My favorite Preface.

This is the age of science, of steel--of speed and the cement road. The age of hard faces and hard highways. Science and steel demand the medium of prose. Speed requires only the look--the gesture. What then, for poetry?

Great need!

There are souls, in these noise-tired times, that turn aside into unfrequented lanes where the deep woods have harbored the fragrances of many a blossoming season. Here the light, filtering through perfect forms, arranges itself in lovely patterns for those who perceive beauty.

It is the purpose of this little volume to enrich, ennoble, encourage. And for man, who has learned to love convenience, it is hardly larger than his concealing pocket.

Roy J. Cook @1958

Prosemification station: a few quotes to note.

"In a democratic age, in the midst of a population which is able to read, no position is comparable for permanent influence and far-reaching power to that of an editor who understands his vocation." W.T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, 1886.

"Entropy is a figure of speech, then," sighed Nafastis, "a metaphor. It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. The Machine uses both. The Demon makes the metaphor mot only verbally graceful, but also objectively true." Thomas Pynchon, in The Crying of Lot 49, 1965.

"EPIHODOV: Speaking precisely, not touching upon other subjects, I'm bound to admit about myself, that destiny behaves mercilessly to me, as a storm to a little boat. If, let's suppose, I am mistaken, then why did I wake up this morning, to quote an example, and look round, and there on my chest was a spider of fearful magnitude... like this." Anton Chekhoc, in The Cherry Orchard, 1904

"La veritable eloquence consiste a dire tout ce qu'il faut, et a ne dire que ce qu'il faut." L Rouchefoucauld, 1671.

"The novel is significant, therefore, not because it presents someone else's fate to us, perhaps didactically, but because this stranger's fate, by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about." Walter Benjamin, in "The Novel as Displacement: Structuralism."

Quote of the Day.

"The Missing Generation"

"Another way to assess that decade is less thematic than generic. One of the most interesting phenomena of the 1830's is the blurring of conventional generic distinctions: Tennyson's inward-turning lyrics which chart new journeys of the mind, Browning's disruption of the conventions of historical narrative in Sordello, Dickens's imposition of a reformist vision on the eighteenth-century picaresque novel, or Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1834) by turns autobigraphical fragment, philosophical treatise, novel and editorial doodling -- possibly the biggest put-on in English literature since Tristram Shandy" (Tucker 11).

from Herbert Tucker's Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, chapter by Lawrence Poston.

Finally, I have a legit reason to dislike/dismiss Carlyle (again).

I said, I'm a teacher!

Betters, here goes nothing... I win again.

The spread? In papers, of course, that made it to final portfolios:

Maus by Art Spiegelman (FTW with a staggering): 39.
TOC by Steve Tomasula &co. (2nd, with a surprising): 13.
City of Glass by Paul Auster &co.: 10.
The Royal Tenenbaums by Wes Anderson &co.: 10.
Assorted songs by R.E.M.: 7.
"Everyday Use" by Alice Walker: 4.
"The Lesson" by Toni Cade Bambara: 3.
"Kiswana Browne" by Gloria Naylor: 3.
"Crying Poem" by Jimmy Santiago Baca: 2.
Assorted poems by Langston Hughes: 2.
Trouble Man by Jeff Fallis: 1.
"These Violets" by Michael Ford: 1.
"Dulce at Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen: 1.
"Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou: 1.

Upsets of the semester: zero papers were submitted to portfolio covering the poems by the following forces of nature:
Rita Dove
Nikki Giovanni
Sherman Alexie
Dwight Okita
Gwendolyn Brooks
Countee Cullen
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Jean Toomer
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim

Oof indeed, and happy holidays!