“They Shall Not Grow Old”

The New Neo Posted on by

I didn’t see the movie “They Shall Not Grow Old” in its limited 2-day run. In fact, I didn’t know what it was about until a few people recommended it in the recent movie thread here. It’s a documentary with a WWI theme, a subject already of great interest to me. But it’s the techniques used to make it that sound positively brilliant and even magical in bringing the past to vivid life.

Director Peter Jackson had access to 100 hours of old British black-and-white silent film of soldiers in the First World War, as well as interviews with WWI vets during the 1950s and 1960s when so many of them were still alive and kicking. But it’s not a conventional documentary. Instead of explaining what Jackson and his crew managed to do, I’ll show you.

Here’s the trailer:

And here’s a discussion by the director:

[NOTE: Here’s a review in National Review. And if you missed the first two screenings like I did, keep checking, because apparently there will be two more showings in limited theaters, one on January 11 and one on February 1.]

Auld lang syne around the world

The New Neo Posted on by

The lyrics were written in Scots dialect by the poet Robert Burns in 1788. That’s a lot of auld lang syne ago.

But the song—set to a traditional folk tune—has endured, particularly at New Year’s to be sung right after midnight. Nostalgia is a common theme at the turn of the year.

What I hadn’t known till I read that Wiki entry is that the song has spread all over the world, either in translation or just the tune:

“Auld Lang Syne” has been translated into many languages, and the song is widely sung all over the world. The song’s pentatonic scale matches scales used in Korea, Japan, India, China and other East Asian countries, which has facilitated its “nationalisation” in the East…

—In West Bengal and Bangladesh, the melody was the direct inspiration for the popular Bengali folk song[23][24] “Purano shei diner kotha” (“Memories of the Good Old Days”), composed by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, and forms one of the more recognisable tunes in Rabindra Sangeet (“Rabindra’s Songs”), a body of work of 2,230 songs and lyrical poems that form the backbone of Bengali music.

—In Denmark, the song was translated in 1927 by the famous Danish poet Jeppe Aakjær. Much like Robert Burns’ use of dialect, Aakjær translated the song into Sallingbomål, a form of the Jutlandic dialect often hard for other Danes to understand…

—In Thailand, the song “Samakkhi Chumnum” (“Together in Unity”), which is set to the familiar melody, is sung after sporting fixtures, and at the end of Boy Scout jamborees, as well as for the New Year. The Thai lyrics are about the King and national unity, and many Thais are not aware of the song’s “Western” origin…

Auld Lang Syne has been used in other works such as movies and poems. My favorite reference is in a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, one you may have encountered in poetry anthologies, “Mr. Flood’s Party.” It’s a poem about time and age and isolation. Old Eben Flood climbs a hill and drinks from a jug, talking to himself—that’s the gist of the poem. But of course it’s much more than that.

Here’s the reference (the last 3 stanzas of the poem). It begins with Flood talking to himself as though conversing with an old friend:

…“Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this
In a long time; and many a change has come
To both of us, I fear, since last it was
We had a drop together. Welcome home!”
Convivially returning with himself,
Again he raised the jug up to the light;
And with an acquiescent quaver said:
“Well, Mr. Flood, if you insist, I might.

“Only a very little, Mr. Flood—
For auld lang syne. No more, sir; that will do.”
So, for the time, apparently it did,
And Eben evidently thought so too;
For soon amid the silver loneliness
Of night he lifted up his voice and sang,
Secure, with only two moons listening,
Until the whole harmonious landscape rang—

“For auld lang syne.” The weary throat gave out,
The last word wavered; and the song being done,
He raised again the jug regretfully
And shook his head, and was again alone.
There was not much that was ahead of him,
And there was nothing in the town below—
Where strangers would have shut the many doors
That many friends had opened long ago.

Happy New Year!!

The New Neo Posted on by

Today the spirit moves me to comment on New Year’s Eve, one of my least favorite holidays even when I was young. In part it’s because I’m not a drinker (have I told you that I’m not a drinker?). In part it’s because I’ve always been hyper-conscious of the passage of time. And as I’ve gotten older, and time has curiously accelerated, that consciousness has only increased.

2019??? Excuse me, but how on earth did we get that far into the 2000s? I’ve only recently gotten it into my head that the 1900s were a long time ago (almost 20 years), but it still doesn’t feel that way to me. I still have to do the math to remind myself.

One thing I must say is that the past year has been exceedingly interesting. I have a hunch that 2019 will be, as well.

Tonight I’m having a very quiet evening. Maybe seeing one friend. I’ll stay up till midnight because I always stay up till midnight. And I’ll hope the year 2019 turns out to be interesting in a good way.

And to all of you: Happy New Year!!

animated-happy-new-year-image-0094

[NOTE: This is an edited version of a previous post.]

Translating Trumpian tweets

The New Neo Posted on by

For example:

Translations follow quotes:

—“I’m in the Oval Office. Democrats, come back from vacation now.”

I work, you don’t, you lazy blowhards.

—“…give us the votes necessary for Border Security, including the Wall.”

Many people have criticized Trump’s penchant for capitalizing words that in English are ordinarily not capitalized unless they begin a sentence. But I think he does it for emphasis of the concepts therein, and to show that they’re a big deal. Border security? Big deal. The wall? Not just any wall; the Wall.

—“You voted yes in 2006 and 2013.”

A historic reference to remind them of their current hypocrisy and their previous support.

—“One more yes, but with me in office…”

C’mon Democrats, do do do what you done done done before. Hey, just one more “yes,” but now I’m president so you can’t bear to give me the satisfaction, because of your hatred of me. So you’re not just hypocrites, you’re spiteful petty hypocrites, willing to sacrifice our country’s security for vindictive political reasons.

—“I’ll get it built, and Fast!”

I’m the doer and not the talker. I’m the man of action, not the empty promiser. I have a track record as a builder, too; before I became president, that’s what I was famous for.

That tweet is only 44 words long in its entirety. But hardly a word is wasted. And I do think he wrote that one himself.

Whether a person hates Trump, loves him, or has mixed feelings, I can’t understand why anyone would actually think him stupid. Oh, I understand why his opponents might call him stupid, but a lot of people I know honestly and truly think he is stupid. I never have thought so, even back when I was writing posts very critical of Trump during the primaries.

[NOTE: Nor, by the way, did I ever think either Obama or Bush were stupid, although opponents of each called them that.]

More on why I’m not too alarmed about the Syria pullout

The New Neo Posted on by

Last Thursday I wrote a post on that subject, and today I see this from Lindsay Graham, which makes me think that the speculation in that previous post is probably true:

“We’re fighting a war against ISIS. They’re still not defeated in Syria. I’m asking the president to make sure that we have troops there to protect us. Don’t outsource our national security to some foreign power. If we leave now, the Kurds are going to get into a fight with Turkey, they could get slaughtered.”

Then, later, after meeting with Trump, Graham said Trump was “reconsidering” the planned pullout, adding that Trump “told me some things I didn’t know that make me feel a lot better about where we’re headed in Syria … He promised to destroy ISIS. He’s going to keep that promise. We’re not there yet. But as I said today, we’re inside the 10-yard line and the president understands the need to finish the job.”

Graham explained, “The last thing in the world we want is a war for Turkey and the Kurds. That takes pressure off ISIS. The last thing we want in addition to that is Iran to be the big winner here. So I think the president’s going to finish the job when it comes to ISIS. I share his goal to withdraw our forces from Syria. I just want to do it in a smart way to make sure that Iran’s not the big winner.”

It’s all rather vague, but it seems to be mostly a matter of timing.

Clips from the Yiddish “Fiddler”

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For those of you who read my recent post about the Yiddish “Fiddler on the Roof” currently playing in New York and were curious to get a taste of what it’s like, here’s a clip of very short excerpts. Unfortunately, it doesn’t contain the translations, but if you actually attend the play you won’t have trouble understanding because there are simultaneous subtitle translations as with opera.

I think you will be able to see from these short excerpts that the Yiddish language gives a special quality of intensity and authenticity to the production, and that the actor playing Tevye is superb (the rest are excellent as well, but he is really a standout):

Internet poetry fills a need

The New Neo Posted on by

So-called “internet poetry” is a phenomenon I knew nothing about till I saw this critique of it by Rebecca Watts. Although the author finds the genre completely abominable, nevertheless her piece contains within itself some answers to the question of why people are drawn to internet poetry.

Poetry used to be rhythmic, mostly rhyming although not always, with a music within its words. In all eras, most poetry that was written was either bad or mediocre, because genius is rare. But in the past, the great poets of the last few centuries wrote works that were neither meaningless nor obscure in meaning. They had a lot to say, and it was written in a tremendously skillful manner that was nevertheless accessible to most people with only a little effort. Even mediocre poetry of the time had some of those characteristics.

But go to almost any literary magazine these days and the vast majority of what you read will be unintelligible, perhaps offensive, and/or on a subject about which the vast majority of people simply do not care. Today’s poetry is also often prose made to scan in “poetic”-looking lines rather than being actual poetry (according to traditional definitions). Many of these newer poems could just as easily have been written as a prose paragraph—and that, oddly enough, is a characteristic of the schlocky internet poetry that Rebecca Watts criticizes so very harshly.

(As an aside, I’ll add that Watts cannot resist what I call Trump Tourette’s, the need to mention him in an essay that has zero to do with him. In fact, she is so afflicted that she mentions him three times).

I actually agree that the internet poetry Watts cites is pretty terrible. But a great many people are probably relieved to find it at all, because it satisfies a need for poetry that isn’t being filled by academic “literary” poetry. The only need most academic literary poetry of today fills is the need for professors of poetry to have something to do, and for their students to also have something to do. The need filled by internet poetry is both linguistic—to read something “poetic” rather than prosaic—and emotional—to read something that touches the heart. Literary poetry used to do both, but now very rarely does either.

I decided to look up Watts’ own work, and found four poems of hers here. They are actually quite accessible, which makes her poetry a bit unusual these days in that respect. But they are examples of what I mean when I say that many modern poems might just as well be written as prose. Who on earth would ever want to memorize these poems, and who (other than Watts herself) would feel any deep emotional connection to them?

Not me. And she is definitely one of the better poets of today in the sense that at least the meaning of her poems is not obscure.

For a contrast, take a look (for example) at the periodical Granta, a literary magazine that’s not especially pedantic but is rather typical. I defy anyone not in poetic academia to like the poems there or to care about them (as examples, see this, this, this, and this).

I originally had wanted to read all the poems on this list from Granta, but I just couldn’t get through it; my boredom with them was too profound. And I am a poetry lover and a poetry writer, and have been my entire life.

The left now hates Israel far more than the Arabs do

The New Neo Posted on by

Daniel Pipes observes:

MbS [Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman] versus Jeremy Corbyn symbolizes these two tectonic shifts, as does Israel now enjoying better relations with Egypt than with Sweden. The president of Chad turns up in Israel but a singer from New Zealand does not. Israel’s athletes compete in the United Arab Emirates but get banned in Spain. Muslims show increasing indifference to the breakdown in Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy, but Leftists express growing anger over it.

Pipes lists some reasons: “a mix of Palestinian public relations expertise and continued antisemitism” accounting for the increase in hatred for Israel on the left, and the Arab world’s growing dependence on Israel’s technology accounting for some of their increased tolerance for Israel. But I’ll add some more reasons.

Fueling some of the left’s hatred we have the fact that decades ago Israel was a very leftist country and it has been tacking to the right for a long time now. So Israel is a political changer of sorts, and political changers often raise special ire. What’s more, the left has become increasingly enamored of third-world victim groups such as the Palestinians and their propaganda, as well as their tendency towards violence and terrorism, which is seen as evidence of their terrible plight (“one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”).

Fueling some of the Arab world’s growing tolerance of Israel we have the fact that the Palestinians have long been unpopular among the leaders of their Arab brethren. They were used as pawns to justify aggression towards Israel, but never because the Arab world was inordinately fond of them (see, for example, Black September as well as the Palestinian history in Lebanon). Also, after several wars against Israel, the Arab world most likely realized that conventional warfare was not going to succeed. Maybe at this point they’re just tired of that particular fight, and have realized that there is something to be gained from a more peaceful relationship with the most successful nation in the region.

Yuval Noah Harari predicts the future—sort of

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The name of Yuval Noah Harari came up recently in a conversation I had over the holidays. He seems to have become some sort of guru to a lot of people, and yet I know practically nothing about him or his work. Looking at his Wiki profile, I see that he’s 42, a historian, and someone who likes looking at the big picture—for example, questions about free will and consciousness—and making predictions about what that future will bring. Lately Harari’s been interested in “the consequences of a futuristic biotechnological world where intelligent biological organisms are surpassed by their own creations; he has said ‘Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so.'”

Well, that’s a mouthful. So when this interview with Harari popped up today in my Pocket recommendations, I decided to read it. I was immediately taken aback by something Harari says almost at the outset:

We began by agreeing that something feels very different about this moment in history. We are on the precipice of a revolution that will change humanity for either our everlasting benefit or destruction—it’s not clear which. “For the first time in history,” Harari said, “we have absolutely no idea how the world will look in 30 years.”

Now, Harari’s a historian and I’m not, but I beg to differ with those statements of his. It seems to me that many generations before ours have had the perception and even the conviction that they were “on the precipice of a revolution that will change humanity for either our everlasting benefit or destruction.” Whether it actually will pan out that way is not clear to the people who believe that it will, because we never see the far-reaching consequences of the trends that develop in our lifetimes.

And is this really the first time in history that “we have absolutely no idea how the world will look in 30 years”? First of all, Harari then proceeds to tell us how he thinks the world might look in 30 years, so he certainly has ideas about it. Although we don’t know whether his ideas are correct, that doesn’t mean people (Harari and many others) don’t have ideas. What’s more, it’s hardly the first time in history we’ve been incorrect in predicting 30 years into the future. In fact, predictions for the future have tended to be very poorly correlated with what actually occurs. History often throws us quite a curve.

For example, did the prognosticators of the 1890s and turn of the century from Nineteenth to Twentieth foresee the Great War that occurred less than 30 years later? As far as I know, they did not. In fact, that conflagration was not only generally unanticipated but, as Henry James wrote in a letter to a friend written the day after war was declared in England (and as I discussed in this 2012 post), that Great War was a great shock:

The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness… is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.

Henry James had thought that humanity was going in one direction, and then it made a huge volta unpredicted by most people. It was both startling and disillusioning, actually shocking, and it’s a turn of history from which we have never recovered (as I argue in that post where the quote occurs).

Did Europeans predict, thirty years before it happened, the Black Death that changed Europe and its society enormously? I don’t think so, although there might have been generally apocalyptic thoughts floating around, as there often are and often were, particularly in times when people had no idea what caused such pandemics and no idea how they might be prevented or ameliorated.

Harari goes on to speculate a great deal about the effects of AI on human beings and how our fundamental nature will be changed as a result. I’ve read a lot about AI and find some of these arguments persuasive, but as with all predictions for the future I take them with a large grain of salt. For example:

What worries you about the new cyborgs?

Experiments are already under way to augment the human immune system with an inorganic, bionic system. Millions of tiny nanorobots and sensors monitor what’s happening inside your body. They could discover the beginning of cancer, or some infectious disease, and fight against these dangers for your health. The system can monitor not just what goes wrong. It can monitor your moods, your emotions, your thoughts. That means an external system can get to know you much better than you know yourself. You go to therapy for years to get in touch with your emotions, but this system, whether it belongs to Google or Amazon or the government, can monitor your emotions in ways that neither you nor your therapist can approach in any way…

Combining this with enormous amounts of data collected on you 24 hours a day can provide the best healthcare in history. It can also be the foundation of the worst dictatorial regimes in history.

Much more at the link.

Science fiction writers have been toying with these ideas for a long time. But we still have no idea whether it will happen in the predicted manner, and even Harari notes that such developments can go either way in terms of good or bad effects.

So we’re back to the usual inability to predict much of anything, and that’s not unique or different. But it’s interesting to speculate, as it always has been.

Beginning to leave the fold

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a sad article by a New Yorker named Lester Berg who’s just beginning to discover that any sort of disagreement on political matters can turn certain old friends against him.

It wasn’t that way back when Obama was president, because he and old friend “Jamie” agreed on the wondrousness of Obama:

Jamie and I would speak on the phone, discussing how refreshing it was to finally have a man of eloquence and grace in the White House. We railed against obstructionist Republicans who undermined Obama—like Joe Wilson, who shouted “you lie!” during the 2009 State of the Union address. We were living in momentous times.

Jamie is black—or rather, bi-racial like Obama—but this was no impediment until the “Age of Trump”, the non-eloquent and graceless Trump. But Jamie is by no means the only person Berg starts having problems with—as he discovers when he starts an MFA program in writing in Manhattan:

Like our old Brooklyn neighbourhood (by now, gentrified out of existence), the students varied stupendously by race and culture. I was excited at first, but soon began to sense a disconnect. Too often, their reasons for being there seemed to have little to do with a love of books. Some only read within a single genre. Others actually bragged about not reading at all. And the social climate could be tense—something I learned for the first time when a gay black classmate warned me to “be careful” before commenting on his story, which was centered on a gay black character. I thought of the verve and confidence that Jamie had always shown when discussing his identity as an author and, as politely as I could, explained that I didn’t have to be careful, because I could say whatever I wanted. Then I went on, as I’d initially intended, to praise the story for its vivid language.

A few weeks later, while scouring the racks at the school’s annual library book sale, I bumped into my professor. I held up a used hard-cover of E. L. Doctorow’s 2005 novel The March, which I’d scored for just a dollar. He looked at the book and asked, “Who’s he?” Doctorow was arguably the greatest living historical novelist in America. The professor, who taught a class on the role of history in narrative fiction, would later become the director of the school’s MFA program.

Berg drops out of the program, and things worsen with old friend Jamie, who had always sounded very full of himself but who now becomes a devotee of politically correct jargon:

“That comment,” Jamie replied. “And other things you’ve said to me…have me asking you to think more about whiteness, privilege, and how it affects every moment of our lives.” In that moment, I realized that the frank and evocative language that once had brought Jamie and me together as children had been replaced by brittle ideological boilerplate, copied and pasted from social-justice Twitter accounts.

Berg has not had any dramatic political change—yet. But what he describes are the stirrings of some sort of political change, and I believe that it’s based at least partly on the fact that the earliest of his formative years were spent in the Soviet Union. He writes:

My small acts of revolt against the political orthodoxy that now filled Jamie’s social-media world represented my first steps outside the New Faith to which the two of us had jointly pledged allegiance during the Obama years. With his stunning division of America into oppressed and oppressor, Coates seemed to be tapping into a moral world that lay beyond traditional Western ideals—a moral world that, in some respects, began to remind me of the one my Russian family had fled in the 1980s.

Berg goes on to say that while he didn’t support Trump in 2016, he had reservations about voting for Hillary, and later on:

After Trump was elected, I continued to seek the company of bookish kin, without fully realizing that they were in the process of excommunicating me. Something shifted in late 2016—and not just with Jamie. An author I’ll call Daniel, who’d solicited my critical feedback in the past, sold his novel to a top publisher, earning a huge advance. I was happy for him, and he was kind enough to thank me in the book’s acknowledgements. But the novel didn’t sell well. And Daniel found a way to blame the bad numbers on Trump’s presidency.

“I hate every Republican, good or bad, with every fibre of my being,” he declared to the world. Trump’s supporters, he said, were all “soulless troglodytes.”…

As a New York writer, I’m supposed to be reflexively hostile to Trump voters—a political breed that often is caricatured as a bunch of racist Appalachian hillbillies. But because of what I do for a living, and who my friends are, I’ve learned that Trump’s enemies can be every bit as Manichean and hysterical as Trump’s supporters. As with a massive gas giant orbiting a smaller body, the gravitational field of Trump’s symbolic presence has come to draw in the petty grievances, career anxieties and existential dread of a whole generation of intellectuals. I hate my boss: Fuck Trump! My spouse hates me: Fuck Trump! No one will buy my book: Fuck Trump! Please, I want somebody to love me: Fuck Trump! Here, at last, was somebody we could freely hate more than we hate each other or ourselves…

…I am no longer in touch with either of the two men [Jamie and another friend]. I also have parted ways with my long-time girlfriend, who got swept up in these same currents, and who once literally wept in my presence because I had made a flattering reference to Camille Paglia…

And then Berg adds something very wise and very true:

The price one pays for acceptance by the congregation is, and always will be, one’s intellectual freedom.

Berg’s article reminds me of the beginning days of my political change, when I voiced a few fairly moderate—but still outside the circle of the liberal party line—opinions to certain dear friends and relatives, and in some cases was excoriated for those thoughts. The road can be quite lonely, and I take the problem very seriously because I’ve been there. I applaud Berg, and I understand why he adds this sad statement at the end of his essay:

…I write pseudonymously, afraid to lose what little ground I have gained while taking flight from the apostles who once called themselves my friends.

[NOtE: Although I was anonymous when I began this blog, I never kept my politics a secret from friends and family. What’s more, I started using my name many years ago when I wrote articles, so I’ve not been anonymous for about a decade. But I very much understand why Berg still is anonymous.]

Chuck Schumer on immigration: then and now

The New Neo Posted on by

It should come as no surprise that just nine years ago, when Obama was president, Chuck Schumer expressed rather conventional GOP-type sentiments on illegal immigration and on what should be done about it. But pointing out Schumer’s slippery political hypocrisy, as that article I just linked purports to do, is fun for those on the right but doesn’t have much affect on anyone else, IMHO.

The argument would be that Schumer has “evolved” on the subject, much like Obama did on gay marriage. For Schumer, 2009 was then; this is now. This is not only now, it’s “the age of Trump,” and all thinking feeling moral people need to vigorously oppose every thought that comes out of Trump’s head and every idea or plan Trump has ever expressed. It’s really quite simple as a guiding principle, and applauded by vast numbers of people.

Consistency is a funny thing in politicians, and people generally seem very forgiving of a lack of it, particularly on the left. The left is all about holding power and getting “progressive” things done and saying what is necessary to do so; it’s not for nothing that Orwell portrayed leftists as being willing to say that two plus two equals five (see this post I wrote on that subject) if the party says so. Schumer is just being a good flexible leftist, and what he really believes may indeed have changed or it may not have changed.

Schumer could also quote no less than Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote in Self-Reliance:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.

Schumer could just say he’s not a little statesman, he’s a big one—or even a “great soul.” Of course, people should be flexible enough to be able to change their minds with changing circumstances, as I’ve said many times here. But what actual circumstances have changed since 2009 that would justify such a change (besides the aforementioned need to oppose Trump)? I haven’t seen Schumer offer any or acknowledge his change of heart. But that’s not Schumer’s concern, because apparently it’s not the concern of those who elect him time and again because he’s a Democrat and because he’s a powerful one.

By the way, here’s Schumer in 2009, in case you wondered what he was saying on illegal immigration back when Obama was president: