-Barney Frank

Just thought I’d share that.

Right now, I can’t help but think that the only flaw in Marini’s biography is his clear preference of Lowell’s second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, over Caroline Guiness (his third wife).  While Lowell ends up living with Elizabeth again towards the end of his life, Marini’s biography leaves me questioning the exact motivations behind Lowell’s decision to separate himself from “Lizzie” in the first place.  The true testament to the strength of Mariani’s writing, however, is that he conveyed the strength of Lowell and Lizzie’s relationship so articulately that the drama of their breakup left me feeling personally affected.  I think that the fallout from Lowell’s divorce, namely his decision to leave Lizzie for another woman, seemed so selfish on Lowell’s part that it might very well explain his subsequent labelling as a hyper-masculine and anti-feminist writer.  My predominant question about Lowell still remains, namely how I might resolve his fluxuating acceptance and intolerance of homosexuality into a more clear position, and is augmented by his similarly vacillating stances towards most civil rights issues: race, gender, and religion (to name a few).  While I would like to attribute his variegated attitudes to his mania (he was manic depressive), I am more apt to believe that, like most of his poetry, his ideas (like two feet on different planks spreading further apart as the planks move away from each other– an image he used to describe his indecision between life with Lizzie and life with Caroline) fixed themselves on his conservative upbringing and his liberal, even rebellious, adulthood.  What I do not know, and cannot know except by careful research, is this conflicting acceptance of his gay friends and his regular use of gay slurs (fairy being a favorite) were typical for his time.  Some of his intolerance might be a means for him to mask queer desires, since he does write about his first crush being for a boy, but I am reluctant to rely too heavily on this reading.   I do not want to get too absorbed in Lowell’s personal life, instead I am particularly interested how I should read his poetry, especially where queer issues are presented.  I am inclined to reread Lowell as a more tolerant and liberal figure, though still someone benefitting from and comfortable with his masculine, heterosexual privileges (he was notoriously difficult on his wives, mostly as a result of his mania).  I’m curious to see where my research will take me.  Now that I am done with reading Mariani’s biography, I am going to start reading some more of Lowell’s poems a bit more closely.  I’ll probably augment my readings with some critical essays here and there, but I’m expecting to immerse myself in criticism once I have a better grasp of Lowell’s writing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek3jAkx9m10&feature=bz301

The FAQ on the website mentions that a single person requires about 800 grains of rice a day to survive.  Thus, I am making it my goal to donate at least 800 grains of rice a day.  I figure this should be easy: every time I open internet explorer, I’ll just answer 10-20 vocab questions. 

Also, the game gives you an average “vocab score” from about 1-60 which supposedly tracks how strong your vocabulary is.  Right now, my high score is 43.  I’m aiming for 50 by the end of the year.

Multiple Oil Company Executives Gave Huge Contributions To Electing McCain Just Days After Offshore Drilling Reversal

Ten senior Hess Corporation executives and/or members of the Hess family each gave $28,500 to the joint RNC-McCain fundraising committee, just days after McCain reversed himself to favor offshore drilling, according to Federal Election Commission reports.

Nine of these contributions, seven from Hess executives and two from members of the Hess family, came on the same day, June 24th, the records show. The total collected in the wake of McCain’s reversal for the fund, called McCain Victory 2008, from Hess execs and family is $285,000.

We were alerted to the contributions by Campaign Money Watch, a non-partisan group that tracks campaign contributions. The contributions were given a quick mention deep in a report the group issued late last week, but with no names or other details provided. The Hess contributions are clearly newsworthy on their own.

The Washington Post reported last week that campaign contributions from oil industry execs rose in a big way in the last half of June, after McCain drew a huge amount of attention by reversing his opposition on June 16th to the federal ban on offshore drilling.

These Hess contributions, however, hadn’t been reported until now, and they will give more ammo to those arguing that McCain is being rewarded by campaign contributions in exchange for pro-industry positions. Here’s a table detailing the contributions:

J. Barclay Collins	Hess Corp.	Attorney	$28,500	19-Jun
John B. Hess	Hess Corp.	Executive	$28,500	24-Jun
Susan K. Hess	Homemaker	Homemaker	$28,500	24-Jun
Norma W. Hess	Retired	Retired	$28,500	24-Jun
John J. O’Connor	Hess Corp.	Executive	$28,500	24-Jun
Lawrence Ornstein	Hess Corp.	Senior VP	$28,500	24-Jun
John Reilly	Hess Corp.	Executive	$28,500	24-Jun
Alice Rocchio	Hess Corp.	Office Manager	$28,500	24-Jun
John Scelfo	Hess Corp.	Senior VP of Finance	$28,500	24-Jun
F. Borden Walker	Hess Corp.	Businessman	$28,500	24-Jun

Norma W. Hess is the widow of oil magnate and company founder Leon Hess, and Susan K. Hess is the wife of Hess chairman and CEO John Hess.

Neither a spokesperson for Hess nor the McCain campaign immediately responded to requests for comment. More on this in a bit.

Late Update: It turns out that $28,500 is the maximum that can be given to the RNC, but because this particular victory fund collects money via various channels, an individual donor can actually give more than that to it. I’ve edited out “maximum” from the headline. Obviously this doesn’t change the story in any way.

Late Late Update: A Hess office manager and her husband, an Amtrak worker, each chipped in $28,000 apiece, too.

Late Late Late Update: Turns out that the office manager and her Amtrak husband rent their home in Flushing, Queens.

Still Later Update: It’s likely that the Amtrak worker makes considerably less than $100,000 a year.

Lowell is typically read as an aggressively independent minded, Catholic, New England author.  Also, he is typically read as a man’s man sort of poet– fiercely masculine.  I see a lot of this in his work as well, but I also see a lot of queer undertones that I plan to emphasize in his work.  First, Lowell’s poem “First Love” is about his youthful attraction to a male schoolmate.  In his poem, Lowell sees his attraction to women as “wisdom’s fear,” and something that developed with age.  I want to consider what I see to be a strong homosocial undercurrent throughout his biography, arguing perhaps that his attraction to literature is a sublimation for his queer desires.  For example, Lowell became a poet around the time that he started liking women and viewed literature as a primarily male discipline.  Also, most of his relationships with other men seem to have circulated around literary texts, perhaps most striking was his “monastic” summer spent in a small cabin with a male friend rigorously reading classic literature (sort of sounds like a “Brokeback Mountain” of literature, probably without the sex though).  Lowell clearly viewed literature as a form of religious asceticism, but my question is what did he deny or sublimate through this asceticism?  There are also several homophobic notes in some of his poems, interspersed with other notes that might suggest queer desires.  I believe that he saw homosexuality as something that could be overcome by sheer will, in the same way that he believed that he could become a poet through sheer will as well.  Although I do not want to speculate if Lowell DID overcome his desires (I do not think he did, especially because he seems to have kept some contacts with several gay authors that might have been sexual), I want to portray Lowell as an author who partially used queer attractions as an unconscious, if not conscious, inspiration for his writing.  I also read in Lowell a strong need for the author to ”prove himself” as a man.  The author apparently worries about being emasculated, although I wonder what might be the source of this fear.  Lowell was raised primarily around women, but would that be enough to make him worry about his manliness so much?  I think that if I prod this question further, my persistence might bear some fruitful research (hehehe).

On that note, has anyone seen the Starcraft 2 website?  The new units look like a LOT of fun.  I can’t wait to run around with a protoss mothership!  My only concern is that Starcraft 2 does not look like it supports the hero model that Blizzard featured in Warcraft 3.  The ability for map designers to have level increasing heroes really helped inspire some great custom maps.  Will Starcraft 2, without the ability to create heroes, have as enjoyable custom map features?  All in all, I kind of hope that it doesn’t, as strange as that sounds: I could use having one less distraction from my Ph.D. work.

Also, moving the Embassy to Jerusalem?  God… can you say saber-rattling?  McCain has the gall to say that Obama is willing to lose a war just to win an election and then goes around saying stupid foreign policy statements that won’t accomplish anything except pissing off Muslims even more.  Or, his stupid comments about kicking Russia out of the G8 powers…  Yes, we need more enemies in the world.

I remember when I was in High School and actually respected McCain.  Now, I feel dirty thinking about that…

On a side note:  I hope that Germany commits troops to Afghanistan in light of Obama’s speech.  THAT would really make McCain look like the foreign policy idiot that he is.