuss how controversial the novel was, and still is. Salon also has a feature but you have to register to view it.

Slate:
http://www.slate.com/id/2132708/

Alternet:
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/25752/

CNN's special on Nabokov:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/books/1999/nabokov/

This BBC site has four streaming audio recordings of Nabokov being interviewed:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/nabokovv1.shtml

After reading the book, this website might be useful for gleaning new perspectives on the text:
http://www.vestige.org/nabokov/lolita/about.html

Orhan Pamuk and the democratic experiment

Orhan Pamuk is still awaiting trial in Turkey pending a technicality, while many writers and publishers are still facing trial for Turkey's article 301, which prohibits "publicly denigrating Turkish national identity, the republic, or the Grand National Assembly." Pamuk, who was charged with "slander" for stating a historical fact, has remained for from silent on the issue, not only repeating the phrase which landed him in hot water, but by interviewing prodigously and writing a fascinating article for the New yorker. In the article he laments that his case has been "overdramatized," since the evidence against him is poor, and lesser-known writers face far tougher trials.

it was interesting to hear him mention the effect fo the laws. Partly, they have served to open discussion, despite more dire consequences to do so. Apparently several prestigious Turkish Universities decided to a conference of scholars whose views were not in line with the state's, and "sinnce then, for the first time in many years, there has been public discussion of the subject." Now that Pamuk has been tried, that discussion has opened up into a far broader audience, with stories appearing in most major western news organs.


While the reasons for Pamuk's trial have been written about astutely by writers like Kaelen Wilson-Goldie,* the implications of Turkey's attempt to maintain a democracy while still having control of the media during what it feels may be a public crisis reflects not only on the troubled past of Turkey, but the weaknesses of Democracy elsewhere, particularly in the United States. A party of the people is open, and that means open to nationalism, which explains to a degree what is happening in Turkey. Pamuk poses the question: "What is the logic behind a state that complains that its enemies spead false reports about the Ottoman legacy all over the globe while it prosecutes and imprisons one writer after another, thus propogating the image of the Terrible Turk?" This question hits close to home for me; America is guilty of the same crimes on a lesser level, having an executive branch which insists that we not question the validity of a war we are fighting, or the methods with which we fight it, which sneaks by congress to make secret laws which may violate the constitution, and employs torture in its interogation of suspects, all the while expecting that we be acknowledged at home and abroad as an exemplar of accountable, democratic government. As in Turkey, the war on terror has been used to reestablish the line between privacy and security. Pamuk argues that as the world superpower, America's actions are not without resonance in his own land. We ourselves are subject to what Pamuk regards as the "same contradictions" that fuel oppression in democracies worldwide, from the Russian oppression of Chechens, to the stifling of freedom of expression by Nationalist Hindus in India, to the scandal involving "Scooter" Libby and Carl Rove, which poses the potential case of our government attempting to stifle the voice of its detractors. These contradictions involve the urge to be safe at the expense of free expression, perhaps the most urgent political issue of this new century. Now, however, the increasingly vivid reality of our position in relation to the new Iraq state seems to be threatening the unquestioningly patriotic attitude taken by many citizens and members of the press following 9-11 and the Iraq invasion, and not too soon. "These days," writes Pamuk, "the lies about the war in Iraq and the reports of secret CIA prisons have so damaged the West's credibility in Turkey and in other nations that it is more and more difficult for people like me to make the case for true Western democracy in my part of the world."

*-can be found at:
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=20961

Albums of 2005

10. Decemberists / Picaresque
The plot is always thickening for these bastards.

9. MIA / Arular
This is just a great album, a natural meeting place for so many different cultures done with such an open sensibililty.

8. King Creosote / KC Rules OK
Rural Scottsman Kenny Anderson makes music steeped in the principles of DIY and spontaneous musing. I've found a page from a collective called Fence he works with, and an interview he did that is pretty brief: Apparently he thinks horses are sarcastic and lives in a small Scottish village making his odd brand of indie-folk. His songs contain simple guitar lines, accordians, pianos and various drum machines, etc. KC rules Ok was done with the help of some friends, fellow Domino stablemates the Earlies. While he could occasionally use some editing, the sentiment of the songs is apparent without any over-technical gloss. Kenny is a fine singer and songwriter who doesn't need or want a big studio to make the points he wants to make.

7. Antony and the Johnsons / I Am A Bird Now
Antony is brilliant. No stranger to donning masks, his persona on this album is sometimes illusory. Is he overly precious? Hell yes, but he never gets carried away on a fantastical whim so far the music suffers. Instead his flights heighten the reality of his music without becoming detached because they are always anchored in the beauty and brutality of love's many guises. The Boy George comparisons must abound, and while you won't find him with posies in his pocket, but you will find him halfway to Klaus Nomi onstage. You'll also find a razor wit from the tradition of Oscar Wilde and an amazing crooner voice. His song "Fistful of Love" was a standout on this album, with bleating stax horns and a cubist sort of bit-crusher guitar sound by Lou Reed.

6. Tapes n' Tapes / The Loon
What can you say about this band that hasn't already been said about Afganistan? They're on fire!

5. Deerhoof / Runner's Four
You can read elsewhere why this is so awesome, and maybe you'll understand those reviews because half of what I've read about this album makes no sense to me. An example: "lyrically they can guess the emotions of all things living (people being chased by spies) or non-living (lightning rods)" and "But I appreciate Deerhoof's challenge here: to comb hair without cutting it, to wash face without popping all the pimples, to be the best band in the world, but beyond that, to be the most lovable, too." And that was pitchfork too. I don't know if this album inspires bullshit, but I don't want to try describing it myself beyond it rocks and it IS wierd, and is probably more like an extension of some of Yoko Ono's work than anything else.

4. Richard Thompson / Front Parlour Ballads
Richard Thomspon was popular before Springsteen, or before Patti Smith. He's been around and already made some amazing albums. His new album is full of amazing stuff, bizarre and brilliant guitar playing, black humour, literary and cultural acumen, all sung in a voice somehow melodic and sardonic at once. Buy this, and keep tongue firmly in cheek.

3. Devendra Banhart / Cripple Crow
The new godfather of wierd beards; Donovan and Marc Bolan's love child. He's gone electric and it actually works pretty damn well. I got to catch his live show and its one of the best I've ever seen; Banhart and crew are a buncha true showmen and gypseys. Some musicians are so talented they could hold a room even if the power went out, etc-these guys would be musical giants if all of America's power went out forever. Plus they dress like old-time train engineers/Jimmie Hendrix's band.

2. Constantines / Tournament of Hearts
Right now it is minus five including windchill in Chicago. I have to put the Devendra Banhart away until weather improves. Some people like to play sunny music in the coldest weather, I don't. It chaps my ears. Constantines are the perfect band for these cold weather spells, by turns brooding and ecstatic, wild-eyed poets in the snow with members of Do Make Say Think playing backup horns. Besides just having great songs, there is a lot frontman Bryan Webb and Steve Lambke have to write about, from "working fulltime" to Frisco wican eco-goddess Starhawk to women's curling tournaments to a gutter nearest you. Great surly music for these frozen northlands.

1. Mountain Goats / The Sunset Tree
What I love about John Darnielle is his humor. To say it's gallows humor isn't quite right because it isn't always, though it often spins out of his darker meditations. Few singers are talented enough to be this earnest and not have it be awful, but Darnielle has perfected it, it seems, and the result is not only an album rich with story telling, confrontation with his own ghosts of the past, and attentive ruminations on memory and how it forms us, but he is so involved in the process of thinking through these themes in his songs that a sense of humor is naturally born from the intimacy of the man to his work. The mark of true genius.


2005 Top Ten List
from Matt Kretzman, keyboardist for Tapes n' Tapes

Andrew Bird – Andrew Bird & The Mysterious Production of Eggs

Andrew Bird displays virtuosic abilities on multiple instruments throughout this splendid orchestral folk pop record. Bird has an equally impeccable and inventive touch with composing and arranging. If Prince wrote folk songs it might sound something like this.

Calexico/Iron & Wine – In the Reins

A succinct and lovely little record! This pairing fleshes out the usually sparse songs of Sam Beam while retaining their natural captive beauty.

Common – Be

Common hits the nail on the head, start to finish, in his latest and best work to date. It’s a love letter to his past, the people, the (chi)city, and the joy of self discovery.

Lipshitz – Jed Sed

You’ve never heard of him, but this unrenowned Chicago MC turned in a superb EP in 2005, a promising portend. Genuine and sincere, but not self-serious. Lipshitz lays it down with poise and assurance over some of the dopest beats you have turned an ear on. That’s right, dopest. The full length is available now from nantucketastrophe.com, I just haven’t heard it yet so I can only give big ups to the EP.

Matt Sweeny & Bonnie “Prince” Billy – Superwolf

Possibly one of the most unique records of the year on several accounts. We all know that ol’ Bonnie never shies away from collaboration and this one saw him teaming up with former Chavez guitarist Matt Sweeny. The result is anything but ordinary. Stark seafaring songs, sonically bare-boned but simultaneously rapturous, it’s a record you really have to get down with. It’s a struggle, but a close listening pays dividends.

The New Pornographers – Twin Cinema

I thought the first two Pornographers records were pretty good though nothing I ever returned to with any regularity. Where past efforts simply power popped me to death, AC Newman and co. capture a brand of dynamism on this record that expands their horizons to encompass songs you can latch onto beyond just a catchy hook. Be not mistaken, this is a pop record through and through, but TNP strike a new balance with “Twin Cinema” and have created a record that shines above and beneath its shimmery sheen.

Sleater-Kinney – The Woods

Raucous, cacophonic, bombastic, and blaring. This record will rock your socks off, melt your face and your heart all at the same time. It’s such a visceral record – whether you like it or not, you won’t be able to listen to it and not respond.

Sufjan Stevens – Illinois

I probably shouldn’t list this on my year-end favorite albums. It can’t be one of my favorite albums because I never actually listen to the whole thing all the way through (once maybe). I could, however, list about a half dozen songs or so off this record as some of my favorite of the year. Yes, Sufjan, you are prolific, never short on words (even when it comes to song titles), but would a touch of restraint really inhibit the overall artistic vision? Be warned vinyl record consumers, as good as this record is, you might wish you’d held on to your cash when you are suffering through the fourth or fifth circus-like interlude on this exhausting 22-track affair.

Thelonius Monk Quartet with John Coltrane – Live at Carnegie Hall

Somebody fire the intern who filed this recording away 40+ years ago, nary to resurface again until this year in the Voices of America archive deep in the belly of the Smithsonian. A lot has been made of this for obvious historical significance – two of our greatest jazz heavyweights sharing the stage in their prime – this recording stands alone, these gentlemen were firing on all cylinders and story lives up to its hype.

Vicious Vicious – Don’t Look So Surprised

This mini-album gets a nod on a couple of counts, but one especially bears mention. “Castaways” is one of the best songs of the year. You’ll probably see it in some movie someday or maybe even a car commercial or an NBA highlight reel – everyone will want a piece of it once they hear it. The point is you should pick it up and give it a listen before someone ruins it for you.


Singles of 2005

Stephen Malkmus – “Baby, C’mon”

Spoon – “Sister Jack”

New Pornographers – “The Bleeding Heart Show”

John Vanderslice – “Dear Sarah Shu”

Kanye West – “Heard ‘em Say”

Wilco – “Panthers”

Kelly Clarkson – “Since U Been Gone”

The Decemberists – “The Engine Driver”

Silver Jews – “Punks in the Beerlight”

Low – “California”

Stars – “Your Ex-Lover is Dead”

My Morning Jacket – “Off the Record”

Wolf Parade – “Shine A Light”

Mong-Lan

I
When I picked up the Best American Poetry edition of 2002, edited by Robert Creeley, I was expecting the contents to be heavily indebted to his own works and those of Charles Olson. Creeley had always been aware of his literary legacy and outspoken concerning poets, whether in favor or disapproval. I was happy to find that while the book contained poetry that I can understand him appreciating, he did a fine job at sifting through imitators of his style and finding new, exciting voices among those writing with a debt to himself, Olson and Williams. The poem "Trail" by Mong-Lan stood out in my mind as unusually moving. She writes in a style which conjures the poets already mentioned, but writes also from her post in contemporary culture and from an entirely different generation, one dealing with the detachment and freedom of technology, the banality and distance of modern travel, and with the politics of emerging globalism. Still, she stays true to an ethos of working toward the truth of the "thing being seen," vividly describing scenes with a chacteristic, fluid line. Trails tells quite a lot about Mong-Lan's personal history, even without having to spell anything too broadly-it was clear that she was from Vietnam but no longer lived there, that she was forced to move and was still emotionally focused upon Vietnamese life, and that her way of understanding the world was often a visual one. I was not surprised, upon looking her up on the web, that she was a painter and photographer before a poet (at least, professionally), and left Vietnam at a young age, living a somewhat gypsey life with her parents before settling in Houston, Texas.

Since then she has become one of the most interesting and important poets I have read in recent memory, a young master who can broadly examine culture from her place as both exile and insider. What emerges is neither shrill nor sleepy, but lyrical and attentive to the weight of experience, observing as "children play mindlessly in satellite/ shores" and "men pick at French-laid concrete like crows// shovels and picks at shoulders." Her importance comes from how she bestows importance on the act of seeing, and the aesthetic heights she reaches in her descriptions via careful attention. Reading her descriptions of Vietnam were so fresh that I felt the importance of each detached instance with greater weight than I experience in my usual daily routines. Her poetry draws its greatest strength from the vividness she conveys through a strategy of fragmentation similar to the variable foot of WCW's poetry. The fragmentation and industrialization of the line envisioned by WCW has grown more appropriate with time, and seems especially well used by Mong-Lan. Her breaking apart of the line across the page combines the sense of line-break as scoring, which it does sometimes to humorous, musical or explosive effect, as well as sometimes being simply for the visual impact of the page. Either way, it improves the allure of her work. It is interesting that Williams tried to make a distinctly American poetry. That Mong-Lan writes in such a western style makes her even more ground, and her work even more important. just as Salman Rushdie may be one of the most important writers about cultural exile, since the modern novel is a particurlarly western event, so Mong-Lan can write about the contrapuntal snare even as she writes from "this age our era i can correctly say this an era of exile"

Also Williams before her, Mong-Lan ultimately owes a debt to Sappho, of whom fragment 16 could be a possible inspiration for Trails:

These — cavalry, others — infantry
others yet, navies, upon the black earth
hold most beautiful. But I, whatever
you desire.
To make this clear to anyone
is most easy.

In Mong-Lan's book Song of the Cicadas she has a poem called A New Vietnam. In this poem she envisions the state of Vietnam, whose cities are growing quickly, and whose people feels the growing pains of that expansion. The second of this three-part poem focuses on the Hue people of rural Vietnam, who face danger in their fields still from an American presence in the form of unexploded ordinances. Indeed, war and the American presence is a major element of this new Vietnam, one in which urban skyscrapers are becoming more common even as rural communities struggle with the past and with a decaying sense of culture, a Vietnam that is both conflicted and eternal:

honey-moon light swoops over the valleys
upon the Da Lat mountains
like squadrons

Never staying on one image for long, she jumps from the moon light resembling plane formations to a banana vendor who criticizes her for scrutinizing his crops. Many of her poems have this sort of humor in them, which comes from her intense closeness to real life. In an Robert Creeley interview conducted by Mong-Lan, he mentions that "insofar as "the poet thinks with his poem," as Williams put it, humor will be a factor." One gets this feeling with Mong-Lan, that as her images jump and shape-shift on the page, that she is undergoing a sort of process of realization through opening herself to memory.

II On "Trail"

Of the Mong-Lan poems I have read, I return most often to that first poem of hers I read, Trail. It is an eleven-part poem (including a ten parts and a prelude) in the form of a letter to a lover far away, who is spoken to directly only in asides sighed throughout the parts. The poem functions on several levels, another important level being the travelogue. Traveling and recording one's travels informs her progression of memory and involves themes such as photography, landscape and indigenous cultures. In order to work through her memories and give them a shape which is meaningful to her, she sometimes will linger "through woods red with evening of dreams spilling" and sometimes more quickly; "to accelerate time I walk from arizona to new york to/ viet nam."

The trail, that record of her travels and of others who have traveled with her informs the piece. She writes;

on this trail of a thousand years there is us amidst misfits & assiduous trees

we have walked
over sand sick with evening of words spilling

what is the remedy for momentum for mania a deciduous heart?

The observations concerning trees are a major theme in the poem, assiduous/deciduous, opening the physical world up to her dilema of time and timelessness without succumbing to the pathetic fallacy.

The desert is mentioned several times in relation to time passing. The eternity of desert lurks around the edges of the poem, surrounding it but never able to be seen for long. As a visual allusion to eternity it is conataminated by the eye, as the "desert raging on a contact sheet the outbreak of pneumonia" or the "satiny desert/....sand sick with evening...." It is possible, given her use of phrases, that she means to observe the sand as sick with evening in the sense that the pattern of living and experiencing time is a sickness suffered by inanimata, or it is stricken with living. Later she recalls the desert again with the observation that "shimmering water copies the blazing desert," maintaining again the primacy of desert to that of water. What can we learn from this series of remarks? It is interesting that the trail does indeed venture near the desert, "dryness & trails," but the poem never goes deep into the desert. Mong-Lan is aware of it as an analogy for beginnings, for tabula rasa. The satiny desert that begins this poem points to a landscape of birth, even as a the "scandent mountains" which begin to cover our view join Mong-Lan's conception of time at the end of the poem. Even on a trail thousands of years old, we are young compared to the mountains which have "had a million years to practice their lines."

The desert is a model as well for this world we live in, a sick world, a global world, an "era of exile." It is the era of the satiny desert as well, and of the sick sands, because this desert that waits for form is both the metaphoric present of an exile culture with no roots, or whose roots are mangled beyond repair, as well as apocalyptic vision for the future, where technology and cultural clashes have raged out of control, or in the case of the amazon rain forest, which she explicitly mentions. In the sixth part of Trails Mong-Lan writes that she dreams "of sand dunes flying ridges & sun i dream of wind blowing darkly usurping/ cultural designs...."

Contemporary culture is a major element of what makes Mong-Lan's poetry interesting. Another factor to this fragmentation is the quick-jump of her ideas and images from place to place, which seems more appropriate to our culture today, and makes Robert Frost look that much older, given our "hyper-awareness born of technology a silver butterfly heavy/ inside this drift split." As is constant in this poem, one image preludes or echoes another. In this case we are drawn back to the poem's prelude, when even as she recalls being at the ocean with her lover, "past we touch/ inside our skin a sterling sound." Time in this poem passes by with the power of narrative, that we will it to pass however imperfectly, and are ourselves contaminants in this sense. It is these elements of change within the author, who may hear a sound and then specify what she believes that sound to be as it occurs to her later, which constitute the narrative power of the poem, giving the poem a sense of time and subsequent life of its own.

The hyper-awareness poses a mixed blessing. It allows her to travel and call her lover, but laments that the phone is but a machine that "keeps us a-/ part/ how many digits is in the number/ for consciousness the total of God?" While the breaking apart a-part may be a bit gimmicky, it does follow with what is throughout her work an interest in voicing language closer to the physical event of speech and away from language as a formalistic process through which it is parsed and organized with periods and capitalization. In the twenty-first century, this tactic is a bit of a high-wire act, with the freedom to voice poems of a fantastically informal nature being long-ago accomplished and since become passe, but she usually pulls it off. When she writes:

grotto of swimming bats I do not swallow
the darkness rocks under my feet
are piranhas' mouths if I miss a step

stalagmite meeting stalactites coincidences
taking forever to form

It is difficult to imagine her usuing proper punctuation. When she maintains a fluidity to her writing, which is established by her rhythm, her lack of punctuation falls right into place.

One of the best images presented in Trails is that of an automobile at night, which reminds me of a Gary Snyder poem in which the headlights of cars contain their own calligraphy. For Mong-Lan, the cars allude to her way of experiencing as a poet, only seen in a strange object that may or may not see her, as she "see cars pass & wonder if the headlights expose & wonder if any will stop."

The car assumes an allusion to the poet, the road memory and headlights the poetic eye, seeing without positing preconceived notion. This poetic process is balanced by our humaness, which is not purely poetic, and steers the vehicle. Mong-Lan observes the world in its cultural entropy but allows for the pain and injustice to speak for itself. These memories is usually assumed in that the poems are often written in present tense, which serves to intensify the patchwork, collage-like assemblies that Mong-Lan creates, both on the page with words and on the canvas with paints. She also uses photography, and in all of these mediums there is a constant use of multiple-imaging, such as pictures placed atop other pictures. In her poems we are frequently confronted with this technique of multiplication, or juxtaposition, which creates the illusion of a different whole from several sources. The overlap is especially resonant for a poetry of exile, where Mong-Lan writes as a Vietnamese/American, seeing the world as what it is and what it has been, and in seeing them both as one, perhaps glimpsing the future.

All Photographs by Mong-Lan. These along with pics of her paintings as well as a few of her poems and her excellent interview with Robert Creeley are available at her website, www.monglan.com.

Seamus Heaney's Stone from Delphi

Stone from Delphi
by Seamus Heaney

To be carried back to the shrine some dawn
when the sea spreads its far sun-crops to the south
and I make a morning offering again:
that I may escape the miasma of spilled blood,
govern the tongue, fear hybris, fear the god
until he speaks in my untrammelled mouth.


The syntax of this poem immediately shifts us into an intimate space. By beginning the poem with a copula Heaney implies a link to a verb which is absent, so we end up with a phrase. This syntax moves us away from public speaking and into a language which seems spoken to the self, fragmented, ruined. His phraseseology in the title regards the Stone FROM Delphi, and not the OF with which it is usually called which may imply a different stone, but a look at the poem considering the stone of Delphi offers an interesting reading nonetheless.



The Stone of Delphi, or Omphalos, literally translates into "Navel." According to Greek legend, the Omphalos is the center, or navel, of the world, where Zeus sent two eagles from different ends of the cosmos to meet and form it. It originaly stood in the Apollo, where Pythia would give the god's oracles. The stone iteslf shows two eagles and is otherwise formed in what appears to be bees nets. Bees were a symbol of death and rebirth in Greek times. Also notable is that Pythia references Pythons, or snakes, which stand for the turning of seasons and rebirth in celtic mythology.

The possiblity of a rebirth is heavy. The south-moving rains themselves suggest a rebirth, from the seas to the sky and back into the land to run to the sea. He speaks of moving in a motion with these rains, and making his offering in the morning as a new day begins.

The last three lines, which are italicized in the original but not here because I don't have italics, constitute the prayer: that he may avoid the miasma (noxious exhalation) of spilled blood; avoid hubris; and importantly fear the god until he speaks. I believe this is the direct reference to Pythia, and a request that he himself be given the gift of Pythia. The mouth itself is the temple, untrammeled by the world, in which the god's voice may rise. To extend the metaphor of mouth as temple, the tongue itself may be the Pythia, who were possibly known as such because of their writhing constitution, as well as their dangerous mouths.

Pythia, or Sybils, were oracular mystics and channelers who usually worked as medium for one of the chthonic goddesses. It is possible this poem was written for them, from their point of view. Heaney accomplished a similar, tough travelling through time and into another's footwear in Punishment, where he takes the view of the bystanders punishing a woman for adultury in pre-Christian Germany. Of the Sybils Heraclitus writes;

"...with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, unadorned and unperfumed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice by aid of the god." (Heraclitus, fragment 12)

The aim of this poem is radical then, as an incantation it looks back to wild, mystical women of the pre-christian era as forebearers of the poetic tradition Heaney is now an important part of. At last, it seems appropriate that we return to the beginning. Death seems suggested here. The verbs he uses in the latter half of the poem are "escape; govern; fear; fear; speaks." Previously to "speaks" these are all verbs which involve keeping at bay one thing or another, the distances we must know to live in peace day by day. At last as he speaks, he moves beyond fear of god to give him voice, and in this realizes a death in that his own will and voice dissapear and are replaced by that greater will which is outside himself. This sounds terrifying, but apparently would not be, if there were no self to lament the dissapearance of self. That this comes about before the navel of the world signifies a birth, making this both a religious experience and a creative one.

Lastly, it is interesting how symetrical this poem is; the two halves which unite in the middle, much like the eagles. These two halves may be seen to generate movement on their own, and to be united as a stillness, a center of the earth. One is the sensual account of physical movement and weather, the other a prayer which engages abstract ideas and propositions. It is possible he means these two to be balancing forces, the base and sublime, giving meaning to each other. I recall this balance somewhere else....

A poem I was reminded of reading this poem, was Yeat's Sailing to Byzantium. He writes about an urn, not a stone, but their elliptical themes overlap:

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

The Trial of Orhan Pamuk

Today is a sad day for free speech and for novelists. In 1987 the New York Times wrote "a new star has risen in the east..." in reference to Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. Today he stands trial for violating Turkey's laws forbidding the insulting of "Turkish Identity," for bringing up the issue of the Armenian Holocaust during an interview with a Swiss reporter. His remarks were far from inflammatory by Western standards. What he said was "a million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in these lands, but few dare to talk about it." Indeed, for talking about it Pamuk faces up to three years in prison, and he is not alone but only one of 60 writers and publishers facing punishment for violating the new law in Turkey.

The author of acclaimed novels Snow and My Name Is Red, Pamuk has been mentioned as a candidate for the nobel prize. His most recent novel Snow meditates upon the nature of theatre, art, government and oppression, and the strange places where these elements synthesize. It begins with a successful and controversial play in which a Muslim member of the audience is brought onstage and tortured. The plot spirals into a situation where an actor is brought into power by coup, and the lines between the reality of theatre and the theatre of political life is increasingly tenuous. During this shift, an exiled poet, Ka, returns to Turkey, the scene of the novel, to investigate a string of suicides in remote Kars. Ka is cut off in Kars by snow during the coup which ascedes the actor to power, and what dramatic changes happen to Ka during that period are pieced together in present-day by the character Orhan Pamuk. It is a beautiful and melancholy work that looks deeply not only into political identity, but also into the ability to find sublimity in dismal and isolated times.

It is difficult to hear news that not only is free speach so imperiled in a country on the verge of EU membership, but that an event such as the Armenian Holocaust is still controversial. Between 1915-1917 hundreds of thousands, and by some counts over a million, Armenians were systematically executed. The execution began with thousands of the leading Armenian intellectuals being executed overnight by government soldiers, and was followed by the robbing, raping and killing of the majority of the Armenian population. The government formed either twenty five or twenty six concentration camps near the Iraq and Syrian borders, where populations were killed either by morphine injection, or by being herded into mass graves and buried alive. One military tribunal has suggested that gassing was also employed, and further semblance to the Jewish Holocaust is evoked in seeing pictures of the grossly starved population of men, women and children in camps during that time. In the end, nearly half the Armenian people were murdered in a two year span. The Turkish state has declared that rather than any planned genocide, the high number of deaths of Armenians during this period is attributable to inner-fighting in the state. When Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad referred to the Jewish Holocaust as a myth he was roundly and rightly criticized by European heads of state. In Turkey the official line is equally offensive to the history of a people, but the international reaction has been far quieter about the Turkish government's reprehensible, revisionist views. The presses in Turkey, even the progresive presses, have been nearly silent on the issue, and it is possible that Pamuk, and the 60 other intellectuals on trial for similar offences will go to prison for their stance the issue. Nations, including the United States should be outraged, not only at Turkey's law banning free speech, but on their views on the Armenian Holocaust as well. If we are a state that values free-speech and truthful accounting of history, we could at least speak out against this sad proceedings.

Thankfully, there may be some respite for Pamuk. Since Turkey is vying to be allowed into the European Union, several ministers of the union have spoken out against the arrests of Pamuk and other charged critics. One minister called the arrests "regrettable," and another, "unacceptable." Turkish officials, or most of them, are interested in joining the EU and are aware that this tarnishes a reputation already tarnished. Turkey has long been thought of as being a conservative, military state whose record on human rights abuses is deplorable. Many in Turkey do no wish to become members of the EU, and prefer a more conservative, isolated state. They are collectively known as the "Deep State" (Deep South, anyone?), and see Pamuk's trial as an oppurtunity to stall EU membership and reinforce nationalistic values. The EU's speaking out, however timorously, against the free-speech trials may be having effect. On this, the first day in Pamuk's trial, the Judge halted proceedings to ask for the Ministry's position on the matter, since Pamuk's remarks were made before the laws making it illegal to denigrate Turkey's image were passed. This is a stalling tactic, and not a legitamate response to the EU minister's requests that the trials be halted for good. Pamuk still may be tried, and the trials of the other 60 are going ahead as planned. The Turkish government goes on insisting that it did not commit genocide in the twentieth century. As Pamuk left from the courthouse today, the BBC reports he was hit by a woman with a folder, jeered at and insulted by crowds gathered outside the courthouse. Even as he pulled away in his car, an egg splashed against his window.