In his first book (Meditations on Quixote), José Ortega y Gasset writes as follows (as quoted in his essay "Preface for Germans"):

Woe to the race that does not halt at the crossroads before continuing on its way, that does not make a question of its own selfhood: that does not feel the heroic need to explain its destiny, to inundate its historic mission with light!

It strikes me that the same applies to individuals (yes, I tend to individualize everything). So just I transformed the idea into a short (though, I think, not very good) poem:

Crossroads

(after José Ortega y Gasset)

When you finally arrive at
   The crossroads of your life
Do not plunge blindly on through, but
   Stop: inquire deeply
Into yourself, come to know the
   Meaning of your ideal,
Shine great light on your potential,
   And only then move on.

As mentioned I've started to collect poems in sapphic meter. Among other things, it turns out that the two poems that I've written in sapphic meter are all wrong. As explained by Timothy Steele in All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing and Miller Williams in Patterns of Poetry, the meter of a sapphic stanza in an accentual-syllabic language such as English scans as follows (where "/" is a strong beat, "x" is a weak beat, and "|" divides one foot from another):

/ x | / x | / x x | / x | / x | / x
/ x | / x | / x x | / x | / x | / x
/ x | / x | / x x | / x | / x | / x
/ x x | / x

Here is ann example from Swinburne's poem "Sapphics":

Clothed about with flame and with tears, and singing
Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,
Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity,
Hearing, to hear them.

That scans quite nicely as follows (accented syllables in bold):

Clothed about with flame and with tears, and singing
Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,
Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity,
Hearing, to hear them.

Contrast that with, say, the first stanza of my poem Ancient Fire:

Sing me, Muse, of your bright sister -- small and dark,
they say she was, though I shall never know her.
Her song is lost, yet even her merest shards
are a vibrant spark.

Ouch. And the other stanzas are no better. No wonder the poem doesn't sing the way a sapphic is supposed to. Sigh.

Despite the disappointment of learning that my own poems are merely pseudo-sapphic, I've collected a number of properly-scanning sapphics by Sappho herself, Thomas Campion, William Cowper, Horace, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Andrew Marvell, August von Platen, Philip Sidney, A.E. Stallings, Timothy Steele, Algernon Swinburne, Lewis Turco, and Rachel Wetzsteon. And my sapphics-hunting continues, so expect more reports in the near future...

Here's an intriguing idea for a book: a collection of poems in Sapphic meter. Sapphics are my favorite form (see Ancient Fire and Cobalt), and they've been wielded so deftly over the years -- by Sappho herself and her contemporary Alkaios in the original Greek, by Catullus and Horace in Latin, by the likes of Cowpers and Swinburne in English, by a number of German poets (Klopstock, Platen, Hamerling, Geibel, etc.), and by recent Anglo-American poets like John Hollander, Timothy Steele, A.E. Stallings, Rachel Hadas, James Merrill, Marilyn Hacker, and Rachel Wetzsteon. I feel like a poetic lepidopterist -- I think I'll start hunting sapphics today!

Gary Hess, who maintains the Poem of Quotes website, writes in to tell me that he has posted two of my Sappho translations from Ancient Fire: Come Here to Me from Crete and Some Say. It's always a pleasure to share the beauties of Sappho.

John Enright, in his usual observant way, draws attention to a descriptive passage from Ayn Rand's Anthem that I missed when I wrote my essay Image and Integration in Ayn Rand's Descriptive Style:

The fields are black and ploughed, and they lie like a great fan before us, with their furrows gathered in some hand beyond the sky, spreading forth from that hand, opening wide apart as they come toward us, like black pleats that sparkle with thin, green spangles.

It's a shame that so many commentators are fixated on Rand's ideas, because the purely literary aspects of her novels are fascinating in their own right.

Herewith an update about various further essays of mine on Ayn Rand:

• It's been over three months since the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies published my essay Image and Integration in Ayn Rand's Descriptive Style in Volume 7 Number 2, so I've posted it online under my usual public domain licensing.

• My essay "Friendship in Atlas Shrugged" is forthcoming in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion, due out in 2007 from Ashgate Publishing.

• Chris Sciabarra has informed me that my essay "Nietzsche, Rand, and the Ethics of the Great Task" has been accepted for publication in a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies on Nietzsche and Rand (due out in 2007, I think).

Now I just need to write my projected essay on Aristotle and Rand, which I think will be my last rung on the ladder.

I recently had occasion to re-read Jacob Bronowski's little book Science and Human Values, which contains a pleasant if somewhat dated dialogue entitled "The Abacus and the Rose". I've always rather enjoyed the sonnet with which Bronowski ends the dialogue:

I, having built a house, reject
The feud of eye and intellect,
And find in my experience proof,
One pleasure runs from root to roof,
One thrust along a streamline arches
The sudden star, the budding larches.

The force that makes the winter grow
Its feathered hexagons of snow,
And drives the bee to match at home,
Their calculated honeycomb,
Is abacus and rose combined.
An icy sweetness fills my mind,

A sense that under thing and wing,
Lies, taut yet living, coiled, the spring.

I forgot to mention recently that an essay of mine entitled "Image and Integration in Ayn Rand's Descriptive Style" was published in the Spring 2006 issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Expect me to post it online in three months or so.

Today is the birthday of Walt Whitman, who my friend Deb Ross reminds me was born on this day in 1819. I happen to think that old Walt is the greatest American poet, probably the greatest American writer, and maybe even one of the greatest Americans. I wrote about Walt in three journal entries from 2001 (1, 2, 3) and ever since have been meaning to re-read his poems as well as his powerful essay Democratic Vistas (which I quoted obliquely in my recent post on understanding America). Until I write about Whitman again, I leave you with the poem "Old Walt" from another of my favorite American poets, Langston Hughes:

Old Walt Whitman
Went finding and seeking,
Finding less than sought
Seeking more than found,
Every detail minding
Of the seeking or the finding.

Pleasured equally
In seeking as in finding,
Each detail minding,
Old Walt went seeking
And finding.

Here is another of Walter Kaufmann's German poems (copyright 1962, 1971, 1975 by Walter Kaufmann):

Epitaph

Alles starb in meinem Herzen
was nicht reines Feuer war:
in den Gluten meiner Qualen
bracht ich's Gott im Himmel dar.

Nur das flammenhafte Sehnen
das sich grad am Brande nährt
hat die Gluten überstanden
noch nachdem sie Gott verzehrt.

And my first draft at a translation (there's a lot in this one I'm unsure of, it may change quite radically):

Epitaph

All is dead inside my heart
that once was purest fire:
in the heat I offered up
my pain to heaven's God.

Only the ardent passion
that once nourished the flame
has yet outlived the fire
that God alone devoured.

Yet another of Walter Kaufmann's German poems (copyright 1962, 1971, 1975 by Walter Kaufmann):

Kriegsausbruch, 1939

Wohl strahtle die Sonne über reifen Feldern
und Früchte hängen schwer von jedem Ast,
die letzten Rosen blühn, die Wälder duften,
   und niemals war die Welt so schön.

Doch keine Hände greifen nach den Früchten,
das Korn steht ungeschnitten und verdirbt,
und all die Blumen welken ungesehen,
   freudlos und ohne Liebe hin.

Und nur im Traume küss ich ihre Blüten
und nehm dir Früchte in die durstgen Hände
und frage auch wohl einmal ob ein Sommer
   wie dieser jemals wiederkommt.

And my first draft at a translation:

The Outbreak of War, 1939

The sun shines strong over ripened fields
and fruits hang heavy from every branch;
late roses bloom, the woods smell sweet,
   and never was the world so fine.

Yet no hands are picking the fruit,
the grain stands uncut and wasted,
and all the blossoms fade unseen,
   unhappy and unloved besides.

Only in dreams I kiss the blooms,
take the fruit in my thirsty hands,
and wonder if a summer as fine
   as this will ever come again.

Here's another of Walter Kaufmann's German poems (copyright 1962, 1971, 1975 by Walter Kaufmann):

Yellowstone

Da wo das Wasser in Kaskaden
versprühend in die Tiefe rauscht
hab ich dem Strom so manche Stunde
versonnen and verträumt gelauscht.

Das Wasser grub sich ins Gestein
wo es in grauser Schlucht sich windet
aus der der Fels in tausen Türmen
den Weg zur Sonne aufwärts findet.

Im Traume folgte ich dem Strome
durch Wald und Wüste immer hin
und sah die Welt im Strom gelöst
jenseits von allem Ziel und Sinn.

And a possible translation into English:

Yellowstone

There where the surging water roars
in spraying rapids in the deep,
I've spent countless dreamy hours
listening pensive to the stream.

The water gouges through the rock,
winding its way through gray ravines
where a thousand towers of stone
reach their way upwards to the sky.

In dreams I've followed the river
ever on through wasteland and wood
and seen the world released, flowing
far beyond all meaning and goal.

I'm not fully satisfied with that rendering (especially the final stanza), but it will have to do for a first draft.

One of my favorite poets is Walter Kaufmann, who is best known for his magisterial translations of the works of Nietzsche, but whose poems I've read with pleasure over the years (many thanks to John Enright for turning me on to his poetry). In addition to many fine poems in English, Kaufmann wrote some poems in German in the period 1939-1942 (copyright 1962, 1971, 1975 by Walter Kaufmann), which to my knowledge have not been translated into English. Since few people know of Kaufmann as a poet and even fewer still are probably interested in rendering his German poems into English, I thought I would try my hand at the daunting task of "translating the translator". The first of Kaufmann's poems I've rendered into English is this:

Regen

Der Regen is ein müdes Kind
das heim zur Mutter Erde will:
er gleitet schlafend durch den Wind
und sinkt zur Erde und liegt still.

Here's my first pass at a translation:

Rain

The rain is an exhausted child
that's homesick for its mother earth:
it glides down sleeping through the wind
and sinks to earth and there lies still.

Update (2006-03-11): I've corrected the rendering of "gleitet".

This evening I recorded my first podcast: a reading of my poem Ancient Fire, with commentary. Give it a listen here.

Over on the New-Poetry list we've been discussing Sappho in response to the news (previously wished for here) that the good folks at Oxford have deciphered a "new" poem by Sappho. In the ensuing thread I sent along not one but two of the poems I've written in Sapphic meter. "She is like a god to me..."

The other day, Uche argued for the continued relevance -- indeed, the increased importance -- of poetry in today's fast-paced times, since the concentrated and often difficult nature of poetic language forces the reader to slow down. Yet (as Uche knows) it is more than just diction: it is also the meter (or, more broadly, the rhythm) that induces a kind of slow time when one reads a poem. Poetry is a temporal art in much the same way music is -- and in one respect, a poem enforces slow time even more viscerally than a piece of music does because usually you perform the poem (by reading it silently or aloud to yourself) rather than having it performed for you at a poetry reading or by means of a recording. The post-modernists would call this co-creating the work, and for once they would be right!

One likely theory about the emergence of the arts (advanced for example by Ellen Dissanayake) is that human life started to become more complex around 30,000 years ago -- population densities increased, human bands started to interact more often and in more challenging ways with other groups, long-distance trade began to emerge as a key human pursuit, technology (such as it was) improved faster, and so on (sound familiar?). In the face of that increased pace of change and before the emergence of writing, humans needed something to direct attention to important life lessons and improve coherence across larger groups of people. Dissanayake calls this "making special". Poetry, music, paintings (as in European caves), and other forms of patterned representation emerged as ways to structure information; some of the resulting art-forms also structured time in significant ways, slowing it down and making time, too, into something special. While there can be complexity in poetic language or musical formalism, I think the key to these art-forms is not that complexity per se but the fact that their linguistic or musical materials are different from what we normally experience -- and different in ways that set them apart from humdrum existence.

Does the slow time of poetic experience have special meaning today? As Uche observes and everyone knows first-hand, life is getting faster and faster. We live in a culture of immediate gratification, sounds bites, the latest news, instant messaging (because email just isn't fast enough -- mea culpa!), continuous partial attention, and what Stuart Brand calls fashion (not clothing styles, but the ever-churning monthly and weekly and daily and hourly changes in what's cool, hot, new, interesting, and different). In contrast to that culture, the slow time of poetic experience induces reflection and introspection -- slowing, pausing, stopping, puzzling, treading, absorbing, and eventually delighting in the meaning of difficult words, fresh metaphors, strange word orders, odd grammatical constructions, assonance, alliteration, rhyme, meter, and all the other tricks of the poetic trade.

In that pursuit of slow time, I find nothing as valuable as new poetry. While I love to read old and even ancient poetry (my favorites being Horace and Sappho), poems by authors from the last hundred years (my favorites include Langston Hughes, Walter Kaufmann, and Timothy Steele) often speak to me more deeply because their language and concerns are more naturally my own. Unfortunately, too many poets of the last hundred years thought it was perfectly acceptable to write poems without much form or difficulty -- what Robert Frost called the equivalent of tennis without a net. Yet it is precisely form (meter) and that sense of something familiar yet different and special that induces poetic "slow time". Thankfully, more and more poets are rediscovering their craft and the roots of their art, with the result that they are again making something special.

Here's to new poetry!

Thanks to a fine entry in Uche Ogbuji's blog, I've just discovered and signed up for the New Poetry discussion list. It'll be fun to once again be on a mailing list devoted to something other than technology.

It took me all weekend, but I finally culled my list of favorite Emily Dickinson poems down to thirteen. The results were too long for my blog, so I've posted them in the form of a journal entry. Thanks again to my friend John Enright for turning me on to Emily.

A bunch of folks have pinged me about the astonishing news that a treasure trove of ancient texts will soon be readable again thanks to infrared scanning technologies. Yes, these texts were found in the two-thousand-year-old garbage dump of an obscure Egyptian town and have been essentially unreadable until now. My old professor Dirk Obbink is leading the team that is converting these texts. Personally I'm hoping for the discovery of some of the lost poems of Sappho (much more likely to show up in a garbage dump than some of the lost writings of Aristotle, which would be number two on my wish list).

Because I love poems and language, this excerpt from the introduction to Camille Paglia's new book made me want to yell "Amen, sister!" Some choice observations:

What fascinated me about English was what I later recognised as its hybrid etymology: blunt Anglo-Saxon concreteness, sleek Norman French urbanity, and polysyllabic Greco-Roman abstraction. The clash of these elements, as competitive as Italian dialects, is invigorating, richly entertaining and often funny, as it is to Shakespeare, who gets tremendous effects out of their interplay. The dazzling multiplicity of sounds and word choices in English makes it brilliantly suited to be a language of poetry....

My secular but semi-mystical view of art is that it taps primal energies, breaks down barriers and imperiously remakes our settled way of seeing. Animated by the breath force (the original meaning of "spirit" and "inspiration"), poetry brings exhilarating spiritual renewal. A good poem is iridescent and incandescent, catching the light at unexpected angles and illuminating human universals - whose very existence is denied by today's parochial theorists. Among those looming universals are time and mortality, to which we all are subject. Like philosophy, poetry is a contemplative form, but unlike philosophy, poetry subliminally manipulates the body and triggers its nerve impulses, the muscle tremors of sensation and speech....

Artists are makers, not just mouthers of slippery discourse. Poets are fabricators and engineers, pursuing a craft analogous to cabinetry or bridge building. I maintain that the text emphatically exists as an object; it is not just a mist of ephemeral subjectivities. Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.

The full title of Paglia's book is Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems; I'll review it here once I've read it.

This evening I finished reading Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. It is a rare event for me to read a novel -- usually I read dry books of history or science, and once in a while some poetry. But this is a rare novel, which weaves a sensitive story of a girl's coming of age and the meaning of art around Vermeer's painting Girl With a Pearl Earring (uit Nederlands, "Meisje met de parel"). Highly recommended.

I'm not a huge fan of Neal Stephenson (mostly because I don't read many novels), but this interview with him in Reason Magazine is a good read.

When experimenting with document publishing as I have been recently, the works I usually play with are my poems, specifically the collection entitled Ancient Fire. To my surprise, I discovered that back in 2003 I somehow accidentally deleted my "Urban Haiku", which I've just restored using the magic of the Wayback Machine. Enjoy!

For fans of both Atlas Shrugged and the Narnian Chronicles, Aslan Shrugged is way cool. As someone said in the comments:

"You got your Narnia in my Objectivism!"

"You got your Objectivism in my Narnia!"

Two great tastes that go great together! (Thanks to Ken MacLeod for the pointer; and let's not forget that classic comic book Elvis Shrugged!)

I'm close to finished with writing two essays on literature and the philosophy of the arts that I've been thinking about for a long time: Image and Integration in the Novels of Ayn Rand and The Conceptual Nature of Art. Ping me if you'd like to read either one before I submit them for publication, most likely to the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.

The book Robert Frost on Writing contains a conversation on the craft of poetry between Frost, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and Kenney Withers. Here is an excerpt (pp. 155-156):

WARREN: Well, I'm sure you're right about the dramatic quality being the basic quality of good poetry. That would bring up the relation of meter and rhythm to the dramatic moment -- moment by moment -- in a poem, wouldn't it?

FROST: That's right.

WARREN: I'd like to hear you say it in your way, how meter enters into this picture -- the dramatic quality.

FROST: The meter seems to be the basis of -- the waves and the beat of the heart seems to be basic in all making of poetry in all languages -- some sort of meter.

WARREN: The strain of the rhythm against the meter. Is that itself just a dramatic fact that permeates a poem?

FROST: From those two things rises what we call this tune that's different from the tune of the other kind of music. It's a music of itself. And when people say that this will easily turn into -- be set to music, I think it's bad writing. It ought to fight being set to music if it's got expression in it.

WARREN: Yes, there's something resistant and unique in it; you can't turn it into something else. This is to overstate the matter, but I do want to get it clear, if I can for myself: would you say that even though the meter is based on the human pulse or some kind of basic rhythm in our natures, still for the poet it's something to be played against -- it's not something to be fought with, to be tussled with? It's not directly expressive -- ta-DA, ta-DA, ta-DA, ta-DA, ta-DA.

FROST: No, it's doggerel when you do that. You see, and how you save it from doggerel is having enough dramatic meaning in it for the other thing to break the doggerel. And it mustn't break with it. I said years ago that it reminds me of a donkey and a donkey cart; for some of the time the cart is on the tugs and some of the time on the hold-backs. You see it's that way all the time. The one's doing that and the other -- the one's holding the thing back and the other's pushing it forward -- and so on, back and forward. I puzzled over it for many years and tried to make people see what I meant. They use the word "rhythm" about a lot of free verse; and gee, what's the good of the rhythm unless it is on something that trips it -- that it ruffles? You know, it's got to ruffle the meter.

Now, I find this interesting because I think Warren and Frost are getting at something -- the interplay of meter and rhythm -- that holds true for music as well. The best expression I've found of it is in Victor Zuckerkandl's book Sound and Symbol (p. 172):

Such is the case in all metrical music. To put it metaphorically: the ground upon which the tones fall is itself in wave motion. The wave is the meter; rhythm arises from the different arrangements of the tones on the wave. The greatest possible latitude is accorded to the nature and manner of these arrangements. The tones may be distributed over the measure regularly or irregularly; may fill the measure in rapid succession or leave it empty for long stretches; at one place crowd close together, at another spread thin; may follow the pattern of the measure with their accents or run contrary to it. This freedom of distribution and arrangement makes it possible for the tones to give the constant basic form of the wave a changing, perpetually different profile. In accordance with the will of the tones, the wave will display contours now soft and rounded, now sharp and jagged; will beat softly and calmly or with ever-increasing impact; will heave, topple, break against resistances. This playing with the wave by the tones, this shaping of the substance of the wave; the conjunction and opposition of two components, their mutual tension and continuous adjustment to each other -- this, in music, we experience as rhythm.

In both poetry and music, the meter provides an underlying wave of forward motion -- iambic feet and duple time being the most familiar (interestingly, most poems in the English language put the accent on the second beat, whereas most metrical music puts the accent on the first beat). But if one relies too heavily on mere meter, the result is poetic doggerel (ta-DA ta-DA) or unsophisticated music (the OOM-pah OOM-pah of bad polkas). The dramatic possibilities of rhythm are realized when the words or tones ruffle the meter, resist it, play with it, push it forward and then hold it back, break with it without breaking it.

Robert Frost, in his essay "The Figure a Poem Makes" (Robert Frost on Writing, p. 126), writes that a poem (and by implication every work of art) "ends in a clarification of life -- not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion." His thought is quite in line with my views on art, and contrasts strongly with my old muse Ayn Rand, who claimed that all art has "metaphysical" import and consists in (or reflects) a great clarification. However, in one respect I incline more to Rand than to Frost: in my experience, a work of art can provide something more permanent than a "momentary stay against confusion", and indeed can provide even something approaching "the courage to face a lifetime" (The Fountainhead, Part IV, Chapter 1).

In a letter to Emerson scholar Regis Michaud of January 1918, Robert Frost writes as follows:

Some twenty-two lines in "Monadnoc" beginning "Now in sordid weeds they sleep" (I don't need to copy them out for such an Emersonian as you, Michaud) meant almost more to me than anything else on the art of writing when I was a youngster; and that not just on the art of writing colloquial verse but on the art of writing any kind of verse or prose. I suffer from the way people abuse the word colloquial. All writing, I don't care how exalted, how lyrical, or how seemingly far removed from the dramatic, must be as colloquial as this passage from "Monadnoc" comes to. I am as sure that the colloquial is the root of every good poem as I am that the national is the root of all thought and art. It may shoot up as high as you please and flourish as widely abroad in the air, if only the roots are what and where they should be. One half of individuality is locality: and I was about venturing to say the other half was colloquiality. The beauty of Emerson's "Uriel" and "Give All to Love" is that it is well within the colloquial as I use the word....

The lines from Emerson's poem "Monadnoc" to which Frost refers are as follows:

Now in sordid weeds they sleep,
Their secret now in dulness keep;
Yet, will you learn our ancient speech,
These the masters who can teach.
Fourscore or a hundred words
All their vocal muse affords;
These they turn in other fashion
Than the writer or the parson.
I can spare the college-bell,
And the learned lecture, well;
Spare the clergy and libraries,
Institutes and dictionaries,
For the hardy English root
Thrives here, unvalued, underfoot.
Rude poets of the tavern hearth,
Squandering your unquoted mirth,
Which keeps the ground, and never soars,
While Jake retorts, and Reuben roars;
Tough and screaming, as birch-bark,
Goes like a bullet to its mark,
While the solid curse and jeer
Never balk the waiting ear.

What is this "colloquiality"? It is the living language of conversation, the "hardy root" and grounding of any language in its day-to-day use by individuals speaking together.

I just cleaned up the poetry pages on this website. Much easier to navigate now. I'm still rather fond of these poems, which I wrote from 1994 through 2000. The last poem I wrote was Cobalt on December 20th, 2000, and the muses haven't been back to visit since. That's not as bad as my songwriting activities, though: the last song I wrote was, I think, either Topology or Pre-Emptive Strike in 1995! Maybe I'll clean up my music pages next...

When I have a book in my hand, I can usually be found reading all that heavy stuff like Nietzsche (just wait until I decide to re-read all of Aristotle!). So yesterday I took a little break and devoured two of my favorite books for young adults: The Wonderful O by James Thurber and The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. Both are highly recommended for kids from ages 10 to 100.

The other day John Enright sent me some poems, so this evening I posted them at the website of my literary webzine. John was the first person to publish any of my poems back in the pages of the long-defunct magazine Nomos, and he's one of my very favorite poets, so it's only just that I publish his work. Perhaps someday (after I finish my Jabber book!) I'll print a book of John's poems. But that's for someday, not today or the near future....

Yay, an illustrated version of E.A. Abbott's Flatland is available online. Thanks to Moira for the link. Plus it's Theodore Roethke week over at Moira's blog -- he's one of my favorite poets!

While on vacation I read some older fiction (Willa Cather's O Pioneers!) and some more recent work by Ursula K. Le Guin. I like Le Guin's writings, although I find them a bit maddening (or, sin of sins, boring) at times. She also engages in some worthwhile reflections on science fiction or, as I like to call it, speculative fiction. Le Guin is right that SF does not merely extrapolate from current trends, but rather speculates about what the future might be like. Yet sometimes I wish that SF stories would extrapolate, in the sense of writing about near-future events rather than just far futures in which interstellar travel and communication are givens. How did humans get to the point where crossing the interstellar deeps was normal? What were the first steps in that direction -- L5 habitations, space arks, Mars colonization, what? How did such events relate to human history on Earth? Perhaps it's harder to write stories set in the near future precisely because it's necessary to speculate about the near future of Earth as well, and recent history has been so fast-paced and disruptive that it's difficult to know what aspects of human life will be like in even 50 years, let alone 100 or 200 or 500 years. I was thinking about this the other day while waiting outside Bonnie Brae Ice Cream -- this neighborhood and the stores in it didn't even exist 65 years ago, so it's hard for me to imagine what this area of Denver will be like in another 65 years. And that's just one little street corner. Multiply that by hundreds of countries, thousands of languages, millions of towns, and billions of people. Suddenly extrapolation looks awfully challenging.

I'm finishing up my research into Yevgeny Zamyatin for a paper I've written exploring his (possible) influence on Russian-American novelist Ayn Rand. I think that the influence is there and I provide evidence for thinking so in the paper, which is slated to be published next year in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Zamyatin is a fascinating writer (best-known for his novel We, which was the original dystopia -- move over 1984!), and I find his deep individualism quite congenial to my way of thinking.

One possible source for ideas expressed by Zamyatin in We and Rand in Anthem is the short story "The New Utopia" by Jerome K. Jerome (PDF), published in 1891 and widely read in Russia (in Jerome's tale, people have numbers rather than names, the family has been outlawed in favor of government-controlled breeding, etc.). Another possible influence is Dostoevsky. In separate essays published in Gary Kern's anthology Zamyatin's We: Essays, Richard Gregg argues that We owes much to both Notes From Underground and The Possessed, and Susan Layton argues that Zamyatin's "Synthetism" is a descendent of Dostoevsky's "Romantic Realism". Interestingly, Rand described her own literary aesthetics as "Romantic Realism", although she meant something different by the term (I think the most accurate term for her aesthetics is "Heroic Symbolism", though the art created by her followers even shades over into Objectivist Realism if you ask me). Much to chew on here. And I simply must read more Dostoevsky!

Wow, it was five years ago that I started publishing my literary webzine, the Monadnock Review. There's some good stuff in there, if I do say so myself. My interest in it waxes and wanes, but I'm feeling the need to solicit more contributions before too long (haven't updated it since January!).