Sunday, October 10, 2004
(1:46 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Further New Yorker Watch
If I can devote an entire post to critiquing a bad New Yorker cartoon, certainly I can devote a post to the single best poem I have ever read in that magazine, "Man and Camel," by Mark Strand. It appears as follows on page 88 of the October 11 issue:On the eve of my fortieth birthday
I sat on the porch having a smoke
when out of the blue a man and a camel
happened by. Neither uttered a sound
at first, but as they drifted up the street
and out of town the two of them began to sing.
Yet what they sang is still a mystery to me--
the words were indistinct and the tune
too ornamental to recall. Into the desert
they went and as they went their voices
rose as one above the sifting sound
of windblown sand. The wonder of their singing,
its elusive blend of man and camel seemed
an ideal image for all uncommon couples.
Was this the night that I had waited for
so long? I wanted to believe it was,
but, just as they were vanishing, the man
and camel ceased to sing, and galloped
back to town. They stood before my porch,
staring up at me with beady eyes, and said,
"You ruined it. You ruined it forever."
I apologize to Mark Strand and to the Condé Nast corporation if I have in any way defrauded them by posting this poem on my blog -- in my view, posting it is a work of gratitude, a small step toward repaying Mr. Strand for "its elusive blend of man and camel." As a further step, I encourage everyone to purchase Mr. Strand's Blizzard of One (preferably using my link):
And for a weekly dose of wit and eloquence, I can think of no better use of your money than a subscription to The New Yorker:
To continue in the spirit of Derrida tribute week, I propose we all go read Michael Bérubé's post on "Signature Event Context," and in particular the comments, where he responds to some tedious repetition of stock anti-Derrida arguments as follows:
Which reminds me to complain, pithily, about what I call the Anti-Derrida Two-Step. Step One: claim that his work is nihilist and would leave us all in chaos and darkness. Step Two: respond to patient rebuttals of Step One by claiming that Derrida is a trivial thinker and doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.
