Eric M. Murphy

Southeast, and storm, and every weather vane shivers and moans upon its dripping pin, ragged on chimneys the cloud whips, the rain howls at the flues and windows to get in, the golden rooster claps his golden wings and from the Baptist Chapel shrieks no more, the golden arrow in the southeast sings and hears on the roof the Atlantic Ocean roar. Waves among wires, sea scudding over poles, down every alley the magnificence of rain, dead gutters live once more, the deep manholes hollow in triumph a passage to the main. Umbrellas, and in the Gardens one old man hurries away along a dancing path, listens to music on a watering-can, observes among the tulips the sudden wrath, pale willows thrashing to the needled lake, and dinghies filled with water; while the sky smashes the lilacs, swoops to shake and break, till shattered branches shriek and railings cry. Speak, Hatteras, your language of the sea: scour with kelp and spindrift the stale street: that man in terror may learn once more to be child of that hour when rock and ocean meet.

“Hatteras Calling”
Conrad Aiken

allpoetry.com/Hatteras-Cal...

The Hollow Men We are the hollow men

This, incidentally, is my favorite Eliot poem:

poets.org/poem/hollow-...

Incidentally, it is also the case that T-Diddy never said, “Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men the most."

The list goes on. Attributing these to Thucydides tells me most of what I need to know.

A nice article onnthe subject: research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/portalfil...

For reference, Thucydides NEVER says ANYTHING even REMOTELY resembling this: "A nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its laws made by cowards and its wars fought by fools."

For the love of Sir William Francis Butler and Charles George Gordon, stop.

Funnily, I thought immediately of you. I DID manage to keep my mouth shut almost all the way back to my office. Almost.

Ah. The PME Convocation. 23 minutes of wasted time, designed to:
1) ensure students are on time for the things that matter (a day of "death by PowerPoint"),
2) provide speakers an opportunity to blather about "warriors," and
3) give university "professors" a chance to misquote Thucydides.

If interested, the pre-print paper is published here. This is not my area, and it’s a slog for me to read (many long-unused muscles involved), but it’s fascinating.

arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06137

At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery | Quanta Magazine After finding the homeschooling life confining, the teen petitioned her way into a graduate class at Berkeley, where she ended up disproving a 40-year-old conjecture.

This little math story—very much non-technical—is delightful. The humanity is lovely, and the mathematics are humbling and inspiring.

www.quantamagazine.org/at-17-hannah...

But there IS art here. The choices create something that cause us (or at least lead us) to read, hear, see, and feel certain things

I’d forgotten that this anthology omits my favorite Eliot poem(s), but this fragment of “The Waste Land,” a perfect fragment of a towering achievement, is an uncompromising alternative.

For anyone interested, this “biography” of “The Waste Land” is excellent.

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. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu Mein Irisch Kind, Wo weilest du? ‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; ‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’ —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Oed’ und leer das Meer. Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days.

Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: 'Stetson! ‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! ‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden, ‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? ‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? ‘Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, ‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again! ‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

The Burial of the Dead
from “The Waste Land”
T.S. Eliot

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/...

👇👇👇

I think I’ll change the titles on this little shelf each month.

These are a few things about some things that are woven through things to be taught this year.

a cartoon character is looking out of a hole in a spongebob squarepants . ALT: a cartoon character is looking out of a hole in a spongebob squarepants .

I would tell you about a cold-beer vending machine somewhere in America circa 1994, but I invoke my 5th Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

I’m looking at you #PME.

Turkey got all the way to France. Turkey and Russia had a clear and consistent agreement, cooperating without apparent betrayal throughout the game.

The end-state map for a game of Diplomacy.

"The Annexation of Puerto Rico" (a loving reference to an underrated classic of American cinema, "Little Giants") ends with Russia victorious.

YouTube video by Aaron LaCombe - Topic Ode to the Allsup's Burrito

If you know, you know.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=25KW...

Twirling your blue skirts, travelling the sward Under the towers of your seminary, Go listen to your teachers old and contrary Without believing a word. Tie the white fillets then about your hair And think no more of what will come to pass Than bluebirds that go walking on the grass And chattering on the air. Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail; And I will cry with my loud lips and publish Beauty which all our power shall never establish, It is so frail. For I could tell you a story which is true; I know a woman with a terrible tongue, Blear eyes fallen from blue, All her perfections tarnished — yet it is not long Since she was lovelier than any of you.

“Blue Girls”
John Crowe Ransom

allpoetry.com/Blue-Girls

And I can’t help but recommend a lovely book, more an essay in book form, that says everything better than I can say.

I picked this because it’s my favorite of her poems, and it appears in the volume I’m using as a reference, but…

Moore reworked this poem over an and over and over. My favorite version, from 1967, is just this:

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the same thing may be said for all of us—that we do not admire what we cannot understand. The bat, holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base— ball fan, the statistician—case after case could be cited did one wish it; nor is it valid to discriminate against “business documents and school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the autocrats among us can be “literalists of the imagination”—above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion— the raw material of poetry in all its rawness, and that which is on the other hand, genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

“Poetry”
Marianne Moore

poets.org/poem/poetry

Sitwell is extraordinary. She can’t always make up her mind as to what kind of poet she wants to be, but she’s always giving us something special.

Cried the navy-blue ghost Of Mr. Belaker The allegro Negro cocktail-shaker, "Why did the cock crow, Why am I lost, Down the endless road to Infinity toss'd? The tropical leaves are whispering white As water; I race the wind in my flight. The white lace houses are carried away By the tide; far out they float and sway. White is the nursemaid on the parade. Is she real, as she flirts with me unafraid? I raced through the leaves as white as water… Ghostly, flowed over the nursemaid, caught her, Left her…edging the far-off sand Is the foam of the sirens' Metropole and Grand; And along the parade I am blown and lost, Down the endless road to Infinity toss'd. The guinea-fowl-plumaged houses sleep… On one, I saw the lone grass weep, Where only the whimpering greyhound wind Chased me, raced me, for what it could find." And there in the black and furry boughs How slowly, coldly, old Time grows, Where the pigeons smelling of gingerbread, And the spectacled owls so deeply read, And the sweet ring-doves of curded milk Watch the Infanta's gown of silk In the ghost-room tall where the governante Gesticulates lente and walks andante. 'Madam, Princesses must be obedient; For a medicine now becomes expedient— Of five ingredients—a diapente, Said the governante, fading lente… In at the window then looked he, The navy-blue ghost of Mr. Belaker, The allegro Negro cocktail-shaker— And his flattened face like the moon saw she— Rhinoceros-black (a flowing sea!).

“Four in the Morning”
Edith Sitwell

allpoetry.com/Four-In-The-...

Sure. Why would anyone cheat?

They are not here. And we, we are the Others Who walk by ourselves unquestioned in the sun Which shines for us and only for us. For They are not here. And are made known to us in this great absence That lies upon us and is between us Since They are not here. Now, in this kingdom of summer idleness Where slowly we the sun-tranced multitudes dream and wander In deep oblivion of brightness And breathe ourselves out, out into the air— It is absence that receives us; We do not touch, our souls go out in the absence That lies between us and is about us. For we are the Others, And so we sorrow for These that are not with us, Not knowing we sorrow or that this is our sorrow, Since it is long past thought or memory or device of mourning, Sorrow for loss of that which we never possessed, The unknown, the nameless, The ever-present that in their absence are with us (With us the inheritors, the usurpers claiming The sun and the kingdom of the sun) that sorrow And loneliness might bring a blessing upon us.

“The Absent”
Edwin Muir

www.poetrynook.com/poem/absent-1

I watch the Indians dancing to help the young corn at Taos pueblo. The old men squat in a ring And make the song, the young women with fat bare arms, and a few shame-faced young men, shuffle the dance. The lean-muscled young men are naked to the narrow loins, their breasts and backs daubed with white clay, Two eagle-feathers plume the black heads. They dance with reluctance, they are growing civilized; the old men persuade them. Only the drum is confident, it thinks the world has not changed; the beating heart, the simplest of rhythms, It thinks the world has not changed at all; it is only a dreamer, a brainless heart, the drum has no eyes. These tourists have eyes, the hundred watching the dance, white Americans, hungrily too, with reverence, not laughter; Pilgrims from civilization, anxiously seeking beauty, religion, poetry; pilgrims from the vacuum. People from cities, anxious to be human again. Poor show how they suck you empty! The Indians are emptied, And certainly there was never religion enough, nor beauty nor poetry here ... to fill Americans. Only the drum is confident, it thinks the world has not changed. Apparently only myself and the strong Tribal drum, and the rockhead of Taos mountain, remember that civilization is a transient sickness.

“New Mexican Mountain”
Robinson Jeffers

www.poetrynook.com/poem/new-mex...

Sorry! I’ve highlighted that to her. ☹️