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Ezra Pound was a major figure in the early modernist movement. During his lifetime he developed close interactions with leading writers and artists, such as Yeats, Ford, Joyce, Lewis, and Eliot. Yet his life was marked by controversy and tragedy, especially during his later years.

The post How well do you know Ezra Pound? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.

The New York Public Library has opened a pop-up exhibit called “A Writer’s Christmas: Dickens & More.”

This program was organized to celebrate the holiday season. Some of the items being displayed include a Christmas card from James Joyce, a Christmas-themed book by T. S. Eliot, and ceramic figurines associated with A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

According to the press release, visitors will only be able to see this exhibit at the McGraw Rotunda inside the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. The closing date has been scheduled for Jan. 04, 2016.

It was strikingly appropriate that Sir Geoffrey Hill should have focused his final lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry on a quotation from Charles Williams. Not only was the lecture, in May 2015, delivered almost exactly seventy years after Williams’s death; but Williams himself had once hoped to become Professor of Poetry.

The post Charles Williams: Oxford’s lost poetry professor appeared first on OUPblog.

The New York Public Library (NYPL) is hosting a pop-up exhibit in honor of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Levine at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

Some of the items on display include the first page of T.S. Eliot’s famed poem “The Waste Land” (which includes annotations from Ezra Pound), a handwritten manuscript of John Keats’ piece “Sonnet to Sleep,” and a first edition copy of Walt Whitman’s beloved book Leaves of Grass. A closing date has been scheduled for June 25th.

Curator Isaac Gewirtz had this statement in the press release: “Philip Levine was a poet of the working man and woman, but he was also a poet filled with wonder at the mystery of existence. We are fortunate that the history of his astonishing creativity, which sprang from these sources, is found in his papers at the The New York Public Library.”

This Day in World History

April 1, 1948

Scientists Propose Big Bang Theory

Poet T.S. Eliot might still be right — the world might end with a whimper. But on April 1, 1948, physicists George Gamow and Ralph Alpher first proposed the now prevailing idea of how the universe began — with a big bang.

Gamow worked closely in the 1930s and 1940s with Edward Teller to understand beta decay — a kind of nuclear decay that results in the loss of electrons — and to understand the makeup of red giant stars.

From this work, Gamow and Alpher — one of his students — developed the idea that the universe was highly compressed until a vast thermonuclear explosion occurred. The explosion released neutrons, protons, and electrons. As the universe cooled, it became possible for neutrons to combine with other neutrons or with protons to form chemical elements.

Time Line of the Universe. Source: NASA/WMAP Science Team.

Gamow and Alpher published their findings in the journal Physical Review on April 1, 1948. The title of the paper — “The Origin of Chemical Elements” — suggests the link between cosmology and particle physics that the big-bang theory represents.

The paper’s authorship showed a bit of Gamow’s whimsy. Thinking it wrong to have a paper on particle physics written by one author whose name began with A (as in positively charged alpha particles) and G (as in gamma rays) without having a B (as in negatively charged beta particles), Gamow asked friend Hans Bethe to add his name to the byline. Bethe agreed, and thereby became part of history.

Just five years later, Gamow made a brilliant addition to a wholly different field. After learning of James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of the double helical structure of DNA, Gamow wrote Crick suggesting that the genetic code was made up of three-part segments. Gamow’s suggestion set Watson, Crick, and other researchers to investigate the possibility, which turned out — in essence (though not in the details Gamow had suggested) — to be true.

“This Day in World History” is brought to you by USA Higher Education.
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Faber & Faber, the storied publisher that published T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, James Joyce, Tom Stoppard and Sylvia Plath, now offers online writing creative courses.

The publisher launched Faber Academy Online, a 28-week course that costs £2800 (about $4,400). The publisher first offered writing courses in 2008. What do you think–should publishers offer creative writing classes?

Here’s more from the release: “Chatrooms, topic forums and specially commissioned video content from Faber editors will be combined with one-to-one Skype feedback and podcasts to create a unique learning experience … The first offering to run on the new platform will be Writing A Novel, a 28-week programme based on the face-to-face course of the same name that has already brought huge success for the writers S. J. Watson and Rachel Joyce.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

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I’m not a ticker by nature. You know tickers, right, those bird-watchers who have the list in their back pockets, and are all too delighted at each new sighting to check another one off the list. Yellow warbler, good, that’s done.

I worry about those people. I sit up at night, fretting over the shallowness of that experience. Is that all they want, I agonize, just to check it off and be done with it?

I suspect that some readers are the same way. Read it, read it, read it. Done, done, done. What’s next?

Where’s the reflection? When did it become a race?

Better to read one book well, and deeply, than to race through a dozen.

That said, it felt good to finally get around to reading Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, the book that rekindles the question, “Do I dare disturb the universe?”

By the way, you know where that quote’s from, right? Only one of the greatest poems ever.

I thought The Chocolate War was brilliant, expertly written, full of youthful rebellion, combativeness, anger, sorrow, energy, brutality — and still timely today. A stunner, frankly. There are not many times when I feel I could have written someone else’s book, and it would be misguided and presumptuous for me to say that here, but I did feel a kinship with Cormier. I understood him down to my bones, recognized his choices, knew exactly what he was trying to achieve.

Cormier’s book is darkly beautiful, the characters vividly drawn, sharp and jagged. There’s the cold manipulation of Archie Costello, the puppet-master. Jerry’s confusion and inner conflict, his unresolved emotions, the way events took on a life of their own beyond any decision or intentionality. And all that catholic school stuff, yes, I remembered that,  too. Cormier got it all right. The novel’s themes are closely connected to my own book, Bystander, but Cormier goes deeper, darker, older. If Bystander is right for middle school — a somewhat gentle introduction to bullying, a story that peers over the precipice but never makes that leap into the void — then The Chocolate War goes a step or two beyond, grades 8/9-up. It takes you into the black. Where I stopped short, by design, Cormier plunges bravely onward.

Stop it, stop it. But nobody heard. His voice was lost in the thunder of screaming voices, voices calling for the

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Raghuram G. Rajan won the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for his book, Fault Lines. A £30,000 prize (approximately $47,300) accompanied the award.

The ceremony and dinner took place at New York’s famous Pierre hotel. During his acceptance speech he praised his publisher, Princeton University Press. Rajan said his wife had advised him on making the book easy-to-read. He thanked his two children, joking that had it not been for them, the book would have been written much faster.

The president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Vartan Gregorian delivered the evening’s keynote address. He mentioned the Harry Potter series, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Mark Twain, and T.S. Eliot.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

"... the larger part of the labour of an author in composing his work is critical labour; the labour of shifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing."

This is T.S. Eliot, quoted on page 424 of The Art of Looking Sideways, the final present of perhaps five dozen presents that I now wrap so that it might be slipped beneath the tree. This Alan Fletcher compendium of ideas—visual and other—is as extraordinary in its way as the ladybird I found this morning and photographed against a window leaned upon by snow.

We must, as writers, seek our own path, our own stories. It is the only way.

An agent flings a promising work against the wall. When asked why, she rants about all the times she has read entire manuscripts only to be disappointed in the end. She softens as she explains how, by the time she reaches the final quarter of the story, she longs for the work to succeed. If it fails, disappointment stings all the more.

Agents, editors, directors, audiences, and readers alike expect the scenes of a story to add up to something meaningful in the end.

The End is the Beginning

T.S. Eliot said, "The end is in the beginning."

The beginning of any entertaining and well-crafted story tells as much about where we are headed as to where we will be at the end. This means that until you write the end you will not truly know the beginning.

Which comes first? Does a writer labor over the first three quarters of a project where the groundwork is laid for the end? Or, does one write the climax itself first?

Before a writer can lay the groundwork about the character and the situation to build to a climax in a way that makes the highest point of the story seem both inevitable and surprising, doesn't the writer first need to know the climax? At what point do we surrender our idea of the story and our will, and let the story have its head?

Whichever which way you get there, the choices you make for the end of your story deserve attention.

Connecting the Dots

A finished draft allows the writer to stand back from the story and think both forward from the beginning and middle, and backwards from the climax. In other words, the beginning defines the end and the end defines the beginning.

As Apple co-founder Steve Jobs says, "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future." Of course he was referring to students at their commencement, but it applies to plot as well. For the end to be meaningful and convincing, first specific character emotional development must be established through the use of dramatic action.

What is your story really saying? What do all those words you wrote add up to? Your story is a reflection of a truth. Not necessarily true for all time, but true for the story itself, and likely for yourself, too. What is the deeper meaning? The truth beyond the physical? The protagonist has undergone a transformation. What does that mean? Jot down the ideas that come to you.


The Climax

The protagonist introduced in the beginning 1/4 of a story spends twice that time in the caldron of dramatic action of the middle. In both the beginning one quarter of the story and up to the next three quarter mark toward the end of the middle, the character's emotional make-up is revealed through successively challenging events that are linked by cause and effect.

The dramatic action and the details and interpretations of the story hold the reader's interest and at the same time show the reader what they need to know to follow the story to its climax.

The climax hits close to the very end of the story. It is the point at which the story turns from being an interrelated deliberately arranged set of scenes to gold. "Any event that seems to the given writer startling, curious, or interest-laden can form the climax of a possible story,” writes John Gardner in The Art of Fiction.

The Climax serves as the light at the end of the tunnel. In the final quarter of the work, the protagonist moves toward the light -- one step forward toward the ultimate transformation, three steps back, a fight for a couple of steps, being beat backwards.

The Climax spotlights the character as she comes into full transformation and demonstrates full mastery of the necessary new skill or personality, gift or action.

The protagonist "shows" herself in scene acting in a transformed way -- in a way she could not have acted in any other part of the story because she first needed to experience everything she does to get to the final stage.

When the dramatic action of a story changes a character at depth over time, the story becomes thematically significant. Ask yourself which scene most dramatically shows your protagonist demonstrating her transformed self?

When you know the answer to that question, you have your climax.

The Climax, in turn, informs all the other scenes in the entire project.


Hollywood Endings

The happily-ever-after endings of the 1950s were replaced in the ‘60s and ‘70s by darker works like A Clockwork Orange, Coming Home, and Midnight Cowboy. The next decade brought in the era of Wall Street.

By the late ‘90s and early 2000s, we could afford to produce books and movies that depicted great loss and enduring hardship. As in the The Horse Whisperer and Cold Mountain, the reward in the end often came in the form of a new life.

Today, the shadow side of survival in these later films is fast becoming the reality in more and more book buyers’ and moviegoers’ lives.

Darkness or Hope

Of the two kinds of people who go to film festivals, view popular movies, and read books, one kind believes the universe is orderly and expects us to act morally responsible. These people usually find stories that end on a hopeful note enjoyable and inspire enthusiasm.

Then there are those people who accept a more random view of things. These people are often more at peace with stories that end by reinforcing a grudging acceptance that life is hard.

Both sorts of people are affected by the increasing connectedness of scenes and emotion in a story. In both cases, if unable to find enjoyment in a story or grasp a deeper acceptance for life, people will ultimately stop reading or opt to leave to the movie early.

Thematic Significance

While writing and rewriting the final quarter of the story and the climax itself, a writer looks hard at the meaning of things. An exploration of deep-rooted ideas for the fundamental meaning of events reveals thematic significance, which in turn dictates the final layer in the selection and organization, nuances, and details of the story.

Filmmaker Halidan Hussy, co-founder and executive director of Santa Cruz Cinequest Film Festival, says, “You go to find films that get you thinking, that open you up.”

Stories that get you thinking resonate with meaning. Stories that open you up create opportunities for a shared experience with others. A promising story with a thematically rich climax leaves the reader to ponder the deeper meaning and, in that way, is sure to deliver success.
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From this sensible article on cheating in sports by JERÉ LONGMAN for the New York Times:

Fausto Coppi of Italy, who won the Tour de France in 1949 and 1952, was once asked if he ever fueled himself with amphetamines.

“Only when necessary,” he said.

How often was that?

“Most of the time,” Coppi replied.

The Tour de France ranges from 3,000 to 4,000 kilometres long (1,800 to 2,500 miles) which must be covered really fast in three weeks over hill and dale with just two rest days. Evidence is pretty strong that chemical assistance has been used since the tour began.

Longman points out that the two sports that have had the most drug scandals are the ones that have pursued the issue most vigorously: cycling and track & field. The end result: people think those are the sports that are jam packed with drug cheats. Yet it’s very likely that there’s not a pro sport in the world that doesn’t have athletes who use performance enhancing drugs.

My biggest concern is that athletes are taking drugs that can cause them long term damage (even death) because the hypocrisy around the issue means that drug use is unregulated. And some of the drugs being taken have never been properly tested. That’s scary.

In an ideal world there would be drug-free athletes. What we have now is a world in which not everyone using is getting caught, those who stay clean are at a disadvantage, and there’s doubt and suspicion of everyone. I’m not sure it’s tenable. But I’m not sure what is.

Which is to say I’m bummed I didn’t get to follow the Tour this year. I’m thrilled at how well Cadel Evans did. And I’ll be making sure I get to follow it next year. And hoping that something really radical and smart happens across all sports to regulate drug use in a way that make for more transparency and way less potential harm to athletes. And while they’re at it, if they could end all match fixing, that’d be grouse.

Update: Jenny Davidson has pointed to this fascinating article by Stuart Stevens on performance-enhancing drugs. Stevens tries a whole bunch of them, notes the results, and comes down firmly against them. Well, against almost all of them.

Marrije asked over on insideadog if I’ll be following the Tour de France this year. Sadly, I will not.

This year has gotten out of control. I cannot afford to spend hours every day watching the Tour and following it online. I am incapable of following the Tour non-obsessively. So for the first time in years I’m not following it at all. (No spousal pressure was brought to bear in the making of this decision. Well, okay, just a little bit. I am not husband-beaten! I am not!)

Waaaahh!!!!!

The New York Liberty (10-8) will have to sustain my sport-following needs this northern summer.

And now I go back to the myriad tasks that confront me. At this point it’s so bad I’m resorting to triage. “Which of these tasks will most blow up in my face if I don’t do it?”

But, you know, Vive Le Tour!