The Birthday Party School of Literary Criticism

The Birthday Party School of Literary Appreciation

          Have you heard enough of deconstruction, narratology, semiotics, transgresssive transgendering, flatulitics?  It’s much worse than the older labelling terms and rules—comparatively simple nonsense like iambs and trochees, sonnet forms, heroic couplet

—which were used as a substitute for engaging with literature.  But both the new “theoretical” nonsense and the older formalist labels are worthless, and worse:  they distract us.  We should forget all the old literary arithmetic stuff, and we must refuse, abjure, denounce, and in the future simply ignore all literary “theory” and the literary criticism that uses such.  Literature has value—and neither it nor its readers need literary theory or literary criticism—or rules.

          The world was much better—and we were much better and more useful—when the study of literature meant reading for understanding and appreciation.  Our aim was modest and respectable then:  we served art, rather than shit on it, and we read literature in order to learn more about life.

          Literature has value, and there are good reasons why we should study it.  Criticism has its place, of course:  we should all read critically, thoughtfully, analytically.  But what most literary critics do is—at best—an irrelevant elaboration of the footnote, a sort of self-important distractionism
.

          There was once an important footnote—and it is a most important bit of Keats criticism.  Douglas Bush wrote—in a footnote to the old Riverside edition of John Keats—“When Keats writes about ‘thinking,’ he means a sympathetic understanding of the human condition.”

          The Birthday Party School of Literary Appreciation is dedicated to reading poems, novels, stories, and plays.  And essays, biographies, and autobiographies.  You can attend—or start your own branch.  Why not begin with Keats?  Friday, 31 October 2014 will be the 219^th birthday of John Keats.  Call a meeting—or just invite your friends.  Read and talk about some of Keats’s poems.  You might even refer to his letters.  And celebrate—with perhaps “a draught of vintage”—those poems, and their author.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Bert Hornback                                                    

VIOLENCE

Another murder.  Another young man with a gun, killing somebody.  And Americans are sad, horrified, etc.  For sixty years America has been killing people--innocent people, like the tens of thousands of people it murdered in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, like that little girl covered with napalm, burning alive in Vietnam--and some damnable American journalist took her picture instead of trying to help her.  If there is a hell, he should have a very special place!

Americans bomb the world.  Their shameless hypocritical leader uses drones to kill anybody anywhere--and after they are dead, the USA declares them "enemies."

All the young Americans who kill their classmates are doing is following the leader.  Killing is the American thing to do:  and this president has taken such to a higher leve than we have ever known.  Harry Truman had the excuse of ignorsnce.  The wonderfully named "Obamba" knows exactly what he is doung..  And to cluck and sigh at this latest act of violence is gross hypocrisy.

Stop the president's murders!  Stop the Sixty Years War.

Open your eyes, Americans.  You TEACH violence and murder.  It's the American Way.  And until YOU quit supporting such you will cause more and more murders like the ones in Seattle.

Don't cringe, and sigh.  STAND UP AGAINST YOUR COUNTRY'S MURDEROUS VIOLENCE.  And then you can start to deal with the horrific violence among your fellow-citizens,  in your country.

                                                                    Bert Hornback

JOHN KERRY:  ON BEING A MAN

Mr.  Kerry wants Edward Snowden to "man -up," and go back to the United States to face what Mr. Kerry calls "justice."

Mr. Obama has already said that if Edward Snowden comes home, he--Mr. Obama--will not seek the death penalty for him.

What the United States calls justice --as Mr. Kerry should know--includes the illegal torture facility at Guantanamo Bay in illegally Cuba.  It includes using unmanned drones to kill people who--after they have been killed--are determined always to have been "enemies" of the United States.

The prisoners at Guantanamo--some of them there, now, for fourteen years--have never been tried in a court of law, not even a United States court of law!  They have been declared--without trial--to be "enemies" of the United States.

And now Mr. Kerry thinks Edward Snowden should "man-up" and go back to the United States. He would quickly get sent off to Guantanamo, where he could safely be tortured for the rest of his life.

If Mr. Snowden were not in Russia, Mr. Obama would by now have used one of his American drones to murder Mr. Snowden.  He has already killed one United States citizen with a drone.  (Never mind "trial by jury"--that doesn't mean anything is a rogue state.)

We might remember that when Bradley Manning was first apprehended, and put in solitary confinement, and tortured--in his native country, as a United States citizen:  even before anybody started talking about the perhaps necessity of bringing him to trial, Mr. Obama announced that Manning was in prison "because he broke the law."

When the president of a country declares someone guilty before he is even charged with specific offenses, before he is tried in court for any offenses, that country is a lawless rogue state.  Mr. Obama might as well declare himself for what he is:  a dictator, a lawless head of what has become a lawless state.

When will the United States recover itself?  It can still reform.  Its people aren't evil people.  Americans protested against Lyndon Johnson and his war in Vietnam, and brought him down.  When Richard Nixon's National Guard opened fire on antiwar demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio and killed four young people, the whole nation was horrified.

But now?  Well, the United States has been at war constantly since 1991.  Maybe now nobody knows how to stop being at war.  Maybe that's why most American citizens ignore it.  Maybe they figure they are lucky to be Americans--because so far Mr. Obama hasn't used his drones IN the United States.

Stay where you are, Edward Snowden.  And when you are given the Nobel Peace Prize, accept it in absentia.  Or go to Oslo with Mr. Putin walking in front of you and behind you.

THE NEW SON-NET


I'm writing you a poem which has four-
Teen lines--which means, of course, that it's a son-
Net, and therefore good and worth our stu-
Dy.  Older sonnets rhymed, but now the hy-
Phen's used at ends of lines.  Who wants old-fash-
Ioned stuff?  Who cares to listen to that child-
Ish sing-song, ring-ding, dung-tongue repeti-
Tion?  We hyphenate, and sometimes use a dash--

To signify the octave's over, fin-
Ished. Now it's time to write a clever ses-
Tet.  No more silly quasi-insubstan-
Tial rhyming trash.  No wit or thought or mean-
Ing. All we need is form, and formula-
Tion.  Sing, my muse, sing hyphenated trash--

POPE FRANCIS AND SEX ABUSE

POPE FRANCIS AND SEX ABUSE

A "zero tolerance" policy is nice, and almost sounds tough.  But what about punishing the known offenders?  Shouldn't they be turned over to the appropriate law enforcement officials. to face criminal charges?

"Zero tolerance" says simply that the Catholic Church WILL NO LONGER HIDE CRIMINAL  SEX ABUSERS.  That isn't enough.   Pope Francis has to release the information on those whom the Catholic Church knows are sex offenders so that they can face justice.

Anything less than that is itself criminal.  And hiding sex abusers and sex abuse makes the Pope guilty of such himself.  It's called 'misprision of a felony," or being an "accessory after the fact."

He needs to turn over the church officials who have themselves hidden sex abuse--like Cardinal Mahoney of Boston, who was escaped from Boston authorities by Pope Benedict and hidden away in St. Mary Major basilica in Rome.  Send him back to Boston for trial.

                                                          Bert Hornback
 

MEDICAL CHARLATAN CHAUNCEY CRANDALL

Please join me in shaming Dr. Chauncey Crandall, a third-rate medical charlatan advertising himself for "pennies a day" as a doctor.  He should be banned from the medical profession.  He is a capitalist disgrace to an honorable calling.  Doctors should demand his exclusion from their number.

He is a huckster.  And a disgrace.

Avoid Chauncey Crandall!  Despise him and his kind!

                                                             Bert Hornback

US TERRORIST ATTACK ON TERRORISTS AND OTHERS


Mr. Obama-amabo has done it again.  Strike up another big mark for US Terrorism.  55 people this time.  Another drone attack.  US TERRORISM.  US TERRORISM. The world's biggest Terrorist organization strikes again.

The US rubric is, as usual, "Anybody we kill must have been a terrorist."

Obama makes Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon look like angels.

The US thinks that because it has a million nuclear missiles it can do anything:  murder anybody anywhere.  Like every other corrupt, murderous regime in history, it will fall.  The danger is that the US is so selfish--and so stupid--that it may destroy the whole world as it falls.

Can the US get any worse?  Sure.  And it will.  Every day it gets worse, and worse.   The world's only hope is that it will implode.  Maybe  US drones will get smart and start to explode in the US.

SHAME.  SHAME.  SHAME.