Rockets that will take Americans back to space from U.S. soil for the first time since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011 could also launch new careers in space science. Faith Lapidus reports.
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From: MeNeedIt
Author Archives: FuturSale
Immigrants Are Sought for Labor Shortage in Harvey Recovery
As a parade of motorists rolled down their windows on the edges of a Houston Home Depot parking lot offering cash, the crowd of day laborers had slowly thinned to about a dozen by mid-morning.
The workers who were already gone were off to tear out soggy carpeting, carry ruined sofas to the curb and saw apart mold-infested drywall. Those who still remained knew they were hot commodities and weren’t going to settle for low offers.
The owner of a car dealership shook his head and drove off after his $10-an-hour proposal to clean flooded vehicles drew no takers. A pickup driver who promised $50 for two hours to rip out wet carpeting and move furniture was told the job was too short to be worthwhile.
Day laborers — many of them immigrants and many of them in the country illegally — will continue to be in high demand as workers who clear debris make way for plumbers, electricians, drywall installers and carpenters. Employers are generally small, unregulated contractors or individual homeowners, resulting in a lack of oversight that creates potential for workers to be unpaid or work in dangerous conditions.
Houston’s day laborers are generally settling for $120 to $150 to clear homes of Harvey’s debris for eight hours. As noon struck Friday, three workers took a job for $100 for up to five hours rather than let the whole day slip. It didn’t hurt that the contractor provided tools, distributed bottles of cold water and dangled the prospect of more steady work clearing other houses.
“Now we’ll be busy for the rest of the year,” said the contractor, Nicolas Garcia, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Mexico who has had his own business for 15 years. “Now that this disaster happened, we have to step it up.”
Garcia, 55, is working about 20 miles southeast of downtown Houston in the Southbelt/Ellington area, a middle-class residential neighborhood whose main streets are lined with fast-food restaurants, strip malls and churches. Waters reached 5 feet in some streets on Aug. 27, forcing families with young children to escape on neighbors’ boats and inflatable swimming pool toys.
The contractor led a caravan of workers to a four-bedroom house that was in better shape than others. Sharon Eldridge, a 63-year-old renter who lives alone, landed in about a foot of water when she stepped out of bed Sunday. Her furniture and clothes were ruined, but she didn’t have to evacuate.
Armando Rivera, a 36-year-old Honduran who is living in the country illegally and raising four children with his wife, said it was painful to see so many people die and lose their home, but the storm would jolt the local construction economy.
“When there is work, you can live a good life,” he said as he took a break from knifing Eldridge’s water-logged beige carpeting into pieces small enough to carry outside.
Construction workers were scarce even before Harvey struck. The Associated General Contractors of America, a trade group, said Tuesday that a survey of 1,608 members showed 58 percent struggled to fill carpentry jobs and 53 percent were having trouble finding electricians and bricklayers. Texas’ shortages were more acute.
Nationwide unemployment in construction was 4.7 percent in August, down from 5.1 percent a year earlier. Ken Simonson, chief economist for the contractor trade group, said the latest indicator was the lowest for any August since the government began keeping track in 2000.
“From what I’m reading, we’ve never seen so many homes either destroyed or at least rendered uninhabitable at once,” Simonson said. “I doubt there is enough labor with the skills.”
A sharp increase in immigration arrests under President Donald Trump may further limit the labor pool. The Houston office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has made about 10,000 arrests this year, second-highest in the country after Dallas. The region has about 600,000 immigrants in the country illegally, third-largest behind New York and Los Angeles.
Laborers who gathered at Home Depot stores for Harvey work — some on their fourth of fifth major storm — swapped stories about exploitation that either they or someone they knew had suffered. Jose Pineda, a Nicaraguan who entered the country illegally in 2005 through the Arizona desert, said he had injured his arm with a saw and was shorted $380 but decided not to complain. Arturo Garcia, a legal resident from Mexico, knows three people who got hernias on the job and had to pay for surgery out of pocket because they were uninsured.
Storm recoveries pose heightened danger. A 2009 study by researchers at University of California, Los Angeles and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network found that day laborers working on storm recovery during Hurricane Katrina were commonly exposed to mold, worked on roofs without safeguards against falling and were exposed to chemicals and asbestos.
Pineda, 40, joined three other laborers at a three-bedroom house with soaked red carpet, moldy leather chairs, a television and other furniture strewn about as if a tornado hit. The owner balked in the Home Deport parking lot when workers asked for $120 each to clear the house and bargained them down to $100.
When Pineda saw the home and experienced its overwhelming stench, he realized it would take much longer than the owner promised and insisted on $150. The workers left when the owner refused.
“They didn’t realize that everything in the house was ruined,” said the owner, who identified himself only by his first name, Guy. “We just don’t have the money to pay them.”
From: MeNeedIt
Ice Bucket: Boston Honors man who Inspired ALS Challenge
The man who inspired the ice bucket challenge that has raised millions for ALS research is being honored at Boston City Hall.
Mayor Martin Walsh is hosting a rally Tuesday for Pete Frates at City Hall Plaza. The event coincides with the release of a new book on Frates.
“The Ice Bucket Challenge: Pete Frates and the Fight against ALS” was written by Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge. Half of its proceeds benefit the Frates family.
Walsh will declare Sept. 5 as Pete Frates Day in Boston.
Frates, his family, the book authors, Boston Red Sox officials and the Boston College baseball team are expected to attend.
Frates is a former Boston College baseball star who has inspired millions of dollars in donations for research on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS.
From: MeNeedIt
Global Survey: Generosity Declines Worldwide, But Africa Saves Day
The world’s poorest continent continued to grow more generous according to a yearly index of charitable giving released on Tuesday, bucking the trend of otherwise declining signs of charity worldwide.
Africa was in a 2016 survey the only continent to report a continent-wide increase of its index generosity score when compared to its five-year average.
The score is a combined measure of respondents in 139 countries who were asked whether they had given money to a good cause, volunteered their time and helped a stranger.
“Despite the many challenges our continent is facing, it is encouraging to see that generosity continues to grow,” said Gill Bates, Southern Africa’s CEO for the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) that commissioned the poll.
Numbers for donating money dip
But globally, donating money and helping a stranger fell by nearly 2 percent, while volunteering dropped about 1 percent, the index showed.
From the United States to Switzerland and Singapore to Denmark, the index showed that the planet’s 10 richest countries by GDP per capita, for which data was available, saw declines in their generosity index score.
Myanmar leads the world
Myanmar, for the fourth consecutive year, held the top position of the World Giving Index as the most generous country.
Nine in ten of those surveyed in the Southeast Asian nation said they had donated money during the previous month.
Indonesia ranked second on the combined measure of generosity, overtaking the United States which held that position in last year’s index.
Big jump for Kenya
A star performer, CAF said, was the East African nation of Kenya, which jumped from twelfth to third place in a single year.
Yemen, the Middle East’s poorest country, which has been grappling with the effects of civil war ranked bottom of the World Giving Index.
The index is primarily based on data from a global poll of 146,000 respondents by market research firm Gallup.
From: MeNeedIt
For Chinese Millennials, Despondency Has a Brand Name
Chinese millennials with a dim view of their career and marriage prospects can wallow in despair with a range of teas such as “achieved-absolutely-nothing black tea,” and “my-ex’s-life-is-better-than-mine fruit tea.”
While the drink names at the Sung chain of tea stalls are tongue-in-cheek, the sentiment they reflect is serious: A significant number of young Chinese with high expectations have become discouraged and embrace an attitude known on social media as “sang,” after a Chinese character associated with the word “funeral” that describes being dispirited.
“Sang” culture, which revels in often-ironic defeatism, is fueled by internet celebrities, through music and the popularity of certain mobile games and TV shows, as well as sad-faced emojis and pessimistic slogans.
It’s a reaction to cut-throat competition for good jobs in an economy that isn’t as robust as it was a few years ago and when home-ownership — long seen as a near-requirement for marriage in China — is increasingly unattainable in major cities as apartment prices have soared.
“I wanted to fight for socialism today but the weather is so freaking cold that I’m only able to lay on the bed to play on my mobile phone,” 27-year-old Zhao Zengliang, a “sang” internet personality, wrote in one post. “It would be great if I could just wake up to retirement tomorrow,” she said in another.
Such ironic humor is lost on China’s ruling Communist Party.
In August, Sung Tea was called out for peddling “mental opium” by the Communist Party’s official People’s Daily, which described sang culture in an editorial as “an extreme, pessimistic and hopeless attitude that’s worth our concern and discussion.”
“Stand up, and be brave. Refuse to drink ‘sung tea,’ choose to walk the right path, and live the fighting spirit of our era,” it said.
China’s State Council Information Office did not reply to a request for comment for this story.
Despondency among a segment of educated young people is a genuine concern for President Xi Jinping and his government, which prizes stability.
The intensifying censorship clampdown on media and cyberspace in the run-up to autumn’s Communist Party congress, held once every five years, extends even to negativity, with regulations issued in early June calling for “positive energy” in online audiovisual content.
Later that month, some young netizens were frustrated when Bojack Horseman, an animated American TV series about a half-man/half-horse former sitcom star, and popular among the “sang” generation for his self-loathing and cynicism, was pulled from Chinese streaming site iQiyi.
“Screw positive energy,” Vincent, a 27-year old Weibo user, commented under a post announcing the news.
A spokesperson at iQiyi said the decision to remove Bojack Horseman was due to “internal process issues” but declined to give further details.
Social media and online gaming giant Tencent Holdings Ltd has even gone on the counterattack against “sang” culture. It has launched an ad campaign around the Chinese word “ran” — which literally means burning and conveys a sense of optimism — with slogans such as “every adventure is a chance to be reborn.”
Only-child blues
Undermining “sang” may take some doing.
“Sang” is also a rebellion against the striving of contemporary urban China, no matter the cost or hopes of achieving a goal. Tied to that is intense social and family pressure to succeed, which typically comes with the expectation that as members of the one-child generation people will support aging parents and grandparents.
Zhao’s online posts, often tinged with dark humor, have attracted almost 50,000 fans on microblogging site Weibo. Zhao turned the subject into a book last year: A Life Where You Can’t Strive for Success All The Time.
While China’s roughly 380 million millennials — or those aged about 18 to 35 — have opportunities that earlier generations would have found unimaginable, they also have expectations that are becoming harder to meet.
The average starting salary for college graduates dropped by 16 percent this year to 4,014 yuan ($608) per month amid intensifying competition for jobs as a record 8 million graduate from Chinese universities — nearly ten times the number in 1997.
Even among elite “sea turtles” — those who return after studying overseas, often at great expense — nearly half of 2017 graduates earned less than 6,000 yuan per month, a Zhaopin.com survey found, with 70 percent of respondents saying their pay is “far below” expectations.
Home-ownership is a nearly universal aspiration in China, but it is increasingly difficult to get on the property ladder in big cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.
An average two-bedroom home in Beijing’s resale market costs around 6 million yuan ($909,835) after prices surged 36.7 percent in 2016, according to Fang.com, China’s biggest real estate website. That’s about 70 times the average per capita disposable income in the city; the ratio is less than 25 times for New York City.
Median per person rent in Beijing, where most of the estimated 8 million renters are millennials, according to Ziroom.com, has risen 33 percent in the past five years to 2,748 yuan a month in June, equivalent to 58 percent of median income in the city, a survey by E-House China R&D Institute found. The costs often mean that young Chinese workers have to live on the edges of cities, with long, stressful journeys to work.
Financial pressures also contribute to young Chinese waiting longer to get married.
In Nanjing, a major eastern city, the median age for first marriages rose to 31.6 last year, from 29.9 in 2012, official data showed.
Rising expectations
“Sang” contrasts with the optimism of those who entered adulthood during the years of China’s double-digit economic growth in previous decades. That generation was motivated by career prospects and life quality expectations that their parents and grandparents, who had learned to “eat bitter” during tougher times, could only dream of.
“Our media and society have shoved too many success stories down our throat,” said Zhao.
“‘Sang’ is a quiet protest against society’s relentless push for achieving the traditional notion of success. It is about admitting that you just can’t make it,” she told Reuters.
It is also a symptom of the lack of channels for frustrated young adults to vent frustration, a survey of 200 Chinese university students by researchers at state think tank Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) found in June.
“The internet itself is a channel for them to release pressure but, due to censorship, it’s impossible to do so by openly venting,” Xiao Ziyang, a CASS researcher, told Reuters.
“It’s necessary for the government to exercise public opinion control to prevent social problems.”
Sung Tea founder Xiang Huanzhong, 29, said he expects pressure on young Chinese adults only to grow, citing the aging of the population as a particular burden for the young.
Xiang has capitalized on the trend with products named after popular “sang” phrases. The chain has single locations in 12 cities after opening its first permanent tea stall in July in Beijing, where a best-selling “sitting-around-and-waiting-to-die” matcha milk tea costs 18 yuan.
Xiang said he chose tame names for his products so as not to attract censure from authorities, leaning toward the self-deprecating.
He took issue with the People’s Daily’s critical editorial.
“It didn’t try to seriously understand at all,” he said.
Wang Hanqi, 21, a student at Nanjing Audit University, sought out Sung Tea after hearing about it on social media.
“I’m a bit disappointed that the names for the tea are not ‘sang’ enough,” he said in an interview outside the Beijing stall.
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From: MeNeedIt
Growing US Dilemma: Automated Jobs Meet Social Consciousness
Security guard Eric Leon watches the Knightscope K5 security robot as it glides through the mall, charming shoppers with its blinking blue and white lights. The brawny automaton records video and sounds alerts. According to its maker, it deters mischief just by making the rounds.
Leon, the all-too-human guard, feels pretty sure that the robot will someday take his job.
“He doesn’t complain,” Leon says. “He’s quiet. No lunch break. He’s starting exactly at 10.”
Even in the technology hotbed stretching from Silicon Valley to San Francisco, a security robot can captivate passers-by. But the K5 is only one of a growing menagerie of automated novelties in a region where you can eat a delivered pizza made via automation and drink beers at a bar served by an airborne robot. This summer, the San Francisco Chronicle published a tech tourism guide listing a dozen or so places where tourists can observe robots and automation in action.
Yet San Francisco is also where workers were the first to embrace mandatory sick leave and fully paid parental leave. Voters approved a $15 hourly minimum wage in 2014, a requirement that Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law for the entire state in 2016. And now one official is pushing a statewide “tax” on robots that automate jobs and put people out of work.
It’s too soon to say if the effort will prevail, let alone whether less-progressive jurisdictions might follow suit. The tussle points to the tensions that can flare when people embrace both technological innovation and a strong brand of social consciousness.
Such frictions seem destined to escalate as automation makes further inroads into the workplace. One city supervisor, Norman Yee, has proposed barring food delivery robots from city streets, arguing that public sidewalks should be solely for people.
“I’m a people person,” Yee says, “so I tend to err on the side of things that should be beneficial and safe for people.”
Future for workers
Jane Kim, the city supervisor who is pushing the robot tax, says it’s important to think now about how people will earn a living as more U.S. jobs are lost to automation. After speaking with experts on the subject, she decided to launch a statewide campaign with the hope of bringing revenue-raising ideas to the state legislature or directly to voters.
“I really do think automation is going to be one of the biggest issues around income inequality,” Kim says.
It makes sense, she adds, that the city at the center of tech disruption take up the charge to manage that disruption.
“It’s not inherently a bad thing, but it will concentrate wealth, and it’s going to drive further inequity if you don’t prepare for it now,” she says.
“Preposterous” is what William Santana Li, CEO of security robot maker Knightscope calls the supervisor’s idea. His company created the K5 robot monitoring the Westfield Valley Fair mall in San Jose.
The private security industry, Li says, suffers from high turnover and low pay. As he sees it, having robots handle menial tasks allows human guards to assume greater responsibilities — like managing a platoon of K5 robots — and likely earn more pay in the process.
Li acknowledges that such jobs would require further training and some technological know-how. But he says people ultimately stand to benefit. Besides, Li says, it’s wrong to think that robots are intended to take people’s jobs.
“We’re working on 160 contracts right now, and I can maybe name two that are literally talking about, `How can I get rid of that particular human position?”‘
Spurring new jobs
The question of whether — or how quickly — workers will be displaced by automation ignites fierce debate. It’s enough to worry Bill Gates, who suggested in an interview early this year a robot tax as a way to slow the speed of automation and give people time to prepare. The Microsoft co-founder hasn’t spoken publicly about it since.
A report last year from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded that 9 percent of jobs in the United States — or about 13 million — could be automated. Other economists argue that the impact will be much less drastic.
The spread of automation should also generate its own jobs, analysts say, offsetting some of those being eliminated. Workers will be needed, for example, to build and maintain robots and develop the software to run them.
Technological innovation has in the past created jobs in another way, too: Work involving new technologies is higher-skilled and typically higher-paying. Analysts say that much of the extra income those workers earn tends to be spent on additional goods and services, thereby creating more jobs.
“There are going to be a wider array of jobs that will support the automation economy,” said J.P. Gownder, an analyst at the research firm Forrester. “A lot of what we’re going to be doing is working side by side with robots.”
What about people who lose jobs to automation but can’t transition to more technologically demanding work?
Lawmakers in Hawaii have voted to explore the idea of a universal basic income to guarantee wages to servers, cooks and cleaners whose jobs may be replaced by machines. Kim, the San Francisco supervisor, is weighing the idea of using revenue from a robot tax to supplement the low wages of people whose jobs can’t be automated, like home health care aides.
Doug Bloch, political director of Teamsters Joint Council 7 in Northern California and northern Nevada, said there have been no mass layoffs among hotel, trucking or food service staff resulting from automation. But that day is coming, he warns.
Part of his responsibility is to make sure that union drivers receive severance and retraining if they lose work to automation.
“All the foundations are being built for this,” he says. “The table is being set for this banquet, and we want to make sure our members have a seat at the table.”
Innovation ‘moves the world forward’
Tech companies insist their products will largely assist, and not displace, workers. Savioke, based in San Jose, makes 3-foot-tall (91 centimeter) robots — called Relay — that deliver room service at hotels where only one person might be on duty at night. This allows the clerk to stay at the front desk, said Tessa Lau, the company’s “chief robot whisperer.”
“We think of it as our robots taking over tasks but not taking over jobs,” Lau says. “If you think of a task as walking down a hall and waiting for an elevator, Relay’s really good at that.”
Similarly, friends Steve Simoni, Luke Allen and Gregory Jaworski hatched the idea of a drink-serving robot one night at a crowded bar in San Francisco. There was no table service. But there was a sea of thirsty people.
“We all wanted another round, but you have to send someone to leave the conversation and wait in line at the bar for 10 minutes and carry all the drinks back,” Allen says.
They created the Bbot, a box that slides overhead on a fixed route at the Folsom Street Foundry in San Francisco, bringing drinks ordered by smartphone and poured by a bartender — who still receives a tip. The bar is in Kim’s district in the South of Market neighborhood.
Simoni says the company is small and it couldn’t shoulder a government tax. But he’s glad policymakers are preparing for a future with more robots and automation.
“I don’t know if we need to tax companies for it, but I think it’s an important debate,” he says.
As for his trio, he says: “We’re going to side with innovation every time. Innovation is what moves the world forward.”
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From: MeNeedIt
Steely Dan Co-founder, Guitarist, Walter Becker Dies at 67
A rock and roll fan with a penchant for harmony and obtuse references, Walter Becker, the guitarist, bassist and co-founder of the 1970s rock group Steely Dan, which sold more than 40 million albums and produced such hit singles as “Reelin’ In the Years,” “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number” and “Deacon Blues” died Sunday. He was 67.
His official website announced his death Sunday with no further details.
Donald Fagen said in a statement Sunday that his Steely Dan bandmate was not only “an excellent guitarist and a great songwriter” but also “smart as a whip,” “hysterically funny” and “cynical about human nature, including his own.”
“I intend to keep the music we created together alive as long as I can with the Steely Dan band,” Fagen wrote.
Becker had been sidelined
Although Steely Dan had been touring recently, Becker had missed performances earlier in the summer in Los Angeles and New York. Fagen later told Billboard that Becker was recovering from a procedure. Fagen said at the time he hoped that Becker would be fine soon.
Musicians were quick to mourn Becker on social media Sunday. Mark Ronson tweeted that Becker was “one half of the team I aspire to every time I sit down at a piano.”
Both Ryan Adams and the band The Mountain Goats tweeted that Becker changed their lives. Slash posted a photo of Becker on Instagram, writing “RIP (hash)WalterBecker.”
Started with saxophone
A Queens native who started out playing the saxophone and eventually picked up the guitar, Becker met Fagen as a student at Bard College in 1967.
“We started writing nutty little tunes on an upright piano in a small sitting room in the lobby of Ward Manor, a mouldering old mansion on the Hudson River that the college used as a dorm,” Fagen recalled in his statement. “We liked a lot of the same things: jazz (from the twenties through the mid-sixties), W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, science fiction, (Vladimir) Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Berger, and Robert Altman films come to mind. Also soul music and Chicago blues.”
They played with the 1960s pop group Jay and the Americans and penned the song “I Mean to Shine,” performed by Barbara Streisand in 1971 before moving to California and founding the band, which they named after a sex toy in William S. Burroughs’ 1959 novel “Naked Lunch.”
“Like a lot of kids from fractured families, he had the knack of creative mimicry, reading people’s hidden psychology and transforming what he saw into bubbly, incisive art,” Fagen recalled.
First album in 1972
Their first album as Steely Dan, “Can’t Buy Me a Thrill” was released in 1972, and featured both “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ In the Years.” A lukewarm Rolling Stone review from the time said it contained “three top-level cuts and scattered moments of inspiration.”
The band continued producing albums throughout the 1970s, Boasting songs penned by Fagen and Becker and music provided by some of the best session musicians in the business.
“It wouldn’t bother me at all,” Becker said in an interview, “not to play on my own album.”
In their music, Steely Dan offered an idiosyncratic combination of rock and jazz, backed with subversive and literary lyrics that neither expected many fans to understand — and which they themselves sometimes claimed to not understand. They scored a big hit with “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number” in 1974 before hitting a high point in 1977 with the album “Aja.”
‘Musical antiheroes’
“What underlies Steely Dan’s music — and may, with this album, be showing its limitations — is its extreme intellectual self-consciousness, both in music and lyrics,” wrote critic Michael Duffy in Rolling Stone in 1977 of the album. “Given the nature of these times, this may be precisely the quality that makes Walter Becker and Donald Fagen the perfect musical antiheroes for the Seventies.”
But it wasn’t quite enough to sustain Steely Dan past their next studio album, “Gaucho.” They broke up in 1981 after the album’s release.
Becker had suffered some personal hardships during this time, including addiction, his girlfriend’s death by overdose and a resulting lawsuit, and a serious injury he sustained after being struck by a cab. When Steely Dan disbanded, Becker retreated to Maui and began growing avocados, while Fagen attempted a solo career.
Honored in 2001
Becker eventually reunited with Fagen and, after a nearly 20 year hiatus, released two albums: “Two Against Nature,” which won four Grammys, including album of the year in 2001, and “Everything Must Go.”
They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.
Ever sardonic and ornery, when they got back together and started touring again, Becker joked in an NPR interview that they were going to be wearing defibrillator backpacks during their performances just in case something went wrong.
When the interviewer asked about bands touring past their prime, Becker just said: “People were already thinking that about us in the `70s. It would be a shame if they didn’t continue to think that.”
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From: MeNeedIt
John Ashbery, Celebrated and Challenging Poet, Dies at 90
John Ashbery, an enigmatic genius of modern poetry whose energy, daring and boundless command of language raised American verse to brilliant and baffling heights, died early Sunday at age 90.
Ashbery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and often mentioned as a Nobel candidate, died at his home in Hudson, New York. His husband, David Kermani, said his death was from natural causes.
Few poets were so exalted in their lifetimes. Ashbery was the first living poet to have a volume published by the Library of America dedicated exclusively to his work. His 1975 collection, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” was the rare winner of the book world’s unofficial triple crown: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize. In 2011, he was given a National Humanities Medal and credited with changing “how we read poetry.”
Among a generation that included Richard Wilbur, W.S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich, Ashbery stood out for his audacity and for his wordplay, for his modernist shifts between high oratory and everyday chatter, for his humor and wisdom and dazzling runs of allusions and sense impressions.
“No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery,” Langdon Hammer wrote in The New York Times in 2008. “Ashbery’s phrases always feel newly minted; his poems emphasize verbal surprise and delight, not the ways that linguistic patterns restrict us. ”
But to love Ashbery, it helped to make sense of Ashbery, or least get caught up enough in such refrains as “You are freed/including barrels/heads of the swan/forestry/the night and stars fork” not to worry about their meaning. Writing for Slate, the critic and poet Meghan O’Rourke advised readers “not to try to understand the poems but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music.” Writer Joan Didion once attended an Ashbery reading simply because she wanted to determine what the poet was writing about.
“I don’t find any direct statements in life,” Ashbery once explained to the Times in London. “My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness comes to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don’t think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation.”
Interviewed by The Associated Press in 2008, Ashbery joked that if he could turn his name into a verb, “to Ashbery,” it would mean “to confuse the hell out of people.”
Ashbery also was a highly regarded translator and critic. At various times, he was the art critic for The New York Herald-Tribune in Europe, New York magazine and Newsweek and the poetry critic for Partisan Review. He translated works by Arthur Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel and numerous other French writers. He was a teacher for many years, including at Brooklyn College, Harvard University and Bard College.
Starting at boarding school, when a classmate submitted his work (without his knowledge) to Poetry magazine, Ashbery enjoyed a long and productive career, so fully accumulating words in his mind that he once told the AP that he rarely revised a poem once he wrote it down. More than 30 Ashbery books were published after the 1950s, including poetry, essays, translations and a novel, “A Nest of Ninnies,” co-written with poet James Schuyler.
His masterpiece was likely the title poem of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” a densely written epic about art, time and consciousness that was inspired by a 16th century Italian painting of the same name. In 400-plus lines, Ashbery shifted from a critique of Parmigianino’s painting to a meditation on the besieged 20th century mind.
I feel the carousel starting slowly
And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,
Photographs of friends, the window and the trees
Merging in one neutral band that surrounds
Me on all sides, everywhere I look.
And I cannot explain the action of leveling,
Why it should all boil down to one
Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.
Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927 and remembered himself as a lonely and bookish child, haunted by the early death of his younger brother, Richard, and conflicted by his attraction to other boys. Ashbery grew up on an apple farm in the nearby village of Sodus, where it snowed often enough to help inspire his first poem, “The Battle,” written at age 8 and a fantasy about a fight between bunnies and snowflakes. He would claim to be so satisfied with the poem and so intimidated by the praise of loved ones that he didn’t write another until boarding school, the Deerfield Academy, when his work was published in the school paper.
Meanwhile, he took painting lessons and found new meaning in Life, the magazine. An article about a surrealist exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art so impressed him that he kept rereading it for years. At Harvard University, he read W.H. Auden and Marianne Moore and met fellow poet and longtime comrade, Kenneth Koch, along with Wilbur, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara and Robert Creeley. He would be grouped with O’Hara and Koch as part of the avant-garde “New York Poets” movement, although Ashbery believed what they really had in common was living in New York.
His first book, “Some Trees,” was a relatively conventional collection that came out in 1956, with a preface from Auden and the praise of O’Hara, who likened Ashbery to Wallace Stevens. But in 1962, he unleashed “The Tennis Court Oath,” poems so abstract that critic John Simon accused him of crafting verse without “sensibility, sensuality or sentences.” Ashbery later told the AP that parts of the book “were written in a period of almost desperation” and because he was living in France at the time, he had fallen “out of touch with American speech, which is really the kind of fountainhead of my poetry.”
“I actually went through a period after ‘The Tennis Court Oath’ wondering whether I was really going to go on writing poetry, since nobody seemed interested in it,” he said. “And then I must have said to myself, ‘Well, this is what I enjoy. I might as well go on doing it, since I’m not going to get the same pleasure anywhere else.’”
His 1966 collection, “Rivers and Mountains,” was a National Book Award finalist that helped restore his standing and “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” raised him to the pantheon. In 2011, he was given an honorary National Book Award for lifetime achievement and declared he was “quite pleased” with his “status in the world of writers.”
His style ranged from rhyming couplets to haiku to blank verse, and his interests were as vast as his gifts for expressing them. He wrote of love, music, movies, the seasons, the city and the country, and was surely the greatest poet ever to compose a hymn to President Warren Harding. As he aged, he became ever more sensitive to mortality and reputation. “How to Continue” was an elegy for the sexual revolution among gays in the 1960s and ’70s, a party turned tragic by the deadly arrival of AIDS, “a gale (that) came and said/it is time to take all of you away.”
Reflecting on his work, Ashbery boasted about “strutted opinion doomed to wilt in oblivion,” but acknowledged that “I grew/To feel I was beyond criticism, until I flew/Those few paces from the best.” In the poem “In a Wonderful Place,” published in the 2009 collection “Planisphere,” he offered a brief, bittersweet look back.
I spent years exhausting my good works
on the public, all for seconds
Time to shut down colored alphabets
flutter in the fresh breeze of autumn. It
draws like a rout. Or a treat.
From: MeNeedIt