Poem : Under Which Lyre

I've always loved this poem by Auden, despite (or perhaps because of) his dig at statisticians towards the end. Given my recent career trajectory, it's not hard to figure out why.

Under Which Lyre
A Reactionary Tract for the Times


(Phi Beta Kappa Poem, Harvard, 1946)
W. H. Auden


Ares at last has quit the field,
The bloodstains on the bushes yield
To seeping showers,
And in their convalescent state
The fractured towns associate
With summer flowers.


Encamped upon the college plain
Raw veterans already train
As freshman forces;
Instructors with sarcastic tongue
Shepherd the battle-weary young
Through basic courses.


Among bewildering appliances
For mastering the arts and sciences
They stroll or run,
And nerves that steeled themselves to slaughter
Are shot to pieces by the shorter
Poems of Donne.


Professors back from secret missions
Resume their proper eruditions,
Though some regret it;
They liked their dictaphones a lot,
T hey met some big wheels, and do not
Let you forget it.


But Zeus' inscrutable decree
Permits the will-to-disagree
To be pandemic,
Ordains that vaudeville shall preach
And every commencement speech
Be a polemic.


Let Ares doze, that other war
Is instantly declared once more
'Twixt those who follow
Precocious Hermes all the way
And those who without qualms obey
Pompous Apollo.


Brutal like all Olympic games,
Though fought with smiles and Christian names
And less dramatic,
This dialectic strife between
The civil gods is just as mean,
And more fanatic.


What high immortals do in mirth
Is life and death on Middle Earth;
Their a-historic
Antipathy forever gripes
All ages and somatic types,
The sophomoric


Who face the future's darkest hints
With giggles or with prairie squints
As stout as Cortez,
And those who like myself turn pale
As we approach with ragged sail
The fattening forties.


The sons of Hermes love to play
And only do their best when they
Are told they oughtn't;
Apollo's children never shrink
From boring jobs but have to think
Their work important.


Related by antithesis,
A compromise between us is
Impossible;
Respect perhaps but friendship never:
Falstaff the fool confronts forever
The prig Prince Hal.


If he would leave the self alone,
Apollo's welcome to the throne,
Fasces and falcons;
He loves to rule, has always done it;
The earth would soon, did Hermes run it,
Be like the Balkans.


But jealous of our god of dreams,
His common-sense in secret schemes
To rule the heart;
Unable to invent the lyre,
Creates with simulated fire
Official art.


And when he occupies a college,
Truth is replaced by Useful Knowledge;
He pays particular
Attention to Commercial Thought,
Public Relations, Hygiene, Sport,
In his curricula.


Athletic, extrovert and crude,
For him, to work in solitude
Is the offence,
The goal a populous Nirvana:
His shield bears this device: Mens sana
Qui mal y pense.


Today his arms, we must confess,
From Right to Left have met success,
His banners wave
From Yale to Princeton, and the news
From Broadway to the Book Reviews
Is very grave.


His radio Homers all day long
In over-Whitmanated song
That does not scan,
With adjectives laid end to end,
Extol the doughnut and commend
The Common Man.


His, too, each homely lyric thing
On sport or spousal love or spring
Or dogs or dusters,
Invented by some court-house bard
For recitation by the yard
In filibusters.


To him ascend the prize orations
And sets of fugal variations
On some folk-ballad,
While dietitians sacrifice
A glass of prune-juice or a nice
Marsh-mallow salad.


Charged with his compound of sensational
Sex plus some undenominational
Religious matter,
Enormous novels by co-eds
Rain down on our defenceless heads
Till our teeth chatter.


In fake Hermetic uniforms
Behind our battle-line, in swarms
That keep alighting,
His existentialists declare
That they are in complete despair,
Yet go on writing.


No matter; He shall be defied;
White Aphrodite is on our side:
What though his threat
To organize us grow more critical?
Zeus willing, we, the unpolitical,
Shall beat him yet.


Lone scholars, sniping from the walls
Of learned periodicals,
Our facts defend,
Our intellectual marines,
Landing in little magazines
Capture a trend.


By night our student Underground
At cocktail parties whisper round
From ear to ear;
Fat figures in the public eye
Collapse next morning, ambushed by
Some witty sneer.


In our morale must lie our strength:
So, that we may behold at length
Routed Apollo's
Battalions melt away like fog,
Keep well the Hermetic Decalogue,
Which runs as follows:


Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases,
Thou shalt not write thy doctor's thesis
On education,
Thou shalt not worship projects nor
Shalt thou or thine bow down before
Administration.


Thou shalt not answer questionnaires
Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,
Nor with compliance
Take any test. Thou shalt not sit
With statisticians nor commit
A social science.


Thou shalt not be on friendly terms
With guys in advertising firms,
Nor speak with such
As read the Bible for its prose,
Nor, above all, make love to those
Who wash too much.


Thou shalt not live within thy means
Nor on plain water and raw greens.
If thou must choose
Between the chances, choose the odd;
Read The New Yorker, trust in God;
And take short views.

Operation Baked Goods Update

The week in Ireland was marked by a distinct failure to observe the guiding principles of OPERATION HEALTHY FOOD CHOICES (sorry, Maggie!). Frankly, it was more or less a non-stop orgy of lunches, dinners, cups of coffee, pints of cider, and other occasions of dietary sin. In my defence, there was no real way out, and the conversation and general craic were excellent throughout the week. But I am under no illusion that the four visits I made to the excellent fitness center at the hotel made up for what bordered, at times, on gluttonous excess.

In the end it wasn't the Bakewell tart alone that did me in. Nor was it the ganaches, or the delicious "dessert tasting menu" available at Les Gourmandises. No, gentle reader, it was the crumbles that were to be the major contributors to my gastronomic downfall. Apple crumbles. Rhubarb crumbles. Home-made. Store-bought. It made no never-mind to me. I scarfed them down with carefree abandon, never stinting on the whipped cream.

They say confession is good for the soul. I hope so.

And yes, I will be walking everywhere this week. No metro for this sinner, until that belt-notch issue is rectified again.

But, damn, there is nothing like a delicious rhubarb crumble!

Sigh.

At the money laundromat

During the week in Ireland, I caught up with an old college friend, now an eminent member of the legal profession in Cork. While waiting in her office, I picked up a copy of the following, highly useful, brochure:

Further comment seems superfluous.

Geek's Corner 21 : The News in Slow French

Gmail has a way of throwing up user-targeted ads on the borders of one's e-mail messages. For the most part, I find these ads to be creepily intrusive - though I know that they are a result of bots, and not actual people, scanning through my mail messages, they are nonetheless kind of scary.

Occasionally, though, there are some gems among the dross. This link is a case in point:

News in Slow French

The site contains free downloadable 30-minute podcasts, updated weekly, each featuring 4 news stories of about 5 minutes each, with a 5-minute section devoted to a particular topic in grammar, and a 5-minute concluding section given over to a particular idiom. The presenters are excellent, though the guy is a bit of a dweeb. But it lives up to its name - all the segments are in slow (but not exaggeratedly so), intelligible, French. It is a terrific resource.

Bakewell tart country

For those of you not on Facebook, here are a few photos from the past week, taken mainly in Cork:

The "Echo Boy" statue in Patrick Street.

Fish pedicures are all the rage!

The lotto : a tax on those with poor maths skills.

The Book of Lismore, on display at the Glucksman Gallery, UCC.

I wanted to enroll, but it wouldn't be practical to commute from Paris!

Stretching the truth.

Still, for me, the heart of Cork.

You pay your euro and you make your choice

Break-dancers are out there in the precincts, trying to get out the youth vote. Out there in France outre-mer, the polls have already opened. Yes, tomorrow it's the first round of the socialist party primaries here in France, to determine who will be the party representative in next year's presidential elections. Who has the stature to bring down the much-reviled Sarkozy? Six months ago, the answer to that question was clear:

But fate had other plans for the randy DSK. So the race is on. Who will be victorious? The safe, some might say "boring", front-runner Francois Hollande, who shed 15 kg in the run up to tomorrow's contest? Or will it be Martine Aubry, DSK's anointed successor, known by some as the "Angela Merkel of the left"? Recent surveys show Segolene Royale, Hollande's former partner, and the mother of his four children, to be flagging at the polls -- her loss to Sarkozy in the last election is considered a liability.

Anything might happen. Unlike the U.S., where voting in party primaries is restricted to the party faithful, that is, registered republicans or democrats, respectively, tomorrow's primary is open to voters of any party affiliation willing to fork out the 1 Euro participation fee. It's hard to imagine this happening in the U.S., where it would effectively be an open invitation to skullduggery and sabotage by the rival party. When I raised this possibility in class, Bruno's response was a kind of charming bewilderment at such a cynical idea, which he immediately dismissed as being impossible in France, because it is "contrary to the spirit of the Republic".

Let's hope he is right. In the likely absence of a clear winner in tomorrow's poll, a runoff will be held later in the month.

The campaign has been refreshingly free of the kind of dirty politics familiar to those of us living in the U.S.

Fine Dublin Residence Available

Saying that the real estate bust hit Ireland hard is a bit like calling Sarah Palin mildly eccentric. The bubble has already left the Celtic tiger puking feebly in the gutter, brought down the government, annihilated the formerly monolithic ruling party (Fianna Fail), and the cost of the bailout will be felt for generations. Still, it was nice to see that someone in the real estate sector is left with an intact sense of humour, as the following photo attests:

The "ad" is, of course, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the upcoming presidential election, about which I will say more in a future post.