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...