Shitao/writing

Amy Gerstler makes this clear in �oeFor My Niece Sidney, Age Six,” the first poem in her delightful new collection, �oeDearest Creature.” Like good aunts the world over, she dispenses the info that moms and dads are too squeamish to traffic in, beginning with a factoid that would delight any red-blooded child: the death by boiling of one Margaret Davy in 1542 for poisoning her employer. This is the kind of thing you can discover in any encyclopedia, though no reference book ever breathes

a word about the fact that this humming,
aromatic, acid-flashback, pungent, tingly
fingered world is acted out differently
for each one of us by the puppet theater
of our senses. Some of us grow up doing
credible impressions of model citizens
(though sooner or later hairline
cracks appear in our facades). The rest
get dubbed eccentrics, unnerved and undone
by other people�s company, for which we
nevertheless pine. Curses, outbursts,
and distracting chants simmer all day
long in the Crock-Pots of our heads.

Philip Gourevitch, the New Yorker staff writer who for five years has been doing double-duty as the editor of The Paris Review, will leave his editor's post in April, The New York Observer reported. In an interview with The Observer, Mr. Gourevitch (whose books include "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families" and "The Ballad of Abu Ghraib") said that he wanted to focus more on his writing and a new book project about Rwanda. "I want to give that everything," Mr. Gourevitch said. "You can't take time off when you're in charge." A committee run by Antonio Weiss, the publisher of The Paris Review, and Terry McDonnell, the director of the Paris Review Foundation, and including Bob Silvers, the editor of The New York Review of Books, and Peter Matthiessen, a founder of The Paris Review, will search for Mr. Gourevitch's replacement.

Claude L��,©vi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called "primitive man" and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and '70s, has died at 100.
His son Laurent said Mr. L��,©vi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday at his home in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the C��,´te-d'Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.

"He had expressed the wish to have a discreet and sober funeral, with his family, in his country house," his son said. "He was attached to this place; he liked to take walks in the forest, and the cemetery where he is now buried is just on the edge of this forest."
With the fading of mythâ�,�s power in the modern West, he also suggested that music had taken on mythâ�,�s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.

With the fading of myth�s power in the modern West, he also suggested that music had taken on myth�s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.
But Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau�s idea that humankind�s problems derive from society�s distortions of nature. In Mr. Lévi-Strauss�s view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature�s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools.
This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity�s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.
For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, for example, every culture�s mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing �oebinary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.
This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting and cataloguing them.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss�s �oestructural” approach, seeking universals about the human mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to determine the various purposes served by a society�s practices and rituals. He was never interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a later generation, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and analyzing a society as if from the inside. (He began �oeTristes Tropiques” with the statement �oeI hate traveling and explorers.”)
To his mind, as he wrote in �oeThe Raw and the Cooked,” translated from �oeLe Cru et le Cuit” (1964), he had taken �oeethnographic research in the direction of psychology, logic, and philosophy.”
In radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1977 (published as �oeMyth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture”), Mr. Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how a structural examination of myth might proceed. He cited a report that in 17th-century Peru, when the weather became exceedingly cold, a priest would summon all those who had been born feet first, or who had a harelip, or who were twins. They were accused of being responsible for the weather and were ordered to repent, to correct the aberrations. But why these groups? Why harelips and twins?

ANAGRAMMARIANS ALERT!

English poetry is "NIGHTLY REPOSE"

Spanish poetry is "POINTY PHRASES"

Indian poetry is "PAINTED IRONY"

Sanskrit poetry is "SPOKEN ARTISTRY"

Hebrew poetry is "POWER THEREBY"

Portuguese poetry is "URGE: TYPE OUT PROSE"

Japanese poetry is "PEN REPEATS A JOY"

Irish poetry is "RIPE HISTORY"

Bulgarian poetry is "ARGUABLY PROTEIN"

--HEATHER McHUGH

Poet Heather McHugh mines words for contradictions and double meanings, offering the reader an expansive, fresh perspective on themes like love and mortality.

McHugh was recently rewarded a MacArthur fellowship for her efforts. The so-called genius grant comes with a $500,000 honorarium, which, the poet says, she will use to pay more attention to her work.

"I need to get back to my own work," McHugh tells Robert Siegel. "I've been teaching for 33 years, and to learn to teach has been to learn to pay attention to the work of others. And I've been doing that pretty ardently yea these many years, now and again taking a leave of absence."