Wednesday, August 23, 2006

German cognates I've only just noticed:

Knoblauch || knob-leek (garlic!)

Glocke || clock (But it means "bell.")

Schmerz || smart

Here's an old favorite: Zeitung (newspaper) || tidings

Some others: Eiweiß (protein) || eggwhite

schmecken || "it smacks of"
From Richard Eder's review of Edward Mendelson's The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life:

"His prismatic evocations of the Mrs. Dalloway who is defined by her position, obligations and party preparations and her inner Clarissa — that essential being she glimpses for a moment at the end, thanks to the suicide of Septimus and the steadfast love of her childhood friend, Peter — implant the life and breath of one masterpiece in a masterly work of criticism. The same magic is worked with Mrs. Ramsay in “Lighthouse.”"

It was a pleasant review, and the book sounds perhaps worth reading, but the first sentence of this paragraph seems very wrong. The essential Clarissa is defined by her party preparations; if anything the two novels offer a critique of the notion that there's an invisible world that matters, and a visible world that's mere illusion. Clarissa's party matters to her, and to think so is to embrace life (after her long illness). In contrast, Peter's impatience with convention is the root of his unhappiness, and while he no doubt thinks he suffers for some truth, we know he's simply wrong. ("We know": I can't speak for everyone. But I was very convinced of this when I read it.) There's more to frivolity than meets the eye.

Likewise, in To the Lighthouse "This is a table, this is a chair, this is an ecstasy, this is a miracle." — this is what Lily Briscoe knows. Only a pathetic person like Mr. Ramsay's student would think that the visible world is an illusion.

There are moments (in To the Lighthouse & in the essays) when ordinary people fleetingly seem archetypical. But this is because the colors of the visible world brighten and deepen, not because we see through any veil of illusion (which seems, frankly, an anti-literary impulse.)

Maybe I'm overreacting, maybe Mr. Eder meant nothing in particular by that sentence. I don't, unfortunately, have Woolf's novels at hand (otherwise I would quote at length), but I've just read Annie Dillard, who quotes Teilhard de Chardin: "The souls of men form, in some manner, the incandescent surface of matter plunged in God."… '"Plunge into matter," Teilhard said — and at another time, "Plunge into God." And he said this fine thing: "By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers."…There is only matter, Teilhard said; there is only spirit, the Kabbalists and Gnostics said. These are essentially identical views.'

I've just finished reading this, so I'm alert to suggestions of dualism.
The New York Times has published a letter I sent them:

To the Editor:

Re “In Elite Schools, a Dip in Blacks and Hispanics” (front page, Aug. 18): I teach at an after-school enrichment program in an Asian immigrant neighborhood in New York City. There, by studying English and mathematics in depth and at an accelerated pace, students in effect start preparing in elementary school for the entrance exam for the specialized high schools.

Well over half of the academy’s students are admitted every year.

Perhaps if the Specialized High School Institute were expanded into the lower grades, instead of prepping students for a mere three months before the exam, its students would achieve similar results.

New York, Aug. 18, 2006

'"Nearly all" are admitted' would have been more accurate, but I didn't want to sound too cocky.

They didn't publish this letter, which I sent a few weeks ago:

To the Editor:

I'm baffled by the hostility of your letter writers to an academic program in kindergarten ('Can't We Let Children Be Children,' July 31). While my kindergarten classmates and I played in the afternoons, in the mornings we had a rich program of reading, writing, and arithmetic. I don't think it made me "deficient" in "social and emotional skills," or "derailed [my] ability to think for [my]self," to quote your readers. In fact I would probably have been bored if I'd had to play all day. And best of all, I had learned to read fluently by first grade.

Bologna, Italy, Aug. 2, 2006

I remember when Sr. (then novice) Helena-Marie handed out our phonics workbooks she told us that by the end of year we would be able to read absolutely any word in the dictionary; most pupils gasped in amazement, but not me. “Of course we will! It’s about time,” I thought, but couldn’t help feeling very pleased at the prospect as I tried not to smile.

First thing every morning she read us a portion from the Iliad or the Odyssey; after our work was done she'd read other Greek myths. I remember as if it were yesterday Sr. Helena Marie showing us how an oboe worked, how it differed from a flute, or exhorting us to lift the spirits of those who are sad. (I pictured someone levitating.)
From Yumi:

i didn't get a chance to call you earlier tonight -- sorry! but i wanted to retell the lemon story before i forgot. because you're right; it really is a pretty unbelievable story. i mean, it's teacher training! this is how they teach teachers to teach! argh.

in the first part of the activity, the instructor put a row of lemons up on the chalk tray and asked us for "observable qualities" about the lemon. we were aiming to get to twenty. the qualities named included things like "yellow" "indented" "casts a shadow." she wrote these qualities up on the board and asked us to write them down. this took about twenty minutes.

then, we broke up into groups of three. she came around and gave each group a lemon and asked us to repeat the activity, but in our small group and with our particular lemon. a lot of the students got bored enough at this point to do things like bounce their lemons on the table, rip off pieces of the skin, and so on. surprisingly, everyone was well-mannered enough to actually follow directions and participate. (some people even appeared to be sort of "into it." god help us.) this part took about half an hour.

we then returned our lemons to the instructor, who put them back at the front of the room. each group elected a "representative" to read our list of qualities back to the class, reflect on the process, select our lemon from the group at the front, and explain how he or she found "our" particular lemon. each quality was written up on the board very slowly by the instructor, who couldn't spell to save her life.

we finished with a group discussion on how this activity related to a class on human development. replies: that all humans look alike from far away but are unique upon close observation. that you can see people/things better from up close and with a "hands on" approach. that even though everyone is an individual, we all have certain things in common as well.

i was sort of offended, not just at the inanity of it all, but also at being asked to think of my fellow human beings as, you know, LEMONS.

Kaveri commented:

the unintended message of this excercise seems to be that only microscopic examination enables discernment of human singularity-- our differences are tiny and insignificant.

Thursday, August 17, 2006

Monday, August 7, 2006

Books:



May
A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-77 (Foner)



June
The Tiger in the Well (Pullman)
The Tin Princess (Pullman)
The Dust Diaries (Sheers)



July
The Procedure (Mulisch)
Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury)
The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury)
A Lost Lady (Cather)
A Month in the Country (Carr)
Roman Fever and other Stories (Wharton)
The King Must Die (Renault)



The Pullman books: good, very good, but not as good as The Ruby in the Smoke and The Shadow in the North. The whole series, so rich in detail and atmosphere, so clever and thrilling and well-written, is Pullman's attempt to deal with politics and sex in children's literature. I think he succeeds brilliantly with politics: he shows how seemingly disparate events and circumstances are linked, how this affects real people, and how individuals are complicit in, or struggle against, forces beyond their control. As for the sex, I noticed this only when I read Pullman's criticism of C.S. Lewis: Lewis never lets his characters grow up, witness his treatment of Susan in The Last Battle. (Everything Pullman says about Lewis is terribly unfair.)* In the Lockhart quartet and, of course, in His Dark Materials Pullman shows that he can let his characters grow up. Well, OK. He does a good job, though better in the quartet (especially the first two books — I liked Sally's and Frederick's banter) than in the trilogy. But I don't think this should be a requirement for fiction for older children, as he seems to think.



*Anyway, hostility toward grown-ups and their ways is one of the hallmarks of great children's literature. I felt that hostility myself, and with good reason: every day brought fresh evidence of the stupid things grown-ups were capable of doing. They seemed, the lot of them, unkind, unimaginative, incurious, and it was a banner day when I found one I could talk to.

The Dust Diaries are a biography of the author's great-uncle, a missionary to Zimbabwe 100 years ago, and at the same time an account of the author's travels in the missionary's footsteps. It's admirably unmannered, and earnest without making a fetish of earnestness. Of course, he has such a meaty subject he doesn't need to perform arabesques around it. On occasion the language was a bit too rich, and unnecessarily drew attention to itself, but for the most part the pieces fit together perfectly.



The Procedure: this is one of the worst books I've read in a long time — trendy, glib, incoherent, bullying. That's what I wrote on the last page, and I don't remember enough of it to say much more. The author just plunks down the two halves of the novel, one on the Golem, the other on stem-cell research or cloning (we never find out exactly), and makes no serious attempt to link the two. I loathed the crowd-pleasing magical realist bits about the Prague rabbi ("crowd-pleasing" may be unfair to his readers — I hope no one is taken in) and the embarassingly clumsy, hollow attempts to impress us with the star power of Berkeley's faculty, which just felt like pages and pages of name dropping. As if Mulisch realized that no matter what happened to his main character, we wouldn't care, he includes not one but two birth scenes (not counting the Golem's creation). And all right, these scenes are exciting, but in a way that feels contrived and manipulative and that's entirely unearned. This book was a gift, and the person who gave it to me hadn't read it; she said she had wanted to get Mulisch's Discovery of Heaven, but couldn't find it. The Procedure was so disappointing I'm not sure I can give him a second chance.



Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles: I read these because I thought I might assign the first, and parts of the second, to my students. I could complain — Bradbury's characters are stuffed shirts, vehicles for his predictable ideas, his style is often overwrought and somehow cloying, his sentence structure monotonous — but what matters is that his stories make twelve-year-olds think, and that's all I'm asking for. I loved him when I was twelve. Some of his images are memorable, some of his plots are clever and skilfully executed, and his use of science fiction as a vehicle for his revulsion against consumer society (and almost everything else in postwar America) is pretty interesting. David Bromwich calls Fahrenheit 451 "affecting," and says it embodies "high Enlightenment" values, and I suppose that's fair. It's a good introduction to dystopian fiction, and I think they need that before they're confronted with Brave New World. The ending of Fahrenheit 451 reminded me of We, which is the only really good work of science fiction I've read. (But I haven't yet read Olaf Stapledon; Jennie thinks the world of him. I really haven't read much science fiction at all.) It's as if Zamyatin and Bradbury didn't want a completely tragic ending (as in Brave New World and 1984), but a happy ending wasn't really possible, and so the ending is no ending. There's a kind of honesty in the shambolic inconclusiveness of both novels.



A Lost Lady: very fine, though not as rich or as moving as The Professor's House or Lucy Gayheart. But then it's so much shorter — it's a novella really. It reminded me of Wharton's novella "New Year's Day": both are told from the point of view of a young man growing up observing an older, married woman who at first seems to define feminine charm, and trying to figure out what exactly the quality of her feelings for her invalid husband is.

I've been listening to Tosca constantly since last week; I liked walking from Sant'Andrea della Valle (Act 1) to the Castel Sant'Angelo (Act 3) listening to it. It's the first opera I really liked (not counting Hansel and Gretel) and still one of my favorites; I once saw a performance on TV that was filmed on location. It starts out at a very high, relentlessly lyrical pitch, and sustains that to the end. It's like Puccini's Richard II, Shakespeare's only play without a line of prose: there is some recitative in Tosca, but even that is full of little motifs, and always seems about to break into song (and usually does). I love the overblown pathos of the end, when she thinks he's playacting, and praises his skill — "Ecco un artista!" — and we know that he really is dead. (On the ramparts of Castel Sant'Angelo.) The music is just grand and passionate and sarcastic enough to pull it off.



Compare that to the last opera I saw, a few years ago, Don Carlos, which has about half an hour of good music in four hours. It's hard to take. In compenso, that's an opera with a serious story, and the most shocking line I've ever heard in a play or an opera. It's about the son of King of Philip, who wants to go off and fight for the freedom of the Netherlands, against his father's army. There's a bright and hopeful little tune whenever he and his best friend talk about this. (It hardly lasts a minute.) As if that weren't bad enough, he meets his stepmother-to-be in a forest; they're both masked, each doesn't know who the other is, and they fall in love. (OK, that's not serious.) So King Philip has two good reasons for wanting his son out of the way. He thinks this over, limping heavily around his darkened study. (That, and the Dutch melody, make up the grand total of really good music in the whole opera.) He calls in his confessor, the Grand Inquisitor, to hear what he thinks. "Why not?" the Grand Inquisitor asks. "God himself sacrificed his only son."



It's so shocking! I still can't get over it!



Schiller wrote the play; I wonder if the line is his, or Verdi's.

The Tarantella del Gargano — I've been meaning to write about this for months. Sometime towards the end of winter I heard this on the radio:



Confraternità de' Musici



1.03am Anonymous (C.17th): Tarantella del Gargano
1.09am Frescobaldi, Girolamo (1583-1643): Se l'aura spira; Voi partite, mio sole; Vanne, o carta amorosa; Varie partite sopra passacaglia; Cosí mi disprezzate?
1.14am
1.16am Monteverdi, Claudio (1567-1643): Quel sguardo sdegnosetto
1.21am
1.33am Merula, Tarquinio (1594/5-1665): Su la cetra amorosa
1.42am



Broadcasts are available on the internet only for a week, and for the rest of that week I listened to nothing else. When the week was up I started looking for this music all over the place. I managed to track down "Su la cetra amorosa" and a piece called "Chiome d'oro" by Monteverdi, which uses the same melody as "Quel sguardo sdegnosetto." I was taken aback, months later, to hear a a piece for choir that had the same melody. "Beatus Vir, by Claudio Monteverdi," said the announcer. He must have really liked the melody to use it three times! But it doesn't work as sacred music; it's as secular as they come, as evinced by the two titles, "Golden locks," and "That disdainful glance" — "sdegnoso" with a suffix of affection. The texture of it is like hair, or metal, catching the light in a darkened room. I like the light, energetic, forceful rhythm of the violins and harpsichord, which the voices (two sopranos) go along with at first, and then slow down very suddenly, as if they'd discovered something fascinating — we must linger and look, and figure this out, and fall into it — and op! we're off again, violins and harpsichord leading the way (though it ends in slow, glimmering luxury).
And Tarquinio Merula! I'd never heard of him! He's a genius! Part of his thing is letting you think, or showing you, that up can be down, that seconds contain hours, and between this pitch and that there are a dozen fascinating microtones. He's always dropping the listener and catching her higher up, like a magician-acrobat. But that doesn't do justice to just how catchy, how hypnotizingly rhythmic, the music is. You just can't listen to it and sit still. At first the basso continuo is just a viola and a guitar, repeating a skipping, syncopated phrase that lasts all of five seconds but never gets tiresome, and then the mezzosoprano comes in, joined by a clarinet (?) and they perform acrobatics above the syncopated basso continuo. The mezzosoprano always seems to land in the wrong place, or on the wrong note, and she draws out that wrongness until one's discomfort becomes pleasure. And oh, a hundred other things happen: the clarinet goes back and forth between basso continuo and duet (with the soprano), and sometimes seems to be the soprano's partner, catching her and soaring up just when we worry that she might lose her footing; and a harpsichord joins the basso continuo, lending it a third dimension: if a harpsichord deigns to join something so small and single-minded, there must be a world in it. Thus encouraged, the guitar turns it upside down. It spreads like concentric circles on the surface of a pond, and the mezzosoprano is everywhere.



Nancy used to say that all music is either a song or a dance, or a puzzle — a combination of song and dance, or an abstraction. If there ever was a puzzle piece, this is it: it has the obsessiveness of thought, of a mind chasing down, teasing out an idea.



I found, along with the 8:30 minute long "Su la cetra amorosa," two other excellent little pieces by Merula: "Folle è ben chi si crede," and "Un bambin che va alla scola." But I meant to write about the Tarantella del Gargano. It's anonymous, meaning it's a folk tune, but the radio program gave the courtly version; it fit in with Monteverdi's and Merula's civilized, polished pieces. The version I found on the internet, by Daniele Sepe, is the raw untamed version. He has an androgynous, high tenor voice, and occasionally slips into a kind of rough yodel. In the background someone barks, someone else makes owl sounds, and when Sepe takes a break the instruments take center stage: tambourines, bagpipes, banjos, people stomping and clapping. Listen for yourself.



I wish I could find the Confraternità dei Musici's version: how did someone manage to tame such a wild animal?
The version I overheard at the Castel Sant'Angelo was halfway between the two extremes.



Chiome d'oro: Emma Kirkby, Judith Nelson, and the Consort of Musicke
Su la cetra amorosa: Montserrat Figueras, Jean-Pierre Canhac, Ton Koopman, Andrew Lawrence King, Rolf Lislevand, Lorenz Duftschmid, Jordi Saval

A great Roman building: Castel Sant'Angelo. At first I was just glad to have such a noticeable landmark near my home. (The apartment I was staying in adjoins the wall that runs from the Vatican headquarters to the fortress, along via dei Corridori: a safe outdoor hallway for the pope and his messengers.) The Tiber curves sharply around it, so that from most points of view it seems to stand in the way of the river: an illusion of arrogance. Then I liked the way it starts out squat and broadens from bottom to top: it's like the original of the Guggenheim. (I like the Guggenheim, but next to Castel Sant'Angelo it looks as thin and flimsy as turnip peelings.) As if to say: "I'm big and heavy, but I can still defy gravity." And just so we get the point, there's the statue of the Archangel Michael flying on the top. It's all so incongruous, and it works somehow.
Then, coming closer, I noticed how rough and irregular the stones at the base were; they must be very ancient, I thought. And the smooth and precise brickwork above looked much more recent. Another interesting contrast. I'm glad they didn't cover the old stones with new bricks.
All I knew about the fortress, at first, was from the last act of Tosca: the place where Cavaradossi is executed by a firing squad — a terrible dungeon, a symbol of papal oppression. But one evening I wandered in; you need a ticket, and I didn't have one, but no one stopped me. "It must be because I'm in the atrium; further on they'll ask me for my ticket." But I ventured deeper into the building, and no one stopped me. A plaque informed me that the building started as Hadrian's mausoleum. There's a model of the mausoleum as it looked in 137 AD: the cylinder is the same breadth from top to bottom, so that marvellous broadening must have happened over the centuries as the mausoleum was turned into a fortress. On top of the mausoleum there was a temple, and on top of that, a statue of the emperor where we now have Michael. I walked up the long spiral walk, gradual enough for a horse, deep in the center of the building, to Hadrian's burial chamber, which is now empty except for a plaque with Hadrian's reflections on mortality:



Animula blandula vagula
hospes comesque corporis,
quae nunc abibis in loca
pallidula, rigida, nudula,
nec, ut soles, dabis iocos



Gentle little wandering soul,
guest and companion of the body,
to what pale, stark, naked
places will you go now,
where you won't joke as you are wont



It was disconcerting, and moving, to find those five lines of affectionate, apprehensive second person intimacy at the center of that ancient pile.



I like crossing the bridge that leads straight to its entrance; it makes you feel like the ruler of the world. At night there are torches lining the bridge and surrounding the fortress. (Is that possible? That's how I remember it, but maybe there were only torches around the entrance.) In summer the castle is open until 1 am for cabaret, music, food, and some exhibits.* I wandered around taking in the views, looked down the ramparts (where Tosca jumped) at a stand-up comic, and walked past someone singing the Tarantella del Gargano.



[*There are places in Florence like this — in summer they're full of music, food, exhibits, book tables. I think London's pleasure gardens — Vauxhall and others — must have been like this. I wonder why they closed — did people stop going? What didn't they like?]



Mausoleum, fortress, dungeon, museum, performance space — that building knows more than any mortal.



Here are some marvellous pictures, including 360 degree images that swing you around the Tiber.

Coincidence: These days I'm translating the entries in Il Giornalino di Gian Burrasca about Giannino's visit to Rome. He mentions several monuments, but not the Castel Sant'Angelo.



Coincidence: on the train to Germany I was finishing Mary Renault's The Bull from the Sea. In the last chapter the aging Theseus hears of and glimpses the young Achilles. As I was reading, an eight or nine-year-old boy across the aisle told his father everything he knew about Achilles, and Patroclus, and Hector, and Alexander the Great; and he knew a lot. (Renault wrote three books about Alexander.)



Coincidence: I had just finished a soup for lunch and meant to go over to the Kaffeebaum next door for tea. (It was raining, I was far from home and deep in a book, so there seemed to be nothing else to do.) There were some books lying on a sill, and the title of one volume caught my eye: Du meine Seele Du mein Herz. This is the first line of Schumann's "Widmung" for Clara Wieck. Curious, I picked it up. "A novel about Robert Schumann," said the title page. I turned to chapter one: "All the regulars were at the Koffebaum's evening Stammtisch: Herr Wieck…"