Pedesis

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This is not any sort of a critique. it is impressions and thoughts and feelings over the course of an evening. i was lucky enough to see Televison play at the Void Bar in Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art.

Pedesis, or the night I saw Television.

Down distant shadow extending
Mountains to the flat marshes below.
Egyptian valley of the dead kings
New Yawk art dirt scene garage.
Dug and torn limestone walls
Hand sharp scraping nails
And the light and the colours emboss
Expose surface weird shape faces
Billion year old dead ocean floor
Catacomb tunnels, a history lesson.
And always falling slow below
Rain - democratic rain of atoms
Swerving Brownian epicurean rain
Sewering onto the gluttonous mire
Maladetta, fredda e greve.

And the light!
And the light!
All things are built light
Rolling thoughtless waves
Fade away and radiate.
Long tunnel building light
Sex cramped sardines. Alma Venus.
Dancing billion year dead abyss
Falling rain of generations of fish shit
Tiny calcium carbonate exoskeletons
Patient rock cliff gouged hand and mind
Falling rain like the atoms and swerving
On the heads of the many onto the floor
Of the insatiable sea.

Harsh camera flash belch -
Acid turning oceans
Tiny shells corroding
Not forming - like an atom bomb
Lisping fractal recursion, play old man
Old man, too late, ah christ be double fucked
I am discharging. Cicadas on tree branches
Climb and sometimes sing.
We gather bars, talk endless.
Solitare joy of pure thought
Contemplating pedal steel
Endless rhythm building
Climaxing disorder of sound
Ah! Tis a pretty death!

Band art Faraday cave cage.
Cool outside away night air embrace
Smoking assassins, scientists, and artists.
Old friends chat, new ones stumble.
The celtic bard opines advances moots
Looking at his watch “There was a time
I would not be drunk enough to go out
This early.” Monads muttering
And stuttering, sweating, anxiety
A chance remark serviles me
Battered I fall rain limp,

Atoms in the void,
Unable to catch each other up.
Contort yourself one time
Turning pleasure into fear
Society into isolation
Contort yourself two times
Vortex of anxiety and self-loathing.
Bright police lights
Terror driving home
Country star exposing dark
Unloved unlit country roads.
And high beams make wallaby
Shadows of road side shrubs.

Plagiarism and Utopia

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The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. - Marx

The papers and the internet are buzzing with moral outrage. The ideologues of the present age seem to be encouraging a witch hunt against poets who plagiarise.

Now I would be a conspiracy theorist, if I was to put this witch hunt down to the recent change to a reactionary government. I will note that our current junta sees research as something to be mocked, and that the initial article was printed in that mouthpiece of the reactionaries, The Australian (note that on principle I will not link to this article, you can find it if you want.) I would be happy to put his down to coincidence. I would be equally happy to say, as have many over weight, alcoholic, cynical, television detectives have said, I do not believe in coincidence. I would venture to guess that the artless reactionaries will be happy to use these incidents to justify a cut in funding.

I, for one, will not join this conga line of moral condemnation of the so-called plagiarists. I do want to think about the chummy, vanilla custard culture that the present hierarchy of arts bureaucrats has created. Most importantly I wish to offer some simple (possibly simple-minded) solutions.

I find it surprising that -- if these plagiarisms are so egregious and so corrosive of the public good -- the errors were not noted earlier. Why for example did it take almost three years to notice the errors in the poem that won the Rosemary Dobson Prize in 2010? Why was this found out from a self titled poetry sleuth and not from someone within the prize giving community?

As I am not in this inner clique of the cool kids who make these decisions and award these prizes, I can not comment on their thinking. I am, however, able to make some comments, based on the actions they have taken, and the artifacts of their thoughts.

It seems to me, from my outsider point of view, that the main attribute for a prize winning poem is that the poem sounds like something the judges have heard before, something that has that pleasant overcoat of familiarity. Noting, as Jane Caro did (in noting a twitter post), that there were more ex-students from Riverview in the Abbott cabinet than women, we can also note that the bulk of poetry prize winners come from a similarly small (dare we say privileged) pool. Not only in numbers of actual poets but more importantly the winners are drawn from a similar pool, and are unified thematically and stylistically.

In my utopia, which would be happy and have many good laws, and which we will call Tomton, poetry and art would have a different position that they do in our society. Living in smaller, more sustainable cities and towns, hearing poetry, seeing art would be as easy as floating down to the local centre on a post-coital Sunday morning to get the newspapers, coffees, and cheese danish. For art would be all around. Music would be floating from the open windows of the many well maintained and charming communes. Artists would have decorated the walls, even the streets. No more would our eyes and minds be assaulted by crass advertising for things we have no need nor use for. Children would run and play and we would see and hear their unselfconscious, spontaneous art (the best art of all.) An orchestra would play in the local square, the concert would be never ending as musicians would come and go as they pleased. Poets would be declaiming their work, standing on tables in the cantten, while dancers flowed around the amused diners. A line of excited poets, bongo players, and dancers would snake out the door. All eager to speak, to play, to dance. All eager to contribute, all shouting for joy at this democracy of art. All encouraged.

Sadly all we have is capitalism. And with this way of life we gain competition, and hierarchy, and a constant chasing after.

But in the short term, some suggestions.

Maybe we can have an occasional Jubilee Year. Prizes and competitions would not be allowed to have any entrants from those that work or teach at university. One year moratorium on entries from those who have a degree in a creative writing. Maybe we can do this once every five or seven years, or the various prizes can take turns in seeking entries from outside the university axis.

With the continual “jobbing” of culture, from so-called plagiarists to cynical provocateurs, maybe the contests would do just as well to pick a random poem from out of the proverbial hat. The role of the judge could be no more than one of narrowing down the list of entires from the original (here I am making up numbers) 500 to a more manageable 50, and then rewarding one at random. Software can be quickly hacked up that would generate the appropriate random numbers, so there would be no need to even narrow down the entries.

The picking out of poems at random will ensure that there are no hurt feelings. New poets would not be discouraged, and so would not drop away.

On a more practical note I simply point the reader to any number of plagiarism detection applications. Like the bogus speed cameras that work to limit speeding, even a public announcement that such software may be used will go a long way to limiting such errors.

While on the subject of software I would promote the idea of free software. Anyone can use any poem and a poet even rewrite the original, but they would then have to print the original work alongside the new work. This would of course obviate the need for poetry sleuths and plagiarism detectors and would have the added benefit of introducing the audience to more poetry.

Getting back to Tomton, we should have poets on every street corner not only reading their works, but engaging a interested audience. An audience that is hungry for culture and art.

You may have noticed that I always used the word error to describe the plagiarisms. As plagiarism is not a crime, and is even a more or less modern idea, I wanted to use a word that did not have any moral overtones. Error seemed best to me, in that the poets erred in not noting the original lines and images. If the poet was to read his or her poems to an audience and that audience was able to speak with the poet in an honest, open, and back and forth way would this have happened?

A great deal of this scandal seems bound up in issues of IP. After a decade in the IT industry I never want to hear another word about intellectual property my life!

My beef is not with the individual poet, but rather with the poetry superstructure we have built. If we can change the way we reward poetry we can go a long way to seeing that these sorts of issues never arise again.

Atomous kai kenon

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Standing on the corner a-ringing a bell. And up stepped the sheriff...

How's it going he asked.

Just standing here, you know holding up the wall. Really there taint not much to report really. You?

The shoppers and the workers in town swirled and rambled all around and about us.

Got time?

For you? Of course.

Let's duck in this here joint get us some coffee. It has been a while we can catch up. And besides I am freezing.

Well, I said, as there is not much happening from my end I'm happy to join you in a coffee.

It was more than true that there was not much to say about my life, the last few months have been little more than the daily grind of family and work and all the forms of mental illness that come free with the working class loss of free will life style.

So we sat and we ordered a coffee each. I like to order latte because of the idea -- I think it was Simon Crean who put it out there -- that one can not be a good union member and drink latte. I wanted to prove him wrong. And a long black.

I saw Ian the other day.

Really and how is he?

Good, he was all excited, he had been to the poetry slam heats and later on he read something in the open mic section later. So he was -- yeah all excited. You know Ian.

Indeed he's a pistol. I thanked the waiter for the latte and played with the sandy coloured froth, distorting the intricately poured design. What did he think? I am sure he would have gone all ultra on their arse.

No he was cool. He was surprised -- pleasingly surprised - cause he reckons that the slam format is all male oriented. So he was sort of impressed about the fact that there was about half and half girl boy performers and two of the three finalists were women.

Yeah, well no, that is good. Ian is good like that. He has a, you know, open mind. Having played rugby in college, it has always struck me passing strange how something like poetry can become so macho. Some people just gotta get all competitive. Like those aggro cooking shows. But I think it must be the shirtless, arm waving, shouty-man performance aspect. You know the winning and the losing.

Sure - that is exactly what Ian was saying too. And he thought it cool the way the slam brings out all sorts of poets from out of the woodwork. You know there are heats all across the country?

Yep, and did you know that we were lovers for a while?

Truly? I did not know that. Makes you more attractive to me.

That lemming has dived off the cliff. I have lost all interest. I am pretty much asexual these days. Does not even enter my pretty little head. We all wear a variety of, various masques, do we not? LOL. et tu? And besides after 911 there ain't no need for performance poetry anymore.

I guess.

Yeah but you know I gotta force myself to jerk off at least once a week, you know just to maintain good prostate health.

So okay, whatever. Ian thought it was a good night. He is very political. Right? So he was, he said, he had been to a few slams over the years around and on the mainland and they never really caught his interest. At the heat last week he thought maybe it was you know maybe he dug it cause of the small town vibe of Hobart. People having to make their own fun and whatever.

At this point an earnest young woman, Iona, wearing a fourth doctor sort of scarf -- she told me later her thirteen year old niece had knitted a bunch of these scarfs for various family members -- ripped jeans and a leather jacket, and her equally, if more traditionally garbed beard and glasses sloppy jumper earnest brother Bloom interrupted.

Slam is the democratisation of poetry, of verse. It allows more voices. It may be macho at times and places, but at the same time slams allow different voices to be heard. The voices of women in particular. They may or may not win, that is not really the point. Poets get to perform, mind if I sit, and so by performing they get to build up confidence. What they do from then is up to the person. But lots of voices, of the marginalised and the ones who have not had the opportunity get to be heard. Did you ever read The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry? You should read it, by Somers-Willett - it is interesting. She is in US so she does not talk about the Australian scene. But she does talk about the divide. Poetry in the academy versus in the bars and in the alleyways. I will send you a link of a review.

Like Bukowski.

Or Ginsberg before. Whitman when he said something like, Great Poetry needs a Great Audience.

It is that DIY punk sort of a feel innit. The sum is worth more than the parts. The audience is central to the performance. Slam is the all night acid house dance rave party, the stage dive, slam is Shane MacGowan getting his ear bit off while Joe Stummer caterwaul strums what the hell is wrong with me? The Bomber boys who stole kit during the great blackout and went out to the street corners and clubs and puked forth grinding poverty hip-hop.

I lived for a while in Canberra, the poets there seem to do a good job of it.

Last century there used to be a cool scene in bris vegas based at the Storey Bridge Hotel.

Still your boy Ian reckons that slam is an inherently broken form, due to the idea of competition. The very nature of the slamming scene is broken.

By now we had repaired to a little downstairs hole in the wall jazz wine bar. Trading latte for beer and cider and cheap industrial port, not being able, no matter how ironically I tried, to abide Chardonnay. And conversions swirled and jostled for attention like bored children bickering in the supermarket trolley. Beer flowed like wine. This way and that way words flowed and swirled around all opposition and solid forms finding new paths and forging new channels. Ideas and flirtations. We all overlapped and argued for time and space around an unoriginal table stained years of excited bullshitting and alcohol. A small gang melded the group pushing the tables together, painters, dealers and stoned rappers. Ply upon sandy ply.

No! Slams are good they give people immediate feedback and if the poets or whatever listen and learn they come back and think about things and they can stumble about improve. Even if only in the sense of winning the twenty dollars at the end of the night. But it is all supportive. The old way of getting poems out there -- from entering the contest to getting final finished published book containing heartfelt poems -- could take you know quite a long time. Getting hooked into the slam scene one has a focus. Keep writing monthly new stuff. A monthly deadline. Asses must be driven, as the saying goes, to hay with blows. Or polishing up some piece they are particularly fond of.

It is the constant changing of styles and forms. And a bringing together of voices from all around the country, bush & city. Big places and small. The old and the young. The old hand and the tyro. Coming into being and passing away. The way certain groups, particular groups coalesce around their daily lives and so form particular styles. Meeting in cafes or pubs, sober or not or high as kites and sounds and voices bubble up and styles come and go. Some move on, most are like writers or visual artists just experimenting about or musicians trying out song ideas, or just drunken layabout no names ecstasy poets seeking to get some kicks and maybe laid. All sorts. Resorting to nutmeg. Which as it was the sailors high seems appropriate for Hobart. Eh?

But this very diversity is as much about fragmentation and loss of community as it is about anything. It is one group seedling in and carving out and a liquidness that disbars other groups. I am not making myself clear. Like the way yon internet has a chat group a forum a scene for each and everyone for every sort of idea or kink you can think of and so people become more close, closer in fact, to some random cat two thirds of a wide and wicked world away -- round the world -- or even more better unknown just down the road. And so what ever you want to call it, skate punk XY youth label culture, or some sort of arty boho scene, or some inarticulate anarcho-dread progressive culture all movement it all gets sort of rutted on the ancient wallaby track and people get isolated and so isolate themselves fragmenting into every sort of fraction or clique or ratio group or faction that you could ever think of -- so by this fragmenting we argue and miss the boat the moment and while trying to become the perfecting ourselves change we want the world to be the bosses laugh all the way to bank. Their wealth is my death my life is being broke. Whoa!

Personally, to me it is the death of art, well maybe not THE death of art. This bunch of unemployed or under-employed or unemployable can never destroy art, not even poetry. But this entire American Idol, clap-o-meter idea. When the hurlyburly's done it comes down to me hating this pub scene poet scene the drinking the braking of glass and the nauseating sound of the cash register. Ugh - sends shivers down me spine. Like that inane Nokia ring tone. Makes me physically wanna be ill just thinking about it. But this venereal measuring clap-o-meter could never tear down art by itself. But it is the fragmenting the murdering of art with one thousand cuts. Bleeding it out. No not cuts -- how quaintly cliché of moi. Rather it is like the Cyberian reindeer in the thawing spring time tundra. So many mosquitoes. Fantastic clouds in number and in formation of the blood suckers like dentist drills rise up from countless small puddles and pools of melt water. So much so that some beasts perish with anemia. From so many tiny little bites from so much drop by life creating drop blood being drained. While others in the vast herds are driven insane and panicked fleeing and flailing about the reindeer exhaust themselves running this way and yon - not never being able to find relief.

No it is the democratic dubstep hodge podge of voices and opinions, a honing of ideas in a furnace of art and competition and sampling commerce. The free interchange market of twenty four hour party signs and signifiers of many voices striving for the one voice the way to describe what it is we have been thrown into. For if we be equal in one way, then we must be equal in all ways. Each of us should be expected to have something to say, and we should be allowed to say it. It is even our duty as citizens, whatever the hell that may mean, to speak our mind. Two thirds Rosa Luxemburg, one part Dr Suess. And the slam movement has wrested and extorted poetry from the Academy. Too too much poetry is controlled by the guild of English professors and those who having access and resources speak of the primacy of the written word over the spoken word. It is a silly argument to have as they are both of value. The best writing is best if it is closest to conversation. Even the old fashioned five paragraph essay form should be read aloud, if only as part of the editing precess. Slam poets are like the old beardy bards, like the rhapsodes of Homer's time.

No, not like rhapsodes at all. The name shows the difference. Rhapsode mean to stitch together a song or even better a stitching together of lies. Those poets would have to commit to memory scenes and phrases and what not so then can then, on the spot stitch together a song a lay. They were able to put theses formulas of meter and narrative together. Maybe in new and varied ways. But one big thing that these archaic poets would not have liked would have been innovation. They were very concerned with keeping intact the ideas of the cycle. And it was all you know religious and traditional and you know religion and tradition hate change. The word that Homer used was singer. And here you are right, cause the first duty of the singer is to sing, and the slam venue is just the place to do that. Again we have the idea of immediacy, of meeting face to face like minded people in your community. This is the power of the medium.

Immediate and democratic, and even if I do not agree with what you say, I have to go along with what Sylvia Beach said about Joyce -- he treated people invariably as his equals, whether they were writers, children, waiters, princesses, or charladies. What anybody had to say interested him; he told me that he had never met a bore.

The babbling pumpt of platinism

Yes well LOL sometimes it takes a bit of digging to find out the kernel of the poem or the poet that is any good, worth remembering.

I like the idea of the anti-slam, everyone gets how ever much time and everyone is given as a score a perfect 10. Performing is the victory. Like the Seinfeld joke, people would rather be in the coffin than give the eulogy.

But I guess that raises the question as to how to get an audience to attend what is little more than a poetry recital. Anyway it is getting late. I have to dreadful work in the beastly morning. Until next time, I said, putting on my scarf and overcoat, I shall leave y'all with Democritus, “The realm of the universe is atoms and space, the things that are, are custom. These universes are infinite and so they come into being and they perish.”

To understand Nature's hid causes

Happy, who had the skill to understand
Nature's hid causes, and beneath his feet
All terrors cast, and death's relentless doom,
And the loud roar of greedy Acheron.

I know that I am getting old by the fact that I listen to Radio National rather than JJJ. Apart from making me feel old I have to say the I do enjoy listening to RN. In contrast to television, radio seems to have more time thus allowing a broad wide ranging discussion of events and ideas. Unlike some sections of our society, I am also quite happy to listen to ideas that are different to my own regrettable and hackneyed notions. Indeed hearing the other voices often forces me to perform a revaluation of my thoughts, my values. Sometimes I feel I can quite happily ignore the other ideas, sometimes I am compelled to modify what I currently think, and on occasion I am forced to reconsider and to abruptly and firmly change course. Without doubt this is a good and mature position to take, and more importantly it shows that democracy, being synonymous with diversity, is something greater than the puerile shadowplay of media regurgitation, party politicking or mindless voting between Shem and Shaun.

So a few days ago I was listening to RN. Between cooking dinner, and responding to the endless chatter of three young children, I heard an interchange between an interviewer and his interviewee that gave me pause. As part of a broader conversation of some French intellectual (whose name to my sorrow, I did not catch, I plead in my defense that

I am getting old, and suffer in a minor but still inconvenient way from industrial deafness) calling for a 'temple' to be constructed by and for atheists. Whether this may or may not be a good idea, I am not in position to say. It did bring to mind images of the Culte de la Raison (Cult of Reason) during the French Revolution. What did get my attention was the general and rather casual agreement to the idea that Atheism is always a negation, is no more than negation. This is considered to be common sense, but is, in truth, a cliche, a triviality raised to heights of a profundity. This comment is what forced me to my keyboard.

At first glance it may seem that atheism is in fact a negation, and this my more pedantic readers will point out can be clearly shown by the use of the Greek prefix a-, which of course means no, or not, or even without. One does not have to dig too deep to grasp that this prefix connotes negation. And everyone agrees quite clearly that atheism means without God. It therefore then may seem obvious that Atheism is a negation. However to my mind Atheism is in reality not a negation, but rather an affirmation, and it is Theism that is the negation.

What does atheism affirm? In a word, humanity. All that is solid melts in the air and we are forced to confront the reality of the cold wind of outer space, and of our singposted world, and of uncaring nature. In such a universe we are alone, and naked and scared we must comprehend our smallness and our frailness in the face of almost infinite emptiness and disdain. To my thinking, and I this will not true for all atheists, it is this lack of an afterlife that has made me less, not more willing to support; for example, war, punishment, violence. Indeed atheism makes me cling more closely to my fellow, as Doctor Who would say, stupid apes. This lack of belief in an aftelife has made me less likely to join in the periodic frenzy of demagogic vengeance. I am not able to proudly wear the tee shirt with the lovely slogan 'Kill them all, let God sort 'em out.' While it is equally true that not all theists would endorse such a slogan, this is not the place to argue this point.

In a world where God does not intervene in history and human affairs we are left to our own devices. We are left to figure out for ourselves how the world works and what is the true history of the universe. In the days of the ancient Greek natural philosophers there were those who noted that Ethiopian gods had black skin and curly hair, and so asserted that if cows had a god it would look like a cow. Some of these thinkers were able to approximate the correct size of the Earth. Some of these thinkers could see that the fossilised shells found on the tops of mountains proved what we would later call evolution. How bold were these thinkers, who mocked the polytheism of their day, compared to some of our current fundamentalist thinkers who make a show of public piety, and who view fossils as tricks of God (or the Devil) to test our faith! What an absurd idea that God would plant false evedince in the ground as a joke, as a 'pop quiz', and how difficult to have a rational discussion with such thinkers.

To see professional athletes and entertainers publicly thanking God for their good fortune seems to me to show a remarkable lack of balance concerning the role of God. While millions of children die needlessly every year, it must be the height of arrogance to think that God, rather than saving these poor children, thought it best to make sure an over payed individual received even more accolades and success.

To stand on our own feet and to see the world as it truly is, is the affirmation that atheism stands for. To assume that there are no interventions in the natural world and human history by God, has allowed us to move from the medieval slumber that was the Age of Faith, has allowed the phenomenal growth in wealth and longevity that we enjoy today. Knowing that it is penicillin, which was investigated and discovered and produced by real living humans, rather than prayer that will cure illness is the affirmation that atheism gives us. Knowing, in broad strokes, the way in which life in it's dazzaling complexity developed is the affirmation of atheism. Knowing that there is no God to stop the sun and make it dance in the sky, but rather that all stars are formed from the gravitational forces within interstellar clouds of dust and organic compounds is the affirmation of atheism.

It would be pointless of me to try to prove that all scientists are without religious faith. But it would be equally foolish to try to prove that even the most religious of all scientists does not 'suspend belief' while working in their laboratories. That is to say a scientist can not, after testing various compounds on the stereotyped guinea pig, affirm that it was prayer that cured the cancer.

And it would be foolish of me to say that all atheists are lovely people who would never harm a fly, or that they are able to free themselves from superstition and generalised human stupidity and greed. I can however happily say that when I see the world around me, when I look down the microscope, or I look upwards through the telescope, I see not God (nor Gods) but rather a rational unfolding of physical laws. An unfolding of not only rational laws, but also the creation of a vast co-operative conversation across national borders and across time, which I can comprehend, and be swept up in, and hopefully extend. When there is posited a god who intervenes at random moments in history with unexplainable miracles this rationality falls apart, and I no longer have the ability to grasp the world as it truly stands. This falling down of rational understanding and co-operative enquiry is the negation that theism gives us.

Aristotle once described the good life, the life of virtue as being friendship and the desire for knowing. This is the affirmation of atheism that I affix to my banner. All we have is each other, are hands and our brains. The search for love, and the questing after knowledge are the only worthwhile goals of life. I can love my family and my friends, I can love the other, I can seek to extend creativity and my understanding of the world without having recourse to any sort of God.

I want the grandness of my world, of my universe to be teeming over with life, change, and constant contradiction. This is the affirmation of atheism. I can not, even with the strong religious upbringing that my parents gave me, see theism as being anything but an attempt to stultify and proscribe, to say that this is how it is and how it must be for all time. This to me is negation of the wonderful, terrifying, surging struggle and contention that is our universe.

I am (hopefully) not so blinded by my atheism to not understand that many great scientists and artists have been deeply religious. I only have to look at the work Mendel did with his pea plants that helped us understand genetics. But I think that most people would agree that both the original Miletian revolution in science, as well as our more recent scientific industrial revolutions sprang from an impulse to try to understand the world as it is, with no dependency on divine intervention, to see and grasp the world as the endless unfolding of rational, understandable physical laws. In his recent book 'The Swerve' Professor Greenblatt argues that the Renaissance begins with the finding of one of the greatest works not only of materialism and atheism, De rerum natura or 'On the Nature of Things' by Lucretius, but also a great work of art, full of passion and compassion. In this work Lucretius argues the classical atomist view of Democritus, Epicurus and others that the world is made up of matter in motion.

And it is this desire to understand the world, this fount of human genius that has created this world we now live in, this world of computers, and medicine, and space travel and more. I despair that this world is overrun with shallow moneyed interests who seek to make only profit. But I also hope that one day we can understand that humanity is on the cusp of a brave new world, if we can survive the next phase of history. A world where energy is seemingly taken from the air, where things can be brought into being as if by magic. A co-operativly built world of superabundance were we can move beyond the sordid quest for cash and reputation. For my childrens sake I wish to move into this world where, as Aristotle might have said, we are free to investigate the only things that matter, friendship and the love of knowledge.

The motto comes from Virgil The Georgics Book II and can be found here http://classics.mit.edu/Virgil/georgics.2.ii.html