Well before and well after 1712, the body was thought to suffer from bad behavior. Medicine had always been something of a moral guide, a kind of ethics of the flesh. That role increased dramatically in the eighteenth century as moral norms became, at least in progressive circles, rooted more in nature and taught in school, the world of physicians and pedagogues, and less in divine authority and preached in church, the province of priests or pastors. In this context, it is not surprising that cultural anxieties were translated into disease: diseases of civilization, for example, caused by a variety of bad things—too much luxury, too much mental activity and not enough exercise, too much sympathy or too much novel reading, which stirs up the body and its nerves, or diseases that followed upon too much sexual activity…The fundamental question, therefore, is not why sometime around 1712 masturbation came to be regarded as a medical problem or why around 1920 it stopped being thought to cause disease. More puzzling is why solitary sex in particular became so troubling a moral problem at precisely the time when sexual pleasure itself was enjoying ever more secular approval.

–Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation

On the sidewalk on 42nd Street, outside the New York Public Library.

The Enlightenment project of liberation—the coming into adulthood of humanity—made the most secret, private, seemingly harmless, and most difficult to detect of sexual acts the centerpiece of a program for policing the imagination, desire and the self that modernity itself had unleashed.

–Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation

Two passages from two different poems in Saadi’s Bustan that seem apt, given what’s going on right now in Iran. The versions are mine:

“Be vigilant! Protect the poor and needy;

the crown you wear you wear because of them.

The people are like roots, my son; the king,

the tree that needs the roots to give it strength.

As much as you are able, do not hurt them;

to do so is to dig up your own roots.”

***

“Perched high in a tree, a man chopped hard

at the base of the branch where he was sitting.

Looking up, the garden’s owner said,

‘He commits a crime against himself, not me.’

There’s wisdom in those words, if you will hear it:

Don’t use force to overthrow the weak.

If Heaven decides, a prince will be tomorrow

the beggar on whom you wouldn’t waste a barleycorn.”

The most immediate reason to oppose laws like compulsory hejab or abortion prohibitions, of course, is the harm they do to women. Focusing solely on that harm, however—by which I mean divorcing it from its socioeconomic, political, and cultural context—also obscures what is at stake for men, since it elides the fact that the policing of women’s bodies implies by default the corresponding policing of men’s bodies.

Poetry can only be an exploration of ideology, not a means of expressing belief in it. Reluctant to declare his ideology as the way out of alienation, [Saadi] Youssef shows how his ideology, transmuted within poetry, generates feelings of empathy and solidarity. For Youssef then, the commitment to justice and freedom stand beside his poetry, not above it. His political values, manifested in active participation in social struggle, are in reality fulfilling his abiding devotion to beauty. Justice and compassion in Youssef’s verse are presented in a sensual manner that symbolizes his individualized appreciation of harmony and balance. They are aesthetic choices first and foremost.

–Khaled Mattawa, Without An Alphabet, Without A Face: Selected Poems of Saadi Youssef

It’s not keeping track of multiple projects that gets to me; it’s resisting the compulsion to work on them each a little bit at a time, instead of having the patience, all else being equal, to finish one and then move on to the next.

There can be no doubt that many poems—even many great poems—would gain by being translated into the very language they were written in. This brings up the problem as to whether it is art or the artist that matters, the individual or the product. If it be the final result that matters and that shall give delight, then we are justified in taking a famous poet’s all but perfect poem, and, in the light of the criticism of another age, making it perfect by excision, substitution, or addition. Wordsworth’s “Ode on Immortality” is a great poem, but it’s far from being a perfect poem. It could be rehandled to advantage.

–Fernando Pessoa, “The Art of Translation”

…the couplet was regarded as a plain, ordinary kind of verse, in contrast to the stanzaic forms used so commonly for long narratives and to blank verse, which was best suited for tragedy and epic. The couplet was “nearest prose”; which is to say, our own view of it as artificial and hifalutin is exactly contrary to the view held by those who practiced it and who were trying to do the same thing, roughly speaking, for the poetry of their time that Pound and Williams did for the poetry of theirs.

–Hayden Carruth, “Three Notes on the Verse Writing of Alexander Pope,” from Effluences from the Sacred Caves

“[T]he paper makes a[n] argument for making college a public good, low-cost or even free for everyone. The…cost of higher education is choking Millennial families, and more young people would be able to go to college…if they were able to do it for [what] their parents paid.”

Last week, I took part in PenParentis' monthly salon along with the wonderful writers Jessica DuLong and Anna Malaika Tubbs, each of whom read from books I now want to own. The conversation afterwards, which dealt with writing about trauma, was marvelous! Do check it out:

We must not cede the power to witness what is happening to us, to know how we are seen, to oversee our representation. Without that freedom, we must recognize ourselves in the awful words spoken by the despairing family of one Iraqi man who has disappeared into US custody: “It’s because they have absolute force. No one sees what they do.”

–Patricia J. Williams, “To See or Not to See,” The Nation, June 28, 2004

Marvin Świetlicki, from the introduction to his Poems, published in 2011, translated by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese.

My bewilderment and rebellion before American education were enhanced by looking back to Chinese models. Confucian education never required the study of anything but poetry, and it approached that mostly by being a poet. All scholars were poets. There was no division between the critical and the creative. None but the poets were scholars and none but poets attempted to write on poetry. It did not make for Aristotelian analysis, but it vitalized the whole field of knowledge to the creatively minded. This was the way I wanted to approach Western knowledge. And found it would not work, for there was no tradition like that in American education. I was distressed at the lack of unifying principles. I could build no bridge from one classroom to another, just as I could build no bridge from the New Hotel into the mental Utopia.

–Younghill Kang, East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee

The sexual dramas of white men have to do with not being able to resist the drives or struggling to master them. The drives are typically characterized as dark.…But there need not be explicit or even implied racial reference, it is enough that there is darkness. This furnishes the heterosexual desire that will rescue whites from sterility while separating such desire from the what whites aspire to. Dark desires are part of the story of whiteness, but as what the whiteness of whiteness has to struggle against. Thus it is that the whiteness of white men resides in the tragic quality of their giving way to darkness and the heroism of their channeling or resisting it.

–Richard Dyer, White

Watched the Kanye West episode of Impact: deals his antisemitic comments. Worth watching. One response I have: When someone doubles down the way he’s done, it’s not just rhetoric. That person’s an antisemite. Acknowledging that isn’t cancelling them, even if they think it is.

Treat this world as if it were stranger,

a musician with a new gig every day.

–Saadi’s Bustan (my version)

“There is no more powerful position than that of being ‘just’ human. The claim to power is the claim to speak for the commonality of humanity. Raced people can’t do that—they can only speak for their race. But non-raced people can, for they do not represent the interests of a race. The point of seeing the racing of whites is to dislodge them/us from the position of power, with all the inequities, oppression, privileges and sufferings in its train, dislodging them/us by undercutting the authority with which they/we speak and act in and on the world.”

–Richard Dyer, White

“The man who gives and takes judiciously

draws the world behind him in his wake.

Be that man; let your good name endure,

or fear and regret are all you’ll leave behind.”

–from Saadi’s Bustan (my version)

From Saadi’s Bustan (my version):

I garnered for myself fruit I did not eat;
helpless as death nears, I leave it behind.

To be a man of God involves imagining oneself as a woman, at least when the divine-human relationship is considered analogous to a marriage, as it was in ancient Israel and as it continued to be in late antique Judaism. This process of feminization, which is partial and undeveloped in Scripture, was given greater articulation by the rabbis, the late antique interpreters of Judaism. The rabbis understood full well the fact that in the relationship with God, men must assume the position of wives. Consequently, their readings of Scripture emphasized the ways in which the patriarchs were portrayed as women with respect to God. But the sages also saw the implications of this feminization for themselves. They, too, were wives of God. At times they read Scripture as if they imagined themselves as women, looking to female models for how they should behave. And we shall see that for the sages, as for their predecessors, the thought of seeing God was a decidedly erotic experience.

–Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, God’s Phallus

If the deity is the father writ large, then this divine masculinity is by no means simply a confirmation of human masculinity. It is at the same time a fundamental threat and challenge to it…Indeed…in at least on respect men’s relationship with God is even more problematic than women’s, for on a heterosexual model of intimate relationships, women are more appropriate objects of divine desire than are men. One way of escaping this problem is by symbolically displacing male tensions and contradictions onto women. The otherness of women is exaggerated to minimize the ways men are made into others in a system which validates male authority.

–Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, God’s Phallus

If this were a fantasy novel, that leaf would be an omen of something.

Once again, his body was the measure of all things: the cellar, his bowels; the roof, his scalp; the stairs, his spine…The whole city, he began to see, could be analogized to his flesh, bone, and blood. And why should that be so surprising? When an architect turned his mind to the building of a city, where would he look for inspiration? To the flesh where he’d lived since birth. It was the first model for any creator…There wasn’t an edifice in any street in London that hadn’t begun somewhere in the private city of an architect’s anatomy…

–Clive Barker, Imajica

If a unicorn and a butterfly had a child: