Walter Benjamin on Opium

From the Boston Globe:

"At first glance, Walter Benjamin, the bespectacled, bushy mustached, deeply serious, and influential German literary critic, may not strike you as a likely drug user. Indeed, he considered drugs a ``poison," and a rather disreputable one at that. As Marcus Boon writes in his introduction to ``On Hashish," a slim English translation of Benjamin's writings on drugs, just published by Harvard University Press, ``Drug use was hardly seen as something worthy of celebration in Benjamin's intellectual milieu" in the Berlin of the 1920s and early `30s."

High minded: Benjamin on Drugs

The Humor in Poetry

From Poetry Magazine:

"I have always felt that much of the best poetry is funny. Who can read Hopkins’s “The Windhover,” for instance, and not feel welling up inside a kind of giddiness indistinguishable from the impulse to laugh? I suppose there has got to be some line where one might say about a poem, “That’s too much nonsense,” but I think it is a line worth tempting. I am sure that there is a giggly aquifer under poetry.

Right now I am thinking of something unlikely that I saw a few days ago, the morning after my town had experienced a major winter flood. In the middle of a residential street, a cast iron manhole cover was dancing in its iron collar, driven up three or four inches by such an excess of underground water that it balanced above the street, tipping and bobbing like a flower, producing an occasional bell-like chime as it touched against the metal ring. This has much to say about poetry.

For I do not want to suggest in any way that this aquifer under poetry is something silly or undangerous; it is great and a causer of every sort of damage. And I do not want to say either that the poem that prompts me to laughter is silly or light; no, it can be as heavy as a manhole cover, but it is forced up. You can see it would take an exquisite set of circumstances to ever get this right."

A Consideration of Poetry

On John Stuart Mill

From Prospect Magazine:

"In May 1873, the British establishment was shaken by a bitter row. It concerned the legacy of John Stuart Mill, who had just died. The Times had printed an obituary which was an exercise in posthumous character assassination. It was written by Abraham Hayward, a Tory lawyer and fierce critic of liberals, feminists and philosophers. Mill (who was guilty on all three counts) had been a target of Hayward's vitriol ever since the two had faced each other in the London Debating Society half a century earlier and Mill, in the words of one observer, had "gone over Hayward as a ploughshare goes over a mouse."

The Thunderer's obit caused a retaliatory strike by the liberal cleric Stopford Brooke, during his Sunday sermon at St James's. This provoked Hayward to print an even more savage attack, focusing on an incident from 1823, when the 17-year-old Mill had been arrested for the distribution of literature on contraception. More articles and pamphlets appeared, on both sides, and the controversy raged for weeks. One of the unfortunate by-products of the row was the decision by William Gladstone to withdraw his support from a committee to erect a monument to Mill's memory, an act of cowardice for which he has been condemned by even his most eulogistic biographers. It was Gladstone who called Mill "the saint of rationalism," which, though meant affectionately, contributed to the false picture of Mill handed down to us today: a boy crammed with facts who grew into an ascetic, dry, humourless, sexless, lofty intellectual.

...

He wrote one of the definitive 19th-century works on political economy—and also worked tirelessly for Irish land reform. He produced a landmark argument for equal rights for women, and throughout his life pushed for legal and political reform on their behalf—Millicent Fawcett described him as the "principal originator" of the women's movement. Mill made, in his famous On Liberty, a timeless case for freedom of speech and action that has inspired generation after generation around the world. But as an elderly MP he also led the successful campaign against Disraeli's attempt to ban demonstrations in public parks, especially Hyde park—a corner of which remains a symbol of free speech to this day.

Mill was a man who saw little value in ideas unless they were tethered to human improvement, and was brilliantly successful at using his intellectual stature to influence the politics and culture of his age. He is the greatest public intellectual in British history. This fact—or claim—alone makes his life worthy of re-examination in the light of the current debate about the status of public thinkers, prompted by the Prospect league tables of public intellectuals and books such as Stefan Collini's Absent Minds. Moreover, this May marks the bicentenary of Mill's birth, allowing his admirers the world over to gather in conferences and seminars, including a three-day Mill-fest at University College London."

Portrait » John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill - Wikipedia

Heavy Metal and the Classics?

From the Orlando Sentinel:

"Brazilian heavy-metal band Sepultura released Dante XXI, an album based on Dante's Divine Comedy. And Mastodon recently became metal's newest stars with Leviathan, a Moby Dick-inspired album with songs such as "I Am Ahab" and "Seabeast."

With its preoccupation with evil, dry ice and alternately shrieking and growling vocals, heavy metal has come by its goofball image honestly. But wearing leather and spikes doesn't mean you don't crack open a book occasionally.

...

What's next: Ozzy takes on the short stories of John Cheever? Actually, no. Metalheads live suburban angst, but they don't necessarily read it. Leave navel-gazing ennui to emo bands and Lilith Fair alums.

So if Cheever's not metal, who is? Epic battles of good and evil are very metal, says Weinstein, author of Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture. So is man's battle against nature -- as in Iron Maiden's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," based on Coleridge's poem of the same name (in general, the 19th-century Romantics have staked out a particularly prominent place in metal).

The Divine Comedy seems an obvious choice with its visions of hell, but Dante's metal presence has been relatively limited. Same goes for Herman Melville, despite the Mastodon album and the Led Zeppelin instrumental "Moby Dick."

So, to put it in metal terms, which scribes doth taketh the title of Most Metal? With his clumsy prose and often meandering plots, H.P. Lovecraft still struggles decades after his death for respect in the literary world. But in the metal world, his weird tales blare from Marshall amps the world over. This Rhode Island writer's mystical visions have informed the songs of Metallica, Dead Meadow and plenty of others."

Headbanging hobbits?

Shakespeare

Celebrate the Bard's baptism (1564) by reading the Oxford Shakespeare.

Robinson Crusoe

On this date in 1719, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was published. Read it free at Project Gutenberg:

Robinson Crusoe

Wilde Treasures at Leeds

From pinknews.co.uk:

"Rare documents chronicling the rise and fall of Oscar Wilde together with a poem by Wilde's gay lover, Lord Alfred Douglas are among the literary treasures donated to the University of Leeds yesterday by a wealthy New York based couple.

The newly acquired treasures include Wilde's lectures notes from his 1882 tour of America, marking his rise to fame in addition to a rare copy of the Oxford University journal The Chameleon that played a part in his fall from grace.

Wilde was invited to contribute a handful of witticisms to the Oxford undergraduate publication, which also included a poem by Wilde's lover, Lord Douglas. However, Wilde's link with the journal was later used as evidence in his trial for acts of indecency with the prosecutor asking Wilde about the last line of Douglas' poem: "What is "the love that dares not speak its name?" Leeds is one of only two UK public libraries to hold a copy of The Chameleon."

Gay love poem to Oscar Wilde among literary treasures donated to university

Happy Birthday Henry Fielding

Celebrate Fielding's birthday by reading Tom Jones.