Samuel Smith > Recent Status Updates

We are so back.

My guy Paolo really wants you to know that human energy is measured in calories and that machine energy is measured in joules.

Soooo much technobabble

Just outrageously bad; I'm glad I didn't pay money for this.

Ok now there's a serial killer. The writing is still hilariously bad, but that makes it skimmable. I'm gonna give it an extension to 50%.

This is immediately comically bad; I'm gonna give it to 25% but it's trending toward a DNF.

Looking forward to learning why this book isn't applicable to academic advising

This book is weird as hell

I got about halfway through the audiobook of this in 2023, and do not remember much of what was going on. I thought about just DNFing it, but it has such a good reputation that I'm gonna give it a shot.

Kicking this up to 1.5x

Fighting for my life

Part XII: 1958-1971

A lot of this section was bad: increasingly prosy and self-important, hyper-specific, "occasional poems," etc. But there were some high highs, including the sequence "Thanksgiving For A Habitat." This section is also interesting because one doesn't imagine Auden as living at the same time as Vietnam, the Beatles, the hippies, etc--though one is not surprised to learn that he didn't like them!

This is like the opposite of the Snoop Dogg affirmations--"your feelings are evil!" "Your friends are all criminals!" "Your life is all lies!"

This guy suuuuucks

Part XI: Dichtung Und Wahrheit (An Unwritten Poem)

This was interesting--a sort of ars poetica for love poems, specifically. It feels like something that somebody else would probably like to study!

Part X: 1948-1957

These are inconsistent in quality and trending toward prosiness. But the stand outs (especially The Shield of Achilles and the Horae Canonicae sequence) are very good.

Part 1: Antisemitism

Friends, I had to switch to the audio book. But the reader is really good! The book is, of course, very good. I learned a lot about Benjamin Disraeli and especially about the Dreyfus Affair. I was particularly struck by her description of "the mob" and her discussion of Clemenceau's failure to distinguish the mob from the people. This seems like a good lesson for the leaders of today.

Part IX: The Age of Anxiety

Auden won the Pulitzer Prize for this book-length.... poem? Drama? Drama-poem?

It's a weird one to evaluate. I think the hardest part is the tone: it's hard to tell how serious he is, and if he's not serious, it's hard to say what the point of it is. It's a Christian poem about post-war industrial alienation, in alliterative verse. With a tongue in cheek?

Not my favorite section.

Part 8: The Sea and the Mirror

This is on the short list of best things Auden wrote. It's a "commentary" in The Tempest by Shakespeare and is a hybrid of poetry and prose (not literary criticism). The highlight is a long, florid speech from Caliban to the audience. It certainly bears returning to, and this isn't the last time I'll read it.

Part VII: For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio

I was not expecting to get much out of this, much less to get a twinge of legitimate nostalgia for my academic research. This weird little pageant play from 1942 is so clearly in conversation with T.S. Eliot's weird little pageant play The Rock, to which I devoted about 50 pages of my dissertation. There was probably an article to be written there.

Sir Thomas straight up suckkkkks

Well the 2nd half of this section (1939-1948) was much more uneven than the first, but there were still some highlights.

"The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition."

Yeah, I think I'm gonna be able to make it through this.

Part VI(a): 1939-1947

I divided this part in half because there are a lot of poems and also this was my goal for August: getting to page 300. This is easily the best section so far. Lots of highlights but also a higher level overall. Includes my favorite Auden poem: "In Memory of W.B. Yeats." I noticed that there are a Lot of poems here from 1939; I wonder what was going on then 😅

50 pages lefttttttt...

"A question can be what does not fall. Maybe when a wrong becomes a question, a right becomes an idea. You are wrong because you are not right; something is not right. A right body might be fully functioning; a right body is upright, an able body. A new baby arrives: to confirm everything is right, toes and fingers are checked.
All present
She is all present"

It's just this for 300 pages, friends.