But in my shop, only three entries in the “Write Your Heaven” contest could be chosen, on the basis of originality, wordcraft, and evocativeness.

Congratulations to:

Connie Corzilius Spasser

Heaven is
the anteroom
the dim shop on the narrow street
shelves of books and potions
the walk under branches
humming with portent

Heaven is
the capsule held between the teeth
forever, the high heel dangling
from the toe
the stoppered bottle
the gleaming bar

Heaven is
solitude pitched
on the edge of company
a room with doors
to other rooms you didn’t
suspect were there

Heaven is
the waiting

***

HoppingMadAdjunct

Heaven for this adjunct would be contracts of more than a semester or a year, with no phrase like "this offer is contingent upon ...." in it, for twice what my contract in this vale of tears pays per course, i.e. for the same amount full-time colleagues in my program make for teaching the exact same courses that my so-called part-time colleagues and I teach. In adjunct heaven there'd be professional respect for us as well, with clear evaluation procedures tied to career advancement, health-insurance and retirement benefits and roomy offices for all, full of air and light, and our students too would love us and what we teach as we have always loved them.

***

And Lillian:

The first that comes to mind is a heaven where in lime green Bermuda shorts, bikini top, and with a bandanna tied under my bangs, I'm barefoot carving a longboard down a just-paved summertime street.

***

A note on the judging, which was performed by rascals who will all probably wind up in law school one day: Of the 23 entries, three had to be disqualified for missing the deadline. (Sorry, folks, but they’re future lawyers, what could I do?) The rest were difficult to choose from.

Boots McGee was deemed self-disqualified, though I found his or her entry delightfully Churmish in its play on Sartre:

Heaven is other people. (Naw, just foolin'.)

Kaaren Kitchell didn’t win because we were all just too jealous of what she apparently already has:

Heaven is living in our apartment in Paris with Richard: writing in the morning; exploring in the afternoon; seeing friends at night (or reading great fiction, watching a great film).

Forget Paris; Richard’s heaven enough.

Carl Newman’s bonfire “fed by all the report cards and bills one collects in life” was a nice image but the judges pictured him dancing around the blaze in a devil’s outfit purchased from The Costume Supercenter.

Tim Sheraden wins the special Twinge of Nausea Award for his second of two entries:

The womb is Heaven .... dark, warm, protective, devoid of self-awareness, and temporal. Hell is what happens after you've been forced out of Heaven.

Sadly, Tim, the Twinge Award comes with no prize, but, you know, eww and well done.

***

Winners should e-mail me at Oronte.Churm@InsideHigherEd.com with their snail addresses to claim their prizes. Please list your order of preference for the books, and I’ll make it work if I can.

Thanks to everyone who entered, to my ringer friends who provided their heavens as examples, and to Yale University Press, Princeton University Press, and Dalkey Archive Press for the most excellent prizes.

Katherine Mansfield wrote, “Ach, Tchekov! Why are you dead? Why can’t I talk to you in a big darkish room at late evening—where the light is green from the waving trees outside? I’d like to write a series of Heavens: that would be one.”

Recently I realized I’ve been thinking a long time about how we imagine our heavens. In The Stork, a free, downloadable mini-book from the burgeoning featherproof Books, I wrote several characters in conversation:

I think heaven is a place those three can talk without hatred in the spirit of purest fraternity.
Heaven is one of those dark woods in the interstate median, where you sit around a campfire with your tribe, passing a jug of wine.
You’re an idiot; heaven is the glitter of Burdine’s jewelry counter.
More like the sparkle of sun on bonefish flats.
My Mama’s arms.
Your Mama’s arms.
Girls girls girls, cried Mrs. Wieland….

One of my own heavens would be reading to my young sons, clean and pajamaed at the end of a busy day, their heads on my shoulders, on a cool big bed with perfect light.

Yesterday I asked a few talented friends to write theirs:

Brian Beatty, “Writer. Comedian. Dude with a beard.”
I have no idea what my idea of heaven is, or whether I even believe such a place/feeling/state of being is possible. But I do believe that my dog has achieved a sense of what I might call spiritual centered-ness. My simple/stupid hound follows his nose and scratches whatever itches whenever it itches, never mind what else is happening in that moment in time. He's a little stubborn and slow, too, but never outright rude. He lives on his own clock, by his own rules. He's happy all the time, too. Which, to me, sounds pretty close to heaven. I've never been much of a people person, so I don't know what I'd do with angels, anyway.

Josh Birnbaum, photojournalist
Jerry Garcia, my grandfather, is a unicorn galloping through the deep South with a trail of lemmings behind him, each holding a different-colored cane. They sing joyous songs. My whole family is present as ants weaving their way through the grass, and I am a blade of grass, swaying in the wind but ultimately rooted in the ground. No humans exist.

Another heaven is now. I am living it. Suffering is growth.

Steve Davenport, cowboy poet and radio producer
Wallace Stevens talks some good heaven smack in "Sunday Morning," and I'm down with the Talking Heads' "Heaven," which similarly calls out the place of imperishable bliss. Me, my take? Any good moment that stops the rot of time for a bit. But only a bit. The rot's part of it.

Kevin Dolgin, expat writer living in Paris
When I was very young, I thought heaven would be a lot like earth, but with more candy. When I was older, I thought it would be like earth, but with more music. As the years went on, I thought it would be like earth, but with more sex. Then I stopped believing in heaven which left me only with earth and I realized that there's enough candy, music and sex as it is, you just have to keep your eyes open. So for me, heaven is the life I'm living right now.

Erika Dreifus, “Writer. Reader. Reviewer. Resource Maven.”
Paris. Fifth arrondissement. Freshly painted apartment in 17th-century building. View (partial will suffice) of Notre Dame and the Seine. Nearby boulangerie. Cheese.

Susan Henderson, author of Up From the Blue and curator of LitPark.com
This is interesting because the whole family was in the car the other day, and the kids were talking about heaven in the backseat, not realizing that we were listening. My youngest son was saying that he wasn't afraid of dying so much as he was afraid of heaven. Imagine, he said, all day long you're just flapping your wings and everything's calm, and you have to stay there forever! But hey, if the idea of heaven—forever-boring—makes him more careful to stay alive, that works for me!

Thomas E. Kennedy, expat writer of the Copenhagen Quartet (“an astonishment,” says Junot Díaz)
Eternally getting drunk but never being drunk at an endless cocktail party on a warm April day that would not dance away where everyone you ever knew and liked and loved was in attendance and none got bored with your incessant quoting and anecdotes and in the background a tenor sax played in alto range and cool cool cool jazz guitar and all the beautiful women with gazes of tender invitation and oh their sweet lips and off the creamy shoulder blouses and low-vamped toes with painted nails and you never ever have to dance to keep them happy…

Roy Kesey, expat writer most recently sighted in Peru
My heavens are so many and varied and commonplace that at first I was bummed out at being so predictable. Then I realized that what it really means is, I spend tons of time in one heaven or another, all reachable through simple addition:

my kids + any beach + frisbee
my wife + wine + DVD
friends + large hunk of barbecue
bourbon + Gaddis hardback
full tank of gas + map
my folks + beer + their back deck
And I could go on and on and on.

Crazy Larry, an actor
Sitting in a perfectly appointed room with windows filling a wall facing the sea, reading on a comfortable couch with the perfect partner next to me, the woman I haven’t learned enough about yet to want to divorce. In the meantime, “…I think it's gonna be a long long time / Till touchdown brings me round again to find / I'm not the man they think I am at home / Oh no no no I'm a rocket man...."

Kyle Minor, writer, editor, witness
My idea of heaven is what I heard from the traveling preachers at the Southern Baptist church where I grew up. They were always talking about the Great White Throne judgment, where, they said, a 16mm film of our lives -- all our deeds, good and bad -- would play for an audience of God and everyone who ever lived. I used to think how horrible that would be, but now I think it must be the most boring thing in the world. Half of everyone's footage would be sleeping, and how many viewings would it take before even the sex got repetitive and banal? I hope when I die, that's all there is.

Bill Murray [from Groundhog Day]
I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster, drank Piña Coladas. At sunset we made love like sea otters. That was a pretty good day. Why couldn't I get that day over and over and over?

Jodee Stanley, editor, Ninth Letter
Just arrived in Vermont today, which may explain why the first heaven that comes to mind is an endless, quiet trail through the woods, where I can take a leisurely walk, picking up sticks, looking at flowers, finding little toads alongside the path. And then any time I want to rest, a cabin appears, stocked with armchairs, bottles of wine, peanut butter cookies, and paperback mystery novels.

My second heaven would definitely have fried chicken in it. All my heavens involve food.

***

So there you have it: Candy, cheese, painted toes, little toads, and William Gaddis.

Now it’s your turn. If you were writing a series of heavens, what would one of them be?

The rules for this contest (there aren’t rules in a heaven are there?; rules sound like a drag and surely bliss means doing what you like best; yet limits perhaps are built-in: Mr. Kennedy’s long slow tease would end abruptly if orgasm was on the program; that is, isn’t it necessary to imagine there is no satiation in an imagined heaven?; even Mr. Murray evolved to seemingly deeper pleasures in Groundhog Day; maybe, as in Mr. Kesey’s heaven, variety carries the eternal day; aw, hell: write whatever you want):

Leave one brief imagined heaven here, as a comment on this post, by the end of the day Monday, August 30, for a chance to win one of three excellent books, from university-affiliated presses, that happen to have “heaven” in their titles. You may enter more than once, but please make each a separate comment.

Entries will be judged by a cabal of my new creative writing students—the ones who look most rascally—on their originality, wordcraft, and evocativeness. Nasty heavens not meant for a general audience of highly educated, sophisticated—even jaded—provosts will never make it past the editor who releases comments for publishing.

Winners will be announced here at the blog next week and will need to e-mail me with their snail addresses to claim prizes. Which book goes to which of the three winners is an unknown process. Allow 4-6 weeks for delivery, as they say.

***

The most excellent prizes:

The Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr Beddoes and His Sons of Genius, by Mike Jay. Courtesy Yale University Press. The publisher says:

At the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, England, founded in the closing years of the eighteenth century, dramatic experiments with gases precipitated not only a revolution in scientific medicine but also in the history of ideas. Guided by the energy of maverick doctor Thomas Beddoes, the institution was both laboratory and hospital—the first example of a modern medical research institution. But when its members discovered the mind-altering properties of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, their experiments devolved into a pioneering exploration of consciousness with far-reaching and unforeseen effects.

This riveting book is the first to tell the story of Dr. Beddoes and the brilliant circle who surrounded him: Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, who supported his ideas; James Watt, who designed and built his laboratory; Thomas Wedgwood, who funded it; and the dazzling young chemistry assistant, Humphry Davy, who identified nitrous oxide and tested it on himself, with spectacular results.

“Brilliantly researched and written…fans of scientific biography and history of science, as well as history buffs in general, will be engrossed by Jay’s marvelous study.”
--Publishers Weekly

***

Heaven's Touch: From Killer Stars to the Seeds of Life, How We Are Connected to the Universe, by Jim Kaler. Courtesy Princeton University Press. The publisher says:

Did you know that as you read these words showers of high-speed particles from exploding stars are raining down on you? As you gaze into the starry sky, you might feel isolated from the Universe around you--but you're not. This book reveals the startling ways life on Earth is touched by our cosmic environment, and demonstrates why without such contact, life itself wouldn't be possible.

“With the avuncular Professor as our guide, we are taken on a whirlwind tour of the Universe as we know and understand it and how, possibly, we came to be and very nearly not to be. He has a pleasingly straightforward style and, wherever possible, tries to steer clear of complex scientific jargon. . . . Professor Kaler has attempted to enliven what could be a complicated and uninteresting topic, and through linking everything together via his well-explained engaging text, he has admirably succeeded."
--Astronomy Now

***

The Cave of Heaven, by Patrick Grainville, translated by Dominic Di Bernardi. Courtesy Dalkey Archive Press. The publisher says:

This extravagant novel marks the English-language debut of one of France's most exciting and controversial writers. At the center is a mysterious excavation site in southwest France, where the skull of a 500,000-year-old man has been discovered. Simon, a journalist assigned to do a story on the cave, is a voluptuary keenly responsive to his surroundings, finding an erotic patina over everything he sees, hears, touches, imagines.

As he and a young archeologist from Cameroon find themselves drawn into a whirlwind of sexual hunger, the surrounding countryside fills with strange and exotic visitors: an escaped Basque terrorist, a roving lynx, a redheaded biker queen and her latest conquest (a village waitress), tourists from Northern Europe, a hermit, a gold prospector, a madwoman. . . . All these characters and narrative strands come together at the conclusion as the countryside goes up in flames.

“This is a work that will captivate readers willing to be seduced by extremes of language and image that reflect artistically the voluptuousness of thought and action of the characters created so brilliantly by the author. . . . [T]his is a novel of affirmation: primitive impulses remain vigorous in modern beings. Grainville seizes this convergence, depicting characters who throb and pulse with life and yet who are clearly born of poetic language and imagination.”
--Library Journal

***

Good luck!

***

Review by Okla Elliott

Logic: The Question of Truth. Translated by Thomas Sheehan. Indiana University Press, 2010. Cloth, $44.95.

***

In the course of the Winter Semester 1925-26, as the story goes, the dean of the philosophy faculty at Phillips-Universität in Marburg walked into Martin Heidegger’s office and said, “You must publish something now. Do you have an appropriate manuscript?”

Stanford University professor and Heidegger scholar Thomas Sheehan goes on to inform us in his introduction: “Within a few months he would. As soon as the course ended, Heidegger went off to his cottage in Todtauberg and started writing out Being and Time by hand. By the end of March he had finished much of Division One of the text, and by 20 April he and Husserl were reading page-proofs of those sections.”

But from which thinking did this masterwork of philosophy come? On which philosophical foundation did he build the work without which it is hard to imagine the existence of later work by such giants as Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Richard Rorty, and Jean-Paul Sartre? It is true that Heidegger had a nascent interest in the nature of Being (Sein) and beings (das Seiende) before his widely lauded lectures on logic and the nature of truth in the Winter Semester of 1925-26, but a careful reading of these lectures shows how his conception of truth and logic (in)formed his conception of Being.

The so-called “question of truth” and how/if the human mind grasps truth—and attempts to represent it—has been the subject of philosophical investigation since the ancient Greeks (and likely antedates even them). Two subjects have come to the fore in this discussion since the ancient Greeks as well: logic and language; and these are the starting point in Heidegger’s 1925-26 lectures. These lectures were published in 1976 in German under the title Logik: die Frage nach Wahrheit and have just appeared for the first time in English in this translation by Thomas Sheehan.

The book is in fact more than a translation, which would be important enough, given the embarrassing gap in Heidegger studies this thirty-year oversight has caused. It is also the first synthesis of the three main text sources for Heidegger’s lectures from this era—his own meticulously written out lectures, the transcript of his son’s stenographic recording of those lectures (whose additions allow us to know Heidegger’s digressions and divergences and which were later corrected in collaboration with Heidegger himself), and the notes taken by one of his famous former students, Helene Weiss, who was pursuing her doctorate at the time of the lectures and who later became a professor and Heidegger scholar in Britain. This tripartite synthesis of texts, along with meticulous use of other published texts—both by Heidegger and others—makes this not only the first compete appearance of Heidegger’s Logic in English, but the first complete appearance in any language.

When Heidegger undertook the work on his Logic, he knew what tradition he was entering into. Kant wrote his Logic and, as Hartman and Schwarz tell us in their introduction to their 1974 translation of it, Kant reread it “often twice a year, for over 40 years, from 1755 to 1796 in order to remind himself of his own methodology (and for seminars he frequently gave on the subject).” Hartman and Schwarz also tell us that “the importance of Kant’s Logic has never been fully appreciated. This is one of the reasons this work, published in 1800, is only now appearing in a complete English translation.”

I believe Heidegger’s Logic has been similarly underappreciated and that the first full version of it is only now appearing for similar reasons. But Kant was not the only German philosopher to write his logical methodology into a book. Leibniz, Hegel, and Husserl all wrote their own Logics as a springing-off point for their philosophical systems. Heidegger was positioning himself in the great tradition of German philosophy by writing his, and he knew what importance such an undertaking possessed.

In these lectures on logic, Heidegger makes use of (and often plays his ideas against) Kant, Husserl, and Aristotle to think through the notion of truth and logic, working toward the nature of ideal and empirical being (which sets the stage for his move to a discussion of Dasein and Being in his magnum opus Being and Time). He also puts before us the relationships of psychology and logic, science and logic, and language and logic. These lectures are interesting as a work unto themselves and should be treated with the respect they deserve as a major work, though they are doubly interesting to us because they directly preceded (both temporally and conceptually) Being and Time.

In the Bible, John 1:1 famously reads: “In the beginning, there was the Word”—and there has been much discussion over the translation of the word “logos” in this and other works. It can mean “spoken language,” “word,” “logic,” or “discourse,” depending on the context. According to the Christian cosmology, therefore, in the beginning (before Being came clearly into existence from chaos), there was the logos; and it was likewise with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.

But how important is logic in Heidegger’s view? For him, it is the sine qua non of all truth—scientific and otherwise.

The basic structure of that whole [of the sciences] is the possible “truth” within which any research activity operates. In other words, the constitutive parts themselves are only necessary structural moments of theoretical truth. Thus they can be understood and are to be appropriated from out of the pre-understanding of theoretical truth and ultimately of truth in general. This means that clarity in scientific research is possible only by way of a philosophizing logic.

But it is not a static, “scholastic logic” he is after, but rather an authentically “philosophizing logic.” It is no surprise, therefore, that he would set out to redefine logic before he set himself to revolutionizing philosophy with Being and Time.

It is necessary to trace, as Heidegger does, the pre-Heidegerrian view of logic and truth before we move on to enumerating how Heidegger finds it wanting. We will end this portion of the essay with Heidegger’s notion of truth as aletheia, the term used by Aristotle and Plato for “truth” which means, according to Heidegger’s etymological interpretation, “un-covering” or “being-uncovered.” (There is some debate as to whether Heidegger’s etymology is correct, though most agree it is at least a possible etymology, and it seems more important that this is how Heidegger philosophizes truth.)

It would be simple enough to find quotes from Heidegger’s Logic that sound like a sort of early draft of passages from Being and Time, but the more important and productive endeavor would be to understand the fundamental shifts Heidegger made in logic and philosophy of language which undergird his later radical and almost incalculably influential shifts in ontology. Likely the most direct connection is Heidegger’s discussion of time in his Logic, to which he dedicates thirteen chapters, much of which feeds directly into his thinking in Being and Time. But what is more interesting here, I think, is how these chapters supplement Being and Time, which was planned as a work in two Parts with three Divisions per Part. What we have of that larger planned work is only Division One and Division Two of Part One, that is, only one third of the entire proposed project. Division One of Part Two was, according to Heidegger himself in the introduction to Being and Time, supposed to be on “Kant’s doctrine of schematism and time, as a preliminary stage in the problematic of temporality” and Division Three of Part Two was to be on “Aristotle’s essay on time, as providing a way of discriminating the phenomenal basis and limits of ancient ontology.” In effect, I would argue, the thirteen chapters Heidegger dedicates to time in his Logic can be seen as a sort of completion of his project in Being and Time, albeit an incomplete one.

By applying pressure to the meaning(s) of the Greek word and philosophical concept logos, Heidegger uncovered, as it were, a new way of understanding truth—aletheia, which means “uncovering”—and therefore a new way to conceive of the structure of the world and human consciousness’s place in it. This radical reorganizing of logic and truth made Being and Time. While a brief review is insufficient to uncover the ways Heidegger’s Logic influenced and laid the theoretical foundation much of his later work, especially Being and Time, I can say that with this new translation, such an investigation is possible for English speakers for the first time (and given that this is the most complete edition of the work in any language, it is important for non-English speakers as well). Reading his Logic as a supplement to Being and Time, even at times a stand-in in for certain missing sections from the proposed larger work, we might understand the real magnitude of the Logic and, hopefully, more fully understand Being and Time.

While Sheehan has done an excellent translation overall, he has perhaps failed readers in his lack of discursive footnotes. The generally agreed-upon standard English translation of Being and Time, by John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson, has hundreds of footnotes which include original German quotes and explanations along with connections to other works by Heidegger and others whose works influenced him. Sheehan could have created a stronger book had he followed their model. That said, the glossary of German and English terms specific to Heidegger that Sheehan includes in the book is thorough and should prove very helpful to first-time readers of Heidegger, and it serves some of the same functions I am suggesting for the footnotes.

The other flaw is his translating “Dasein” as “human existence.” Dasein is a very specific term for Heidegger, which literally means “there-being” (sometimes rendered in English as “being-there”), but which actually means, in the Heideggerian usage, something like “the being-there-of-human-existence-as-opposed-to-human-consciousness/subjecthood.” The term is well-known among readers of Heidegger, so not only is Sheehan’s translation flawed, it is unnecessary, since I doubt there will be a large public readership of this book. Those who will read the book either already know the term or would be willing to look it up or would have it explained in the class for which they are reading the book. To his credit, Sheehan admits in his preface that his choice here will not please many people; and if I were forced at gunpoint to translate the term succinctly, I would go with “human existence” as well. My complaint is merely that there was no such gun and the term should have been left in German, perhaps, here again, with a footnote explaining it.

These ultimately minor complaints aside, this is an excellent book, a wonderful addition to Heidegger studies and 20th century philosophy. I recommend it highly for graduate courses in these and related fields and for all university library collections. It is readable, accurate, and I predict destined to become the definitive translation.

***

Okla Elliott's non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared in A Public Space, Indiana Review, International Poetry Review, The Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, and New Letters, among others. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks and is co-editor, with Kyle Minor, of The Other Chekhov.

Several sessions were held this week by Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to explain the campus move from “legacy” technology to Microsoft’s unified communications system.

The session I attended, for faculty, was held in a three-ballroom space filled with hundreds of chairs. It was staffed with six or eight people, including three Microsoft reps, and they had enough technology among them to run the Bulgarian space program. Two large screens, one on either side of the dais, had been set up for the demonstration so everyone could see, but only about three dozen faculty, lecturers, instructors, or teaching assistants attended, which is to say, less than one-fifth of those who teach in my department alone.

A Beatles’ session tape was playing as we waited. One of the Microsoft reps shut it off during “The Long and Winding Road” and began with a wry and perhaps premeditated comment that there had been “some years of work already” to get us to this point.

Illinois currently uses different tools for e-mail, conferencing, “calendaring,” instant messaging, and telephony and voice mail.

“…Microsoft’s Exchange Server and Unified Communications products…will replace [individual] systems,” the CITES website reads. “These changes, which will result in significant savings in time and money for the campus, will leverage our world-class data network and cutting-edge communication and collaboration tools.” The update was a mandate at a school that not only prides itself on its engineering and computer science programs but also belongs to a state system in deep financial trouble.

“June 2012 is the date for turning off all non-unified systems,” said Charley Kline, IT Architect at CITES. By spending two million dollars for upgrades now, he said, the university will save three million dollars each year until then, what he described as “an ROI [return on investment] any business would like to have.”

Existing e-mail and calendaring “have to go away,” Kline said. “They’re at the end.” And instead of multiple e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and other ways of routing communications from various users, “your e-mail address will become your [sole] identity in the future.”

The advantages of the new system, we were told, is that Illinois faculty would: A) use one communications tool and one sign-in; B) have access to all their messages from desktops, laptops, PDAs, cell phones, or landlines; C) be able to read voicemail by email, and listen to and reply to email over the phone; D) see “colleagues’ real-time status and identify their preferred method of communication”; and E) personalize the features of the system, such as level of contact with others.

A Microsoft rep did several of these tasks and projected them on the big screens. Much of it worked well, though it was a little dizzying as the screens and popups flashed by, driven by an expert user who occasionally made mistakes and wandered around at lightning speed in the applications to fix his problems. The audience laughed when the pleasant voice of the computer interface chided him for not speaking his commands more simply, during the hands-free demonstration, though it completed his requests. The video conference he tried to put together on the spot didn’t go through, and while describing the ease of “bringing people in real quick” he admitted to having hit the wrong button in a demonstration at Northwestern and auto-calling 22 people on a list. “I had to send e-mails for two days saying sorry,” he said.

I know too that transcription of voicemails to a text message or e-mail can be tricky. I left a voicemail for a friend recently, as I was driving my boys home from a visit to see his parents, where the band .38 Special was playing at the local festival, and tickets were $12. The e-mail version he received read:

Hey, you know man. Peace in the boys are driving home. Mr Aaron faster Curran. It's a color monitor so I guess we got to go home now. The interested last night with your mom and dad appreciate that. Peace lot of. I guess. Go over to his from drinking and player tub of Miller Beer with so it was. Yeah. And yeah, I would like to try to get all as well, so I just wanna go over it that anyway. 38 Specialist plant last night but as i said, i think i did you go from being like and Syria. Chin, M, T V, 1 M, T V or something down to play on the Herrin fast or Tickets are $12 billion. Anyway, and we're doing well and I'll catch you later. Bye.

But it's clear the new system will do many things, including provide the ability to poll students in real-time during a lecture (“do you understand the lecture?” was the example provided) and record lectures and capture other materials for archiving. (“Some professors who think of their lectures as ‘theirs’ might have some problems with this feature,” a Microsoft rep said after the session. “But I think those used to thinking in the newer ways will realize that it benefits their institutions to have that material available to, say, the whole Big Ten, the entire nation, to third-world countries.”)

New components that will be installed with the change include fake telephones on every desk—actually small computers transmitting on the wireless network—that have no hardwired phone lines, and the possibility of “adjunct thumb[-print recognition] swipers” for people who share phones in group offices.

The tradeoff, Kline admitted, is that software systems won’t be as reliable as hardware, and any system that allows remote use from personal computers is even less so. In the telecom world, there’s a “five nines” rule of reliability: public phone systems must work 99.999% of the time, which allows for only five minutes per year of unplanned downtime. Cell phones, he said, are typically 99.9% reliable, with 8.76 hours of downtime per year, and desktop PCs are just 99% reliable—3.65 days of downtime. A unified system such as the one at Illinois will be tied to that weakest link.

Personal computer, software, server, and network failures, and building or city power-outages become, with this kind of system, blocks to productivity at best; at worst, they’re life-threatening emergencies, such as if someone gets trapped in an elevator and can’t call the police, or there’s a fire in a lab and no one can dial the fire department. Possible solutions, Kline said, include both education (awareness and training of alternatives in case of the coincidence of emergency and outage) and old-style hardwired phones in key locations such as elevators, hallways of buildings, and “blue light” emergency kiosks around campus.

While it seems many might balk at losing reliability for any reason, at any time, Kline said that our society has already chosen the increased functionality of smartphones over their lesser reliability, so it shouldn’t be a problem.

In the brief Q&A session following the presentation, a few of those present asked about other concerns. One woman said she taught large lectures and stored all her grades on her laptop. “Since everything I do now will live in some server cloud, will Microsoft guarantee the security of all this personal information?” she demanded.

No, said the Microsoft rep, he would not commit Microsoft to the security of everything that was on her personal laptop. The audience laughed, and she looked flustered and angry. He gently went on to explain that she could choose how much access anyone on the unified system had to her data, and that there were always risks, every time she got on the Internet, through any portal.

She responded by saying she never got on the Internet with that computer, ever—admitting a breath later she sometimes downloaded some things—then asked, “Am I paranoid?”

The Microsoft rep paused and said, “Maybe above the mean.” The room rang with laughter.

But a CITES employee told me privately that unless users know how to use the system well, it might be easy, if using a personal laptop or home desktop, to leave open a path to data that could be shattering in the wrong hands. If, for instance, you let students or friends have access to something on your desktop—say, an open-source program like Audacity—they could suddenly find their way into your personal bank statements, medical information, perhaps mean-spirited correspondence, or stash of porn.

For reasons having nothing to do with paranoia I can say with some certainty that I will never in a million years use all the features of the new system. As an adjunct in the humanities I don’t usually get invited to participate in video conferences—though I was once nearly a junior participant in a State Department-funded video conference on Chekhov, until the gig fell through because there was no easy way to get us to a video link—and I don’t online chat or “calendar” as a verb or do voice-recognition tasks or check to see if my peers have blocked their calls with “in a meeting” messages. I don’t teach online, and my big lecture classes rely on, at most, a microphone, an overhead projector, and sometimes a DVD player. I don’t even use my ancient office phone.

The last question of the day, for which there was no time, was from a prof who reminded the corporate reps that the university had strict rules against using school resources (including phones and computers) to do any personal task. Indeed, the state-required ethics test we all take online once a year makes it clear that violations can be punished by loss of job, fines, and legal prosecution. I could be fired, for instance, if I used my university e-mail account to send a message to my editor here at IHE. With a unified system “there’s no longer a wall” between work we do as employees and work we do for ourselves, the prof said—especially if our e-mail addresses, which are the same as our university IDs, become our sole online identities in a system meant to subsume all ways of communicating with each other.

Charley Kline blinked and said that the “state rules were archaic,” but the man who asked the question wasn’t convinced. A Microsoft rep stepped forward and assured him that a committee had been formed to look into that. As his co-workers shut down their system connections, e-mail accounts, chat spaces, electronic calendars, address books, onboard cameras, and internal and external microphones in their laptops, along with their projectors, Bluetooths, and who knows what other software and hardware, the rep said the committee would “help us perhaps re-think those archaic rules.”

A piece in the Times recently was titled “The Web Means the End of Forgetting.” Thank god, we’ll finally be able to find Mrs. Churm’s keys when she needs them.

Of course author Jeffrey Rosen doesn’t mean that kind of forgetting. He’s wondering, “Can we imagine a world in which new norms develop that make it easier for people to forgive and forget one another’s digital sins?” “Sins” in this case is mostly ironic and means merely “bad taste” or “questionable judgment”:

Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was “unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree. Snyder sued, arguing that the university had violated her First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech.

In truth, Rosen says, we care less about scrutiny of our online lives than we do about controlling our reputations, since “the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances—no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows [through, say, a Google search] about you.” He mentions ReputationDefender, a company that “automatically rais[es] the Google ranks of…positive links…[and so] pushes the negative links to the back pages of a Google search, where they’re harder to find.” Of course this spin comes at a price, subscription to their services, which the company sells with fear: “Your life could go viral at any moment.” A video on their site, titled “Why you need ReputationDefender,” is, they claim, “only lightly terrifying.”

(The ad is somewhat convincing, showing Facebook-style photos of a shirtless guy with a beer bottle sitting upright on his enormous gut and a naked couple with their[?] cats covering their genitalia. I instantly regretted posting them here at the blog. But elsewhere the company’s visual rhetoric is confused. Under the category of “[the opinion of] bosses” there’s the famous still photo of Elvis in creepazoid mode with nasty Richard Nixon. Does this imply I should suppress knowledge of my pill-popping so I can become a bloated narc for a corrupt government? Under “partners” the video shows Roosevelt and Churchill with Stalin. Does this mean to suggest, even jokingly, that Stalin’s reputation would be good-to-go if only his genocides could be pushed to the end of search-engine results?)

Rosen quotes “cyberscholar” Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, who claims that “In traditional societies…the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten.” He’s never worked in my department.

It is true that sins are forgotten in human memory—or else transmuted into nostalgia; see the case of Billy the Kid—but sometimes that’s only long after the individual who stands to suffer for them is gone. Sometimes grudges and rumors actually fester and become more poisonous before they fade, since they amplify or confuse original events. But Scott Fitzgerald overstated the case when he said, “There are no second acts in American lives.” In the digital age, as it’s always been, there are second acts but not for all, only some, and it’s hard to tell how the play will end. (“You die and then you rot,” a friend used to say, in which case online reputation might grow less interesting to you.)

Some corporations may not hire based on what they see floating around in the clouds of the new technology, but it’s just as true that many people will never change their opinions on someone even after seeing hard evidence to the contrary on the web, and others will never sift through all the data to discover the truth. Mayer-Schönberger’s claim that online material “will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them” is almost triumphalist in its perception of technology’s power over the human. It runs in the same vein as an esteemed writer’s claim that humans have “evolved” in a few decades with the invention of digital storage and is even related to the seemingly opposite belief that new technologies will always come along to fix what the old ones screwed up.

(The Industrial Revolution produces greenhouse gases that warm the planet; “geoengineers” clamor to fix the problem by bombing the upper atmosphere with sulfides to reduce solar radiation; “a failure of the geoengineering scheme [leads] to rapid climate change, with warming rates up to 20 times greater than present-day rates”; the entire surface of the earth breaks out in volcano-sized canker sores in the year 2041; it gets hard to find all-you-can-eat fried shrimp specials; McDonaldland scientists announce on Fox News they’ve developed a new Soylent Shrimp Meal; etc.)

When Mayer-Schönberger regrets that “societal forgetting” is a thing of the past, I sympathize then add that society—that plastic mass of people over time—will also forget, ignore, lie, and get bored with dissecting the same events and turn to other things.

Mankind writes its story in more and more diffuse ways. With the web and other recent technologies the book grows exponentially larger, but who can read the whole thing? Who would want to? “[T]he Library of Congress recently announced that it will be acquiring—and permanently storing—the entire archive of public Twitter posts since 2006,” Rosen writes. Will anyone care what @Churm 8 4 lunch in 2010 when there’s no fried shrimp in 2041?

Technology may insist we not forget anything, but with that much data it’ll be harder to discern which stories matter. One man’s madeleine has always been another man’s meat house.

***

Speaking of never forgetting: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab at the California Institute of Technology invites you to put your name and zip code “with others on a microchip on the Mars Science Laboratory rover heading to Mars in 2011!” Presumably you’ll be fondly remembered by that robot forever, or at least until our sun dies in the year 5,000,002,010 and leaves behind only “the lonely cinder of the former planet Mars.” The death of our solar system is brought to you by Bud Light.

***

The Internet should, in theory, keep humankind from losing old processes that might otherwise have died with their practitioners, but it’s still something special to watch them practiced by people. I don’t know how lost the skills of timber framing, stonecutting, and masonry ever were, but let’s take a drive over to the Ozark Medieval Fortress, where the next two decades at hard labor will give retro meaning to the term “brick-and-mortar business.”

***

As IHE reported a couple of weeks ago, writer Frederick Barthelme is being let go from the creative writing faculty of the University of Southern Mississippi. “Barthelme said he is being pushed out prematurely, but university officials said that—facing cuts in funds—they have been forced to set priorities for other programs, and not to continue ‘phased retirements’ like the one Barthelme wanted.”

Barthelme writes, “Having been delicately ousted from my slot as editor of Mississippi Review print and online editions, where I toiled these last several decades, I have invited my close colleagues who worked with me on the online version of the MR to join me here at a new venture….”

Forget MR Online. Say hello to Rick Magazine.

The Underwater Construction School at the Naval Construction Battalion (Seabee) Center in Port Hueneme, California, offered useful blocks of instruction called "Appreciation Days."

Seabee Underwater Construction Teams have a similar mission to that of Army diving teams I served with, which is why their school was one of several we attended. In addition to combat duties, they too are tasked with

...underwater construction…cutting, welding, grinding, concrete placement, component assembly, system installation, underwater material inspection, precision explosive demolition…seafloor excavation, hydrographic surveys, object search and recovery, and engineering reconnaissance support to amphibious operations. They participate in research and development of new diving techniques/procedures, and are hyperbaric chamber operators and supervisors inside tenders. Projects may include piers, piles, wharves, quay walls, causeways, bridges, boat ramps, moored systems, pipelines, cables, ranges….

In fact the biggest difference between Seabee UCTs and Army dive detachments might have been their slogans. Navy divers claimed: “We Dive the World Over.” Army divers, fewer in number, so perhaps compensating a little, said: “We may not dive the world around, but we’ll go down on your daughter.”

Listen, I know, chancellor: Those people are awful, awful people. I’m just here to bring you the word.

In addition to relying on the technology in modern diving rigs that can be almost astronautical, working divers use digital, hydraulic, pneumatic, explosive, and other tools to accomplish just about anything that can be done topside, but in a more hostile and dangerous work environment.

On [Fill In the Blank] Appreciation Days, Seabee cadre forced us to set certain technologies aside in order to value them more. Hydraulic Appreciation Day meant using the older technology of pneumatic jackhammers to break up concrete underwater. We dressed in scuba, not deep-sea gear, and the compressed air exploding out of the piston port beat the living hell out of our lungs, ear drums and sinuses. Blinded too by bubbles pouring from the hammer, it was easy to grow confused about why we didn’t stay in college.

During Power Tool Appreciation Days we laid a submarine cable used for electricity or communications. The cable, paid out from a barge we moored offshore, had to be armored with cast-iron split pipe not much changed since the 19th-century. Each half-piece of pipe was about 18 inches long and weighed maybe 30 pounds. It had a bell-shaped casting on one end that interlocked with a flange on the other, so the nuts and bolts that held the halves together also married one section of pipe to the next. Bolting them together on the seafloor, by hand, with spud wrenches instead of hydraulic torque wrenches, was monotonous, frigid work. In the surf zone we couldn’t use scuba gear, just masks and weight belts, since the breakers tossed us around like a washing machine.

One exhausted diver I knew, older, whip-lean, and more than six-and-a-half feet tall, left his spud wrench upright on the head of a bolt when he crawled onto the beach to vomit like a sick dog. A wave picked me up and dropped me on my lower back on the pointed end of the wrench; a few inches lower and I’d still be walking like a Creamsicle. I crawled onto the beach then too, and we lay next to each other in the sand, brothers in arms, him throwing up and me cussing him while he did. I’m a bit of a hardhead, so the exercise didn’t really give me a greater respect for power tools than I already had, but it did make me forever wary of people more than six-and-a-half feet tall.

***

We had a birthday picnic recently for Wolfie at New Salem State Park, a reconstructed village where Lincoln worked and lived as a young man. It was 98 degrees with high relative humidity here in the tornado belt; cupcakes melted quickly in the heat. An elderly volunteer was at work in the cooper’s shop, a log cabin as hot as a smokehouse under the sun. He talked to visitors as he cut and bent strips of steel and banded the staves on a milk churn he was making to edify America’s Nintendo youth. He was dressed in period woolen trousers, suspenders, hat, and tie, and his filthy, long-sleeved, linen shirt was so soaked with sweat it was transparent. I’d rather forget what I saw in that dark cabin.

***

I’d been reading Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America (Steidl 2006) before our visit. Some of the subjects in these photo-essays on “sixty representative historic or present American utopias” seem to aspire to live in the technological manner of young Lincoln and his love Ann Rutledge. While I admire several of their projects, what strikes me is that they look precisely as dirty and uncomfortable as the pioneers in photos in the museum at New Salem. Is that really necessary?

***

My mom deflated false romance with gusto. Watching a TV movie she’d point her finger at the grimy hero triumphant after long battles with the wilderness and the indigenous, as he moved in to kiss his betrothed.

“Whooeee, I bet he stinks,” she said. Here was a woman who understood life with little technology.

***

When you think about it, the earth is just covered in dirt. Most of our technologies were invented to distance us from it. This is called neurosis. Once mankind achieved the quest for fire, it immediately began the quest for the vacuum cleaner.

***

Despite the continued heat wave, we decided to go camping last weekend. As a way of building the romance of the adventure for our boys and gaining their cooperation—and perhaps to work myself up for it—I showed them books on camping I’ve held onto since I was a kid. A favorite was First Camping Trip (How to Make It Easier and More Comfortable), written and illustrated by C.B. Colby, “author of First Fish and First Rifle.” The boys on the cover are wearing rolled dungarees and high-top Keds and are carrying bedrolls and pack baskets. The Golden Book of Camping, by William Hillcourt, has wonderful illustrations by Ernest Kurt Barth and some good tips:

Camping with the family is something else again. You probably have a way of living at home that you’ll take to camp with you—with every family member having certain duties to perform. Yet camp will not be the same—you’ll have a chance to relax more than you do at home. Dad may want to get up early a few mornings and take Sonny fishing with him. Mother may want to go wildflower hunting and daughter will want to go along.

Sure. Then we drop in on the Eisenhowers for steaming mugs of Postum and to chat about the Sputnik problem.

Fact is, modern outdoorsmen use lots of technology meant to alleviate inconvenience and discomfort, and I don’t mean RV campers with generators for hi-def TVs, margarita blenders, and electrified paper lanterns strung in the trees. Our hot-dog forks have glow-in-the-dark handles, we discovered, and they are good. Our dome tent is enormous for its low weight, and the mesh windows are high enough under the fly that even when it rains they can be left open in the heat. And god bless Cascade Designs of Seattle, Washington, whose Therma-a-Rest mattresses held air despite being rolled tightly in my basement for 15 years.

We brushed past the deer flies, built a campfire, cooked apple cobbler in a dutch oven, told stories, sang songs, and sweltered, together. I took a long exposure of everyone around the fire with my digital SLR; the puzzling glow that appeared on Starbuck’s face in the photo wasn’t the full moon; it was light from the display screen of his own little camera, which he’d been staring at when my shutter was open.

At bedtime the four of us lay in the stifling tent, soaking in the funk of wet cotton clothes. After brief thrashing the others fell asleep, mercifully, while I dreamed of a cool Waterpik rain shower, 14 glasses of ice water from the in-line fridge dispenser, a handful of Aleve, and my own Perfect Sleeper bed. A front moved through about midnight. I heard wind in the treetops and waited patiently for it to reach us. Finally I slept, fitfully, sharp bones in a heavy wet sack. I woke once more in the dark to rain pattering on the nylon, but mysteriously at dawn there wasn’t even dew on the grass. Five-year old Wolfie was awake too. Instead of waking his brother or racing up, as he’d do at home, he lay on his sleeping bag and stared up at boughs waving in the wind, leaves illuminated by the early light. The sky behind them was blue.

He whispered to no one in particular: Wow. Wow.

Buceadores del ejército de los Estados Unidos, Isla Grande, República de Panamá, el día de Navidad, 1985. I’m the beautiful one.

(Now) chaplain Captain Floro, subject of an interview here at the blog, is second from left. Judging by our pose, ZZ Top was popular on MTV. Courtesy of Mark Wilson, friend, diver, surfer, father, and (now) hyperbaric chamber operator.

Facebook photos are only one of several resurfacings of the past in recent days. As I said a couple of posts ago, an old friend contacted me unexpectedly, which led me to a dear former roommate. Mark, another former roommate, posted this and other photos I didn’t know he had.

Then, going through dampish boxes in the basement, I found reports I wrote at age 13 for my Boy Scout hiking merit badge: Seventy miles in two weeks in the steam and heat of the land between the rivers, including one 20-mile death slog. I wrote the reports by hand on a large notepad I can no longer explain (“Mach II, for all your aviation insurance needs”), each with the name of the hike, date, time, destination, route, distance, purpose, permissions needed, items to be carried, sources of water, a slogan (“Quitters never win; winners never quit”), hand-drawn map of the route, and “story” of the march. (“Finally 13th Street ran out. We made a left, and a block later [the scoutmaster] showed us the ‘hanging tree,’ on which a man was hung because of a riot.”) This was probably the first writing I did on the topic of my novel.

Stranger still: As I was working in the library last summer on my nonfiction book—a brief history of the town where my novel is set—I met an elderly woman from there who was very sweet until she discovered what I was up to. She told me then tartly, “None of that should be dredged up.” And attached to the front of my merit badge reports is a handwritten note from her father, a local historian and scout leader who was old enough to have driven boy scouts in his flivver up to see the Galloping Ghost play ball at Illinois. He awarded my writing first place that year and wrote, “This is the best I have had in all my hikes since 1965.”

How to account for these synchronicities? Maybe it’s an effect of my disturbing our lives’ detritus and repairing, painting and wallpapering our old house. My cussing alone could generate a magnetosphere capable of disorienting animals and bending time. In fact, a confused field mouse has been cavorting in our cabinets, chewing labels off the olive oil and balsamic bottles, and dropping excreta like blackened wild rice. This sometimes happens in fall and spring, when the cold and wet bring them inside, but never summer. Clearly we can’t live with a mouse in our kitchen, so I had to do something I don’t like to do—move the family into a tent in the backyard until the mouse decides to leave.

I know, Dr. Trinkle, you’re a man of science, and so am I. There are rational explanations for all this weirdness: I blog, so an old roommate reads of how another old roommate contacted me, and he posts his pictures. There are only 10,000 residents in that town where I was doing my research, so the odds were not bad I’d meet someone related to someone. And the mouse loves Saigon cinnamon and curry powder. See?

But top this: Earlier this month I was lying on the couch with our cat Plop on my chest, reading Werner Herzog’s published journal, Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, just out in paper. It’s a strange, haunting book by a strange, driven filmmaker with a psychotic star and impossible self-imposed shooting conditions, and I’d gotten to the part where Herzog is reflecting on the myths of seduction and nightmares surrounding the real pink dolphins of the Amazon basin, where he was filming.

As I was reading that entry I heard a soft little bump-scrape several times in a row. In a house with two young boys, two young cats, and two aging dogs, odd repetitive noises can only mean trouble. I peered around the living room. At first I saw only our other cat, Bitey, but she wasn’t eating Legos like usual; she was looking up. I lay still and watched. A three-foot long mylar balloon in the shape and color of a pink dolphin sank slowly down the wall. I was about to throttle up into a full-bore Klaus Kinski fit when I remembered Wolfie had asked me to buy the balloon, for no reason other than he liked it, for Mrs. Churm for Mother’s Day. It had floated up to the ceiling after the celebration and been concealed for six weeks behind a segmented arch ten feet overhead.

You have to admit that’s a little weird. How many times do you hear of cats named Plop and Bitey?

Larry called at midnight. “I went to see this improv show for the third time. How to describe it to you? Simply the best. Not just that, though. A leap above all other attempts to do it. Unrelatable to anything else, a different beast entirely. It will forever scar me that all those talented people at the Main Stage at Second City won’t ever make something like this. These people truly elevate themselves. They make me want to partake in it. But you read Tolstoy and the rest become unpalatable.

“Afterwards we went to Walker Brothers. They make this omelet. It’s unusual and tasty and baked, so it’s light and fluffy and not at all greasy. It’s incredible. Now I can’t enjoy it any place else. Once I’ve had that. Do you see what I’m saying?

“It makes the rest of the world quite gray,” Larry said. “My life is punctuated with bright sparkles of nonreality. Tomorrow it’s back to the grim grayness.

“Maybe if we were ignorant it wouldn’t be so bad. Instead it's painful.”

“Who was it that said, ‘To be human is to be a conversation?’” Pearl London asks Philip Levine.

“I don’t know, but I’ll say it,” he replies.

This week I’ve been reading Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversation with America’s Poets, edited by Alexander Neubauer (Knopf 2010).

Those poets— Philip Levine, Maxine Kumin, Robert Hass, Muriel Rukeyser, Louise Glück, James Merrill, Derek Walcott, C.K. Williams, Robert Pinsky, Ed Hirsch, Frank Bidart, Li-Young Lee, Charles Simic, Eamon Grennan, and many others—were interviewed in a course called “Works in Progress,” taught for more than two decades by Pearl London, at the New School.

London’s class, largely ignored by students when she began teaching it in 1970, became a “coveted destination” for winners of the Nobel, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer, and for eight U.S. poet laureates. (The students came after all.) The poets not only came to class to talk with London and her students, they came as many as five times to get “examined, dissected, valued and exposed” for recent or unfinished work that in some cases became their best-known.

“Within four walls for an hour and a half every other week, London quietly brought a generation to light, the best poets and poetry of the last quarter of the twentieth century,” editor Neubauer writes.

“This is a course concerned essentially with the making of the poem, with the work in progress as process—with both the vision and the revision,” London wrote in letters when asking poets to come to her classroom. “In a sense, the shaping spirit of the imagination is what it is all about.”

Some of the selections here (portions of fewer than a quarter of extant interviews are included) don’t detail the revision process; the talk is more general, on context, reactions to other poets, the writing life, how ideas came, and so on. The most useful interview for poets learning their craft might be with Derek Walcott, who offers in-depth explanation of specific choices for at least four drafts of his poem “XLVIII” from Midsummer.

At least one of the poets seems ambivalent about the idea of being examined or dissected at all. Rukeyser invites students to speak (“Anybody want to talk?), but it’s a challenge and a trick. Apparently without allowing for exchange, Rukeyser quickly goes on,

I myself have never talked after hearing poems. I’ve been silent. And I know that in schools and colleges, criticism and showing-off talk is considered a very high form of response to poetry. I have thought making a poem is a higher response to poetry, making love is a higher response to poetry, silence is a higher response. Criticism may be well down the line, maybe number 17. But I’m inviting questions of criticism or anything you like, and this is all out of character for me. I’ll keep quiet now.

She sounds like my mother, who said she hated baseball but that if I really wanted to play she’d come to every game. I never played baseball.

Because the interviews are edited, the book truncates and makes briefer and lighter the experience, obviously, of being in London’s class. The portions chosen as representative also don’t read like shaped craft essays on a topic or theme, as they do in the excellent book series Poets on Poetry from The University of Michigan Press. Except in cases of certain longer and more fluent passages, they don’t have the concentrated presence of what I’ve called the recursive self. But the poets are usually brilliant—all the more admirable given the impromptu context, even if, as with any speaker or teacher, they have their stock phrases and pet topics long-prepared—and London’s style is that of the best teachers: democratic, curious, sensitive, engaged, a little wily, holding up for admiration the deserving yet not holding back on informed judgments. That is, she models what she expects of her students, her poets, and their poetry.

"[I]t seems to me that the invitation of poetry is to bring your whole life to this moment,” Rukeyser says to London’s class.

Pearl London was the daughter of M. Lincoln Schuster, cofounder of Simon & Schuster, and she married a lawyer who defended artistic expression. She wrote poetry herself from an early age (Orson Welles read her official poem of the 1939 New York World’s Fair over the radio) and earned a master’s in English from NYU, but despite rumors and hints of her own book one day, she never published one and any manuscripts have gone missing. (“[T]his brilliant selection of her conversations with other poets…is, finally, you might say, that missing book,” writes Robert Polito, Director of the New School Writing Program, in a postscript.)

It’s well known: Teaching often drains vital juices, even if it’s the thing you were meant to do. Worse, brilliance, if and when it does occur, remains afterward only in a few memories. Imagine if Brando had acted twice a week for three months in performances for only 12 at a time, no cameras allowed. If not for the discovery of a hundred audiotapes hidden in boxes in London’s closet, after her death in 2003, only bits and pieces of these performances would exist in the minds of the few who were there on a given day. Besides, not all of us can go to schools where such opportunities exist, and this book is a rare reminder of and insight to what is often lost whether you were there or not.

Transcribing tapes is an act of translation too; choices are made, such as ignoring pauses for consideration, verbal stumbles, tics, uncertainties, confusion, chitchat, and the like. Even more importantly is setting typographically what in poetry would be line and stanza breaks—the breaths and phrasing—and their emphases. It’s odd, given the various poets’ backgrounds, that the voices in these interviews begin to sound alike in their erudition. Some, such as Maxine Kumin, are more conversational—nearly equal space is given on the page to her and London—while others, such as Philip Levine, need only a brief prompt from London to deliver a formal lecture.

Topics are all over the place, as one might hope of any good discussion. (Derek Walcott: “Can I say something [off topic]?” London: “You can say everything.”) But the speakers tend to return to the main thing, choices and fate in the act of writing. It’s instructional to hear the same topic articulated in different ways:

Muriel Rukeyser: “It’s very hard to talk about the rewriting that goes in [poems] because the major rewriting is likely to be in the matter of sound, the sound that is deep in the structure, almost a crystalline structure of sound in the poem.”

Robert Hass: “The patterning of vowel sounds, the patterning of breath, is the way a poet actually reaches into and takes over your body while you’re reading and experiencing his poem. The terrific simple example of this is that wonderful old poem of Keats, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’…. I think I swooned when I read it…’She looks at me and she did love / And made sweet moan.’”

Amy Clampitt: "…I think most poets [such as Keats] who do write sonorous poetry do not do it by any science but simply hear echoes—one word will suggest another because of the sound.”

There are facsimiles here of some of the poems discussed in class, and even multiple drafts in a few cases, but you’ll need to keep a dozen other volumes at hand to get the most from this book. Online searches will find some of the texts or allusions, such as Frost’s “Silken Tent,” not reprinted here, which Glück and London argue over .

One bit in the book particularly struck me, since writing for a periodical—or just periodically—can lead to habits that become crutches or routines or the only doors out. Glück says:

[W]hat happens is, you learn to write a poem that breaks stanzas in a certain way, that takes certain kinds of linguistic, syntactic turns to stand for closure. […] You look at a tree, and you turn that into a tree poem, and you look at a rock, and you turn that into a rock poem. They all have the same arc. As soon as you can recognize a consistent shaping principle, recognize that a certain kind of sentence is always a cue to you for an end, then you’ve got to resist the cue.

She says when she realized some of her endings were “summaries” or the poems “bulletproof,” “I had stopped learning, because I could convert all I saw only into one kind of truth. And it was no longer interesting. So I wanted to see what I could do when those habitual devices were refused.”

This act of process and the supreme challenge it offers inspires both highs and lows. Derek Walcott, after detailing why a phrase of his, which the class loves, is all wrong, goes on to explain why his combination of the words “vague sea” was the perfect choice, based on “a French word, vague, which is wind [agitation of the water]”:

I was exultant after I got it, and I went up to a friend and I said, “Jesus, you know…I just got it, ‘the vague sea.’” Again, the idea of blur and mist and melting. Because you have vague, which is the wind and the sea, then you have “vague,” which is a sea itself being blurred, right? And what may work for it is within the tonal quality of the two words, the sibilants. “Vague sea.” It’s like one word “vaguesea,” one stroke almost, a small stroke.

Walcott starts to say he’s always trying to get the “effortlessness that comes…” but then cuts himself off.

“There is no rest, really, there is no rest, there is just a joyous torment all your life of doing the wrong thing.”

It’s a feeling I’ve known since childhood, though it’s come sporadically over the years: An extreme sleepiness without fatigue, a dream without sleep, a staggering drunk without the buzz, a codeine high without skin rash. My eyes won’t focus; I stumble. Usually it occurs in summertime or in the tropics or subtropics, but not every hot place does it and sometimes I can sink into it in some cool interior such as a public library.

Melville describes this feeling, which he attributes to languor, washing over everyone aboard the ship Dolly:

We abandoned the fore-peak altogether, and spreading an awning over the forecastle, slept, ate, and lounged under it the live-long day. Every one seemed to be under the influence of some narcotic. Even the officers aft, whose duty required them never to be seated while keeping a deck watch, vainly endeavoured to keep on their pins; and were obliged invariably to compromise the matter by leaning up against the bulwarks, and gazing abstractedly over the side. Reading was out of the question; take a book in your hand, and you were asleep in an instant.

In the army we called it Brain Fever. For two or three days we’d lie around like lotus eaters, missing meals, going unwashed, shirking our duties as dutifully as we could. The worst case I ever had was after I got off a Blackhawk somewhere near Río Coclé del Norte in the Republic of Panama, expecting to join my dive detachment but finding instead I’d beat them there. I spent a soporific week by myself in a 16 x 32’ tent belonging to a larger unit bivouacked high above the sea. It was hot and windy at night and hotter and more humid in the day, and I spent both days and nights sleeping or nearly asleep in that canvas tent, plagued by mosquitoes and weird dreams and pacing like a sleepwalker. In the middle of one of those nights a young PFC from the engineer battalion apparently walked off the cliff, fell several stories onto volcanic boulders, and was swept away by the breakers. When I was shaken awake roughly by soldiers with flashlights, they called me by his name, hoping upon hope he wasn’t sunk in that black sea. There were many rumors as to what happened, but I’ve wondered all these years if he died by languor.

It has occurred to me that languor is a sort of depression, though it feels nothing like the loss of the magic of adventure, when foreign mountains are suddenly just mountains and not like being in love. I used to get it when I visited my sister’s home, where I felt unusually safe, and it interfered with my visit.

I’ve also wondered if it might be useful, a protective mechanism that slows me down the way a bad summer cold will do when I’ve been working too hard, a way for the subconscious to get more time to work. The pace at which my novel is allowing itself to be written has slowed after the first burst of concentrated energy, and even though I fell asleep on the couch after dinner yesterday and have been picking my way through conversations like a dullard, I indulge the languor when I have the time or ability because it feels necessary. I also look for the thing that signals the end of it.

Last week in the midst of a languor misty enough to make my freshly-painted walls drip, I got an unexpected e-mail from an old army friend, who led me to another. I haven’t seen or spoken to Egg or Sammy since the early ‘80s. It seems odd to say that they have been my lifelong friends, since I only knew them one or two years a quarter of a century ago. But my memories of them are so plentiful and strong—confirmed now by speaking with them—that the people they were then have been with me since young adulthood, and something awful that Sammy did even showed up on page 95 of my first novel.

And so—just as I’m working on a new novel set in the Gulf of Mexico, now deep in oil, about a group of veterans looking for one of their own and pulling into a Florida city with blighted real estate—here, up from out of the languor, swim my old friends, one of whom was an engineer on a tug during the Exxon Valdez mess and knows all about spills and salvage, and the other who lives in that blighted city and has a girlfriend in the chief mortgage/title business there. Those are wonderful, odd coincidences—nay, a sign from the universe to snap out of it and work harder—but that’s not all.

We leave our suitcases in other people’s houses. They keep them for us, sometimes even after we’ve left word to throw them out. Much later, to our dreamlike amazement, the cases are brought to us, opened, and we get to measure ourselves against what we remember being. Some part of us has been saved when we thought it was lost, and we realize we’re carried around as we carry others. It’s reason enough to rouse ourselves and get moving.