[BRIEF NOTE] Olympics on TV

jdhorner recently mentioned the CBC's coverage of the Olympics in Athens. There's an interesting article on Slate praising CBC coverage compared to that of the major American networks.

[BRIEF NOTE] One More Giant Gone

From the Washington Post:

Polish Poet Czeslaw Milosz, 93, Dies

By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 15, 2004; Page C09

Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, 93, one of the major poets of the violent 20th century whose unflinching view of man's inhumanity was tempered by his love of the world's beauty, died Aug. 14 at his home in Krakow, Poland.

No exact cause of death was reported. His assistant told the Associated Press: "It's death, simply death. It was his time -- he was 93."

Czeslaw Milosz, censored in Poland, won the 1980 Nobel Prize.

His life, forged from the start in the crucible of Russia and Eastern Europe, straddled the chaos and the cataclysms of the century. He spent 30 years in self-imposed exile in France and the United States but returned to Poland in 1989 after the overthrow of Communist rule. His poetry inspired his countrymen for decades before he won the 1980 Nobel Prize for literature, which made him one of the best-read poets in the United States.

"He is without question one of the heroic figures of 20th-century poetry, although 'heroic' was a mantle he shunned," said Robert Faggen, a literature professor at Claremont McKenna College who interviewed, studied and wrote about the poet. "At the [Solidarity] monument in Gdansk, you have icons of three figures: Lech Walesa, Pope John Paul II and Milosz."

His work grappled ceaselessly with the religious and metaphysical paradox of how to live, and maintain one's faith, in a world of mass-scale suffering. He insisted on detachment and irony. "There is a very dark vision of the world in my work," he once told a Washington Post reporter, but he added that he was "a great partisan of human hope" due to his religious convictions. He believed, he said, in "the passionate pursuit of the real."

Czeslaw Milosz, "Ars Poetica?"

I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

That's why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion,
though its an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.
It's hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from,
when so often they're put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty.

What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons,
who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues,
and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand,
work at changing his destiny for their convenience?

It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today,
and so you may think that I am only joking
or that I've devised just one more means
of praising Art with thehelp of irony.

There was a time when only wise books were read
helping us to bear our pain and misery.
This, after all, is not quite the same
as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics.

And yet the world is different from what it seems to be
and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.
People therefore preserve silent integrity
thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
under unbearable duress and only with the hope
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.