Karen complained about having to make collages in English class in tenth grade, and other insults to her intelligence that she endured in high school. Steven: "You turned out all right in spite of that." Karen: "But for years I was filled with rage. I had nightmares about not graduating from high school because I had to fulfill the kindergarten requirement."

I asked them (as I've been asking everyone) what happened to the revolutionary* fervor that animated so many Texans in the 1890s (how can a political tradition vanish without a trace?), & Matthew mentioned the discovery of oil. That's very plausible!

*I didn't know what word to use here. "Populist" has a debased meaning, except as a proper adjective, and Goodwyn (rather perversely) redefines "Progressive" to mean "reactionary." Maybe I should call it "socialist," as their enemies did. (But they can't have objected, since they allied themselves with Eugene Debs!)

In spite of its jargon-filled introduction, The Populist Moment is very good.

I wish I could say the same of Georges Mounin's Storia della Linguistica. In spite of the title, and the publisher (Feltrinelli), this is not a book for the general reader. Mounin seems to think that the point of his book is to suggest directions for future research, and he's pathetically eager to prove that he's done his reading:

Si facevano ricerche qua e là su molti problemi dello stesso tipo: per esempio, quello dell'a indoeuropea, dove appare chiaro l'immobilismo rappresentato dalla teoria schleicheriana dell'antichità del sanscrito. Lo stesso Curtius aveva proposto un principio di soluzione, scartato da Schleicher. Esattamente in questo clima si debbono situare gli articoli di Brugmann e di Osthoff sulle sonore; il primo, nella prefazione, si riferisce, con elogi, del resto, a Scherer e a Leskien.

It sounds like a parody, but it's not. Does it have to be that boring? I don't think so. The first sentence refers to Sanskrit's tendency to turn every vowel into "a," but does he explain that? Of course not! "Then would be some stooping, and I choose never to stoop." He's constantly alluding to things that sound interesting, but he never explains.

I was quite excited about this book at first, because it has a long section on the ancients, the premise being that writing systems tell us a great deal about how people thought about language. It sounds like an obvious point, but so often people date the birth of linguistics to the nineteenth century, or worse, to Saussure. So I was delighted to see an acknowledgement that people had ideas on the subject thousands of years ago, even though they failed to put their ideas into scholarly format. But even this part of the book was a disappointment, because it wasn't illustrated.

Enough. If you know a good book on the history of linguistics, tell me about it.

From Edith Wharton's Glimpses of the Moon

She had taken Clarissa, as usual, to the Giardino Pubblico, where that obliging child had politely but indifferently "played" — Clarissa joined in the diversions of her age as if conforming to an obsolete tradition — and had brought her back for a music lesson, echoes of which now drifted down from a distant window.

I've been savouring that parenthetic remark all day — it's so sad and funny, and quick.

Books:

January

The Black Cauldron (Alexander)
The Hunters (Messud)
The Castle of Llyr (Alexander)
Taran Wanderer (Alexander)
The High King (Alexander)
The Populist Moment: A History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (Goodwyn)


The Hunters (two novellas) was very good indeed. Messud works on a small canvas, or maybe I should say in negative space, for how many novellas are there about the relationship between a cleaning lady and her employer, or between a summer boarder and her neighbor? But these relationships fill the hearts of Messud's characters, and it seemed presumptuous to feel sorry for them, especially after one had been persuaded that what seemed like emptiness was pullulating with life... or with the shadow of life. You can't get away from the sadness of it.

I started reading the Prydain Chronicles back when I was eight. I got through The Book of Three and The Black Cauldron, and I must have read at least part of Taran Wanderer, because I remembered one episode from it. I remember very vividly learning the word "mesh," from Gwydion's first appearance, and "bauble," from Eilonwy's. I'd been meaning to read the whole thing for years, and now I finally have. It's wonderful. I especially liked the growing seriousness of the books, as if Alexander expected the reader to grow up along with Taran. His sense of humor is really fine, and I was actually moved to tears by two death scenes in The High King. One was of a comic character, and his death had the pointlessness of humor. (That's not the whole truth: part of what made it so poignant was that this ridiculous character, who gradually comes to realize how ridiculous he is, without losing his good humor, puts his silliness to good use and actually manages to save his companions at the cost of his own life. It's hard to kill off a boob without verging on the grotesque,* but Alexander pulls it off.)

*Is this true? I'm not sure.

Then I read Willa Cather's Lucy Gayheart. I read My Antonia in seventh grade, for school, and it left me cold. I was persuaded only recently to try Cather again. (By Jennie!) Since then I've read The Professor's House, Death Comes for the Archbishop, O Pioneers!, and now Lucy Gayheart. I've come to think that Cather can't write badly, even though I have no fine quotations to prove it — she's the least flashy of writers, and the most consistently graceful.

All her protagonists are people who are in love with the world and yet feel irredeemably alienated from it. There are so many warm, solid descriptions of landscapes, cityscapes, weather, music — all the good things one can always count on — and yet a fatal sense of separation. (In one way or another, people usually fail the protagonist.) The calm, gentle narration at first lulls me, and then seduces me so that I can't stop reading, and then in the end I'm devastated.

The same day I wrote that I read this, in Lucy Gayheart:
He had missed the deepest of all companionships, a relation with the earth itself, with a countryside and a people. That relationship, he knew, cannot be gone after and found; it must be long and deliberate, and conscious. It must, indeed, be a way of living. Well, he had missed it, whatever it was, and he had begun to believe it the most satisfying tie men can have.

I read Goodwyn's The Populist Moment right before Lucy Gayheart. One of the Populists' grievances was the rapacious lending practices of banks, and one of the main characters in Lucy Gayheart (set ten years after the Populist moment) is just such a banker who bankrupts farmers and buys them out. Cather doesn't gloss over this, but she does make it impossible for us to hate him.