April is…
Or at least, a cruel month. But it’s not really a surprising announcement; I didn’t think the edicts would be lifted as soon as right after Easter.
That line about April being the cruelest month is usually quoted alone, and it’s a great line. But here it is in context:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
I have very mixed feelings about T. S. Eliot. On the one hand, I think “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” are masterpieces, although I don’t much care for his other poetry. On the other hand, he gave us the poems that were the inspiration for the musical “Cats,” and for that it is hard to forgive him.
A delightful post. Thank you.
Prufrock is one of my top 5 favorites. I read it about once a year now.
I had to study The Waste Land as a freshman in college, and I didn’t like it- the allusions were just too many that I was just lost as to what it all meant.
About a month after I got internet for the first time, in late 2000, one of the first things I did was read a version of The Waste Land that had hyperlinks within the text to the sources of the allusions, or an on-line discussion of the allusions and the source. That greatly raised my opinion of the piece to a point that it is now also one of my favorites.
. . . might be to keep more city people from invading the places with the more lenient rules.
Nailed that right on the screws neo (as golfers used to say of perfect club-to-ball contact). Also right that this news cannot be surprising, as we foresaw it since 3/20/20, sitting right there in plain sight.
I don’t think the policy could have been otherwise on practical political terms (much though as I might wish it to be otherwise, thinking the trade off too extreme a bow to the present emotional inputs and too little to the unseen but nevertheless impending emotions rooted in other more distant, more complex yet just as certain consequences). Politics! It’s opinion massing; whaaddaya gonna do?
sdferr,
Assume you are responding to her comment on other thread. My point is it needn’t be a total lockdown vs. back to normal. They could loosen restrictions in some areas but still greatly urge social distancing and businesses could require people where masks ( they need to be producing masks by the hundreds of millions).
It just seems it’s becoming too easy for them to extend these dates out. I’m big believer in once govt does something people would normally call extreme the first time it becomes easier and easier to repeat.
I’m uncertain about your remark, Griffin, as to my response to “her comment on another thread”, mainly the referent — but no matter — I quite agree as to the ratchet and pawl phenomenon in Fed gov power seizures deriving from crisis (war, generally speaking). In part, that too is a component of my dread. Mostly though I dread the ruin of lives, businesses, families, connectedness we have but do not regard, in consequence of the closure of daily life. It’s immense (and unseen, as Bastiat could teach us). Far beyond my capacity to describe, though I imagine it dimly anyhow.
sdferr,
Your italicized quote above of neo doesn’t appear in this ‘April Is…’ post but in her last comment on the ‘Conversations..’ post was all I meant but no big deal.
But, yes this entire episode is filling me with dread. Far too many massively huge unprecedented actions being taken based on very incomplete and confusing data but leading to big time economic carnage. And who knows if it will even work against the virus.
They don’t know.
Disappointed. Seems like much of the nation could be allowed to return to normal.
Some relaxing music for a Sunday night:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUoBhQEdJQ4
“Hatachi no Koi” / “Twenty-year-old Love”
Tsk, Neo: I consider “Four Quartets” to be the great poem of the 20th century. “I stand or fall on them,” Eliot said, and in my opinion he stands. He was really a very limited talent but he did a great thing within those limits. “Prufrock” is wonderful, but it’s only one poem, “The Waste Land” a sometimes brilliant mixed bag.
I am violently and probably hopelessly prejudiced against the musical “Cats” and accordingly have never seen it. Perhaps I’m missing something, but I’ll survive. I do love the poems.
Mac:
I’m with you on “Cats” but not on “Four Quartets.” I know the latter is supposed to be a great great great poem, but it just leaves me cold. To me it’s “thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.” I hear no music in it; it feels almost like dry prose, with a lot of multisyllabic Latinate words that might be in an essay.
As I see our fat and clueless political/media establishment continue to double down over and over against Trump, the poem I’m reminded of is from Robert E. Howard.
My Ruthless hands still clutch at life-
Still like a shoreless sea
My soul beats on in rage and strife.
You may not shackle me.
My leopard eyes are still untamed,
they hold a darksome light-
A fierce and brooding gleam unnamed
that pierced primeval night.
Rear mighty temples to your god-
I lurk where shadows sway,
Till, when your drowsy guards shall nod,
To leap and rend and slay
For I would hurl your cities down
And I would break your shrines
And give the site of every town
To thistles and to vines.
Higher the walls of Nineveh
And prouder Babel’s spires-
I bellowed from the desert way-
They crumbled in my fires.
For all the works of cultured man
Must fare and fade and fall
I am the Dark Barbarian
That towers over all.
Trump isn’t the Dark Barbarian. But if they call for him long and loud enough, he’ll get here sooner than they think.
Mike
Not forgiving Eliot for “Cats” is like not forgiving Shakespeare for “Strange Brew”.
Neo: That FQ is prosey is a fair criticism. I would describe its music as subtle and subdued, but oh well, one’s taste is one’s taste.
I was too hasty in reading your comment about “Cats,” and thought you said you *could* forgive Eliot. We agree about the musical, it seems, notwithstanding that I have not seen/heard it. I don’t hold it against Eliot, though.
My apologies to you Griffin: I really was confused, thinking I was reading the top of this newer thread when in fact reading down in the older, from whence as you knew and I didn’t the quote had come. My mistake, entirely.
sdferr,
No worries.
Do I dare to eat a peach?
F:
Just don’t wear the bottom of your trousers rolled, and it’ll be fine.
Empowering and protecting your family during the COVID19 pandemic
– Dr. David Price, Weill Cornell Medical Center
* social distancing (3 ft)
* hand to face hygiene
* coexisting with people (especially in close proximity) who are infected, who have the disease
* when to visit the hospital (e.g. resource management), and triage (e.g. telemedical services)
Bottom-line: We don’t have to shut down the country. We should avoid spreading a social contagion. There are rational and reasonable steps to take in order to mitigate infection, respond to disease, to manage resources, and to mitigate collateral damage.
Morning update: active cases for US continues its 4 day trend of linear increase. If it was still following the exponential fit, there should have been close to 200,000 cases at the end of yesterday, not the 135,000 reported. As NY is driving the US data, it also shows 4 days of linear increase. Interestingly, the new cases actually showed a decrease from 18,000 to 17,000…probably just a 1 day statistical anomaly. Recovered cases reported now in complete agreement with my projection based on two week recovery and a 97% of the active cases with no substantial effects.
On Trump extending to end of April: this will definitely cause more economic collapse. Oil just hit $20/barrel which sounds good, but is going to put a lot more people out of work. The trouble is that states, even with small case numbers, are seeing exponential trends, so from a political standpoint having those states go back to work looks foolish. The news out of China of deaths more in the 45,000 range is also going to cause more panic. I keep wondering if this was 50-60 years ago and we didn’t have the technology to detect this virus through testing, but had our modern medicine treatments, how we would view this? I would guess as a particularly bad flu season, but not much else. We are frightening ourselves with our own knowledge, and the politicians must follow along. Will the US economy completely crumble in April along with social collapse? I’m tending more to answering that question “yes” this morning, than I would have yesterday morning despite the virus data.
I agree with Max that “Four Quartets” is the great poem of the 20th Century. But I disagree with his evaluation of Eliot. Eliot is the great poet of the 20th Century. If want obfuscation read Pound.
Since this thread has been occupied by Covid-19, I offer this quote from Dr. John Lee, an English physician and epidemiologist writing in the Spectator:
https://spectator.us/deadly-coronavirus-still-far-clear-covid-19/
“Statistically, we would expect about 51,000 to die in Britain this month. At the time of writing, 422 deaths are linked to COVID-19 — so 0.8 percent of that expected total. On a global basis, we’d expect 14 million to die over the first three months of the year. The world’s 18,944 coronavirus deaths represent 0.14 percent of that total.”
That does not sound like justification for pushing the World’s economy into a full-blown second Great Depression, fully the equal of 1929. Nor does it sound like justification for putting whole cities and states under house arrest.
Bananarama – Cruel Summer (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ml3nyww80
T.S. Eliot had more appeal to my post-adolescent self. Now it seems like pouting, and Princess-in-the-Pea “I’m more hurt by phoniness than all you phonies” posturing. But there’s no denying some of the riffs are catchy, like the mermaids singing, each to each.
Artfldgr: Bananarama’s Cruel Summer, that’s a good one that I remember well.
1960’s thru 1980’s domestic and international music is the best. Everything went down hill with the ’90s and it never recovered. I’m talking popular music.
Way too much time on my hands 🙂
I was able to fit the current active case data with a sigmoid function. It predicts the flattening in about 11 days at around 300,000 cases. I’ll have to keep adjusting parameters in the equation as time goes on, but that’s the best guess at the moment.
I loved the musical “Cats” but I saw it in the New London Theatre the first season and again with 6 teenaged kids in 1982. By the second time, it had evolved into a children’s show and parents would bring the kids up to meet the old cat at intermission. The kids loved it. My stepson had to be dragged to it but he was humming the music as we left.
Way too much time on my hands
I’ve been doing similar sorts of things. I think the data are still a bit too noisy to project into the future, or the less noisy sample is too short (like the 5 days), but definitely seeing some flattening, even in deaths, which would be a lagging indicator. Too early to say if it’s just a hiccup or a trend that will persist.
I’m in Mac’s camp about Eliot. Though I’ve not read them in a while, the FQ influenced my 20’s and 30’s like nothing else. Key passages remain with me like bookmarks to Eliot’s vision into life and, possibly, redemption. The work is deliberately “prosy,” to direct the reader’s attention to metaphor and theme. As I’ve aged, my one concern has to do with Eliot’s youth. Some of the observations about age and change — “old stone to new buildings” — ones that moved me back in graduate school, seem to have come a little too easily. They aren’t as pithy for me now as they were then. Not sure if that isn’t just me. As poetry, I’d rank Eliot among the greats. The early work like Prufrock and TWL strike a reader’s ear with discord/dissonance. The later works, I believe, were Eliot’s attempts to create in a very different and more “organic” way. The early were Stravinsky, the later more Beethoven/Brahms.
Whew … that was a worn out way of saying it. LOL. Apologies for that nearly academic and purple prose. Old habits do indeed die hard.
Mike K:
Well, you have a lot of company in loving “Cats.”
Not me, though. I took my son to see it when he was little, and after 5 minutes my eyes started to glaze over and I thought, “I’m going to have to watch this for 2 hours?” I hated it from the start.
As my mother used to say, that’s what makes horse races.
In Slovak there’s a saying:
Marec poberaj sa starec
meaning
March – goodbye old man.
So many old folk so often die at the end of Winter, just as Spring appears.
Perhaps not those from the Hyborian Age,
tho Robert E Howard committed suicide in June, at around ~36.
Loved his books.
Tom Grey:
Wow, that’s quite a saying. Wonder if the mechanism was mostly flu.
April is the cruelest month? What’s so cruel about daffodils, Robin’s hopping along searching for worms, and life giving rains; what’s not to like? Silly T.S.
My daffodils and hyacinths have now survived 2 spring snows, the heavy wet kind that breaks tree branches if they have leafed; we always lose a couple in the end of the season, which can go as late as mid April or longer.
A friend raised in Leadville CO remembers putting firecrackers in the snowmen in July.
“Cats” always struck me as Eliot’s poetry for younger readers – similar in tone to what Edward Lear might write for older ones. My edition has drawings by Edward Gorey, which help make the reading more fun.
I do like some of the music from the stage version, and can see why people love it. I also can see why people love “The Phantom of the Opera,” which I find unendurable.
Will the US economy completely crumble in April along with social collapse? I’m tending more to answering that question “yes” this morning, than I would have yesterday morning despite the virus data.
This is the perfect time to reach spiritual enlightenment as well as study educational materials that people lacked in schools, such as Flat Earth Theory. Because people’s magical Babylon currency will not be of much effect later on.
The STEM fields are going to be overturned, almost overnight, and 99% of what they obtained from degrees will become either publicly recognized as wrong or just obsolete. Much like moderns view leech treatments and mercury injections.
Word food for the soul. Wonderful stuff