‘Hearing’ ‘Voices’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The poet and critic John Greening sums up the career of James Merrill, who conversed with the inhabitants of other planes of reality, in a 2010 essay, “Ouija”:

James Merrill made a point of breaking all the rules, of remaining recklessly formal when all about him were casting off their chains, of being incorrigibly discursive and elitist, shunning the rhythms of speech for something more refinedly musical, and unswerving in his determination to squeeze every last pun out of a line.—John Greening, “Ouija,” The Dark Horse, Summer 2010

Merrill was a rebel in his adherence to rules in a rule-breaking era. He wrote dazzling, perfect poems, and he employed almost every verse form available to him, as an actor might use accents. Greening quotes George Bradley: “Reading James Merrill is enough to make the rest of us suspect we’re not smart enough to write poetry.” Even at his smartest, he is engaging and not impenetrable. His pleasure in the sounds of words and the poetic effects he creates and his many puns are always evident. He compliments his readers in his implied assumption that we must know what he is writing about at least as well as he does.
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Today in History, February 26

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Jackie Gleason (above) was born 100 years ago today.

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Four hundred years ago today, astronomer Galileo Galilei was ordered by Cardinal Bellarmine—under the orders of Pope Paul V—”to abandon completely … the opinion that the sun stands still at the center of the world and the earth moves, and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing.” Galileo was allowed to consider the idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun as a philosophical idea, a metaphysical “what-if,” but he was prohibited from teaching it or writing anything that argued for its physical truth.

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Mutual Film Corporation and Charlie Chaplin signed a contract that would pay him $10,000 a week on this date 100 years ago.
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Today in History, February 25

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all.”—Nikita Khrushchev, February 25, 1956

After ten days of meetings, the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union came to a conclusion on February 24, 1956, when party officials were informed that at midnight on February 25, an unannounced “closed” session would begin. Only those with special invitations could attend. Sixty years ago tonight, at midnight, General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev (pictured above) began speaking. For the next four hours, he read from a prepared text titled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” in which he denounced his late predecessor, Joseph Stalin, and outlined his many crimes against the Soviet people and the Communist Party. The speech itself was not made public until 1989, but its existence was a widely discussed rumor within months of Krushchev’s reading of it. As rumored speeches go, it was effective: the Stalinist Era was over.
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