Dr. Metablog

"Mr. Kripke"

When I was in graduate school (fifty years ago, believe it or not), I enrolled for a course called "Modern American Poetry." In the unthrilling days of yesteryear, "modern" still meant the generation of Eliot and Pound. This particular course, however, was so up-to-the moment that it might have been called "last month's American poetry." Some of the poets whom we studied turned out to be mere flashes in the pan, and none of them, I think, ever came close to Yeats or Frost. Nevertheless, it was good to know about Olson and Hall and Bly and Snodgrass and Levertov. There were major omissions to the curriculum: Sylvia Plath had not yet flashed across the horizon, and Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso and Duncan were far too rude to have been invited to this particular party.

Our instructor was a genial man named John Lincoln Sweeney. Although he was not a bristling-with-bibliography kind of academic celebrity, he knew everything about the subject and was famous as a supporter of poets and artists. I knew that he was "different" -- even my callow unsophisticated eye noticed the elegant bespoke suits and the aristocratic mien. At the Woodberry Poetry Library in Lamont, Sweeney was listed as "curator" but I have not doubt that he was also patron. Woodberry collected not only books but also records and audiotapes and films of poetry readings. It was a spectacular resource. There was a rumor that there were poetry gatherings at Sweeney's mansion on Beacon Street, across the river, but I was never invited. Why would I have been?

Here's a photograph of Jack and Maire Sweeney:   

Sweeney's letters are now housed in the Trinity College, Dublin Library. "Correspondents include Conrad Aiken, William Alfred, Padraic Colum, e.e. cummings, Richard Eberhart, Leon Edel, T.S. Eliot, Robert Fitzgerald, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Thomas Kinsella, Philip Larkin, Marianne Moore, Edwin and Willa Muir, Wallace Stevens, and Richard Wilbur." The paintings (Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse) were bequeathed to the National Gallery of Ireland.  

There were about twenty students in "Modern American Poetry." Nineteen of them were regular; one was irregular. Whenever "Mr. Kripke," whom I remember as an exceedingly scruffy young fellow, signaled that he wanted to participate in the conversation, time stopped. Both the instructor and my classmates treated Mr. Kripke, who spoke in halting, awkward, and oracular tones, with extraordinary deference. "What's the deal?" I asked, privately. "He's supposed to be very smart," I was told. I myself didn't understand a word that Mr. Kripke said during the entire semester. Not a single word. When I don't understand, it's hard for me to tell whether the speaker is spouting hot air, or I'm just not smart enough.

"Mr. Kripke" dropped from my consciousness. But just the other day, I noticed an advertisement in the NYRB for a colloquium honoring the achievement of Saul Kripke, Distinguished Professor at Princeton and at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Here's the scoop: according to wikipedia, "a recent poll conducted among philosophers ranked Saul Kripke among the top ten most important philosophers of the past 200 years." Top ten?  This is no trivial praise. No wonder everyone stopped to listen. It was like having Michael Jordan in your gym class.

Kripke was apparently a prodigy who made important contributions to modal logic, whatever that is, while still in his teens. For example:

A Kripke model is a triple , where is a Kripke frame, and is a relation between nodes of W and modal formulas, such that:

• if and only if ,
• if and only if or ,
• if and only if .

Which. frankly  I never doubted.

Mr. Kripke had a couple of branches of logic (and mathematics) named after him before he entered college. No wonder I didn't understand (and still wouldn't) what he was struggling to say. The most recent philosopher I can understand is John Locke, and then only the easy parts.  

In retrospect, that class in poetry had more drama than I gave it credit for. Here was John Sweeney, civilized and be-boutonniered, acquaintance of Yeats, friend to every important poet in America. And there was Saul Kripke, not only a mathematical and philosophical genius but also the son of "the only conservative rabbi in Omaha, Nebraska." 

And then there was me.   

Trollope on the Kindle

My first purchase for the new Kindle was a "set" of fifty novels by Anthony Trollope for $4.95 -- or ten cents for each spacious, digressive, leisurely book, many of which I have read in the past as three-volume baggy monsters. Initiating a 21st-century electronic device with classic Victorian novels tickles me.

The Kindle fits nicely with my latter-day anti-clutter neurosis. No need to buy a new bookcase. No need, even, to dust the volumes.   

It's a new way of reading, but whether for better or worse I can't yet say. The Kindle is portable and easy on the wrist. There's a built-in light for cloudy days and the middles of nights. But I'm used to knowing where I am in a novel. How many pages I've read, how many to go are elements crucial to the experience. I miss, frankly, the heft of the book, the gratification of accumulating all those turned pages. (The Kindle notes the percentage of the book that you've read, which is helpful but not satisfying. And when you buy fifty novels in a bundle, the K tells you only that you started The Eustace Diamonds at, say, 26% and finished at 29% -- information which is utterly useless.) 

Can You Believe Her? clearly signaled that it was coming to an end, but Phineas Finn, this time through, came to a conclusion that seemed to be far more hasty than in previous readings. I was surprised that Trollope left so much unresolved. But then, perhaps he had a sequel already in mind.

I need to remind myself that the first readers of these novels didn't read them in book form. They read them as periodic installments in magazines. The experience of reading a novel in the course of a year or eighteen months was profoundly different from zooming through 800 pages in a few days. While there's  nothing "authentic" about "kindling," the kind of Trollope-reading at which I've had a lifetime of practice is  equally artificial.   

Dog-faced Man

Here's a sad childhood memory.

Just around the corner from us, on Ditmas Avenue, there lived the ugliest man I've ever seen in my entire life. He was a small, always solitary old man. He was not deformed, just plain ugly. His nose and mouth stuck way out, but his chin receded; he had very long canine teeth and the world's saddest eyes. He walked the ugliest little dog. 

I confess that when we passed in the street, I looked away, even though I was fascinated enough by his repulsiveness to steal a surreptitious backward glance. I imagine that everyone else whom he passed averted their eyes as well, and that the poor fellow lived in a world not only without friends, but even without eye contact.

Later I learned that he made his living my exhibiting himself nightly at a Coney Island freak show. He was the "Dog-Faced Man."

This was in the late 1940s or early 1950s. I hope that freak shows are a thing of the past.