Saturday 19:52 (2 Google)

TW: Devolution into shameless pretension after crossword talk.

That's a pretty good time for a Saturday, at least compared to the last few. Perhaps the stupid pills I've seemed to be on lately are wearing off, or maybe this was super-easy. Google came through pretty big. I hate to cheat on super-long clues, but whenever I see something like "Winner of the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for poetry," I feel screwed. Sure, I know some poets, but Pulitzer winners? The only thing worse is Nobel science winners. There are always a few obvious candidates when they go for a poet, but they are not afraid to go obscure on Saturday and it was too long to guess at (it was the only 14-letter answer in the asymmetrical grid).

Unfortunately, the answer turned out to be Wallace Stevens, a very famous poet who I've studied and know pretty well to the point that he might be counted among my favorites, at least of the 20th Century. That always makes me feel kinda silly for cheating because if I could have thought harder on getting some more crosses, it would have felt more satisfying to find. But what if the answer is someone like Theodore Roethke? (winner in 1954; he has the more crossword-appropriate 15 letters in his name) That name rings a much, much fainter bell, and I would have felt fine about searching for him.

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

—Wallace Stevens, "The Emperor of Ice-Cream"

I love the alliteration in the third line, and the uneven rhythm reminds me of Gerard Manley Hopkins, another favorite. I've never really been the type to sit and read poetry for pleasure. Few are, even among other poets. I will read in order to study (if you found the above stanza confusing, you are not alone – my copy had question marks all over it. This is why school is not a waste.*), but most poetry at its core is meant to be performed, ideally by the author.

More about tonight another night

*While IMing some time ago (the fact that I call it that should give you an idea of how long ago), my friend Dan said he was interested in reading Ulysses, but wasn't sure how to go about it. He was right to ask me for help. See, my class of English majors spent an entire semester in Junior Seminar reading that book. While I had a class senior year that expected us to read a full-length novel a week (I skimmed most of them), we read Ulysses one chapter per class, twice a week. While you can get Spark Notes or whatever, you shouldn't bother. An established reading guide (The New Bloomsday Book, by Harry Blamires.



No Amazon link. Support your local bookstore!), itself 250 pages long, was actually required reading. It helped decipher some of Joyce's symbolism and Irish wit. You can get Ulysses anywhere, it's public domain by now. Any American with a middling high school education can read it. It's in English, and most of the words aren't even all that long. Many people claim to have read Ulysses because of its reputation and they're not all lying. Yet for the most part, the only people who end up studying it in depth are the English majors and because of that pace and focus,  they just get so much more out of it. Without that study, I don't think I could say that I enjoyed it, or that it was even that big of a deal. I'm not sure if he ever did end up tackling the book, but Dan is hyper-intelligent, and if he picks up the reading guide, I'm sure he'll get it as well as any of us did 20 years ago.