THE DAWNING

AWAKE, sad heart, whom sorrow ever drowns ;
Take up thine eyes, which feed on earth ;
Unfold thy forehead, gathered into frowns ;
    Thy Saviour comes, and with Him mirth :
                                            Awake, awake,
And with a thankful heart His comforts take.
    But thou dost still lament, and pine, and cry,
    And feel His death, but not His victory.

Arise, sad heart ; if thou dost not withstand,
    Christ’s resurrection thine may be ;
Do not by hanging down break from the hand
    Which, as it riseth, raiseth thee :
                                            Arise, Arise;
    And with His burial linen drie thine eyes.
Christ left His grave-clothes, that we might, when grief
Draws tears or blood, not want a handkerchief.

George Herbert

The Dying Christian To His Soul

Vital spark of heav’nly flame!
Quit, O quit, this mortal frame:
Trembling, hoping, ling’ring, flying,
O the pain, the bliss of dying!
Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife,
And let me languish into life.

Hark! they whisper; angels say,
Sister Spirit, come away!
What is this absorbs me quite?
Steals my senses, shuts my sight,
Drowns my spirit, draws my breath?
Tell me, my soul, can this be death?

The world recedes; it disappears!
Heav’n opens on my eyes!  My ears
With sounds seraphic ring!
Lend your wings!  I mount, I fly!
O Grave! where is thy victory?
O Death! where is thy sting?

Alexander Pope

I have received a lot of flak from friends recently about the intermittency of my blog posts.  In this digital-print-rich world, frequency is as important as volume and clarity, and I have been neglecting my blog at my own peril.  Over the last two weeks, my blog has averaged two hits a day.  Boy, if I cared about stats, that would be a real blow to my ego.

Anyway…I thought of an interesting series of posts for the next couple of weeks.  I’ve always been a big fan of metaphysical poetry–that is, poetry that conveys spiritual and supernatural truths and insights.  But I’ve noticed that many of the poems I take as the most fascinating are

1. Not known by literary hacks (like me) because most of them think “metaphysical” means superstitious, and
2. Not known by many of my Christian friends because most of them aren’t literary hacks (like me) and have seen little reason to investigate the history of poetics.

So.  I’m going to start posting some of my favorites.  I’ll post one every day or two, or maybe week, for as long as I can sustain such a thing…I’ll invite comments on each of the poems and then, in typical Schmidt-classroom style, pronounce my authoritative (ha! as if) interpretation after everyone has had her/his say.

I’m going to post the first poem tomorrow night, after (perhaps) some of my old audience have seen a flag on their RSS feeds that says schmidtty is posting again.  I hope at least one of the five people who read this blog will encounter at least one new poem to add to her/his favorites…one person, one poem–that’s what I live for.

Cheers, everyone.

Here’s the most helpful “case for Obama” piece I’ve found.

http://www.slate.com/id/2202163/

Enjoy.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/obit_newman

One: my wife and I are okay; Hurricane Ike did not damage our home, and we had power back as early as Tuesday night.  We are very blessed.

Two: a short, revealing, readable, popular-level analysis and fact-check of McCain/Palin’s claims about Barack Obama is right here.  (It’s especially revealing about Palin’s claim that Obama never authored any major legislation at either the state or the national level.  Amazing what she can get away with saying.)

Three: Tina Fey has achieved a new level of hilarity in her portrayal of our ill-fated future would-be Vice President:

A big thanks to all of you who read my last post and offered kind words for our plight.

Thankfully, as of yesterday, the English department had mostly manageable classes.  My largest class is now 35, my average 29, and my total 175.  This is a great improvement, and I have to thank my building principal and our counselors for tireless work in making it happen.

I’m sad to report, though, that about ten of my students decided that they wouldn’t be able to hang with the AP curriculum, and dropped out of the class.  So my satisfaction at having smaller classes is tinged with a sadness at having lost so many to discouragement already.

Yes, I know.  I can’t have it both ways.

I just wrote a post for my friends’ new communal blog.  You should, like, check it out.

 We who hate all things monstrous are now rejoicing at the news that GM is losing money on the Hummer and hopes to sell the brand this year.  This after pangs of guilt (or sanity?) coaxed GM to gradually deflate this swelling phallus–from the H1 (which is no longer sold) to the H2 (which is getting harder to find) to, finally, the H3 (which, at 14 miles per gallon, is the Hummer line’s most modest and sensible product). 

But, honestly, the H1, H2, and H3 are all equally maniacal, and drivers of all three models (still too common in my city) demonstrate the worst and most obvious signs of that vague, agressive schoolboy rage that the world has come to expect from Americans.  I cannot imagine the hidden thoughts of a person whose dream car is modeled on a military utility vehicle–built for ramming into, running over, and shooting down the enemy.  (Is that what we fellow motorists are to them?)

But, as it does so often, economic necessity is ruling out this most vulgar excess; even those with enough spare cash (or credit) to pay a monthly note on a Hummer can no longer aford to keep gas in it.  (As I have argued previously, high gas prices are a good thing.)

So, good riddance to the Hummer. 

But there is another physical monstrosity that just refuses to die–one that I had hoped the coming economic recession would halt, but that lives in some places nonetheless.  This bigger, more expensive, and even less thoughtful behemoth is–you guessed it–monolithic land development.

There are two kinds of development, both equally pernicious.  The first kind demolishes trees and grass, ruining the habitats of countless animal species and ensuring that America’s children will never again feel connected to nature.  Over ruined forests and prairies it builds planned neighborhoods with deed restrictions and look-alike strip malls, each with a Quizno’s, a Supercuts, and a Starbucks.  I like to refer to this development as the “build out” phenomenon.

The other demolishes bars and bookstores, ruining the habitats of countless human species and ensuring that America’s collegians will never again feel connected to the past.  Over bulldozed cafes and noodle shops it builds hundred-story condo buildings with storefronts at street level and, you guessed it, Quizno’s, Supercuts, and Starbucks.  And, in the midst of a mortgage crisis when new construction of the build-OUT type is slowing encouragingly, this build-UP construction refuses to stop.

Ask the inhabitants of New York’s West Village, whose famed seediness has been making artists and deadbeats feel at home for a century.  Christopher Hitchens writes a smart and impassioned plea in this month’s Vanity Fair for developers to leave well enough alone; I recommend the article for anyone who, like me, feels romantic about this particular nationwide fight.

America is lacking in cultured seediness anyway, so those few corners we have left for bad poetry slams and amateur philosophizing are all the more worth protecting.  Those who went to college with me in Denton have recently seen how quickly a greedy landowner can bulldoze half a dozen beloved bars and restaurants on a favorite corner of town–places that have come to define a community over decades of providing unique atmosphere, drinks, and music. 

Garrison Keillor has remarked (with his characteristically cloudy nostalgia) that there used to be a time when a plot of land didn’t have to justify its own existence in terms of revenue.  Build-out and build-up development are both motivated by an impatient insistence that every place do just that; and, tragically, developers seem to be raising their standards for acceptabile revenue.  So whereas yesterday’s developer couldn’t see any beauty in a field of grass or a forest of trees, today’s developer can’t see any beauty in a cafe full of unpublished poets or a bar full of mediocre rock bands.  Yesterday we lost the earth; today we are losing civilization.

Why not leave well enough alone and allow places like New York’s West Village and Denton’s Fry Street (yes, I dare to compare the two) to develop naturally, slowly, with deference to the strange and eccentric tastes of the people who inhabit those corners?  Why not ignore the extravagant demand for high profits, or at least put a moratorium on them in these most cherished locations? 

Why not do to high rises what we have done to Hummers: admit that they are relics of an insanely combative past era, and leave them there behind us?

Can the coming economic downturn help us here, too, where it helped us with the Hummer?  I hope.

I don’t suppose it should come as a surprise to anyone that the cover story of Atlantic, vanguard of twentieth century print media, should suggest something so inimical to the newly christened Web 2.0.  I also don’t find it at all surprising that Web 2.0, having been recently christened, is already so blase that even a technophobe like me can have a weblog.

Least surprising of all, though, are the ubiquitous (and damaging) effects of web browsing on thought patterns.  Read the story in Atlantic: a blinding flash of the obvious will stun you senseless.  In short, Nicholas Carr argues that point-and-click reading (the preferred method for Americans now, regardless of age) is rewiring our brains out of any inclination (or ability, even) to focus on a line of plot or reasoning for more than a few minutes.

But wait–haven’t I just demonstrated Carr’s thesis and made the problem worse?  There’s no WAY you’ll read the article now that I’ve already given you the title and paraphrased the thesis.  Why read for yourself?

All right: take up the challenge.  Read the article.  Start to finish; no stops, no breaks, nothing to eat or drink that you didn’t have when you started.  No bathroom, no TV, no youtube, no advertisements.  DO NOT CLICK ON ANOTHER LINK.

Then, when you fail (having read only the first few paragraphs), revel in the irony: you, who (probably) once considered yourself well-read, now cannot sit through a MAGAZINE ARTICLE because it is too long.  It demands too much time. 

There are too many flashy clicky things to go and see.

Oh, I couldn’t finish the article in one sitting, either.  It took me three.  During the longest sitting, I got up four times.  Four times, while reading this piece, I spaced out, got up to get a drink, was distracted by a desire to read something else.  Anything else.  Anything except what’s in front of me. 

The market reflects this psychological phenomenon quite well.  The New York Times now prints abstracts of all its stories inside the front page: that way we don’t have to waste time reading whole stories OR turning pages. 

Almost no newspapers are making money now–especially not by printing them.  A few make money by selling ads on their web pages.  (Don’t mistake my tone: it’s not that electronic media are inherently inferior.  The flashed word semantically as good as the printed one.  It’s just that–I think you’ll agree–the printed page tends to encourage more disciplined reading habits than web pages do.  How many people sit and read a single document online for more than five minutes?)

Ironically, in the same issue of Atlantic, Rupert Murdoch (owner of Fox News and a surprising number of other sensationalizing media sources) defends his plan to save American print media by remaking the Wall Street Journal. 

Excuse me: Rupert Murdoch is going to save the printed word?  Mr. Fox News and New York Post, the sell-a-story-at-any-cost-to-content-KING, is going to save the printed word? 

And his vehicle is The Wall Street Journal?

This is how far we’ve fallen.  Not even businessmen–boring, suit-and-tie businessmen–are going to have a serious paper any more.  Not that they necessarily want one; it’s mostly academics like me who enjoy the superior writing, the attention to detail, the appreciation for at least SOME subtlety that only the “finer” papers (used to) provide.  Rupert Murdoch knows business better than anyone on the Journal staff; proof: he’s successfully managed multiple billion-dollar enterprises for his whole adult life.  So if he says the Journal better stop being so stodgy, then it sure as hell better.

It’ll be three steps above a tabloid in three years, and people will buy it again, and other papers will follow his lead–and all will be well for American print media’s bottom line.

I hope you’ll help me out on this one.  Start by reading the Atlantic piece about how the web makes us stupid.  Make what you will of the final conciliatory page where Carr argues that it’s not THAT bad; if you’re with me, you’ll say that it most certainly still IS.

Then…and this is the tough part…go find the most thought-provoking, challenging book you read in high school or college.  Something tough.  Mine is Dostoevsky, or maybe Heidegger.

Then go to the library and check out another book by that same author.  Library–not bookstore.  Bookstores let us buy books so we know we can keep them forever–which means there’s no urgency to focus.  No: check out your book at the library.  Remember: you’ll have to face that librarian again in two weeks, and if you renew the book, that means you’re a lightweight who can’t finish.  Okay?

Check out a book by that great author and read it, cover to cover.  Take notes, like in the old days.  Pretend you’re going to have to answer for what you retain.

Then–and this is the fun part–blog about it.