Thursday, March 30, 2006

More on "Remember My Forgotten Man":

Here's the first stanza:

Remember my forgotten man
You put a rifle in his hand
You sent him far away
You shouted hip-hurray
Look at him today

I was tempted to put in a great deal of punctuation to make up for the lack of conjunctions, but decided not to: the sarcasm of the song has everything to do with the absence of transitions: nothing is connected to anything else.
Another great thing about this song: the regular march, the unvarying rhythm of the words vs. the lurching crippled rhythm of the music (and especially the violin & piano accompaniment).
Last week I went to this discussion at Columbia:

Beauty and Morals: Some Literary Perspectives
With John Hollander, Alexander Nehamas, Marie Ponsot & Elaine Scarry

I came very close to not going: I was weary and hungry, and, I thought, "Will anything get resolved? Not likely." But I went anyway, and didn't really regret it. Naturally, I got there very late, and Elaine Scarry and Alexander Nehamas did much of the talking while I was there.

You have to admire Scarry's boldness, her lack of concern at seeming sentimental. (Although part of me chafes: one should take it for granted, and regard the opposite as grotesque.) One would like one's favorite people to hit it off; one would like one's favorite ideas to reinforce one another. And instead of shrugging her shoulders and saying, "Sometimes it just doesn't work out," Scarry pours all her energy and her intelligence into arguing that beauty and justice are two sides of the same coin. Like her, I never understood what the fuss over The Triumph of the Will was all about, and yes, the notion that fascism has first dibs on beauty is grotesque. I was also half convinced by her idea that the opposite of beauty is injury. (When I'm nauseous, which almost never happens, the mere thought of suffering or injustice can make me throw up; beautiful things, especially music and spaces, on the other hand, are a great curative.)
On the other hand, I'm not sure I understand her idea that what links beauty and justice is the ideal of symmetry. I can see that for some things — faces, for example, or façades. (Later, I remembered the biggest example of symmetry in music: Brahms's German Requiem, which is so symmetrical that you can pair up the movements: 1-7, 2-6, 3-5, and 4 in the middle. After 7 your ear half expects 2.) But there's plenty of art that plays with the idea of imbalance. Later she specified that she didn't mean anything so crude as bilateral symmetry — more "balance." But this seems awfully close to lifting the boundaries from a word, undefining it. (For example, can't you argue that local imbalances are part of a grand symmetry? Yes, in art; but not in justice.) Moreover, aesthetic experience is often painful — and I have in mind Keats and Mozart, not Bunuel's knife-in-an-eye scene.
Alexander Nehamas asked if there wasn't something unjust about the way that beautiful things and people stand out. I was reminded of this wonderful passage from The House of Mirth:

They turned into Madison Avenue and began to stroll northward. As she moved beside him, with her long light step, Selden was conscious of taking a luxurious pleasure in her nearness: in the modelling of her little ear, the crisp upward wave of her hair—was it ever so slightly brightened by art?—and the thick planting of her straight black lashes. Everything about her was at once vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine. He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her. He was aware that the qualities distinguishing her from the herd of her sex were chiefly external: as though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to vulgar clay. Yet the analogy left him unsatisfied, for a coarse texture will not take a high finish; and was it not possible that the material was fine, but that circumstance had fashioned it into a futile shape?

Elaine Scarry said, "But perhaps seeing a beautiful thing leads us to pay more attention to everything else." Perhaps; and often enough, to be disappointed, if beauty is what we're after. But then, beauty isn't everything.

Nehamas was effective because he wasn't posing as a bad boy; he wasn't championing the theatre of cruelty, for example. He was simply saying that there were exceptions. And that's the way I like to see it. Scarry's arguments are very appealing; but I need an escape clause.

Here's a good article: "In from the Cold: the Return of Knut Hamsun"
James Freedman, Former Dartmouth President, Dies at 70
on March 21, 2006

From the obituary:

When Dartmouth recruited him, in 1987, he became the first president of the college since 1822 not to have been a student or faculty member there. His mission, he wrote in ''Idealism and Liberal Education,'' was to shore up the intellectual reputation of a college known for being ''inhospitable to women, fraternity-oriented, unintellectual, ultraconservative and especially congenial for 'jocks.' ''

In his inaugural address, he declared his intention to make Dartmouth more attractive to students who took pleasure in ''the lonely acts of writing poetry or mastering the cello or solving mathematical riddles or translating Catullus.''

———

Coincidentally, I met Johs's sister Holly, a Dartmouth graduate, earlier this month, and she complained emphatically about the anti-intellectualism and the congeniality to jocks of Dartmouth.

Sunday, March 26, 2006

Observations on lentils

Since the fall I've made lentil soup nearly every week. A pot lasts that long, and it's wonderful to know that when I get home all I have to do is heat up my lentils. It's perhaps the only thing I can eat for dinner day in, day out, without getting dumpish. In time I've come to know them quite well. Here's what I've discovered.

Choosing:
I usually choose French lentils. With their speckled and swirling greens and blues, each lentil looks like a flattened planet earth. They remind me of Leonardo's advice to his students to lose themselves in observation, to discover a world in a grain of sand or a patch of mould.* A website on lentils says, "These choice lentils were originally grown in the volcanic soils of Puy in France." Those dramatic origins seemed to explain their appearance.
Second choice: beluga lentils, for their glistening blackness. But as these are very small and round, they're harder to handle.
Occasionally I add green or brown lentils. The way red lentils turn into yellow mush doesn't serve my purpose.
Beluga and French lentils are more expensive than the other varieties, and I wonder if that's simply because they're more beautiful.

Sorting:
Sometimes lentils have an electric charge. This is obvious in the way they bounce along the plate, attracting and repelling one another. It's hard to imagine — lentils, so humble and humdrum — but there's no doubt about it.

Rinsing:
Some of the lentils sink to the bottom without a fuss. Others cluster in tight knots near the surface of the water. It reminds me of a flat and placid landscape with huge thunderclouds overhead. I have to break up these clumps with my fingers to make sure every lentil gets washed, and little bubbles come up when I do so. Is this phenomenon related to electricity, or is there something else going on?

*Bisogna guardare nel turbinio confuso della vita con quello stesso spirito fantastico con cui i discepoli del Vinci erano dal maestro consigliati di guardare nelle macchie dei muri, nella cenere del fuoco, nei nuvoli, nei fanghi e in altri simili luoghi per trovarvi "invenzioni mirabilissime" e "infinite cose."

-Gabriele D'Annunzio

[One must look into the bewildering whirl of life with that same fantastical spirit with which Vinci advised his disciples to look at patches on walls, cinders of fire, clouds, mud and other similar places in order to find there "most wonderful inventions" and "infinite things."] ["Invenzioni" I think is meant in the broadest sense possible — something found, something made.]

Thursday, March 23, 2006

I have a title now that obligates me to write rather more about books than I do.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Last year I bumped into an old elementary school classmate on the bus. I had seen her only once since 6th grade, in high school, when she came to a recital a friend of hers and I were in. Anyway, she told me she was a cabaret singer specializing in songs of the 20s and 30s. Although she was awfully mean to me in 6th grade, she was perfectly nice to me when we met in high school, and downright effusive when we met on the bus. So I looked up her website, listened to samples, and ended up buying all three of her CDs. I really like them. I like her invocation of her Ziegfeld's Follies grandmother (I've had a weakness for vaudeville ever since watching a great deal of Charlie Chaplin and reading Angela Carter — Wise Children and Nights at the Circus — in high school, and it all came back to me last week when I read Philip Pullman's magisterial Shadow in the North. There's a song by Jan Johansson that perfectly captures one aspect of vaudeville: the self-deprecating, shabby yet spiffy, humorous, good-natured mournfulness. It's called "Det sjunger nagontig inom mig," and it's in the Spelar Musik Pa Sitt Eget Vis. (There are circles over some of those a's.)) Anyway, back to Maude Maggart: at first all I could do was listen to her rendition of Cole Porter's "Looking at You" again and again. Now I've been able to tear myself away from it long enough to appreciate (on the same Look for the Silver Lining album) "I'll See You Again," "J'ai Deux Amours," "Look for the Silver Lining," and "My Man," and on the With Sweet Despair album, "Beyond Compare," "Remember My Forgotten Man" (I love the haunted bitterness, the stomping fierceness & the grace of it), and "Happy Days Are Here Again." It's hard to believe, listening to her calm, melancholy performance that this was FDR's campaign song.
I went to Oxford to participate in a degree ceremony (finally!), and the week was one long convivium; every day I rushed from lunch to tea to dinner, with hardly any time in between. It was like a banquet after a long fast. (That's an exaggeration; I see people in New York too; but not three times a day.)

In the brief intervals between meals I bought books:

Novels:

Hardy, Return of the Native
Owen Sheers, Dust Diaries

Children:
Norton, The Complete Borrowers
Pullman, The Scarecrow and his Servant

Poetry:
Browning, Poems and Plays

Essays:
George Eliot, Selected Critical Writings
Sebald, Campo Santo
Pater, The Renaissance

S gave me Faulkner's Wild Palms.

Thank you, S!


Recommendations:

Miklos Banffy's Transylvanian trilogy, starting with The Writing on the Wall (Marion)
Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française (Marion)

Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy (Sue)
Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Sue)

Jenny Uglow's biography of George Eliot (Deborah)
This happened a few months ago, but my gorge still rises at the memory:
At a party I met someone who's a third grade teacher at one of the best schools in New York. I asked him lots of questions, and he was kind enough to give detailed answers. Here are the answers that raised my hackles:
__ Do you teach grammar?
__ Not in the younger grades. We find it inhibits their creativity. We teach it in eighth grade.

But in fact grammar appeals to the persnickety side of 7, 8, 9 and 10 year olds. By the time they're 13 they can't be bothered with precision; they want drama, big ideas.

And:
__ What's the history curriculum?
__ They study the Native Americans of the Eastern Woodlands, because they embodied the ideals of peace and justice.

To paraphrase from The Time Garden, I had to choke down symptoms of nausea.
Paul Avrich 1931-2006

Please read one of the online obituaries.
Paul was a colleague of my mother's and a friend of my family's. My first conscious memory of him (I may have met him as a baby) is from 1985, when we went on a day trip to visit the silk mill museum in Patterson, New Jersey. (His interest in the labor movement, my father's interest in silk mills...) It was a grim winter day, and I was prepared to be very bored, but the excursion turned out to be a pleasure thanks to Paul's enthusiasm and his inexhaustible supply of anecdotes about old anarchists. That's when I decided that Paul was someone who could talk to children, and to whom I, as a child, could talk. He didn't condescend; he was a tireless and very entertaining explainer. (He later wrote a recommendation for me for middle school. I can say this, but my mother actually plans to mention it in an obituary she's writing for a trade publication, as evidence of his "mensch"lich qualities. I'm embarrassed before the fact.)
The last time I saw him was just over two years ago, just before he fell ill (I think). But I remember most vividly the time before that, on the top floor of Alouette at 98th and Broadway. He was full of life, brimming over with stories. I especially remember a story about a dog he had as a child. At some point the dog got too big, and he had to give it away. He was heartbroken. He didn't see the dog for years, until one day he went to a political rally. (There were significant details about the political rally — the slogan? the buttons? I can't quite remember.) He was at the back of the crowd, leaning in to hear the speaker, when he felt two paws on his back. He turned around, and there was his long lost dog! The dog jumped for joy, and slobbered over Paul's face and hands. Paul was hardly less delighted.
He was such a good storyteller that I actually had tears in my eyes at this point, though I was laughing too. It seems so unfair that conversation should be so ephemeral. I remember that story, and there must be others who have heard it. But none of us, I'm sure, will bring anyone to tears recounting it. So when we die the story will die with us.
Luckily, in Paul's case, we have his books as well. He nearly managed to finish his last book, and his family is planning to publish it. It's about Alexander Berkman, a friend of Emma Goldman's.
Admissions: of the seventeen eighth graders I've been teaching since last January:

one got into Brooklyn Tech

three got into Bronx Science

and eleven got into Stuyvesant.

A number also got into Horace Mann, Brearley, Riverdale, and Trinity (some but not all with scholarships).

So it's a good result, but the exultation (my exultation) is not quite what it was last year. Partly because my heart is with my sixth graders, who haven't yet heard results. Partly because I think: those eighth graders could be better educated. I could have made them write essays every week. We should have read more books and poems; we could have done some history. It's ridiculous that I should have had to spend so much time teaching basic grammar to seventh and eighth graders. When I was assigned them last January I was a bit disappointed: twelve is old; I didn't want to do a rescue job. But then I was impressed by their grinta, their determination, their spunk, their alertness and their curiosity. They're not passionate about books as my best 6th graders, but they're willing to work hard. Then last fall I was again disappointed with them for slacking off after the SSHSAT, and now I'm pleased with them again.
I congratulated them on their results (the two who didn't get in anywhere are not in my class any more), and they said, "That's old news!" Me: "But it's big news!" I had them write a few pages describing a recent family meal, and, as it turns out, high school admissions are the topic of conversation at everyone's dinner table.

The sixth grade is reading Elizabeth George Speare's The Witch of Blackbird Pond, and we talked about John Holbrooke's disapproval of Kit's reading of plays. Why would a Puritan object? What does John hope to get out of his reading? Kit? Why do people read? Is fiction morally improving, and if so, how? Patrick mentioned having dipped into Pilgrim's Progress. "It was like The Phantom Tollbooth." Me: "How so?" He explained. What he was saying, without having the word for it, was that they're both allegories. (Which I hadn't noticed about The Phantom Tollbooth. The one thought The Faerie Queene left me with was "I hate allegories." So now I recognize allegory only when I'm peeved.) Patrick called John Holbrooke a hypocrite and a turncoat, and although I find him a likeable character, Patrick has a point. Anyway, practice in spotting hypocrisy is certainly improving.

The students have to write three sentences using vocabulary words at the end of their vocabulary quizzes. Richard wrote one sentence with three words, but I made him write two more sentences (especially since he had used one word incorrectly). Me: "Last year I had fourth graders who would write seven sentences when I asked for three." "Are you sure those weren't fifth graders?" Patrick asked coyly (he and his classmates were fifth graders last year). "Quite sure." "Gosh. They're better than we are." I'm not sure about that, but I didn't say anything.

Update: four of the sixth graders got into Hunter (out of ten); one is on the waiting list. But his letter said "Congratulations!" and invited him to the Open House, so how can they possibly reject him?