This be the thread...

by liberal japonicus

Just to get things started:

This be the verse

Have at it.

Comments

[wj]

Maybe the gloomyest thing I've read in ages. I realize some folks write poetry in order to cope with their dark view of the world. But I do wonder why anyone publishes something this negative.

[Michael Cain]

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, Teach Your Children. Always tried to keep this chorus in mind, both for my parents and my own children:

Don't you ever ask them, "Why?"
If they told you, you would cry.
So, just look at them and sigh,
And know they love you.

[nous]

But I do wonder why anyone publishes something this negative.

Because it is clever (the opening line is literally true in both senses of the profanity involved). Because it is a counterpoint to a Robert Louis Stevenson poem (that would be more to your liking). Because people often think these very thoughts in less memorable terms. Because it's helpful to know that you are not alone in having these dark moments.

And because, despite this darkness, he spent time on a piece of art with no utility because it engaged him to do so, and that is hopeful.

[liberal japonicus]

Larkin is an interesting person, had to deal with bouts of depression so reading him can be revalatory, especially if you wrestle with depression. I also think it says something about the British character that he's one of the most loved poets.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20151201-philip-larkin-englands-most-miserable-genius

Perhaps it is just me, but given the tenor of the times, I think Larkin had his finger on the pulse, albeit a few decades too early

from Neurotics, a poem published after his death

…The mind, it’s said, is free:
But not your minds. They, rusted stiff, admit
Only what will accuse or horrify,
Like slot-machines only bent pennies fit.

[nooneithinkisinmytree]

Annus Mirabilis

Sexual intercourse began
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

Up to then there’d only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) –
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

—Annus Mirabilis by Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Hmmm, Martin Amis, whose Dad, Kingsley, a fine, hilarious writer as well, was Larkin's best friend (both practiced alcoholism as a second vocation) seems to place "events", shall we say, on an earlier timeline than Larkin recalls:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8687167/What-scandalous-plot-twist.html

This is longish, but here Martin Amis, who shares Larkin's and Kingsley's talent for the incisively sad but wryly hilarious and sometimes tawdry details human nature bedecks itself in, addresses Larkin's reputation as an anti-Semite and misogynist, and, as with Flannery O'Connor and her racism, also revealed in letters (also in her stories and novels, but those, the art itelf, at least cast things in a more redemptive light), on our own shores, for example, comes down on the side of separating the ART from the rather complicated, sometimes nasty characters who create it, which is really all we can do, while of course dealing with racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny in real time, today, with a punch in the face.

https://ghrendhel.tripod.com/textos/amispolitical.htm

[GftNC]

I do wonder why anyone publishes something this negative.

Larkin was a very great poet. I have linked before to his Aubade, one of the greatest poems of the second half of the 20th Century:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48422/aubade-56d229a6e2f07

I am not sure that there has ever been a more devastating (or wonderful) description of religion than this (my bold), when he writes of his fear of death:

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,

and as for:

all the uncaring
Intricate rented world

as a description of a particular (and not uncommon) feeling about "reality", I doubt it has ever been bettered.

Aubade too, of course, is very dark, but it is not the function of poetry to be positive, or "life-affirming" in the normal sense. Its function is more to examine and reflect life in all its complicated and twisted glory.

Larkin was a complicated, damaged man (not least by his parents: his father was a Nazi sympathiser among other things). But he was capable of writing poetry of extreme beauty mixed in with the darkness too:

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Or, as another example of his astonishing imagery, I have never forgotten the picture conjured by the last quatrain (my bold) in this short poem:

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

These last two are not even among Larkin's greatest poems. Apart from Aubade, many would include The Whitsun Weddings (possibly too full of English references for a US audience, classist though aimed at his own class, but with an unforgettably haunting ending),

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48411/the-whitsun-weddings

or, perhaps, the brilliant Deceptions

https://allpoetry.com/poem/8495693-Deceptions-by-Philip-Larkin

wj: in the house of poetry are many mansions.

[Girl from the North Country]

p.s. russell: I am so glad you liked the piece on Ellington. It was well above my pay grade (I am not nearly as sensitive to music as to poetry), but I tentatively thought it might be of interest and I'm glad it was.

[hairshirthedonist]

I’m not much for poetry, so I skimmed this thread thinking I would skip it. I turns out I like this sort of poetry, which has me cracking up a bit that wj finds it so objectionable. There truly is no accounting for taste.

[Donald]

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/books/review/Donadio-t.html

Save a punch for Martin Amis, JT.

There was a period in the 00’s when some liberals flirted with Islamophobia. Domestic islamophobia, not the foreign policy murderousness which never goes away.

[Pro Bono]

...Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave
Death is no different whined at than withstood

[Donald]

Key quote, which can’t be explained away as opposition to extremism.

“ less than a month after British authorities had thwarted an alleged terrorist plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners, Amis wondered out loud: “What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge — don’t you have it? — to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation — further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”

[Hartmut]

I like the macabre kind of poetry.

Poète maudit

Shall I now sing of sex or violence
Of rabid rapist, pious pedophile
Or psychopaths that mangled corpses pile?
I know in each case some will take offence

I love to sing of whores not abstinence
Of ev'rything that's putrid, foul and vile
And if the moralists through that I rile
It will my satisfaction just enhance

The bard of boredom I don't wish to be
So spare me laurels, you keep them for those
That fill your ears with 'wholesome' poetry

Her thorns are what for me define a rose
Of poison ivy weave the wreath for me
My song shall praise whatever you oppose

Of course that's cheap and easy.

[liberal japonicus]

Got a few commments about Amis but will have to wait. short take, Larkin, relatively unproblematic with it more due to the times than the man, Amis, probably more so, but then every writer has issues. Amis was Christopher Hitchens best friend, and that's probably not going to be helpful for a relatively balanced world view.

https://unherd.com/2020/11/life-death-and-christopher-hitchens/

And as the dominant non-fiction writer in the group, it was the force of Hitchens’ political polemic that forced the others into positions and stances they might not otherwise have taken. So much so that when they disagreed (as Hitchens and Amis did very publicly over the latter’s Koba the Dread [2002]) it was noteworthy, even newsworthy.

[GftNC]

Pro Bono: Yes. That is marvellous. I can never decide which bits to quote.

On Amis, it is so very complicated and difficult. He has sort of apologised for the remark that Donald quotes, but said plenty of awful, and good, and just plain contradictory stuff, e.g.:

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/the-two-faces-of-amis-774978.html

But one thing is for sure, he is a formidable critic, as JDT's 2nd link (which I had never seen before) reminded me.

[Girl from the North Country]

How funny: I have just come to the end of the transcription of Amis's talk, and he too quotes The Trees as a kind of "sister poem" of This be the Verse, despite remarking that Larkin had written on its manuscript "Bloody awful tripe!"

I still have to read the rest, Q+A with among others Robert Bly...

By the way, wj, if you don't know it, the Stevenson poem which nous says may be more to your taste is this, called Requiem:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Truly, impossible to imagine anything more different!

[nooneithinkisinmytree]

I've read just about everthing Amis the Younger has written, and I'm fully aware of his share in the mass psychosis that afflicted, and still does afflict the West regarding all Muslims, not merely the perpetrators who were personally responsible for the murders.

I'm also aware that his description of those planes heading for the Towers in his essay, "The Second Plane" was the most harrowing prose written about that day, in my opinion.

And not only was Hitchens Amis' best friend, but Salman Rushdie made a trio between the three of them, and Hitchens and Amis both lived through the fatwa against Rushdie, which I'm sure was formative to their reactionary rhetoric.

And so I practice, in retaliation, what they preached, except against the malign and what I believe to be the murderous crypto-religious, American Christian fundamentalism that has gifted us with the evil of the racist, vote-stealing Trump Republican Party and conservative movement, to my mind no less dangerous to us than Muslim fundamentalism, both at their roots reactionary conservative movements, and killers like Pat Robertson, who should have been punched in the face and worse for assigning personal responsibility for every low pressure system over Norfolk to all LGBT folks because some conservative closeted gay guy in Dallas was kanoodling fore and aft with his fellow man, and now of course the same crypto-Christian bullshitters, yeah, all of 'em, why not generalize indiscrimately, are causing .. yeah, there is causation ... their fellow dumbasses to ignore basic common sense science and commit suicide by pandemic and spread the deadly virus to other humans.

Just as I don't change the dial on the car radio when the Phil Spector-produced "Be My Baby" by Ronnie Spector and the Ronettes plays, but can also do a self-fist bump that Spector is behind bars for committing murder, and if he sat down next to me a bar, he'd have his fucking hands full with me punching his lights out, just so, I can tiptoe around Amis' discriminatory foolishness and simultaneously admire his prose, but also know that if he spouted off in my face with his hate speech regarding those hundreds of millions of Muslims in the world who should not be assigned personal responsibility for 9/11 (funny how many white men murder and rape, and now we have white women engaging in rapine see Epstein's personal assistants, but no general responsibility is assigned to me, or any other white man, even if we are driving a taxi late at night, unlike the vast majority of black and brown men driving the same taxis who lose fares because of some personal responsibility assigned to them by white folks for crimes they didn't commit), I would take a swing at Amis too and remind him that a straight line can be drawn drawn between his indiscriminate rhetoric back then and the fact that Ilhan Omar's head is literally hunted by subhuman armed conservative twat Boehbert in the halls of our U.S. Congress, and not one goddamned fucking thing is done about it.

Yes, I would break Boehbert's jaw with my fists when I get the chance, and it has no bearing on my otherwise pristine non-abusive treatment and respect for women in my personal and professional life.

She's an armed bullying jagoff asshole and will have her jaw broken like nearly every one of her bullying male conservative "colleagues" will have theirs also shattered if they want to fuck with me.

Equal rights for equal subhumans.

Of course this separation we practice between the character of the artist and his or her art takes on considerable water at the extremes, I mean, thank goodness Hitler was such a pathetic no-talent painter (think if he had painted the Mona Lisa) and Stalin wasn't turning out magnificent piano concertos while starving Ukrainians to death.

Speaking of Hitler, I love (not) the latest current trending horseshit by the CRT and "objective" history conservative bookburners that the Fuhrer and his deeds should be treated evenhandedly and any opinions by educators that might lean to the 'left" side of the "debate" must be censored and/or the opposing view (he had some good people on his SS staff) accorded equal space and time.

[wj]

it is not the function of poetry to be positive, or "life-affirming" in the normal sense.

I understand and agree. Sometimes life is sad. Sometimes things go wrong. And poetry can certainly reflect that.

Where I have a problem is when poetry (or prose) goes beyond that to say, in effect, that everything is terrible, that it can never get better, and all hope is lost now and forever. Which is how the origonal entry struck me.

As for Requiem, I think it's a lovely verse. But my perception might be skewed because I first encountered it here.

[nous]

Where I have a problem is when poetry (or prose) goes beyond that to say, in effect, that everything is terrible, that it can never get better, and all hope is lost now and forever.

It's a poem, not scripture. It's a feeling. It's weather.

Depressives know from experience that the blackness he describes so well is a real feeling. Healthy depressives know that feeling is no more or less true than the bright moment when all seemed well. Your feelings are a thing you are going through. Both will go away. You need to commit to the process, the journey, the task, not the feeling.

Poems are a feeling. Poetry is a task.

[CharlesWT]

Having had parents who grew up on hardscrabble farms during the Great Depression, I can relate to This Be The Verse.

[nooneithinkisinmytree]

The Chinese and Russia and Iranian governments are ecstatic, having worked hand in hand these past five years with the subhuman antihuman unAmerican traitorous conservative movement to cripple governance and the workforce of the Defense Department and all of the other agencies, not the mention NATO and the negotiated nuclear treaty with Iran, and to advance the Covid-19 epidemic as deeply into the federal workforce as possible and disable and kill it, the eternal dream of all conservative anti-government vermin.

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/01/another-hack-judge-invents-an-anti-vaxx-veto-on-federal-power

Natch, the murderous Federalist Society Trump Judge is a Texan, which shows to go that holding back from nuking the entire state of Texas (it's their state right to be exterminated for what those vermin collectively have done to our country) because of some mythic sentimental lie about the Alamo.

Violence wounds all heels.

[nooneithinkisinmytree]

Genocide.

And not a trigger finger is lifted to wipe the murderous perpetrators off the face of the Earth.

https://jabberwocking.com/come-on-folks-get-boosted/

[nooneithinkisinmytree]

This stage direction from Shakespeare's grisly play, Titus Andronicus, seems apt for the sickening bloody tragedy pigfucking conservative America is headed for:

"Enter a Messenger with two heads and a hand."

[wj]

Genocide

It doesn't actually qualify. Because genocide, as defined, requires a) intent to wipe out b) a specific group. These anti-vaxx nuts are working at wiping out themselves (and their kids, of course), but that is not their intent. They aren't actually a suicide cult. Just terminally stupid.

[Girl from the North Country]

Where I have a problem is when poetry (or prose) goes beyond that to say, in effect, that everything is terrible, that it can never get better, and all hope is lost now and forever.

All human life is there, wj.

You did say But I do wonder why anyone publishes something this negative.

That you don't like it, or it makes you uncomfortable, or you have a problem with it, just means it's not your personal cup of tea. That artists can describe, either beautifully or exactly, or ideally both, common or sometimes universal human feelings in an original way which has never been done before, is a miraculous thing.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Rarely if ever can the damage done in families, and spilling down the generations, have been so succinctly described.

As for:

Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats

I submit this is a perfect description of a kind of hypocritical, sententious family dynamic.

I am happy never to have personally experienced these specific things, but I know for sure that plenty of people have, and I am grateful and think it very important that an artist can describe them so precisely and perfectly.

I suppose, in a way, when nous says poetry is a task, that in my mind also equates to the concept that the truth shall set you free. That, I think, is why people publish it.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

Ah, all the talk of poetry reminds me of that long ago time, on a tiny little blog ("Busy, busy busy"?).

In which, the custom (at least for a while) was for all of the comments to be in haiku.

It was a magical time, indeed.

[wj]

Democracy fades,
One bill after another
Thru fall and winter.**

** See, I can be gloomy, too.

[JanieM]

GftNC -- great comment at 6:52. Profound and pithy all at the same time.

[Henry Cohen]

The title comes from "Requiem," by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

[liberal japonicus]

Democracy fades,
One bill after another
Thru fall and winter.**

A haiku should have a kigo or seasonal word in the first line
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kigo

Winter for democracy
one bill, then one more
fallen leaf from dead tree

[wj]

I knew that a haiku should have a seasonal reference. I hadn't realized (or, perhaps, wasn't taught) that it had to be in the first line.

Some days, tanka just seems so much easier.

P.S. Isn't the syllable count off in your version?

[liberal japonicus]

left out the a before dead tree

[CharlesWT]

The title comes from "Requiem," by Robert Louis Stevenson:

On that, analysis of the poem and also what can happen when one of those kids is in the university poetry class you're teaching.

"“This Be the Verse” takes its title from an equally famous poem, Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem.” Larkin not only quotes Stevenson but also echoes the rhyme scheme (abab) and the epigrammatic phrasing of “Requiem.”
...
“Requiem” and “This Be the Verse” are poems at rhetorical extremes. In his depiction of the coldness of childhood, Larkin offers a counterpoint to Stevenson’s warm representation of death as a restful homecoming. Together, the two texts work as opposing visions, one poet speaking about the ending of life and the other about its beginnings. “Glad did I live and gladly die” Stevenson proclaims, while Larkin offers his counterview: “Get out as early as you can, / And don’t have any kids yourself.”"
Don’t Have Any Kids Yourself: On Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”

[novakant]

Regarding Amis, I've only read "The Rachel Papers" (his first novel) which was funny and quite sweet.

Unfortunately he has become a representative of a certain type of toxic midldle aged masculinity you encounter quite often in English society.

I have yet to read Larkin, based on what I know about him never feel a very strong urge to do so - buy since there are some fans here I might give it a go.

[Girl from the North Country]

Thank you Janie.

[Girl from the North Country]

Also, I think lj's amended haiku is excellent. Alas.

[Girl from the North Country]

This is a column from today's Observer about a recent controversy in the publishing world. The columnist is a POC, and it deals with so many of the issues we discuss here, I thought some of you might be interested.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/23/the-hounding-of-kate-clanchy-has-been-a-witch-hunt-without-mercy

[GftNC]

This is a column from today's Observer about a recent controversy in the publishing world. The columnist is a POC, and it deals with so many of the issues we discuss here, I thought some of you might be interested.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/23/the-hounding-of-kate-clanchy-has-been-a-witch-hunt-without-mercy

[wj]

lj's verse is lovely. But I was taught that haiku must be 5-7-5 syllables. And what he offers is (as amended) 7-5-7.

But perhaps therre are alternate forms...?

[nous]

GftNC - The things under discussion in the Guardian piece are sticky. Readers reactions are sticky, and it's not always easy to predict what will set a reader off, and trying to figure out which responses will trigger a cybercascade of outrage and which will disappear in the vast hollow of social media apathy... I don't know anyone that has a handle on that.

I really do understand why people are disturbed by "wokeism" and feel that anti-racist activism is to blame. A cybercascade is a terrible thing, and it is not always nuanced or just.

I'm in an interesting position for observing all of this. I'm university faculty in a school of humanities and know post-colonial and anti-racist scholars personally (and share their concerns). The critiques and analyses they offer are not aimed at authors personally in most cases, but at culture and conventions and ways of seeing and expressing our understanding of the world. It's not the descriptors like "almond eyes" that are offensive, it's the way that sets of descriptions exoticize and Other a character in ways that make them scenery rather than characters. When an author does come under criticism, it's because there is a pattern of problematic representation that rises above the cultural background to become a personal issue.

But your average reader does not ever reach the levels of reading skill or understanding of culture that those scholars bring to their analysis. They pick up tactics or remember words or phrases from the analysis and those details get used in a way that is disconnected from the deeper analyses and reading of culture. And those shallow readings get recirculated and reinforced in communities of readers until the become cybercascades.

I pay a lot of attention to these things because I study rhetoric and media, and because the work that I do centers a lot on fan communities, and because my wife is a published SF author whose books get read and interpreted by these communities. My sympathies are on all sides. I'm a scholar, and a fan of SF, and an insider to publishing and authorship.

Yes, I've seen editors combing through manuscripts to complain about the phrase "almond eyes." I've heard authors talk about eliminating whole side plots for POC characters in their books to avoid stereotype even though the character involved was based on real people that they authors knew and were treated as individuals and not as types, and even though the deeper structures of the books in question were clearly working against those stereotypes. So yes, it is chilling, sometimes against the very people that are trying to fix the problems. The author/fan relationship is fraught.

Imperfect, impatient middles are messy places. The Internet mostly functions as an aggregator and amplifier of imperfect, impatient middles.

I don't disagree with the author of the Guardian piece, I just think that anti-racist and post-colonial, and other "woke" approaches are valuable and necessary, and that the real problems she is pointing to here do not originate with the approach, but with people who believe that they are doing anti-racist work but who do it with insufficient care and understanding, and with a more sympathetic ear for their own trauma than for the intentions of others.

Our current Internet and media environment is not built to slow the cascades or to try to widen and deepen engagement. It accelerates shallow judgment and is vulnerable to outside exploitation (as LJ's other, mostly ignored thread shows). It's been this way for a while.

[Girl from the North Country]

nous, I don't disagree with what you say, and you put it well. The whole subject is complicated, multilayered and fraught, which makes making rules about it difficult or even in some cases impossible.

(My only supplementary question is this. When you use the word "sticky" at the beginning, do you have a specialised meaning, or does it just mean difficult and complicated?)

[nous]

I wasn't really trying to be technical with "sticky," just thinking that word captured a lot of the connotations I was trying to tease out. It's like flypaper in a way. We get drawn to the conversation because it speaks to something in our experience, but once we try to engage, we find ourselves stuck, and the parts of the experience that are difficult "stick" with us and get brought to the conversation as well.

I just taught a Jonathan Lethem essay about Talking Heads "Memories Can't Wait" in class last week. He describes the song as being like an armored figure (Doctor Doom, Robocop) that has been "smeared with tar and then rolled like a cheese log in gravel." I think that's what I mean by sticky here. The conversation seems to attract more and more of the rough bits of our lives in ways that make it hard to extricate ourselves or our traumas.

Something like that, anyway. I'm still processing it all myself.

[liberal japonicus]

Hmm, you are right, I flipped them. So 5 7 5

Winter in the states
fallen leaves from a dead tree
a pile of bills stopped

Speaking of what nous says, most of the people in my orbit are liberal/left, which is natural, if you think the US of A is the best country in the world, you probably aren't going to agree to settle for anywhere else, least of all in a country full of Asians.

Yet this morning, this, from Bari Weiss's substack, appeared in my FB feed from a person and was seconded by some folks who I know share my views.
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/im-a-public-school-teacher-the-kids

I pointed out that this was the Tom Friedman school of writing and there seemed to be no other record of the author, Stacey Lance, whose bio says 'Mother and educator'. The reply was well, the kids aren't alright, and I said perhaps, but Weiss is the one who trumpeted the founding of the 'University' of Austin

https://junkee.com/bari-weiss-anti-woke-university-of-austin/314555

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/11/17/university-austin-bari-weiss-pinker-culture-politics-522800

https://www.salon.com/2021/11/13/bari-weiss-field-of-right-wing-dreams-will-the-university-of-austin-ever-actually-exist/

I'm well aware that there are lots of problems in higher ed. I'm also pretty sure that whatever Weiss is selling has some ulterior motive.

GftNC's article has a number of interesting things to pull out. For example, this.

After her publisher, Picador imprint’s Philip Gwyn Jones, rightly reflected that he wished he had been clearer about its support for Clanchy and her rights, alongside condemning the online abuse and trolling by her critics, he issued an apology for causing further hurt that read like a hostage note: “I now understand I must use my privileged position as a white middle-class gatekeeper with more awareness.”

Note that it is not 'I must step back from being a gatekeeper'. Her publishers want to keep all their perqs and so will throw anyone else under the bus.

Pan Macmillan’s overreaction has caused huge collateral damage – it will no longer publish a new anthology of poems by Clanchy’s students – and is no substitute for working at becoming more diverse. “Sensitivity readers”, people who comb manuscripts looking for the potentially offensive, are a crass development: it outsources responsibility and plays on the idea that if a book has the potential to offend, it shouldn’t be published.

Make no mistake about this, it is about maintaining profit margins. It is about keeping the same system in place while appearing to be sensitive to current concerns. These same companies want to monetize these streams (Subscribe to our youtube channel! Follow us on Twitter and Instagram!) so when the lowest common denominator swells thru, they toss out the weakest and look to come back after the tidal wave has gone thru.

It should be no surprise, the same phenomenon was at the heart of the 2010 Flash crash
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash

The difference is that people feel that they individually have agency, so something like this is truely a representation of opinion. It's not. It should also give one pause to consider how the final report parcelled out the blame for this

On April 21, 2015, nearly five years after the incident, the U.S. Department of Justice laid "22 criminal counts, including fraud and market manipulation"[11] against Navinder Singh Sarao, a British financial trader. Among the charges included was the use of spoofing algorithms; just prior to the flash crash, he placed orders for thousands of E-mini S&P 500 stock index futures contracts which he planned on cancelling later.[11] These orders amounting to about "$200 million worth of bets that the market would fall" were "replaced or modified 19,000 times" before they were cancelled.[11] Spoofing, layering, and front running are now banned.

but...

Some recent peer-reviewed research shows that flash crashes are not isolated occurrences, but have occurred quite often. Gao and Mizrach studied US equities over the period of 1993–2011. They show that breakdowns in market quality (such as flash crashes) have occurred in every year they examined and that, apart from the financial crisis, such problems have declined since the introduction of Reg NMS. They also show that 2010, while infamous for the flash crash, was not a year with an inordinate number of breakdowns in market quality.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) investigation concluded that Sarao "was at least significantly responsible for the order imbalances" in the derivatives market which affected stock markets and exacerbated the flash crash.[11] Sarao began his alleged market manipulation in 2009 with commercially available trading software whose code he modified "so he could rapidly place and cancel orders automatically".[11] Traders Magazine journalist, John Bates, argued that blaming a 36-year-old small-time trader who worked from his parents' modest stucco house in suburban west London[11] for sparking a trillion-dollar stock market crash is "a little bit like blaming lightning for starting a fire" and that the investigation was lengthened because regulators used "bicycles to try and catch Ferraris". Furthermore, he concluded that by April 2015, traders can still manipulate and impact markets in spite of regulators and banks' new, improved monitoring of automated trade systems.

[liberal japonicus]

quick note, the spam folder seems to have roused itself from its dogmatic slumber. If you think something you wrote may have gotten caught up, short comment and I'll fish it out, though it may be best to just keep a copy and repost.

[CharlesWT]

pointed out that this was the Tom Friedman school of writing and there seemed to be no other record of the author, Stacey Lance, whose bio says 'Mother and educator'.

Her Twitter account.

[wj]

if you think the US of A is the best country in the world, you probably aren't going to agree to settle for anywhere else, least of all in a country full of Asians.

Admittedly, my situation is atypical. But my surroundings here in the US of A are rife with Asians. Mostly Japanese Americans (families here for a century or more), but increasing numbers of immigrants from, for example, Thailand. Plus the occasional South Asian. WASPs are a distinct minority in my social circle.

No doubt the xenophobes would freak out. But to me it seems unexceptional. People, after all, are people. It's no more peculiar to have someone of Hispanic ancestry cooking in a Japanese restaurant than to have someone of Chinese ancestry be an expert in Frence cuisine. Welcome to the melting pot.

[CharlesWT]

I've read that Vietnamese restaurants prefer to hire Hispanics.

[wj]

I've read that Vietnamese restaurants prefer to hire Hispanics.

Pretty much all restaurants prefer to hire Hispanics for most positions. Just on the basis of cost -- especially for illegal immigrants. (The major exception being the wait staff, where looking like to nominal ethnic is preferred.)

[Liberal japonicus]

Hate to be paranoid, but that Twitter account starts in aug 2021 with this

I volunteer as tribute. Unmask our children and put all the unvaccinated lovelies in my class. I’ve got this ✌️

[Liberal japonicus]

Forgot to add the chef’s kiss. The tweet is accompanied with a pic of Katniss Everdeen from Hunger Games🙄

[CharlesWT]

I think with the Vietnamese restaurants the theory is that, unlike their fellow Vietnamese, Hispanics won't work long enough to learn the business and then start their own restaurants.

Yes, the Twitter account looks like a hobby horse account.

[CharlesWT]

...then start their own [Vietnamese] restaurants.

[nooneithinkisinmytree]

In any othert context, if the jagoff behaving this way on private or public property, was a black individual, an immigrant, anyone else but a white conservative subhuman pigfucker, male or female, a weapons-carrying conservative would be shooting to kill and asking questions never:

https://twitter.com/thatdaneshguy/status/1485106239910690816

Losing his job is not enough. Nothing is enough any longer for the racist pigfucking death cult of the thug conservative movement.

The cops, had they been called, wouldn't have shot him dead either because we know why.