December
3,
2004
MHC
Newsmakers
View and Review Mary Jo Salter and Brad Leithauser, who share a marriage and the
position of Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at
MHC, found themselves together yet again on the pages of the New
York Times Book Review. In the Book Review’s
October 31 issue, Salter reviewed The Prodigal by Derek
Walcott, finding that, although the poem is “not
as assembled as one might wish, in moments of plain-spoken humility … Walcott
is restored, paradoxically, to his usual grandeur.” She wrote, “The
Prodigal seems an almost inevitable title for the verse memoir
that Derek Walcott, addressing himself within it, calls ‘your
last book.’ One hopes that this prediction of finality, by
the Caribbean poet who so clearly deserved his Nobel Prize in 1992,
is wrong. And yet the biblical theme of the prodigal son has been
waiting as steadily as home—the end of the story—for
this world-wanderer, born in 1930, who now openly feels his age.” Salter
continued, “It’s easy to name themes in The
Prodigal: the familiar struggle, for this Caribbean- and North
American-based poet of African, English and Dutch ancestry, of
synthesizing his fractured identity; the deracinating effects of
world fame; the regrets and bodily changes of old age; the war
of importance between History (often capitalized) and natural history;
the loss of vividly remembered loved ones; the more unsettling
loss of memory. Yet to summarize the poem’s action is almost impossible…. The Prodigal disappoints
by not finding a home in a few controlling poetic techniques, apart
from a wobbly blank verse. The story’s
structural and syntactic lapses loom larger where the music is
lacking. Walcott seems to know that his poem is something of a
hash, and approaches this suspicion with a mixture of defiance
(‘I could give facts and dates, but to what use?’)
and apology.”
In the Book Review’s November 21 edition, Leithauser reviewed
two works by Richard Howard: Inner Voices, a collection of poems, and Paper
Trail: Selected Prose, 1965–2003. Howard “follows a salutary
impulse, and I pursued Inner Voices not merely with steady respect but
with—as he might put it—a
gratitude, a warmth, a coalescing affection,” Leithauser wrote. “As
critic, Howard is primarily an enthusiast,” he wrote of Paper
Trail. “Although
his poems suggest, in their veiled way, a mordant appetite for the deft and shattering
put-down, little of this finds its way into his criticism. What is collected
in Paper Trail—including substantial pieces on Marianne Moore and Emily
Dickinson, essays on a host of French poets and prose writers, and an assortment
of generous introductions of younger poets—is mostly high praise, some
of it higher than high: Howard is a eulogist who reaches for the empyrean. (I
remember a blurb of his—written for a poet I much admire—that made
me laugh aloud: ‘I cherish this radiant threshold the poet has now crossed.’ What
does that feel like?) Tempered he is not. Nor is he a critic who aspires to be
a pane of glass, the transparent lens that delivers a sharper focus. His essays,
no less than his poems, are outsize, buoyant performances, forever drawing attention
to themselves. The vocabulary in the prose is even more venturesome than in the
poetry, the syntax still more gnarly. There are brilliant moments and there are
moments when one clause too many is piled upon a clause. You enter a Howard parenthesis
as you’d crawl into an unfamiliar cave, not fully confident, the deeper
you go, of seeing the light of day again.”
Sneaky Science, or Losers of the Pack Professor of psychology and education
Karen Hollis was featured on the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s radio
science show Quirks and Quarks in late October to talk about her recent work
on how animals learn to compete for food when they are subordinate members
of their group. Here is an abstract of a paper on this topic, “Novel
Strategies of Subordinate Fish Competing for Food: Learning When to Fold,” by
Hollis and colleagues K. S. Langworthy-Lam, L. A. Blouin, and M. C. Romano.
The paper is soon to be published in Animal Behaviour.
“When dominant animals monopolize food access, subordinates often will
steal, risking attack if caught. But how do subordinates know when or where to
steal? We show that subordinate fish can use learned cues to mount highly effective
sneaky tactics, tactics that reduced the number of retaliative attacks they received,
as well as time spent fleeing dominants. More importantly, our results reveal
unexpected sophistication in the cognitive mechanisms underlying this learning:
Like privately trained dominants, privately trained subordinates learned to approach
food signals directly; however, the first occasion a dominant was present, subordinates
abandoned their direct approach, adopting a different, sneaky, tactic instead.”
Listen to the segment online at www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/04-05/oct23.html#2.
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