May 2008 Archives
Frank O’Hara adopts a distinctly W. C. Williamsian style:
I picked up a leaf
today from the sidewalk.
This seems childish.Leaf! you are so big!
How can you change your
color, then just fall!As if there were no
such thing as integrity!You are too relaxed
to answer me. I am too
frightened to insist.Leaf! don’t be neurotic
like the small chameleon.
The last two lines puzzle me. The simile is not immediately appealing, and after further contemplation I am only a little closer to grasping its motivation. The word “neurotic” is not one I can imagine Williams using, so, if these lines are meant as a parody, the effect is less than compelling. “I am too / frightened to insist” would have been a fine place to leave off.
It comforts me that these lines also reduced Marjorie Perloff, Stanford’s own O’Hara scholar, to mere summarization: “A simple thing like a wet leaf, found on one’s path, becomes comically emblematic of neurotic behavior. The poet begs the leaf not to be ‘like the small chameleon.’” Perloff then forces the rather vague conclusion that “‘Les Etiquettes Juanes’ is no more than a charming slight poem, but we can already see O’Hara’s own aesthetic emerging: even the falling of a single leaf, the poem implies, is worthy of notice. ‘Don’t be bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial, and don’t be proud. The slightest loss of attention leads to death.’”
Would O’Hara have wanted “Les Etiquettes Juanes” to be judged by those criteria?
Today I took a waist-deep plunge into the mud puddle that is FastCGI. I use this metaphor advisedly, because the puddle didn’t look very deep (mud puddles never do), and it wasn’t really very deep (they rarely are), but it was deeper than I thought at first (as one invariably discovers after ruining one’s shoes). I’ll spare you the full discussion of my failed attempts; the upshot is that the site is now a lot faster when a script is executed (e.g., when a search is performed), thanks to some clever techniques employed by FastCGI. In case you care to replicate my results, keep on reading.
Continue reading FCGI.
It’s always a joy to stumble across a stranger’s stockpile of favorite quotations.
Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dream-
ing so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it?
A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled
back, skin falling off. But he wasn’t afraid of that. It was a beau-
tiful day. How ‘bout some coffee? Don’t mind if I do. Take a little
ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.
— James Tate
While I’m on this Latin kick, a phrase for all occasions:
idem dixit illa
Literally,
She said the same.
Key here are (1) the final position of the subject (for emphasis), (2) the demonstrative pronoun illa instead of the personal ea, and, of course, (3) the unambiguity of the subject’s gender: idem dixit is grammatical but lacks that vital specificity. Use ille to mark male utterances.
Odi et amo. quare id faciam fortasse requiris
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
Id est,
I hate and I love. Why do I do it? perhaps you wonder.
I don’t know—but I feel it happen, and I burn.
Translation mine.
If you have any experience with JavaScript, you ought to know that function arguments are accessible via an implicit array-like object called arguments. This method of argument access allows variable-length argument lists:
function sum() {
var sum = 0, len = arguments.length;
for (var i = 0; i < len; i++)
sum += arguments[i];
return sum;
}
How do named arguments interact with implicit arguments? I won’t answer this question for you, but by way of clarification I pose the following puzzles.
Continue reading Argument oddity.
One poem and two photos of mine were recently published in Leland Quarterly. The full issue, of which my contributions are only a tiny part, can be found here.
Don’t miss the web version, either. It recently underwent an inspired redesign in the hands of Selena.
Direct links to my stuff (if you’re that impatient):
