Writes Professor Emeritus Ben Blum:
Zen is about nothing
Numerous books have been written about it
They mean nothing
Marianne Moore: Poetry
The Miracle of the Bees and the Foxgloves
Photo: Gerst
A Poem I Love: Debra San
How happy is the little stone
That rambles in the road alone,
And doesn’t care about careers,
And exigencies never fears;
Whose coat of elemental brown
A passing universe put on;
And independent as the sun,
Associates or glows alone,
Fulfilling absolute decree
In casual simplicity.
Emily Dickinson (1830-1896), Complete Poems, 1924, XXXIII
Writes Professor Emerita Debra San:
Sometimes life’s burdens and obligations, even the presence of other
people, weigh too heavily on us, and how pleasant it is to fantasize
being free of all that, free to just wander along without a care in the
world, like Dickinson’s happy little stone. It lives its life “in casual
simplicity,” and so does the form of the poem itself, with its rhymes in
couplets and its lines short. It’s a marriage of form and content. But,
as always with Dickinson, there’s a hint of something disturbing under
the surface. The stone is happy because it’s free of burdens, but only
as the result of unknowingly complying with “absolute decree,” the
inviolable will of nature or the deity. Are we as humans also fulfilling
“absolute decree”? Would we be willing to sacrifice free will to
experience the happiness of the little stone? What seems so casually
simple may not be so simple after all.
Translating Basho…April 21, 2018
The Friday Reading Group gathered to translate a Basho haiku from the Japanese. “Old pond…new frog…water jump-in sound” is how one translator renders it, but every rendering renews both poem and poet because the poem is the poem of poems. The readers rendered the haiku this way:
There is an old pond/A frog jumps in/spash (Ben Blum)
ice pond just melts ssssshhh/frog jumps ripple (circle) green/green (circle) green green (Lin Haire-Sargeant)
Ancient pond, ancient/ silence–until a frog leaps/ down and up leaps splash! (Debra San)
An old pond lies still./A springing frog awakens/Shattering water. (Josh Cohen)
A quiet old pond/Frog jumps into the water/The quiet pond sings (Hu Hohn)
A pond full of frogs;/A jumping and one goes in;/Kersplashing echoes. (Albert Lafarge)
Constant Readers: In The River of Meaning, Nothing Is Lost
Debra San writes:
In that tiny poem—like a haiku—Robert Gerst envisions this:
Literary Traditions: From Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596)
To thousand sorts of change we subject see:
Yet are they chang’d (by other wondrous slights)
Into themselves, and lose their native mights:
The fire to aire, and th’ ayre to water sheere,
And water into earth: yet water fights
With fire, and aire with earth, approaching neere:
Yet all are in one body, and as one appeare.
Literary Traditions: “I Decided to depict Gregor’s New Form as a Cockroach”
Writes Alex Blaisdell (’22):
For my final art piece for Professor Norrie Epstein’s Literary Traditions I chose to make an edition of eight relief prints inspired by Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. I am primarily an oil painter, but I felt like oil paint wouldn’t be the right medium to use for a piece about The Metamorphosis. I liked the smaller medium of relief prints because The Metamorphosis is a shorter novella, as opposed to a long, epic novel. I also like the idea of the image repeated. I feel that repeating one image, such as street art does, has a humorous quality, and The Metamorphosis is an absurd and humorous book. I also like the simplicity of relief printing where there are only two values used. This simplicity seemed to fit well with the Metamorphosis and its somewhat simple plot.
For my image, I chose to depict Gregor’s shadow because Kafka had said that he didn’t want Gregor’s “monstrous vermin” self to be illustrated. I decided to depict Gregor’s new form as a cockroach anyways, but I only drew his silhouette as a nod to the ambiguity of Gregor’s new form. I also chose to include Gregor’s poster of the woman in furs because it’s the only thing in Gregor’s room that is specifically described and this says a lot about Gregor and his psyche. The woman in furs felt like a character in the novella; she’s Gregor’s only true ally through his transformation and brings him a sense of normalcy and stability.
Literary Traditions: “Draw Every Female Character in Every Story Our Class Has Read This Semester”
Writes Sinclaire Thomas (’22):
It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to do for my final project for Professor Norrie Epstein’s Literary Traditions. For a while, I wanted to focus on Medea because it was my favorite story of the semester. But, after I started seeing everyone else’s finals and how many were based around Medea, I admit I got a little self-conscious. I started thinking about how I could go above and beyond. Think outside of the box. Get creative.
That’s when I thought up the project that would take up the next 140 hours of my life: draw every female character in every story our class has read this semester.
The first day or so was spent sketching and doing research. All of these women existed during specific eras and places. I wanted to make sure that I could be as historically accurate as possible. Characters like Grete Smasa from The Metamorphosis and the Wife from The Wife of Bath’s Tale were easy to figure out. There’s no shortage of art from the time period as well as extant garments for me to be inspired by. But women like Shamhat from The Epic of Gilgamesh and Eve from Genesis have very little or very inaccurate references.
All of the artwork dedicated to Adam and Eve tend to depict a white couple. However, we know that the first humans lived on the African continent and the first Hebrew people lived in the Middle East. For these women, I had to rely more on my own personal interpretation. After I found photo references and came up with sketches I liked, it was just a matter of spending my every waking moment drawing, coloring, and shading.!
In all seriousness, it was a lot of hard work. But it was a lot of fun, too. I love history, so coming up with the costumes was great. And thinking about these women’s personalities and how I could convey them through their poses made the creative process more interesting. At the end of the day, I’m proud of what I turned in… And it only took me four days!
Literary Traditions: Moo Butler Enacts Lady Macbeth
Writes Professor Norrie Epstein:
For a final Literary Traditions project, each student was asked to translate a literary work into their preferred medium. With her performance of Lady Macbeth’s harrowing speech, Moo brought the assignment to new heights. I’ve seen several great Lady Macbeths, but Moo’s interpretation truly gave me chills.