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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
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NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





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Tuesday, October 7, 2014

J'ARRIVE J'ARRIVE


My next door neighbors from 1971 to 1980 in Northampton were the Bagg family – Bob Bagg, a UMass English Professor, Sally Bagg, a cellist [in whose parents’ home they then lived], and five children, Teddy, Chris, Jonathan, Melissa, and Hazard.  Hazzie was a bit older than my older son, Patrick.  Bob is a poet – one of the “Amherst poets” in the line that began with Robert Frost and continued through Richard Wilbur [with whose beautiful wife I danced in the American Academy in Rome on New Year’s Eve 1954, when I had just turned twenty-one and she was amusing herself by vamping me.]  Jonathan is now the violist of the Ciompi Quartet, which is in residence at Duke University, where Susie and I have heard him several times.

One of Bob’s poems concerns a meeting with a woman, in which there appears the line “J’arrive, J’arrive.”  I think the meeting takes place on the Riviera, but it is forty years and more since I have read the poem.  Anyway, I always think that is what I should say when I get to Paris, so:

J’arrive, J’arrive!

1 comment:

Aldo Antonelli said...

PLAYING THE WHEEL
By Robert Bagg

We are leaving the Casino at Juan-les-Pins
the roulette marbles still tumbling over numbers
about to lodge in somebody else's stomach.

By a hotel full of the Rolling Stones
arrogantly parked is a black Maserati,
the mild swale of its transparent fastback

frosted smooth by the August dawn.
There a suave finger––speaking, I supposed,
for the whole woman––had written,

"Dear Luc, I waited for you since three hours.
Your anger not incurable anger?
Biot 479 310"

My fingers are spinning the dial
around like the wheel of fortunate numbers
ticking into a perfect parlay

just as she answers—Daisy! with a voice
full of money which I spend in the dream
Je suis Luc J'arrive J'arrive

[The picture on Bagg's web page, http://www.robertbagg.com/bio.htm is taken in front of the gate of the American Academy in Rome, up on top of the Janiculum.]