I'm getting some great essays from my sixth graders:

A Sentient Object


Patrick:

I hear people crying. Why? I can not move. I do not hear this person's heart beating. Is my person dead? I do not know.
I see some light. I guess the skin of my dead person is wearing away. I am being exposed to the sun.
Many years have passed. I do not know how many. However, I can not see the sun anymore. Layers of land have covered me over time. Winds have blown thrown land over me, burying me. Vines and other plants have grown over that layer of land. Glaciers covered up the plants. The ice melted, but more land has come on top of the second layer of land. I am now very deep in the earth.
More years passed. My guess would be more than five millenias [sic]. Huh? What is that stick? It is digging away all the layers of land that have buried me. A hand that looks similar to my person's hand is touching me and feeling me and inspecting me.
"Hey Crispin! Come over here!" yelled the human.
Another human comes. They are both intrigued by me. I am satisfied with my current life, but I think this is a turn in my life. I am probably going to become famous. I know I will be inspected. Humans are so curious these days.
The human is putting me into a bag. He does this very delicately. I am being driven to a building that reads "The New York History Museum." I am being given to another human. This human is inspecting me.
My life has not changed much since that day. Day after day is constant inspection. Huh? Finally! I am being displayed in this place. They put me in a glass case. People from all over the world are coming to see me. I am famous! My life-long dream has come true. I am now living in this glass case, being treated like a king. This a great life. I predict that I will live like this until I become of no use to the humans,
I am now lost. I am now forgotten by humans. However, this will not last long. Soon, my life, the life of the skull of a prehistoric human, will repeat and be luxurious once again.


Excerpts:

Richard:

I am an object that impatiently waits for someone to pick me up and purchase me. … I am, unfortunately, nothing by a mass of pages binded [sic] to a spine. … I love to be written all over, since it shows that my owner loves me and tries to make the best while I last.
I was manufactured by a kind man. I was first printed, ink filling each of my single pages. I then was neatly arranged in order and stiched [sic] onto my friends who help me stay safe from gloomy weathers. …
I have evolved greatly. … My ancestors were exotic scrolls and parchments kept safely in containers, for things objects like me were scarce. Now there are too many of me and my owners [are] careless of my future for they could always replace me. …
I am the always evolving book.


Jun:

I am gray. I am usually round. I can weigh an ounce and I also can weight 100 pounds. I come in many sizes. In the bible [sic], Jacob sleeps using me as a pillow when he runs away from Esau for taking a blessing from his father. It should have been Esau's. The blessing is who will be the chief of the tribe.
In the new testament [sic], the name of Jesus's disciple Peter means my name. I am uncomfortable if you want to use me as a pillow.
… Also in the bible, David uses me in his slingshot and throws me on Goliath's forehead and Goliath dies.


Jasmine:

… The girl reached and grabbed me. I was afraid, but a little bit happy. I have heard legends about famous siblings who got picked up, and [were] never seen again. The girl dropped me into something dark. When I looked up, she had closed the sky.
… When the sky opened once more, the girl picked me up again. Then she pointed me straight down. All the blood rushed to my head.
…I am a pen. Not much, but I am important.


Matthew:

Sometimes I feel sad that I can't be free like all the other creatures of the dessert [sic]. All I can do is watch life go by me. And there will be no time in the future for me to wish any longer, because one day the sand of the desserts will turn into roads. After that the dunes will turn into little homes. The next thing you know, everything will turn into buildings and industrialization.
One thing that makes me feel good about being a cactus is that although I am not able to cause a great impact on the dessert, some people think of me as a historical monument.




A Teacher Who Changed Me

Jun:

Outline

I am talking
Ms. Rennert
conceited
dumb
selfish
mean

A teacher that changed my life was a teacher named Ms. Rennert. She always wore jewlery and bragged every day. She never taught us anything either. She said to just do pages in her workbook. If we didn't understand she would just ask the smart people in the class to help us.

She was very mean. She didn't let us use the bathroom. She allowed drinks in winter but not in summer. She was wrong most of the time. If we said that she was wrong she would punish us. She made up lies and did dumb things that made us laugh secretly. If we laughed and she caught us she would yell. One time she brought a nail clipper and clipped her toe nails.

We all used binders to do our subjects. One time she saw me and four other kids doing work in our binders and she yelled at us for using binders not notebooks. She said she told us to bring notebooks but she never did. It wasn't on the supply list either. She changed me by making me happier to go to school the next year. All my teachers taught us things but Ms. Rennert was the only one who didn't. So I was much happier to go to school the next year and all the other years. I was happy because the teachers actually taught things and weren't mean like Ms. Rennert. Another thing Ms. Rennert did was eat our food. She was obsessed with food. She was very skinny but ate a lot of junk food. When we had chips or cookies, she would eat it. One time at a birthday party she ate all the chips and took the cheese off all the pizza slices and ate it. The pizza was nasty after that. She used to search our bookbags for food. Ms. Rennert did change me though. She made me happy to go to school next year and the year after that. Now I am still happy to go to school knowing that nobody will ever be like Ms. Rennert.


Excerpts:

Diana:
Throughout grades one to five, my class and I never really learned to appreciate social studies. Yes, we had fun making posters of Indians in third grade, but love it… never. Making us read documents of the constitution and the preamble, I learned to love and enjoy everything in store for me. Currently, in sixth grade, I am learning about Egypt and Mesopotamia, and all the interesting facts now leave me in a daze.
After a splendid fourth grade with her, she asked me to be her moniter. With grateful eyes I told her yes. … For a "thank you" gift in Christmas, she gave me a whole make-up set. Although I would have rather gotten something else, it was more than enough.


An essay on a significant age:


Excerpts:

Diana:
With my six-year-old body, I trudged through the vast halls of my new school.
Our teacher, Mrs. Allen, was a welcoming one. She understood our feelings and our melancholiness about leaving our friends from kindergarten.


Richard:
I was afraid that my new teacher would be malicious towards me and that my fellow pupils would despise me.


Patrick:
When I was seven I played all the time. Now that I have matured, I understand that playing is not everything, but back then playing was really very important to me.

From The New Republic:

After her widely ridiculed "listening tour" of the Middle East you would have thought that public diplomacy czar Karen Hughes learned a thing or two. But there she was in Indonesia last week, on the next leg of her campaign to improve America's image in the Muslim world, making the same mistakes all over again. There were the same patronizing and vacuous statements: "My state of Texas is very big," she told students at an elite Jakarta university. "So you can imagine my surprise to learn that your country, Indonesia, is three time bigger than my big state of Texas."

Cp.:

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

At one point, da Silva even exhibited a map of his country, which is larger than the continental United States. "Wow! Brazil is big," Amorim quoted the U.S. president as responding.

I think these comments are very revealing.

Last year when I was looking for a room I met some very unusual types. One was a man who maintained (not implausibly) that the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been the indirect cause of all the catastrophes of the twentieth century. His sitting room was a shrine to Austria-Hungary. (I'm sure you can picture it.)

One woman's e-mail username was something like "peregrinefalcon." "Are you fond of falcons?" I asked. "Yes, I am. In fact, I'm a falconer." I gaped. Falconers still exist?! In New York City?! She explained that falcons are the best way to scare away small birds at the airport. I couldn't help picturing her in medieval or Renaissance garb, and to imagine her like that, with her big glove and her falcon, in the bleak landscape of an airport — it's too much.

I was studying Latin on the subway, and an old woman* sitting next to me drew me out of my book & began reminiscing about her years studying Latin in high school. "I went to an all-girls school." The second before I asked her, I knew what the answer would be: she had gone to my high school — had graduated in 1939. "The French teachers were fantastic. Whenever I forget a French word, all I have to do is remember Miss —, and it comes back to me… Eleanor Roosevelt spoke to us." "Oh! When I graduated, we were told that 60 — or 70 — years before Franklin Delano Roosevelt had given the graduation speech on that very same stage." "Miss Verplank [or Vanderplank?] of the Verplanks was our Latin teacher." I looked blank here. Who were the Verplanks? Are they in an Edith Wharton novel? "She dressed in purple from head to toe." Just like Mrs. Wilson! I wanted to say, but held my tongue, because I wanted to hear more. (I learned in high school that Woodrow Wilson's wife took to wearing purple toward the end of his life, and she attributed some of her influence to the power of purple.) Maybe Miss Verplank just wanted to wear the school color. "The only man in the school was the janitor. Once a troupe of actors visited to play Shakespeare, and when the lead actor strode onto the stage we all sighed in unison. Afterwards the headmistress gave us a talking to: 'Girls, you must not behave like that.'" At Union Square, unfortunately, she got off the train. I was headed for my Latin class, and when I got there I told the teacher — who also went to my high school — about my chance encounter on the subway.

* I realize "old woman" is a blunt phrase, & I considered changing it to something else, but all the alternatives seemed clunky and idiotic. If we say "young woman," why not "old woman"? Is it so terrible to be old? She certainly carried it off well.

I usually feel inconspicuous in the city, but recently two things happened to disabuse me of this notion:

On the subway, I was sitting next to a woman who was writing furiously in a notebook. She would often glance up, and I suspected she was taking notes. So, as discreetly as possible, I took a peek at the notebook: "a woman with a green bowling bag sitting next to me." Oh my God! That's me! What else does she say? But just then she shut the notebook and got up for her stop. (Also: I hadn't know my bag was a bowling bag.)

Another time I was going home late at night, and half the subway lines weren't working, so I had to walk about fifteen blocks in the homestretch. It was very late — past one, I think. The streets were absolutely deserted, and I was a bit scared; luckily there was a 24-hour grocery store every five blocks or so. At one point, I noticed a police car. Three blocks later I glanced back, and there it still was — it was trailing me! When I turned onto my cross-street the police car couldn't follow me, because it's a one-way street, but its siren warbled goodbye. (You know the friendly, cartoonish sound sirens can make — "blurp.")

More on Sunrise:

In a self-service café in the city, the husband is trying to win back his wife's trust: he goes off to the counter and comes back to their table with a plate piled high with pastries for her. He sets it down before her and waits, anxiously, hands clasped, for her to eat. She puts a pastry in her mouth mechanically, but before she can bite down she bursts into tears again, and soon she's sobbing, with her mouth full of cake.

That moment rang so true I thought, "Why haven't I seen that before in a movie? This is what life is all about!"

There were so many wonderful scenes and sequences like that in Sunrise, some funnier, some more tragic, none so perfectly balanced in complicated innocence.

Figures of speech:

my arthritic umbrella

in a building under demolition: the staircase sagged like a slack accordion

Something I was reading with an eighth grade class mentioned the Iliad. "What's the Iliad?" I asked. Nobody knew (they're not the best class), but one boy made some valiant attempts: "It's about the Battle of Marathon between the Greeks & the Persians!" "No." "It's about that blind old man and his daughter." "No." "Oh! I know! The war between Athens and its rival, that other Greek city..."

The other day I asked my seventh grade, "Who's a good author if you want to read about Greek mythology?" I hoped someone would mention Edith Hamilton, and was astonished when Kevin called out, "Robert Graves!" I like Kevin; he slouches and looks half asleep, but he's actually alert and curious and hard-working, and good-natured too. The other day Mrs. K, passing by, moved my seventh graders around (quite unnecessarily — they're very well-behaved), and Kevin, who had been moved to the center of a row, wailed, "The wall! I can't concentrate without the wall!" (He leans against it.)

I was impressed when Kevin mentioned Robert Graves, & was reminded of another moment with another student (whom I taught, coincidentally, in the same room). This student, a high school junior, told me that within the space of a few months he had gone from being a "hard-line anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist" to being a skinhead. Naturally I was speechless. We talked, and I mentioned Rosa Luxemburg, and the movie of her life. Joon: "I haven't seen the movie, but I've read some of Rosa Luxemburg's writings." !!! I hadn't read anything by Rosa Luxemburg!!! (Still haven't!) We ended up reading George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia; he seemed to like it. (He later told me that he was a non-racist skinhead; in an essay he tried to explain his trajectory: he became a Marxist-Leninist when he saw how terrible working conditions were in the factories of his grandfather's friends; he didn't have much of an explanation for his subsequent transformation.)

I'm not making this up: a biophysicist has written a paper on "The physics of running in children who have just learned to walk." That must have been fun to research.

The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach made a big impression on me; it's a really gripping book. Kaplan gives Brasillach's address (among others), and since I was in Paris when I finished the book, I checked out the building. Naturally, there was nothing in its innocent and cheerful façade to suggest that a vicious fascist, winner of literary prizes, had once lived there. What did I expect? Brasillach lived with his sister and brother-in-law, and someone with his brother-in-law's last name still lives at the address Kaplan gives.

Books:

August
The Botany of Desire (Pollan)
Tintenherz (Funke)
The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Kaplan)
The Mother's Recompense (Wharton)
The Language Police (Ravitch)

September
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
The Closing of the Western Mind (Freeman)
A Little History of the World (Gombrich)
The Poet Dying: Heinrich Heine's Last Years in Paris (Pawel)

The Botany of Desire was excellent, so good I wanted to read it out loud, so good I could have turned back to page one as soon as I finished it. (By the way: when I asked for this title in a bookstore, the assistant leered at me. Part of me wanted to laugh & say, "Read the back, you dummy!" But I managed to keep a solemn demeanor.)
Tintenherz was not so good. It pains me to say that, because Funke has her heart in the right place: she evokes the magic of reading very well, and the first chapter was so promising. I won't go into the details, but Tintenherz made clear why in all the great children's books adults are for the most part evil, or, if they're good, they're befuddled, oblivious, helpless. It's a capital mistake to put a strong, capable, good adult at the center of a children's book; it means that the child protagonist never comes into her own.
But I'm glad I've read it, because my students mention it, and because now I can say I've read a 550-page book in German.

The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach was superb. In writing about the novels, Kaplan speaks of Brasillach's characteristic "turn of the century charm and childlike joie de vivre," with WWI as a sudden, incomprehensible parenthesis; his pet notion of "brother enemies," so useful when he wanted to be forgiven by the Resistance figures whom he had hounded and betrayed to the Germans (going so far as to publish addresses of hiding places). One of his novels even features a love triangle involving a Frenchman, a German, and a woman named Catherine. Doesn't this all sound a lot like Jules et Jim? Now I know that movie is based on a different book, but maybe Henri-Pierre Roché was recycling something by Brasillach? I found a website that spoke of Truffaut's "predilection" for literature of the extreme right, and elsewhere I read that the editor Roché worked with had signed the clemency petition. (But that doesn't mean much, since so many men of letters did.)

I bought Gombrich's Little History of the World for my sixth graders. I've been looking for such a book for a while, and I was pleased to find one recommended by Philip Pullman. (And such a satisfying design! Such thick and creamy pages & beautiful woodcut illustrations!) I decided to read a bit to them every class, since xeroxing it would be impractical. The first chapter is a bit abstract, and I was afraid that they would find its extended metaphor for history and memory — dropping a burning scrap of paper down a well, and seeing what it lights up — abstruse or tedious. I was so worried that I'm afraid my voice trembled, and I rushed as I finished the chapter. But when I shut the book Viren exclaimed, "Oh my God, that's such a good book!" Patrick: "It's like he's talking to you!" That's exactly the effect Gombrich aims for, and it charmed me when I read it. But when I read it out loud I suddenly became self-conscious; would they find it hokey and condescending? I'm glad they didn't. Viren even appreciated the style: "He's such a good writer! It's really well-worded."

Another recommendation: Malcolm Gladwell's review of a book by Jerome Karabel on admission to Harvard (& Co.). It made me hate the Ivy League more than ever. This in particular stayed with me:

And the most important category? That mysterious index of “personal” qualities. According to Harvard’s own analysis, the personal rating was a better predictor of admission than the academic rating… When the Office of Civil Rights at the federal education department investigated Harvard in the nineteen-eighties, they found handwritten notes scribbled in the margins of various candidates’ files… One application—and at this point you can almost hear it going to the bottom of the pile—was notated, “Short with big ears.”

"Short with big ears" — I bet he had a big, goofy smile too, and was nervous but eager to have a serious conversation. And all the interviewer could think was "short with big ears."

The article is riveting.

Recently, I've scoured the internet looking for pictures of panda cubs. Other people might enjoy the fruits of my research:

http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/GiantPandas/MeetPandas/pandacubgallery/

(Be sure to click on "next photo," and don't miss 10 and 11!)

http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/GiantPandas/PandaFacts/cubgrowth.cfm

Many of these pictures are collected in an album at

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/index.html

And:

http://www.sandiegozoo.org/news/panda_news.html

http://www.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/exhibits/panda/panda.htm

(The sixth-to-last picture on that page is a bit unnerving; I believe the scientist is just getting stem cells from the panda's umbilical cord. Notice how the mommy pandas sometimes hold newborns in their mouths, so that only their legs and tails poke out!)

The newborns are not cute — they look like fetuses or rodents — but between the ages of five weeks and five months pandas are too adorable for words (but slightly melancholy-looking too — like little pierrots).

A few years ago my father began quoting a poem by D'Annunzio, "Laudi del cielo del mare della terra e degli eroi." It refers to the following legend: some time in the first or second century, people on a ship off the coast of southern Italy heard a voice crying from the land, "Il dio Pan è morto!" Presumably they panicked. I love how the sea is comforting & familiar & the land mysterious & full of portents, & I'm fascinated by anything that has to do with the end of paganism. (Non to mention the following paradox: Christ is sometimes represented as a Pan-like shepherd, & the iconography of the devil clearly has something to do with Pan, or at least with satyrs.) Anyway, my father went so far as to send me a xerox of the poem. It's a vitalist, neo-pagan paean to Pan & the earth's bounty, & reaches its climax in the declaration, "Il Gran Pan non è morto!" I liked it, but couldn't understand my father's fixation (not that one needs an excuse to quote a poem, of course). Well, just a few months ago he told me about his Greek and Latin teacher in high school, who was more or less openly antifascist. At some point during the war he sent his family to live in Florence, which is where they were from, because he feared for their safety; he showed my father his hiding place. One day he enlisted my father to help him carry a load of reeds. (Why reeds?! My father couldn't remember, but it's perfect for the story — almost too perfect.) On the way they stopped at a café whose radio was tuned to the BBC. That's how they heard that the Americans had landed. And the Greek and Latin teacher jumped to his feet and shouted, "Il Gran Pan non è morto!" I like to picture how mystified the people in the bar must have been. And it's nice to think that the Americans landed not so far from where the ominous cry was heard so many centuries ago.

During an air raid my father and some of his friends, like the stupid teenagers they were, went and wandered around in the deserted streets. They came across some German soldiers and fell into conversation with them. "I'm a communist," one of his friends boldly declared, much to my father's consternation. But the German soldiers were not fazed. They talked about their plans for the future: after they'd won the war, they assured the Italians, they would start a revolution. Then the air raid ended, and such confidences seemed once more unthinkable.

Later, to avoid the air raids, my father went to live with his grandmother in the country. One Sunday he was at the local parish house for an afternoon social, and some troops broke in: they'd heard that the priest was hiding someone, and wanted to see if he was a Jew. They made all the young people line up, and one soldier poked his machine gun in my father's stomach; my father seized the muzzle & gently pushed it aside, smiling; the German soldier smiled too; perhaps he was ashamed. The priest's secret guest was not Jewish, so the Germans left without incident. But some time later Fascist militiamen tracked down the same unfortunate man in another nearby parish house, and murdered him: he was a partisan.

Four German soldiers were quartered in my grandmother's house. One was a high officer who had lost his face in the war. He lived in a darkened room and spoke little; his only pleasure was to play chess with my father, and this he did tirelessly, day in, day out. (I suppose my father didn't have much to do either.)

"Il più scaltro," and the most prescient, was a doctor. There was much talk of Hitler's secret weapon: whether it existed, what it was. "I know what Hitler's secret weapon is," the doctor told my father, grinning, and put his gun on the table. "This is it. He's going to shoot himself."

Then there was an officer who was in charge of some Russian soldiers who had agreed to join the German army in exchange for their lives. This man bullied his Russians, and endeared himself to no one else. Finally, there was Heinz Brandt, who became friendly with his hosts and even wrote his address and phone number in my father's German-Italian dictionary. When German troops rounded people up to dig ditches & such this man would hide with the Italians. After the war he came back to visit them, and told them how the bully had met his end. During their retreat, the Germans had to cross the Po in dinghies, because all the bridges had been destroyed. The bully and his Russians commandeered a rowboat, and in the middle of the river the Russians shot him and pushed the body overboard.

Addenda: My uncle says the prisoners were Turkmen, not Russian. And he says that when the Germans and the Turkmen packed up there was a panic because they had counted all their guns, which were kept locked in the credenza, and one was missing. The place was turned upside down, to no avail. In all the commotion one of the Turkmen winked at my uncle and said just above a whisper, "Kapitan kaput," and drew his hand across his neck.

Once a villager took my uncle aside and said, "The next time the bully is in the back garden, stay away from him. We could have killed him the other day, but it was a long shot and you were nearby, and we didn't want to risk hurting you." "He was a friend of the family," my uncle said, "I had no idea he was a partisan."

My uncle told another story when we passed through a small mountain town. "That house belonged to the Such-and-Such family, which grew rich during the occupation. The daughter of the family brazenly sunned herself on the rooftop balcony through the worst of the war, and the partisans would train their viewfinders on her. 'Should I shoot?' they joked." (They never did.)

Last year my fifth-graders all applied to Prep for Prep, and none of them got in. I was quite distraught, & could scarcely believe that the interviewers had found candidates better than my best fifth-graders. They were no less upset — Viren confessed, grinning, that he and Patrick had burst into tears when they read the rejection letter. But we talked about it & I at least felt better afterwards. They reminisced about the awkward moments in their interviews. Richard: "She asked me whether I pursued any interest outside of school, and I said Greek mythology. 'Oh, tell me all about it,' she said. I thought, 'I've just read a four hundred page book on Greek mythology, how can I tell you all about it?!'" Unfortunately everything I said to comfort them only seemed to make matters worse. "I don't want to go to a bad school!" Viren whimpered. "But you know," I said, "you don't have to apply to those schools through Prep for Prep — you can apply on your own." Richard: "I did! I applied to Horace Mann, and I got in! Only they didn't offer me a scholarship." After that, I shut up.

Last year I gave my sixth graders a four-page handout on conjunctions. I wanted them to see that two sentences illustrated the very point they defined, and as I spelled it out the students realized I had written the handout myself. They were impressed, and Ben said, without a hint of irony, "We have an author in our midst!" It was hard to keep a straight face. (I think they interpreted my smile as a sign of shy, embarassed pride.)

I was overjoyed to see my students again, but I was quite unprepared for how happy they were to see me. One of my eighth-graders (erstwhile seventh-graders) saw me in the reception area and asked, "Are you teaching us?" "I think so." (I never know til the last minute.) "Oh my God!" she squealed, and ran to tell her classmates. Whenever I saw my sixth-graders (last year's fifth-graders) we waved and smiled at each other, and when at the end of the day I finally walked into the classroom to teach them Patrick said, "The return of Ms —!" (Was that a Star Wars reference?! I think it was.)

After reading Hobsbawm's fine essay in The Invention of Tradition I was excited to read his four volumes on 1789-1994. So far I've read the first volume, and was very disappointed. It's the kind of history book that gives you the broad sweep, but don't expect names, dates, or God forbid, events. I couldn't help wondering: who is his ideal reader? Certainly not the expert: it's too vague. And the book is useless as an introduction, because it alludes to events, even very important events, without explaining them. The beginner would stumble around in that miasma of stage directions and throat-clearing. I felt he never got to the point, that what he considered background should have been in the foreground. His approach worked in Industry and Empire, a straightforward work of social and economic history, but it's disastrous if you're looking for political history, or a history of ideas.

Hugh Brogan's Penguin History of the USA, on the other hand, is an excellent introduction, chock-full of details and debates, and never tedious. And he doesn't consider it beneath his dignity to give character sketches, or memorable anecdotes, all of which serve as mental signposts, or a skeleton on which to hang the rest.

I love how Dvorak can be both playful & intense to an extreme. In the last movement of the sonata in F, there are two fan-like runs in the piano 36 seconds to the end. It's quiet, so it happens in a penumbra, but surrounded by the aura of pedal. It opens like a quick breath, like the lifting whirl of the hem of a skirt, & then it's over. A few seconds later the figure is repeated in the violin. I usually like Dvorak's violins, so vigorous & pressing & present, all muscles & tendons, but in comparison with the brief loveliness, the vanishing sublimity of the piano — well it can't compare.

Some good letters from the New York Times:

Nice Work, if I Can Get It (2 Letters)

To the Editor:
Re "The Wages of Failure on Wall Street" (editorial, July 13):
I believe that I can muster the requisite skills to run a company into the ground. Since the compensation seems to be so very good, I think that just may be my next career move.
Fran Martone
Chicago, July 13, 2005

To the Editor:
A July 13 editorial rightly condemns Morgan Stanley for paying a departing co-president, Stephen S. Crawford, $32 million in compensation for three months of subpar work.
But an even greater outrage is how Morgan Stanley and like-minded companies finance lobbying campaigns to oppose increases in the federal minimum wage, arguing, with straight faces, that increasing a worker's pay to, say, $12,000 from $11,000 for a year of full-time work would somehow hamper their competitiveness.
If Morgan Stanley were to forgo paying Mr. Crawford his bonus for failure, the savings from that one small gesture alone could be used to give such modest wage increases to 32,000 workers.
Joel Berg
Executive Director, New York City
Coalition Against Hunger
New York, July 13, 2005

Around the same time a judge decided that Disney's board did not betray the trust of the shareholders when it paid Ovitz $132 million for 14 months of mediocre work. Apparently the decision is not meant to comfort board members or CEOs across the country, because the judge also said that past excesses might be forgiven, but that things are different in the 21st century. I don't see that: certain things are wrong no matter how, or when, you look at them, and a salary that exorbitant is surely one such thing. It's funny, isn't it, that the judge accepted the lame defense, "We grew up in a strange decade, we hung out with the wrong crowd; it's not our fault if we didn't know better."

Books read:

April
The Outsiders (Hinton)
To Sir, With Love (Braithwaite)
Changing Places (Lodge)
Oresteia (Aeschylus)
Education and Economic Decline in Britain (Sanderson)

May
Purgatorio (Dante)
University to Uni: The politics of higher education in England since 1944 (Stevens)
Electra (Sophocles)
Electra (Euripides)
Iphigenia in Aulis (Euripides)

June
Things Fall Apart (Achebe)
Iliad (Homer)

July
The Phantom Tollbooth (Juster)
From that Place and Time: A Memoir 1938-1947 (Dawidowicz)
Twilight Sleep (Wharton)
Le Nozze di Cadmo e Armonia (Calasso)

It's a relief to be in a city where cars are kept in their place, where car lanes in the ring road are even being eliminated to make way for more trolley tracks. Of course no car lanes would be the ideal, and the other day I read that in the 18th century the city's "ancient walls were torn down to make way for a promenade." There's an idea! (The train station, which is across the ring road (former promenade, former wall) from the old inner city, bills itself as a "promenade" but they mean "mall" — although, come to think of it, that's what "mall" used to mean.)

I can't stop thinking about my students. Once I handed out the Indo-European family tree to my Saturday fifth graders. "Hey look, Anisha! There's Gujarati!" said Viren, whose family is from Gujarat. He and Anisha are the only Indian-American students in the class. All the other students are Korean-American, and I suppose felt a bit left out. Patrick suggested, "The Korean word for bread is pan. Do you think there's a connection?" I had to tell him that Korean is almost universally considered a language isolate (unless it has some relation to Japanese, but even that is disputed). But bless him for suggesting the word for bread and not, say, computer, or satellite. (I can't believe I didn't ask them for one, two, three, mother, father in Korean and Gujarati. I'll do that in the fall.)

A spectacular storm the other day. I was taking the train straight across Germany, and for the last three hours of the trip lightning flashed large on the horizon every few minutes, but there was no thunder, and it didn't seem to be raining. When I arrived the lightning was still flashing, but still no thunder, and no rain. I settled down and had dinner. "When thunder does come, it'll be ear-splitting, and last minutes, to make up for these hours of silence," I thought. It was warm & people were sitting at outdoor tables. Around midnight, within the space of one minute, the wind rose and the heavens opened. People barely had time to save their drinks. I raced two blocks and got soaked. My room faced onto an airshaft, and when I opened the window the noise was so loud it was like being under a waterfall.
The next morning, a harvest of tree branches, and even a couple of trees.
(I suspect this is the sort of thing that's really not that interesting to read, but I wrote it anyway because I like remembering it — it was so dramatic.)

I'm staying in the room of my dear friend Amber, who's out of town. If you want to see what Amber looks like, take a look at John Eliot Gardner, the Monteverdi Choir, and the English Baroque Soloists' recording of Bach's Ascension Cantatas. There's Amber, smack in the middle of the CD cover, next to Bach. She did not pose for the picture, and she didn't even know it existed til she saw the CD in a store. It has to be her — it's small, but it looks like no one else, and she was spending a lot of time in the Thomaskirche the year before the CD came out. We were all astonished. (It so happens that she plays the baroque violin!)
The Thomaskirche is Bach's church — where he worked, where he's buried — at the altar, no less. I sang there once, & thought, "I can't believe I'm singing Bach's music in the presence of Bach's bones!" At moments like those relics & ancestor-worship make perfect sense.

Funny scene in a food shop: (my German is not so good, so I tuned in and out)

Cast of characters: shopkeeper, customer, and me, looking at pastas and occasionally eavesdropping.
The customer was telling the shopkeeper about his love life; he's apparently scheming to win someone over, and was looking for the right cheese for the occasion. The shopkeeper gave him a sliver of Manchego to taste and held up the huge wheel, declaring, "Women love this cheese!" I tuned out for a while, until I heard the customer say, "Maybe I think about things too much." When he left, the shopkeeper wished him good luck. I wish I had paid more attention to their whole long conversation.

Three blocks away from where I'm staying in Leipzig you will find, on three adjacent blocks, the once and future courthouse (a museum under the DDR); the university library; the Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy School for Music and Theatre; and behind that, the Institute for the Art of the Book. (Leipzig was once home to most of Germany's publishing houses.) It's intense. All these were built in the second half of the nineteenth century, in Leipzig's glory days; they all have impressive façades with columns and pediments and grand staircases. The courthouse is nearly as broad as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and much taller, with a one large and three small cupolas. The 1907 trial for high treason of Karl Liebknecht was held in it, as was the show trial of those accused of setting fire to the Reichstag in 1933. Karl Liebknecht grew up on an important boulevard (now named after him) just a block away. The university library is exquisite; its lobby is a bit like the lobby of the New York Public Library, but smaller and not so white or severe.
These grand buildings mark the entrance to the "Musikviertel," the music neighborhood, where most streets are named after composers. This used to be the neighborhood not only of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater, but also of the Gewandhaus, which stood in front of the university library. When I first came to Leipzig that spot was a parking lot; now there's a totally nondescript university building. I'd been told that the Gewandhaus was completely destroyed in WWII, but a plaque on the new building says otherwise: "the ruins of the old Gewandhaus lay here until March, 1968, when they were dynamited." That's the same year the grand old university building, damaged but still functional, was dynamited, along with the sixteenth-century chapel that stood next to it. (See www.paulinerkirche.de for information on efforts to rebuild it.) The plaque listed famous conductors who had given concerts in the old Gewandhaus, and spoke of its legendary acoustics. It also showed a picture of the building with its admirable motto: RES SEVERA VERUM GAUDIUM. "True joy is a serious thing." (At first I thought it meant, "A difficult thing is the true joy," which would have been even more appropriate.) Apparently the architect was one "Martin Gropius." "Gropius" is not a common name, and some professions run in families: could Martin be related to Walter, who's responsible for the Pan Am building? How depressing.
—> Apparently Martin was Walter's great-uncle. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Gropius has a picture of the old Gewandhaus (with the University Library on the right).
I've looked at rental prices in Leipzig, and no apartment is as expensive as my measly two rooms in Brooklyn. No price was listed for one five bedroom apartment with a dining room and two balconies; maybe that could compare. And these buildings are nothing to sniff at; they're as fine as anything on Riverside Drive, but smaller — 6 or 7 stories instead of 10 or 15; their façades have more detail; and they often come with bay windows, turrets, even caryatids, as well as access to a garden, or at least a view of one.

Recently read:

The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norman Juster. I can't believe I've waited so long to read this one — it's been on my list since I was ten. It's an excellent little book; I often had to catch my breath at how perfectly the puzzle pieces fit together, how clever and funny it all was. Some of Juster's conceits reminded me of Calvino — the invisible city, the boy who never touches the ground til he grows up — except that it's 1000 times better than anything I've read by Calvino.

From that Place and Time, A Memoir, 1938-47, by Lucy Dawidowicz. I was at first very excited to read a whole book by someone who went to my high school; she even talks about it:

Meanwhile, in 1928, I entered Hunter College High School, then an all-girls' elite high school, known for its rigorous curriculum which required four years of English, three years of mathematics and Latin, two years of French or German, as well as biology and physics. As for history, all I can summon up is the unhappy memory of an American history course which consisted of tables of railroads (names, dates, and mileages) and of tariffs (names, dates, and the imports on which duties were imposed).
The English courses mattered most to me and they nurtured my love for literature, poetry especially. We had some splendid teachers, who introduced us to the English poets from Shakespeare to Swinburne. All women, a few of them became the objects of those prelesbian crushes endemic to all-girls' schools. On our own, we discovered contemporary poets, notably Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose verses fed my romantic imagination. T. S. Eliot was still an unknown name to me.
Reading spurred me to writing, especially to poetry. I was soon admitted into the school's literary clique, and joined the staff of Argus, the school's literary journal, becoming its editor in my senior year. Through Argus, I was introduced to the excitement of printing, the clutter of the printing shop and the clatter of its linotype machines and presses. I felt very important as I read and corrected galley proofs, my fingers smudged with printer's ink.

The rest of the book is extremely absorbing and (like many memoirs, I suspect) a very fast read. I only wish her sketches of people were more complete. Perhaps she spreads herself too thin, out of a sense of duty — she gives a page or two each to about thirty people, so that the reader ends up with a blurred impression of even the most interesting characters. Photographs might have helped.
I'd thought this was going to be a complete change from the Iliad, but on the very first page Dawidowicz likens Jewish Vilnius to Troy. It was strange to read how hatred of Germany kept her up at night just days before going to Germany, and thinking, as usual, how much I love Germany.

Twilight Sleep, by Edith Wharton. Not one of her best; in fact at some points I couldn't help suspecting she hadn't bothered to re-read what she had written. But I'll say no more, since I'm a great fan of Wharton's. I recommend The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, four novellas of Old New York (in particular The Spark, and the novella that begins with a fire in a hotel on Christmas day), but NOT Ethan Frome or The Age of Innocence. The Reef is excellent, but I wouldn't recommend it as an introduction; it's Edith Wharton's The Waves: humorless, extreme, relentlessly inward-looking, and very beautiful and moving. But not for the uninitiated.

Le Nozze di Cadmo e Armonia, di Roberto Calasso. I really wanted to like this one. Calasso takes his myths seriously, on their own terms, and writes about them without jargon. But I'm afraid he's incapable of being organized. Not that I think literary criticism ought to have an argument, and I understand that everything is connected to everything else, but still! Think of the poor reader! His prose is never less than melodramatic; his favorite words are "first," "last," "only," "never before," "never after," "everything," "nothing," "without equal," "alone among." It's like playing everything in vibrato. Sooner or later one becomes petulant and pedantic: "We have no knowledge of a more mysterious smile than the one that rumpled the forehead of the lord of the dead." "Are you quite sure? Have you made a list of mysterious smiles, and compared them?" Often I couldn't help laughing, as when I read, "We owe it to that laugh if the world has not yet fallen to pieces." But he has an even more annoying habit than mere hyperbole: hyperbolic paradoxes. I felt like he wanted to take my breath away, to knock me out, and he would use torches, acrobats, and special effects if he could. So I can't recommend this book, but I can't deny that I've learned plenty from it (though I probably would have done better just to browse through the Oxford Dictionary of the Classical World — yes, encyclopedia prose would be just the thing after this wild ride. There are two excellent ones online: the Catholic Encyclopedia and the Jewish Encyclopedia, both written in stately late nineteenth-century English. The ODCW, being still in print, is not online.)

Two moments of déjà-vu in Berlin:

I went to the Museum of Musical Instruments the other day. It's housed in a pathetically ugly building right near where the wall used to be, and the minute I stepped through the door I knew I had been there before. Six years ago I went to a concert of the Berlin Philharmonic. I was late, the lobby was empty, and when I went to the ticket counter the seller gave me a ticket and said, "There's no time for you to pay. Just run! Run!!!" And so I ran, up a kind of vertical labyrinth of stairwells and landings and balconies, with stained glass walls and spherical light fixtures like mobiles hanging from the ceilings. At every level an usher cheered me on & pointed me to the next stairwell. I reached my seat in the brief stillness before the music began, holding my breath so as not to pant audibly.
And now the old Philharmonic is a museum. What a difference from that evening. Now the atmosphere is one of slow, quiet luxury, as if those beautiful objects, already burnished and intricately wrought, were being aged to perfection. I saw a guitar with skulls, each no bigger than small coin, carved on the side.

Then, an hour later, walking along Unter den Linden, I passed by the Meissen shop. I've walked down Unter den Linden many times in the past few years, but the last time I noticed that shop was the first time I saw it, in 1986. My parents and I had gone to East Berlin for a day trip, and my mother was tempted to buy a set of Meissen dishes, though it was hard to tell if the store was open or closed. She had bought some dishes in Prague a few years earlier, but they broke in transit. The sky was cloudy, the buildings were grey, and the Meissen shop seemed to be the only one for a very long stretch. What a contrast to yesterday, when the sky was blue and the buildings cream-colored, the treetops swung in the sunlight, and the sidewalks were crowded with café tables and ice cream eaters. (I saw the shop in July 1986, so the trees must have been in leaf then as they are now, but somehow I don't remember anything green at all.)

Another ill-fated purchase from behind the iron curtain:

A cheese cake from Poland. My parents bought an extra one for me to taste — I wasn't travelling with them — because according to my mother it was just like her mother's cheese cake, but by the time they got back to Italy the cake had gone mouldy.

On teaching literature to 12-year-olds:

My seventh-grade class read Ben Jonson's poem "It is not growing like a tree." Here's the text of that poem:

It is not growing like a tree
In bulk doth make Man better be;
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May,
Although it fall and die that night —
It was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauties see;
And in short measures life may perfect be.

(I can't space it properly on this program, but it should be centered.)

First we parsed it for vocabulary & syntax, paraphrased it & looked at the structure (the significance of lengths of lines, for example). Then I wanted to suggest two possible readings: one that Ben Jonson had in mind his own children, all of whom died very young; the other that he was articulating a defense of lyric (against epic or history). So I told them about his children, and they took the next step. So far so good. The other reading was harder to get across, and I didn't quite know how to get them to understand this without just handing it to them. I suppose I could have framed it as fiction vs. non-fiction — they might have been able to draw an analogy. (I think I just talked about short works and long works.) I don't think that's terrible — I think they got it, but I wonder how I could have done it differently.

I chose "It is not growing like a tree" because it's short (easy to memorize) & dense, and some of them did memorize it. But, not surprisingly, they weren't as taken with it as they were with Blake's "The Poison Tree" (which is not to say I won't teach it again).

It's hard to get them started. When we read a poem I feel like the class is a kitten which I've just deposited in a vast maze, and I have to prod it to get it to explore.

But sometimes they chase after metaphors on their own. We read an excerpt from Moby Dick about the sea's "suffusing seethings." I told them that the literal meaning of "seething" is "boiling," & they caught the implication of latent violence in the word, & one of them even pointed out that the whale rising out of the sea is like the pot boiling over.

Once we were discussing chapters 27-30 of Anne of Green Gables; in 27 & 28 Anne pursues extravagant fantasies and comes to grief; in chapters 29 & 30 she throws herself into real life, and draws great satisfaction from it. So we summed up the four chapters as baldly as possible, and I asked if they could spot any contrast or development. They could; in fact it was the most mischievous boy in the class who got it.

I love it when things happen on the spot; when they see things I hadn't noticed, as with "suffusing seethings," or when I see things I hadn't noticed before. When we were discussing chapter 23 of Tom Sawyer it suddenly occurred to me that the revival and the storm are a comic reversal of Noah's Flood. I was too excited to keep this to myself, let alone to consider how I might nudge them to notice it, so I spilled the beans.

Sherlock Holmes & the short stories of Ray Bradbury went over very well. No surprise there!

The eternal dilemma in teaching is finding a balance between giving and drawing out (like sowing & reaping); one doesn't want to give too much, but if one doesn't give enough nothing will come out. The aim is to find a productive balance, which, of course, differs with every student. It's much easier if they ask questions; then one doesn't have to guess about what they know & what they don't know.
Of course, there's no dilemma if you just lecture, & certainly there's a place for lectures even in high school courses. (They're extremely unpopular at the moment.) (There's no dilemma also if you go to the opposite extreme, which judging from conversation with teachers, is a far more common solution — giving students geometric shapes and hoping they'll rediscover the Pythagorean theorem, for example. "Board of Ed regulations limit me to 10 minutes of instruction," said a colleague who teaches middle school. "For the rest of the hour they free-write on some topic — an ideal vacation for example— exchange it with one neighbor, then another..." She rolled her eyes. "But how can they write if they don't know what a sentence is?" This brings back bad memories...)
I wish there were books that suggested ways of presenting literature to children & teenagers; not just discussion questions, but what they should know before the discussion, different possible follow-up questions — as a ground bass for an improvisation; I don't think anyone would follow it as a script — so that one wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel every time.

Things that move my father to tears (a partial list):

1) The Spanish Republican song with the refrain, "El pueblo, unido, jamas sera vencido!" He and I were singing this, and he had to stop. My mother: "Oh Carlo, it happened over 60 years ago!" (Strange words for a historian.) Father: "I know, [sniff], but the Spanish people suffered so much [cough]."

The great-aunt of an erstwhile flatmate of mine was on a Spanish Republican poster urging women to donate blood; up to then it had been thought that women couldn't or shouldn't give blood.

2) The women farm labourers' song with the following words:

Sebben che siamo donne
paura non abbiamo,
e abbiam delle belle buone lingue,
e in lega ci mettiamo.

O, li-o li-o laa, e la lega vincerà
E noialtri lavoratori
siam per la libertà

La libertà non viene
finchè non c'è l'unione,
crumiri col padrone
crumiri col padrone

O, li-o li-o laa, e la lega vincerà
crumiri col padrone
son tutti d'ammazzar.

Except that he always changes the last line to "son tutti da legar," because scabs and bosses maybe should be tied up, but not killed.

3) Once he was telling me the story of the Battle of Thermopylae, and every few sentences he would stop to putter around. I waited expectantly for him to finish the story, and it took me a while to understand what these frequent interruptions were about. Finally he forced himself to finish, coughing and sniffing his way through Simonides's epitaph.
(I have to say that's how I feel right now about the Iliad. It's taking me forever to finish, partly because I don't want them all to die.)

4) In the country graveyard where my great-grandparents are buried there's the tomb of an anarchist who died in Libya or Ethiopia in the 1930s. The last time we visited the cemetery the tombstone was too decayed to read, but my father had memorized the epitaph: "...mourned by friends and family, he died in un'impresa violenta [I can't think of an English word that would convey the sarcasm of impresa], dreaming of a fatherland not of soldiers but of citizens."

5) Once, late at night, we passed Imola, and my father insisted on stopping to read the the words of Andrea Costa, father of Italian socialism, on a plaque in the main square of the city. It was too dark to read the whole thing, but we managed to make out a few words and even those brought a tear or two to my father's eyes. I've actually found the plaque on the internet, and it's a rousing speech. (http://www.er.cgil.it/im/homeimola.nsf/f3800598d0274240c12568c6004d2ca2/a352eb30fe5f182bc12568c7005029f6?OpenDocument) Here's some of it translated:

31 December 1900 - 1 January 1901 It's the dawn of a new century - Toss flowers with full hands - Workers, thinkers, men: if the century that's dying saw the unity and independence of nations, the coming century will see their federation. If the impulses toward emancipation of the working classes were ruthlessly crushed in blood from 1830 to 1871, the next generation will see their triumph. If woman lies still in centuries-old obbrobrio ['opprobrium' doesn't sound quite right], if the child lacks bread and education, if the old person finds no roof or rest, provide, o new century, for the redemption of woman, the protection of the child, the care of the elderly. ... Onward, citizens! ... Let us throw to the century that did not witness our birth but will see our death our living hearts, and thinking, working, struggling, loving, strong in our sense of destiny, by science enlightened, give, oh! let us give to all children of men work, freedom, justice, peace.

Politicians don't give speeches like that nowadays. Is that a bad thing? I think it is. It's a vague speech (but by no means so vague as to be acceptable to all) and perhaps that kind of rhetoric can become manipulative, but these are mealy-mouthed excuses. Besides, it might be easier to spot bullshit in magniloquence than in its opposite. (I know that sounds paradoxical.) But more importantly, one has to take the risk. People need to be reminded now and then (especially now) what politics are really about, what's worth fighting for.

When my father was very young his grandmother, a pious lady much admired for her charity, admonished him not to play with the children of farm labourers. I think that goes some way towards explaining why he became a historian of agriculture, and founded a museum of peasant culture (http://www.provincia.bologna.it/cultura/vsmeraldi/)

He has some good war stories which I'll post here in the coming months; I don't want to forget them.

My students are so good! I read the story of Pyramus and Thisbe to my Saturday fifth grade at the end of class, as a treat, and before I had read three sentences Patrick said, "Oh, that's the story that's like Julio — I mean Romeo and Juliet."

Justin, a fourth-grader, is one of my weakest students; but he makes an effort, and is so eager to please that he finishes my sentences for me. Once I was working with him, and I said, "Justin, the way you're holding your pen is..." Justin: "Unacceptable!" a kind of joyful self-flagellation. "Well, it's just not helping you..."

I had tea with someone I knew from my undergraduate days. We made small talk for over an hour, and it was a bewildering experience. Small talk is not necessarily a drag, but her heart wasn't in it, nor was mine. Anyone observing her for a few minutes would probably conclude that she was lively and engaging; but the cumulative effect was deadening, deadly. I kept hoping we would light on some interesting topic, but we never did. Later I found out on the internet that she's studying something that interests me intensely, but somehow this never came up. And so I can't help wondering, "Is she humoring me? Does she not consider me worthy of interesting conversation? (But how could a teacher be so stingy?!) Or is she simply not as interesting as I've always imagined?" (David: "The latter. Don't torment yourself." But I'd hate to come to that conclusion before excluding every other possibility.) She has a kind manner, and God knows that as an undergraduate one wants nothing more than for people to be gentle with one (college being like an insane asylum), but — I don't know. I've had tea with her other times over the years, and this happens every time, though I've never been as disappointed as the other day. It was like being a child, and feeling that you're not taken seriously; whatever you say people just think you're cute. "What do we say to one another? Why am I alive?" I wondered as I took my leave. But luckily the rest of the day went much better.

A few weeks before I had invited a colleague to lunch, point-blank. Her company biography seemed interesting ("classicist, bookbinder, pastry chef" — it was all I could do not to fall at her feet & beg, "Teach me everything you know!"), and I figured I wasn't going to meet her any other way. As it turned out, we talked nineteen to the dozen for three hours, about everything. I suppose that wonderful experience emboldened me, so that I felt ready to take on tea with X — and came away feeling as defeated as ever.

I keep a list of reasons why I'm happy not to be in graduate school. Here are a few: when I was searching for a room in the fall I came across a young man who was a graduate student in English at a university in New York. For one of his required courses he was reading an anthropological study of the readers of romance novels. How many removes from the real thing is that? I can't even count them. (In other contexts a study of the readers of trash might not seem so dire, but here it seems like — oh, I don't know, an exercise in cynicism. How did it become a requirement?!)

I told a fellow of a research institute that I studied Andrew Marvell. "Oh! He's really good! I mean, what I study is essentially doggerel, so when I turn to Marvell I'm like, 'Gosh, this is real poetry!'" She was my age, and charming, and had we lived in the same city I would have tried to befriend her, but I don't understand how one can dedicate one's life to doggerel.

A professor emerita at a university in New York: "I try to read my star graduate student's book, but every time I start it I can't make head or tail of it, and then I get bored, and I always end up reading a novel instead. I so glad I'm retired, and I don't have to bother about what Dante might have drawn as a child, I can concentrate on my grandchildren's drawings!" (This was in a non-academic setting, so I guess she figured she could say whatever she wanted.)

Charles Simic on the crisis in translation: "Academics used to buy books in translation, to see what Russian or German authors were writing. They don't do that any more."

Dinner at Leah & John's: I was delighted to discover that they dislike Henry James as much as I do; it marks a new stage in our friendship. John even took Aspects of the Novel off the shelf and read E. M. Forster's cutting remarks on James. (Forster manages to be both magniloquent and incisive. It's very satisfying.) They disagree on George Eliot. "One day many years from now," Leah said, "when you're incapacitated, and I'm taking care of you, I'll read Middlemarch to you, and you're going to love it." I know exactly how she feels.

And an updated list of books I read in March:

Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Spark)
Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery)
Inferno (Dante)
The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)

Recommendations:

Terry Castle's memoir of Susan Sontag in the LRB is very amusing, and true to my own impression of Sontag (from the one time I met her). It's rather cruel and catty, but so funny you can't really feel guilty. I like how Castle casts herself as a clumsy ingenue.

Last year I heard Jill Crossland perform in Balliol College. I sent her a very appreciative e-mail, asking if a Händel CD was in the works. Her secretary wrote to thank me, and say that there was no Händel CD nor would there be one for a while. I didn't reply, because I didn't really have anything more to say. Then a few weeks later this kind soul wrote to me again, apologizing that she, and not Ms Crossland herself, was writing, and saying that there was a homemade recording of Händel's Suite No. 5 (which includes the miraculous Harmonious Blacksmith variations), would I like a copy? Would I! And how thoughtful and excessively modest of her to apologize for not being Jill Crossland. Anyway, I got it in the mail a few weeks ago — Händel's Suite no. 5 and the Chaconne. I love love love them. Especially in the Chaconne, the way it slows down after that marvellously self-confident, majestic entrance (so typical of Händel). "Let me savor this," it seems to say, and goes into variations (explorations really) that range from the contemplative to the energetic. After five minutes it modulates into minor and you think, "This is just another variation; such self-confidence can afford to entertain self-doubt." But after a while it becomes clear that this is no entertainment: the poison almost makes the music grind to a halt, until suddenly it catches a kind of despairing energy: "If it must be, so be it!" Might as well go down in style. It gathers momentum (baroque music is the best at conveying extremes of bitterness and despair without ever losing shape, quite a feat when you think about it; gives the lie to Johnson's comment about Milton's "Lycidas"). And then all that running in a miserable panic through a wasteland leads one to, of all places — I don't know, a sunrise, a banquet, a loved one, all rolled in one — the joy of the beginning, except that this time it feels earned. It starts out majestically, and then it starts running too. But this is a happy running.

What a piece! All that in under twelve minutes!

Then I started listening to John Potter's recordings of John Dowland. At first I thought I only liked "Come Again" (I bought the CD for that song) but then I discovered "Fine Knacks for Ladies" and "Now, O Now, I Needs Must Go." They're excellent. (All the other songs promise to be real downers: "In Darkness Let Me Dwell," "Lachrymae Verae, " "Lachrymae Tristes," "Lachrymae Amantis," "Flow My Tears," "Go Crystal Tears.") The liner notes for the CD are interesting. They start out defending the use of the saxophone in a recording of Elizabethan music, and end up as an impassioned declaration of artistic independence from historicism. It's very well-written, and it struck a chord with me since I read it during a period when I was spending days and weeks with boring historicist criticism. (The saxophone, in case you're wondering, works astonishingly well in Dowland's songs.)

Good news: my review of James Wood's The Irresponsible Self is going to be published! In The Reader. I've met him twice in the past month and a half (happy to report that he's a Nice Person; one doesn't want to admire cads), and the second time he asked me, was I writing anything. "Yes, as a matter of fact I've just finished a book review." "Well, I'll definitely look out for it." You're in for a big surprise, I thought, too shy to tell him what I'd reviewed.

My father recently went to California for the first time in nearly forty years. "What were your impressions?" I asked. "Well, California has changed a lot. In 1968 I read a book at the library of UC Berkeley. This time, I ordered that same book, and — they didn't have it!" I later repeated this exchange in my father's presence, and he objected: "That's not what I said." But it is. (This is very typical of my father.)

I re-read what I wrote above about time passing and I couldn't help remembering a friend's parody, I can't remember of what: "I was brushing my teeth, and suddenly I thought, 'This is life!' and sat down on the edge of the bathtub and burst into tears." And a friend who had edited her high school's literary magazine said half the submissions were exactly like that.

For a long time I thought the Trojans were Greeks too, a different kind of Greek, but I've just found out that they actually spoke "Luvian," an Indo-European language (sub-family: Anatolian) related to Hittite. Google thinks I might be interested in meeting "Luvian Singles."

Cassandra, Alexander, Scamandrus, Meander, Leander — is that a Luvian ending??

I've read that Etruscan might be a language related to Luvian, and not an isolate after all. I know you can't believe everything you read on the internet, but it's an awfully intriguing possibility. It would corroborate Herodotus's story about the origins of the Etruscans, and, of course, Virgil, considering that most of the seven kings of Rome were Etruscan. Maecenas, after all, had Etruscans forebears.

I recently came across this:

(Dis)empowering the Child: A Critique of Children's Literature

It's a post-colonial critique — a sweeping condemnation — of children's literature. It also offers itself to the hapless undergraduate as a "sample essay." I had two reactions: 1) "I always knew this kind of criticism was entirely mechanical, and now I have proof: you could take this sample essay and change the names — the author seems to expect you to do this — and no one would blink an eye" and 2) "I'm surprised a postmodernist critic takes enough interest in his students to produce a webpage" though, to be sure, the page does nothing to foster independent thinking.

The best/worst line was "Thus we must not condemn all writing by adults."

Thank goodness for that!

I wonder what a post-colonial critic would make of Homer's treatment of the "Other" in the Iliad. Maybe he would be big enough to recognize Homer's generosity, or maybe he would rage against lines such as "Thus would murmur any man, Achaian or Trojan: / 'Father Zeus...'" as an attack on the Trojans' irreducible otherness.

Two subway scenes:

On the way home, a man sitting right behind me suddenly said, "Somebody ask me a tough question about God. Any question." Two teenagers took him up on the offer, and then another guy joined in. Soon the whole car was listening. It was a real debate, though I think the questioners let him off easy on the suffering of innocents. It was still going strong when I alighted.

Another day, some guy leaned towards towards me as he walked to a seat and muttered something. I didn't at first understand what he was saying, and as the subway seemed to be full of eccentrics that day I was on my guard, and gave a curt nod without looking up from the Iliad. But as I thought about it I realized what he had said was "Good book!"

The other day I wore what Kaveri calls my Miss Marple suit to class. (Wednesday, so fifth graders) "Why are you wearing a suit?" Me: "I had an interview." They were all agog. "Are you applying for something?!" "Yes, for a job." "But who will teach us proper English if you leave?!" "I bet the students at the other school are horrible!" "And the cafeteria food is rotten!" "Yeah, and they use textbooks from 1963!" "If you leave, Dr K [the director of the program and their math teacher] will take over. He'll be like, 'Uh, how do you spell 'perimeter'?'"
I was touched. I hadn't expected such an outpouring of affection from this particular class of dutiful, hesitant, somewhat reserved little people.

My Saturday fifth grade class is a society of Falstaffs in comparison. Three stories about that class:

One day I brought to class Roget's Thesaurus. I wanted to teach them to use it, and also to appreciate how many crazy synonyms English has. It went over better than I could have hoped: for the rest of the class Patrick would turn to Richard and say, "Bald as a billiardball!" And Richard would respond, "Plump as a partridge!" And they'd burst into peals of laughter.

I read the first chapter of Edward Eager's The Time Garden at the beginning of the term, only to be told by the director of the academy that really my students should be working the whole two hours. It didn't seem particularly tragic, given that they're all avid readers, but still, what a pity, what a waste to read the first chapter of a book and then stop. I wanted to know what they thought of it, but that first day they were too shy to talk; now I would never know. But I soon forgot about it. A few weeks later I gave them a reading list. "You're to choose one book from this list, read it, and then give a presentation on it to the class." "Can we read more than one book?" "Of course!" "Can we read all the books on the list?" "Absolutely!" I almost laughed. When the time came for the students to give their presentations, I was delighted to discover that four out of my eight students had read books by Edward Eager. I had forgotten, but they hadn't.

Another time we were studying transitive and intransitive verbs. One of the specimen sentences, courtesy of the University of Ottawa, was "The Stephen sisters are very talented: Vanessa paints, and Virginia writes." After we had ascertained that the verbs were not used transitively, I asked if those verbs were necessarily intransitive. "No," said Richard. "Give me an example." "You could paint — I don't know — a lighthouse, and then it wouldn't be intransitive." When he said "lighthouse" I nearly shouted. And they were all agog as I told them who the Stephen sisters were, and To the Lighthouse. I still can hardly believe the coincidence.

Apparently Schumann's Papillons (Op. 2) "is a musical rendering of the ballroom scene from a chapter of the novel "Flegeljahre" by Jean Paul Richter, Schumann's favorite novelist." This information comes, if you can believe it, from a website called "amazing butterflies," which recommends a CD of "butterfly" music to attract butterflies to your garden.

From a student paper (one of those seventh-grade boys!):

I enjoyed reading Anne of Green Gables. I read it because I had to, I was forced to read it, but I still think it was a good book.

He probably doesn’t realize just how emphatic the comma makes that sentence sound. (Or who knows, maybe he does.)

We just finished Anne of Green Gables, and one of the girls, an excellent student, asked if we could read a “hard book” next.

More on Murnau’s Sunrise. It reminded me of Gabriel Josipovici’s thesis in _On Trust: Art and the Temptations of Suspicion_. I started reading it a few years ago, then stopped in the middle, just before the chapter on Proust, because I hadn’t read Proust (am about to do so). Here’s what the dust jacket says: “In this wide-ranging book, an eminent novelist, playwright, and literary critic explores the question that has troubled artists and philosophers (though not critics) since the time of the Romantics: is it possible to create art today with the freedom of earlier ages and yet produce works that are more than merely decorative or commerical? Such a question, argues Gabriel Josipovici, is not timeless; it has a history, and a relatively short one at that. Why is it only with the Romantics that suspicion, not just of motive but of the very tools of art, language, and form, has become so insistent? Why could Shakespeare depict suspicion with such power and insight in the figures of Hamlet and Iago, yet himself work with such apparent ease within the conventions of his time?
To understand Romantic suspicion, the author argues, we need to understand what it supplanted and why. To that end he turns to the work created in what he calls cultures of trust, to Homer and the Hebrew Bible, to Dante and Shakespeare, before examining the interplay of trust and suspicion in a number of Romantic and post-Romantic writers from Wordsworth to Beckett.

This seems to me far more convincing than Eliot’s dissociation of sensibility, or the fatuous notion that the “self” (whatever that is) was invented in the Renaissance — one might as well go back to the expulsion from the Garden of Eden for the original, fatal self-division. (I haven’t read “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry.”)
I heartily recommend the first half of _On Trust_, and by the end of the year I hope to be able to recommend the whole thing. Anyway, it seemed to me that the power of _Sunrise_ comes from its combination of artfulness and unself-consciousness, of delicacy, and straightforwardness and confidence in the tools of its art (it won an Oscar for cinematography in 1927).

_Sunrise_ presents absolutely uncompromising versions of city and country life, and this whole-hearted endorsement of opposites is one reason, I think, for the film’s vitality. (Much as I love trolleys, I couldn’t help thinking, “It’s no ordinary trolley that goes from that village to that city!” But I suppose in Germany it’s possible.)

Schumann’s butterflies

A few years ago I attended a performance of his Carnaval “Scènes mignonnes sur quatre notes.” They’re sketches of people at a masked ball: friends, musicians, commedia dell’arte characters, and two versions of Schumann himself. After the eighth sketch the pianist closed the piano, wiped his hands on his knees, and waited. At first I thought he was collecting himself for the next challenge, but as the silence lengthened I began to worry that he might have hit a block. After two minutes I was so frantic for him that I heard ringing in my ears. (He was an acquaintance.) Finally, smiling, he opened the piano and played the next sketch. After the performance I asked a musician friend what had happened. “That’s the sphinx. Schumann’s instructions are to shut the piano and sit and wait for a long time.” A sphinx at the masked ball: as if to say, some people are utterly inscrutable; we just don’t know what to say about them.” (“We dance in a ring & suppose./ The secret sits in the middle & knows.” The sphinx comes almost halfway through the Carnaval.)

Recently I read that “the motivic seeds of Carnaval are revealed by the notated but unplayed “Sphinxes” (inspired by Jean Paul’s Sphinx moths): the pitches E-flat, C, B, A (“es c h a” in German) denote Schumann, and A-flat, C, B (“as c h”) or A, E-flat, C, B (“a es c h) stand for Asch, the birthplace of Ernestine.” (“A.S.C.H-S.C.H.A (Lettres dansantes)” is no. 11, and “Estrella” (Ernestine) is no. 14.) What are Jean Paul’s Sphinx moths?! Are they related to Schumann’s Papillons Opus 2? The Sphinx comes right before a sketch named “Papillons.” It also comes after the “Réplique” (no. 8) to Coquette (no. 7), so maybe it’s part of a conversation.

Suggestions welcome.

Twelve-year-old boys

It’s a curious fact that all the antics of twelve year old boys that I deemed stupid and immature when I was twelve amuse me no end in my students. It’s often a struggle to look stern. I once just had to bite my lip and look busy with a pile of papers, and then I caught the chief mischief-maker peeking at me, an expression of utter surprise on his face.
If my seventh-graders were animals the girls would be swans and the boys would be puppies. That’s how stark the contrast is between them. The girls, in their graceful dignity, are less amused by the boys than I am: they usually ignore them, or occasionally, when I’m otherwise occupied, tell them to shut up. But once or twice I’ve seen a girl shake with silent laughter at the boys’ tomfoolery.

There’s a non-fiction version of this so-near-so-unreachable. Last spring, while idly googling my mother’s unusual family name, I came across the Polish Business Directory of 1929. There were my poor great-uncles, murdered in World War II:

Mojz.
Joz.
Kaminiskiego 3
Grocery Items-Retail
Kolonjalne artykuly-Detal

It sent shivers down my spine: an official record, perhaps the only remaining record, of their existence, beyond family knowledge (which, now that my grandfather is dead, amounts just to their names and occupations). Even Yad Vashem had never heard of them.

It’s unbearable how inexorably the past slips away from us. I cried on New Year’s Eve 1981, because all the festivities smacked of ingratitude to good old 1980. It’s incredible that within my short lifetime everyone who could remember World War I has died. In Oxford colleges at Armistice memorial services one still recites, “At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them, we will remember them.” For how much longer? But ending the tradition would seem like a betrayal.

I own a xeroxed volume of the private memoirs of a woman who was born in 1896 and died in 1993. She once said to me, “Munich was such an exciting city before the war!” Really? In the 1930s? It was hard to believe. Later, after she died and I learned how old she really was, I realized she had meant before World War I. I still can’t believe I knew someone that old; and I never knew it.
In her memoirs she mentions having tea with Hans Richter, which puts me at three degrees of separation from Brahms, and eight from Bach (Brahms - Schumann - Mendelssohn - Mendelssohn’s great-aunt Sarah - Bach’s Berlin son). We could all have tea in heaven.

MLA 2004

This isn’t really news — it’s from December — nor does it shed new light on the MLA; on the contrary, it’s the conference living up to one’s lowest expectations, to a comical extreme. John and I went just for a day trip. We missed the early train, and met J at the conference center. “I loved your paper!” J called out to someone in a crowded lobby; the woman acknowledged her praise, and John, J and I were swept on by the throng. “Did you really like it?” I asked, genuinely pleased and looking forward to hearing about it. “M-hm.” Half an hour later, at a restaurant far from the convention center, I asked J about the paper she loved. She glanced around to make sure there were no other conference-goers around, then said grimly, “It was awful.” She took out her “notes” on the paper, which were a list of all the speaker’s preposterous po-mo neo-logisms. We had a good laugh, and then I had to ask, “Why did you say you loved it if you thought it was so awful? Why encourage such people? You don’t have to be rude, but —” “Oh, I don’t know, it just seemed to be the thing to say...”
We had a long & leisurely lunch, so that I missed most of the panel I’d meant to go to. One paper, however, was enough. I couldn’t pay attention to it, it was so awful, but every once in a while I was jerked out of my reverie by some remarkable turn of phrase. I’ll never forget “the Lacanian transformation of the penis into the phallus.” “What’s that?!” I wanted to ask. “Whatever it is, it sounds awful” — and went back to studying the carpet.
The one satisfaction of the day — apart from seeing J — came when I read Ann Durrell’s heart-felt introduction to Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game: “Our friendship really began in the smoking car of a Pennsylvania railroad train en route from New York to Philadelphia” — and there I was, on a train en route from New York to Philadelphia! (Children’s books, American railroads in their heyday — it reminds me of Edward Eager, whose characters are constantly stepping into the past, or into other fictions.) I love this kind of literary serendipity. And it’s amazing how often it happens. In Go Tell It on the Mountain “I sauntered down Lennox Avenue and entered the Park” — and there I happened to be, on the M4 bus, where Lennox Avenue meets Central Park. When Tristram Shandy fled to Rome (a light-hearted version of Laurence Sterne’s flight from death — the jokes seem so desperate when you think about it) I was sitting on a train to Rome. And when the main characters of Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun are reconciled in the main square of Perugia under the statue of a pope who seemed to be blessing them, I had just arrived (for the first time) in Perugia. Italian cities are set up for this sort of thing: if Dante mentions a place, there’s a plaque to remind the passer-by. There ought to be more such plaques.

One purpose of this blog is to find people, preferably in New York, who might be willing to talk about books. Here's a list of the books I've read since September:

Fall 2004

The Bunner Sisters (Wharton)
Homage to Catalonia (Orwell)
Summer (Wharton)
Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (Spence)
Death Comes for the Archbishop (Cather)
The Irresponsible Self (Wood)
Reunion (Uhlman)
Nedda, Vita dei Campi (Verga)
Odyssey (Homer)
Song of Solomon (Morrison)
Wind in the Willows (Grahame)
What's the Matter with Kansas? (Frank)


Winter 2005

January:
Journey by Moonlight (Szerb)
The Westing Game (Raskin)
La letteratura e gli dei (Calasso)
Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (Hobsbawm)
Tom Sawyer (Twain)
The Penguin History of the USA (Brogan)

February:
Tom Brown's Schooldays (Hughes)
Oedipus Rex (Sophocles)
Oedipus at Colonus
Antigone
Ajax
Philoctetes

Just because they're on the list doesn't mean I liked them. Once I took out Song of Solomon on the subway, and a woman leaned over to say "I loved that book!" I'm all for sharing opinions on the subway, but I didn't want to get into an argument with a stranger, so I just smiled and nodded. I LOATHED that book, couldn't believe how bad it was...
So if you've read any of these books and would like to talk about them, drop me a line.

I'll probably post plenty of student stories here, but for now I'll just describe one of my favorites so far. It happened in October. I asked my sixth-graders to bring to class two articles from a reputable newspaper, one on Bush, the other on Kerry. They would summarize their articles to the class, and we would discuss and compare them. One boy brought a list of candidates' favorite things, from Time Magazine for Kids. I was annoyed, but didn't question his choice at first, because this somewhat unpopular boy was having his moment of glory, and I didn't want to crush his enthusiasm. Once the excited questions and comments had died down, however, I couldn't help asking, "Should one's vote be influenced by such trivia?" Well, favorite sports and food were irrelevant, they admitted. "But some items are quite revealing." Me: "Really? Can you give me an example?" Class: "Consider the favorite childhood books. Kerry's favorite book was _Robin Hood_, which shows he cares about poor people, and Bush's favorite book was _The Very Hungry Caterpillar_, which shows he's greedy."

The other day Kaveri and I went to see Murnau's _Sunrise_. I didn't know what to expect, and I was blown away. I wasn't the only one: at one point a moviegoer in the back row started exclaiming, in a loud monotone, "Stunning... A genius... Perfection in film..." And so on, until the soundtrack drowned him out.

I've often wondered about the seven liberal arts. The trivium, obviously enough, has to do with language. But it wasn't obvious to me for years, because I was convinced "logic" had to do exclusively with the kind of logic used in mathematical proofs. Then I remembered that in third grade I learned "analisi grammaticale," ie, parts of speech, and in fourth grade, "analisi logica," ie, parts of sentences. So rhetoric must be the next level, composition (though I realize there are important differences between rhetoric & composition). So far so good. But what about the quadrivium? Arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (or astrology). What an odd assortment — why not, say, history, philosophy, geography, and something else? Then I studied the music of the spheres, and it began to make sense: the four higher liberal arts concern complicated harmonies, patterned, abstract systems. The goal being to study them for their own sake, but also, by a kind of magnetic attraction, to inspire harmony in the soul of the microcosm, the student.

A few weeks ago I sent an e-mail with the subject heading "Subway Art" to the MTA. I wrote about how much subway art means to me and, no doubt, millions of riders; I asked for more mosaics and bas-reliefs, and made some suggestions about their online gallery. My e-mail was, I think, warmly appreciative. Within minutes I received an automated confirmation of receipt, with the subject heading "Subway Art Incident." Poor MTA! Such anxious humility in that bit of automated editing...