Gentle Reader

Literature and Science

2010-08-14T16:49:00.000-07:00

Currents similar to those of the hairs of the nettle have been observed in a great multitude of very different plants, and weighty authorities have suggested that they probably occur, in more or less perfection, in all young vegetable cells. If such be the case, the wonderful noonday silence of a tropical forest is, after all, due only to the dulness of our hearing; and could our ears catch the murmur of these tiny Maelstroms, as they whirl in the innumerable myriads of living cells which constitute each tree, we should be stunned, as with the roar of a great city.

— Thomas Henry Huxley, "The Physical Basis of Life," 1869

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

— George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-2 (begun 1869)

Huxley's essay comes close on the heels (in my anthology) of Matthew Arnold's "Literature and Science," in which Arnold argues that the humanities will always have a place in education, because we have a "desire" for "conduct" and "beauty." Studying science (at the schoolboy level — he doesn't mean research) is like piling up so many interesting facts — interesting, but not meaningful; the student is left spiritually hungry. I don't think he argues very well, and he doesn't even write as well as Huxley, but essentially I agree with him. (It doesn't help to put the argument in either/or terms, which is how he starts out, apparently taking his cue from Huxley. But he goes on to frame the question more cautiously — "will always have a place.")

However, you could say — George Eliot may suggest — that the habit of observation that science cultivates in its students, of paying attention, is preparation for a moral life. (Paying attention: there's a lot on this in the chapter "Seeing" in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

Huxley argues enthusiastically that the writers of the future will take inspiration from science. George Eliot (probably) did. And I read this in Edith Wharton's memoir A Backward Glance:

In looking back over my memories of Theodore Roosevelt I am surprised to find how very seldom I saw him, and yet how sure I am that he was my friend. He had the rare gift of bridging over in an instant those long intervals between meetings that so often benumb even the best of friends, and he was so alive at all points, and so gifted with the rare faculty of living intensely and entirely in every moment as it passed, that each of those encounters glows in me like a morsel of radium.

What struck me is how little of this there is in twentieth century writing. Does her last word ring false only because we now know that radium causes cancer, or is it the case that this is an impulse that didn't go anywhere? How common are metaphors based on (for example) the double helix? How successful are they?
I'm about to read Michael Frayn's Copenhagen — I saw it a few years ago — and, yes, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is all over that play. But that's not the sort of thing one can refer to off-handedly.

A Backward Glance: interesting, but really only for die-hard fans of Wharton. It's really like a big thank you to all the wonderful people she's known, too polite to be revealing. At first I found all the name dropping irritating, but then it occurred to me that she's not showing off; on the contrary, she's being modest: "My life is interesting only insofar as I've known interesting people." But only her portraits of Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt are satisfying; the other sketches are at best only tantalizing. (Not a bad thing: I've put on my to read list some totally forgotten novels by various contemporaries, mainly friends, that she warmly recommends: David Graham Phillips's Susan Lenox, Robert Grant's Unleavened Bread, Howard Sturgis's Belchamber. She also loves The Egoist and Harry Richmond by George Meredith, who may not be forgotten, but — I don't know anyone who's read him. On to my list.)
So for her strained relationship with her mother, the failure of her marriage, etc., I'll have to go to Hermione Lee's biography. But I'm glad I got Wharton's view — "glance" — first.

This is funny:

…the first time I went to Washington after [the Roosevelts] were installed in the White House I was promptly summoned to lunch, and welcomed on the threshold by the President's vehement cry: "At last I can quote 'The Hunting of the Snark'!" "Would you believe it," he added, "no one in the Administration has ever heard of Alice, much less of the Snark, and the other day, when I said to the Secretary of the Navy: 'Mr. Secretary, What I say three times is true,' he did not recognize the allusion, and answered with an aggrieved air: 'Mr. President, it would never for a moment have occurred to me to impugn your veracity'!"

2010-01-03T19:02:00.000-08:00

Bought at Unnameable Books: Anne of Avonlea, signed

Mary S. Brinton
Xmas 1909

Paris 1919

2009-11-12T20:44:00.000-08:00

On November 11 I went to see the documentary Paris 1919 by Paul Cowan. The film mixes original footage with (usually silent) recreations, in color, of scenes for which footage is lacking: diplomats and cartographers at work or taking a stroll, the attempted assassination of Clemenceau, a German negotiator who resigned, back home at the dinner table with his wife and children. Most of the talking is voice-over narration, which relies heavily on the letters and diaries of Harold Nicholson, John Maynard Keynes, and one of the German negotiators. The actors seldom speak, so that when they do we sit on the edge of our chairs. There are no talking heads to break the tension and help provide perspective; it is all painfully close and inexorable. I was a bit uneasy about the format of the film before I saw it — who needs a frivolous mixture of fact and fiction about the events of 1919? — but was soon won over. I can't recommend it highly enough; it's one of the best historical documentaries I've ever seen.

Here's what I learned:
Lloyd George, who had done so much to stir up revenge hysteria in his recent electoral campaign, at the very end pleaded with Wilson for a more generous settlement with Germany. But by then Clemenceau had won Wilson over, and the American president, who had expended so much energy in trying to moderate French and British demands, dug in his heels on the other side. Why? Had Clemenceau really convinced him? Or was he eager to get the conference over with so that he could go back to the US to campaign for the League of Nations? And why did Lloyd George have a change of heart? Had Keynes convinced him, finally, that Germany was capable of paying only a small fraction of what Lloyd George had promised the British public?

An armistice is not the same thing as capitulation. One learns that Germany lost WWI, and one assumes (or at least I did), that it was a case of utter defeat, like WWII. But no: an armistice is a truce; the German negotiators went to Paris expecting to negotiate, not to have the terms of the peace dictated to them. Of course, they were anxious about their reception; on the train into France they are shown busily drafting arguments showing, on the basis of international law, that the war was justified, or that Germany was not solely responsible, or that all sides engaged in atrocities. The long suspense, as the German delegation does its homework in an unheated hotel, their shock upon receiving a copy of the draft treaty, and the speech of their chief negotiator before the assembled diplomats are among the high points.

A small, memorable detail: the Germans suspected that their hotel was bugged, and so they played Wagner on the gramophone all day, at high volume. After they saw the draft treaty, however, they turned off the gramophone. Why? In despair? Or was it a way of saying to the French, "We have no important secrets to keep from you; go ahead, listen in."

But the film does not focus exclusively on the main actors; it also does a good job of evoking the myriad negotiations that settled borders, with fateful consequences, all over the globe, from Africa, to Iraq and China.

2009-10-19T13:02:00.000-07:00

I'm adding Philip Roth to my list of American authors I won't touch with a ten-foot pole, authors whose badness boggles my mind:

Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms)
William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury, Absalom Absalom, Wild Palms)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night)
Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon)

I just finished Portnoy's Complaint. The book apparently owes a debt to stand-up comedy, and I think is meant to roll the reader along on waves of vitality and "wicked humor" (to quote a reviewer), but — I just didn't find it very funny. I could tell when Roth (or Portnoy) was trying to be funny, I could practically see him winking ("Look at my joke!") but more often than not I had to groan at his lame puns and his contrived Freudian paradoxes. And the ethnic stereotypes — the fact that there's a kernel of truth to them, or that it's done (more or less) with affection, doesn't rescue his characterizations from shallowness.

Otherwise I don't know what to say. Being all about sex doesn't necessarily sink a work — Y Tu Mama Tambien pulls it off. (But it's hard.) A maniacal monologue can be a masterpiece — Hamsun's Hunger. And misogyny can be fascinating: The Kreutzer Sonata. But Roth isn't in that league. (To give him his due: I didn't have any trouble turning the pages. Portnoy's Complaint is an easy read.)

Take a small detail: the totally predictable surprise ending. Roth prefaces it with a little title: "THE PUNCHLINE." I was reminded of a child's drawing complete with labels: "THE SUN." "MOMMY." "MY DOG." That's the kind of clumsiness that characterizes the whole novel, though it's more often filtered through an "adult" sensibility. (To belabor the obvious: adult = arch, annoyingly arch, and adult = pornographic.)

Question: What do the authors listed above (except Hemingway) have in common? Answer: The conviction that more is always better. Melville could really write like this, and so could Whitman, and since then many — perhaps most — American writers have apparently considered it their artistic-patriotic duty to pile it on, structure and style be damned. But what stands out in these twentieth century successors is their lack of control — on every page, in every paragraph a poor word choice, an incoherent metaphor, shaky syntax, choppy transition — and the whole thing teeters and collapses before it's out the door. And there's more: the irrelevant or unwarranted authorial contempt or adulation that seeps through, the wallowing around, the working oneself into a frenzy in the fond hope that the reader will join in — I could go on, but I suppose there's no point if I can't quote and give page numbers. These people write as if they were throwing mud at a wall.

(I hate Hemingway just as much as the others, but he can't fairly be accused of excess. Still, his repression is a symptom of hysteria as tiresome and ostentatious in its own way as the ravings of these others.)

On a happier note: I liked Atonement a lot. Now there's a writer who has the situation under control! According to D. and waggish McEwan can be even too controlled, and I believe it, but Atonement strikes the right balance between the freedom of the characters and the control of the author, thanks to a style tethered by intelligent, patient observation and a brilliant plot — not just a clever plot, but one that sets up a spellbinding moral conflict. The characters come to life in the confrontation with their consciences, and this works even retroactively, even offstage, when we only hear about them from other characters.
I liked — loved — the clever post-modern touch of the very thoughtful letter from the editor of Horizon, not so much the clever post-modern touch of the ending… but I don't want to give anything away.

Fun fact: McEwan likes Roth. He said so himself, in an interview. I don't know what to make of that. (generation?)

2009-09-29T13:50:00.000-07:00

argh... New comments on David Brooks's latest column, "The Next Culture War," are no longer being accepted, so I'll have to vent here. Many readers have correctly pointed out that Brooks fails to put any blame for our current "decadence, corruption, and decline" on Ronald Reagan and his followers, that he fails to credit Roosevelt and the New Deal for our erstwhile restraint, and that past bubbles were also caused by lack of regulations, and others have noted the odious American exceptionalism of his introduction (as if working hard were a peculiarly American trait!). What struck me was this:

Government was limited and did not protect people from the consequences of their actions, thus enforcing discipline and restraint.

When economic values did erode, the ruling establishment tried to restore balance. After the Gilded Age, Theodore Roosevelt (who ventured west to counteract the softness of his upbringing) led a crackdown on financial self-indulgence.

Brooks ignores the fact that big government was born with Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressive effort to "restore balance." In other words, the limited government Brooks praises in one sentence is exactly the opposite of the "crackdown on financial self-indulgence" that he also praises in the next sentence. It's symptomatic of Brooks's authoritarian sympathies that he disdains our elected government but instinctively admires the "ruling establishment."

2009-09-22T20:41:00.000-07:00

For a while my father received frequent visits from Jehovah's witnesses. Often he wouldn't answer — he claimed he had learned to recognize the way they rang the bell — but sometimes he would invite them in, offer them tea, and chat with them about the Bible. One story he often brought up was the sacrifice of Isaac. "I cannot — I cannot believe in a God who makes such a monstrous request. If God came to me and told me to sacrifice my daughter to him I would tell him to get lost!" My mother often enough makes the obvious point that God is merely testing Abraham's faith, which does not assuage my father. But he was intrigued by the explanation that the Jehovah's witnesses offered: God had promised to multiply Abraham's seed, so Abraham had to know that God was bluffing. (Of course this explanation doesn't take Ishmael into account.)

I've always been interested in myths about the end of human sacrifice (for example, Iphigenia in Tauris). This is one I read today:

Jupiter demands human sacrifice from Numa Pompilius, Romulus's successor as king of Rome. Specifically, he wants a human head. Numa is shocked and dismayed by the unspeakable request. He thinks long and hard about what he should do. The day for the ceremony comes. The city (or more likely: village of mud huts) is all decked out, the ritual reaches its climax, and Numa offers Jupiter — an enormous onion. Jupiter's reaction? He laughs. He claps Numa on the back. He likes the joke.

James Wood writes, in The Irresponsible Self, that the laughter of the gods is crude and cruel, viz. they laugh at limping Hephaestus, they laugh at Ares and Aphrodite caught in a net in adulterous embrace. Jupiter's laugh in this Roman myth seems a good counterexample with its mixture of shame, appreciation, and forgiveness.

started, but not finished

2009-08-09T17:04:00.000-07:00

Civilwarland in Bad Decline, by George Saunders
I read most of the short stories in this collection a week ago and already I'm having trouble remembering them. (I didn't get to the novella that takes up the second half of this small volume.) The writing is extremely flat and simple. No doubt there are good reasons for this — the world Saunders describes is stark and grotesque, his characters mostly boobs or sadists — but I find it hard to stay interested in flat writing. (Saunders's one stylistic novelty, the use of truly awful corporate jargon throughout his characters' interior monologues, was funny at first but then got boring.) And the plots were depressingly similar: they all involve a horrible, cartoonish accidental death. There's real misery in these stories — the characters hate their jobs, have no friends, get divorced — and in that context I didn't know what to make of the gruesome accidental death as the climax of each story. I was bored and bewildered. So I stopped. (Kaveri said the first short story was the best, and if I didn't like it I should stop. I soldiered on until I had read most of the stories, then gave up.)

Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky
Marion recommended this, and I eagerly went out and bought the French edition. Then I read Ruth Franklin's rather damning critique, and began to regret my purchase. But then I was still determined to read it, if only to practice my French.
I disliked it immediately. This is a novel in which a teenager goes into his room, slams the door and thinks, "I hate my family!" — and this counts as characterization. The mistress of a vain, selfish, snobbish writer sits on the floor gathering up the finished pages that he drops from his desk. And so on, one cliché after another. (So anti-semitism is only one aspect of her simple-mindedness.) Even the random observed details, contrasting the beauty of nature or the everyday concerns of people with the chaos of war seem drearily contrived, probably because the whole machinery is so creaky. (If I read the end of All Quiet on the Western Front fresh from Suite Française I'd probably be disgusted, even though I was very moved when I read it the first time.)
But I had read 97 pages, and was determined to finish at least the first novel in the volume (which consists of the first two of five projected novels on France at war, the ones Némirovsky completed). Then I re-read Franklin's review, and this sentence struck me:

There are many exquisite moments in Suite Française: the hypocritical generosity of Madame Péricand, her teenage son Hubert's reckless patriotism, the romance between Jean-Marie Michaud and the peasant girl who nurses him, and other indelible scenes.

I did not find the hypocritical generosity of Madame Péricand an exquisite moment; for me it was as revoltingly bad as everything else. If I like Némirovsky less than Ruth Franklin, I thought, I should stop. So I've stopped, as of now.

It was interesting to read Suite Française right after Atonement: one section of Atonement is set during the French collapse in June 1940. Némirovsky lived through it and McEwan didn't, but his description of the retreat is about a hundred times better than hers.

I was also reminded of Alice Kaplan's excellent analysis of the fiction of Robert Brasillach, another French anti-semite whose novels and journalism enjoyed great success in the 1930s. She writes that he has two modes, mawkishness and contempt, and never had the toughness of mind to achieve a synthesis. That's true of Némirovsky as well. Kaplan calls this the right-wing style (so did Kaveri, in another context!) and that makes sense to me.
Von Rezzori's Memoirs of an Anti-Semite also offered lots of insights into the mind of a reactionary, though he writes much better than Némirovsky, and turns the mirror on himself.

Recommendation

2009-08-06T09:38:00.000-07:00

Antica Gelateria Fiorentina, via Faenza 2A Firenze

favorite flavor: Persian (rosewater, pistachios, with blocks of frozen cream)

Here's what they have to say for themselves in English:

A long ago, at the Medici's court, during sumptuos balls, it come the ice-cream made by the architect Buontalenti a persolality in the ice-cream history who has held his importance just to nowadays.

But they sure know how to make ice cream!

2009-06-11T01:16:00.000-07:00

One of Ours
I often thought of Jacob's Room while reading One of Ours: both are about the boyhood and youth of men who will die in World War I. But whereas Jacob Flanders is a negative space, defined by the needs and desires of those who crowd around him and wonder what is the secret of one so blank and beautiful, Claude Wheeler is someone we get to know from the inside; unlike the maddeningly (apparently) self-sufficient Jacob, Claude projects his hopes and fears hither and thither, in the ardent and disorganized fashion of one whose education came too little and too late and who feels alienated from everything he grew up with. Claude seizes on the war as an escape from his unhappiness, as a source of meaning that is truly bottomless, that won't disappoint because war is incomprehensible.
One of Ours was published in 1923, one year after Jacob's Room, and it's a far more traditional novel in every way. While I love Jacob's Room, Cather's novel made me appreciate the costs of Woolf's denials: no, you shall not get to know the main character; no, the war had no meaning. Cather presents the excitement and the patriotism of her characters without anger, and sometimes comes close to endorsing it. In its strongest form the patriotism is francophilia — France as the opposite of Nebraska — which complicates the picture.

"On a cross at their feet the inscription read merely:

Soldat Inconnu, Mort pour La France

A very good epitaph, Claude was thinking. Most of the boys who fell in this war were unknown, even to themselves. They were too young. They died and took their secret with them, — what they were and what they might have been."

So far so good; Woolf does not write at such a low, relaxed pitch, but the sentiments are similar to those in Jacob's Room. Then Cather writes:

The name that stood was La France.

Woolf would never have written that, not even in the voice of a character. But the engagement with patriotism, with the idea that the war could have seemed meaningful to those who died in it, is rewarding and thought-provoking.

Like Fielding and Eliot, Cather passes judgment on her character: "He died believing his own country better than it is, and France better than any country ever can be."

But there's so much more to One of Ours: the painful, beautiful scene in which a father tries and fails to reject his daughter's suitor out of concern for him, not for her, is one I've read aloud twice already.

One of Ours may not be as perfect and as devastating as Lucy Gayheart or The Professor's House, but it's nearly as good, and certainly as good as O Pioneers!.

2009-05-24T11:54:00.000-07:00

My friend Amber McPherson has been profiled by the BBC!!!

The link will be up for only two more days.

Names

2009-04-28T22:02:00.000-07:00

Beecham > Beauchamp

Buford > Beaufort

Tolliver > Tagliaferro

2008-12-25T14:44:00.000-08:00

The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth: this is the kind of book Dr. Casaubon was trying so hard to write ("A Key to all Mythologies"). It was fascinating to get to know the Near Eastern gods, whom I had previously encountered as mere faceless villains in the Hebrew Bible, and fascinating to come across traces of polytheism in the Hebrew Bible. The chapter on the epic of Gilgamesh as a source of the Iliad was especially moving. The book's length and critical apparatus may look intimidating, but in fact it's for anyone interested in mythology or philology. One had the thrilling sense that this is as far as we can go — West follows certain threads all the way to Sumerian literature, which is over 4000 years old. Beyond we'll never know.

Last summer I met a Palestinian, a translator by profession, who told me that the Hebrew word for grain or cereals, "dganim," is related to the Philistine god's name "Dagon." He was a god of agriculture and of the harvest. And the Hebrew word for "sun" is practically identical to the name of the Babylonian sun god. And one of the Hebrew months, Tammuz, is named after Dumuzi, the Sumerian goddess's Inanna's shepherd lover — analogues of Venus and Adonis, according to West.

2008-11-28T09:29:00.000-08:00

I love Macaulay! Here he is reviewing Southey's Colloquies:

SC.13
Mr. Southey's political system is just what we might expect from a man who regards politics, not as matter of science, but as matter of taste and feeling. All his schemes of government have been inconsistent with themselves. In his youth he was a republican; yet, as he tells us in his preface to these Colloquies, he was even then opposed to the Catholic Claims. He is now a violent Ultra-Tory. Yet, while he maintains, with vehemence approaching to ferocity, all the sterner and harsher parts of the Ultra-Tory theory of government, the baser and dirtier part of that theory disgusts him. Exclusion, persecution, severe punishments for libellers and demagogues, proscriptions, massacres, civil war, if necessary rather than any concession to a discontented people; these are the measures which he seems inclined to recommend. A severe and gloomy tyranny, crushing opposition, silencing remonstrance, drilling the minds of the people into unreasoning obedience, has in it something of grandeur which delights his imagination. But there is nothing fine in the shabby tricks and jobs of office; and Mr. Southey, accordingly, has no toleration for them. When a Jacobin, he did not perceive that his system led logically, and would have led practically, to the removal of religious distinctions. He now commits a similar error. He renounces the abject and paltry part of the creed of his party, without perceiving that it is also an essential part of that creed. He would have tyranny and purity together; though the most superficial observation might have shown him that there can be no tyranny without corruption.
SC.14
It is high time, however, that we should proceed to the consideration of the work which is our more immediate subject, and which, indeed, illustrates in almost every page our general remarks on Mr. Southey's writings. In the preface, we are informed that the author, notwithstanding some statements to the contrary, was always opposed to the Catholic Claims. We fully believe this; both because we are sure that Mr. Southey is incapable of publishing a deliberate falsehood, and because his assertion is in itself probable. We should have expected that, even in his wildest paroxysms of democratic enthusiasm, Mr. Southey would have felt no wish to see a simple remedy applied to a great practical evil. We should have expected that the only measure which all the great statesmen of two generations have agreed with each other in supporting would be the only measure which Mr. Southey would have agreed with himself in opposing. He has passed from one extreme of political opinion to another, as Satan in Milton went round the globe, contriving constantly to 'ride with darkness.' Wherever the thickest shadow of the night may at any moment chance to fall, there is Mr. Southey. It is not everybody who could have so dexterously avoided blundering on the daylight in the course of a journey to the antipodes.

***

We despise those mock philosophers, who think that they serve the cause of science by depreciating literature and the fine arts. But if anything could excuse their narrowness of mind, it would be such a book as this. It is not strange that, when one enthusiast makes the picturesque the test of political good, another should feel inclined to proscribe altogether the pleasures of taste and imagination.

2008-10-05T14:37:00.000-07:00

My Antonia

I was assigned to read My Antonia in seventh grade, didn't like it, and struck Willa Cather off my list of authors to read, until Jennie recommended The Professor's House a few years ago. Since then I've worked my way through Cather's œuvre, and some of her novels rank as my all-time favorites. So I was curious to re-read My Antonia: was I wrong to be unimpressed? Would I see things that had escaped me in seventh grade? The answer is "no." My Antonia is inferior to all the other novels I've read by Cather, and I can't understand why it received so much praise, or why it hasn't been displaced on school syllabi by Lucy Gayheart or (if you want a novel about the making of America, which people do, unfortunately, when they think of Cather) O Pioneers!. It's a hodgepodge, a grab-bag of characters and anecdotes that never come together. Oh, it's not terrible — it has the looseness, the breadth and breath of life, some of the episodes are memorable, and Cather's prose is always graceful, but I'm peeved that I almost missed out on Cather because someone inexplicably thought My Antonia was just the thing for a school syllabus!

This is the best part:

I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon began to ache all over. When the straw settled down, I had a hard bed. Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land -- slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me at the sheepfold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don't think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.

"Not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made": one could say that My Antonia is not a novel, but the material out of which novels are made.

2008-09-08T08:27:00.000-07:00

The New York Times is not going to publish my letter, so here it is:

To the Editor:

I read Jiri Pehe's opinion piece, "A Spring Awakening for Human Rights," with sympathetic interest. I was startled, however, to read that "After 1968, once powerful communist parties in France, Italy and other Western European countries gradually faded." This is not true in the case of Italy. Indeed, the Italian Communist Party, under the leadership of Enrico Berlinguer, condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia: in a speech he gave in Moscow in the presence of Leonid Brezhnev, Berlinguer declared that the "tragedy in Prague" had revealed fundamental differences within the communist movement on national sovereignty, socialist democracy, and cultural freedom. The Italian Communist Party continued to be the main opposition party through the 1970s and 1980s, and is the direct ancestor of the main center-left party in Italy today.

2008-09-07T15:56:00.000-07:00

"Drift," as defined by a new student, a fifth grader:

to move unknowingly and floatingish

2008-08-29T13:24:00.000-07:00

I'm re-reading Philip Pullman's The Shadow in the North: my ninth grade is going to read it this semester. (Patrick complained that last semester's book, Emily of New Moon, had no plot. You want plot?! I'll give you plot!!) (Gratifyingly, most of his classmates liked Emily of New Moon, and not just the girls.)

I noticed on the copyright page that The Shadow in the North had originally been published in 1986 under the title The Shadow in the Plate. "In the plate"? What's that?! Then I realized he must mean "photographic plate": Sally's comrades run a photographer's studio. A shadowy evil in the north, photography... these are the leit motifs of Northern Lights (aka The Golden Compass). Where do they come from?

Photography (not to mention electricity) as a link to the spirit world was the object of much study in the nineteenth century — and Northern Lights is set in the nineteenth century, albeit a fantasy of the nineteenth century — no less than the Sally Lockhart quartet. The northern evil must come (via Milton) from Canaanite mythology, where the great Adversary had his seat in the north. God, anti-god, Pullman's atheism...

2008-08-26T18:18:00.001-07:00

Funny names for food:

sticky Richard
spotted Dick
bangers and mash
neaps and tatties
toad in the hole
pigs in blanket
bubble and squeak

saltimbocca

2008-08-13T09:46:00.000-07:00

A while ago I went to JS's presentation of his new book, at Columbia. It was very interesting, and a lively discussion followed. I participated, but I wasn't yet able to put into words what I was thinking. Hence this post.

— I was troubled by the way that the word "ahistorical" was used as if it were a bad word. The philosophical foundations of human rights are "ahistorical." So they are, and isn't it in the nature of ideals to be ahistorical? Ideals can be bad and they can be good, and historicism is a poor standard by which to judge them. And: why not say, instead of "ahistorical," "timeless"? I know that's a word that people are embarrassed to use, but why? It's an embarrassment that should be interrogated.
[J once pointed out that academic critics' fondness for the word "interrogate" betrays their adversarial stance toward literature. Yes, although it's also a word that translates poorly from romance languages — in Italy teachers interrogate their students, and I suppose there's something adversarial in the exercise, but not as much as in a police interrogation!]

The flip side: I recently read Perry Miller's essays in Errand into the Wilderness, on the first few decades of Calvinism in America. He shows very convincingly that this tremendously unstable Calvinist edifice [J's talk was all about the deep contradictions in pure Calvinism] began to buckle under pressure from reality very soon — by the 1660s Boston reverends were already engaging in casuistry, and surely they knew what they were doing. Isn't there a danger in treating Calvinism in America as something that never evolved — a danger of being ahistorical?

2008-08-13T09:33:00.000-07:00

Books since last summer:

Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763
Felix Holt, the Radical (George Eliot)
Vertigo (Sebald)
Nights at the Circus (Carter)
Storia degli Italiani, vol. II (Procacci)
Sexing the Cherry (Winterson)
The East Face of Helicon: West Asiastic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (West)
Malgudi Days (Narayan)
The Same Sea (Oz)
Ozma of Oz (Baum)
Comet in Moominland (Jansson)
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation: vol. I: The Pox Party (Anderson)
Prince Caspian (Lewis)
Emily of New Moon (Montgomery)
The Enchanted Castle (Nesbit)
My Antonia (Cather):
I, Claudius (Graves)
Claudius the God (Graves)
Miti e leggende di antica Roma (Agizza)
My Mortal Enemy (Cather)
Living in the Land of Ashes (Gebert)
The Omnivore's Dilemma (Pollan)
Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace (Gessen)
One of Ours (Cather)

2008-07-23T13:34:00.000-07:00

I changed my signature; "a reader" seemed too generic. Miranda Gaw made up the nickname "Nanette Elfstocking," Kaveri called it a stroke of genius, so that's my new signature. Or pseudonym. "Elfstocking" has to do with our shared love of socks, especially thigh-highs, especially stripey thigh-highs. It was Miranda who introduced me to the store Sock Dreams. Nanette, I don't know.

2008-05-07T21:19:00.000-07:00

We remember Isaac Meyers, a"h

Museum Pieces

2007-09-01T08:55:00.000-07:00

The archeological museum in Lesvos:

In the old building there are two statuettes of a tumbler doing handsprings. The statuettes are placed in profile, right next to each other, so that the effect is like that of Muybridge's horses, or like two frames from a film. It was moving to think of the lightness, the grace, the liveliness of the gesture, and the extreme age of the statuettes.

I liked the carefree presentation of myth as history in this bit of wall text, in the entrance of the old building:

Lesbos, also known in antiquity as Makaria, Pelasgia, Issa, Imerte, Lasia, Aigeira, Aithiope, and Mytonis, was named after the Thessalian hero Lesbos, who came to the island and married Methymna.
When the Pelasgians, the island's first settlers, came to its shores, they found it deserted, and Xanthos Triopou, their king, named it Pelasgia.
A local tradition in western Asia Minor relates how the Pelasgians came to inhabit the whole of the Ionian coast, north of Mykale, and the nearby islands. More widespread is the view associating or identifying the Pelasgians with the Aeolians.
It is said that seven generations after the coming of the Pelasgians, Lesbos became a wasteland, due to Deukalion's flood. After this came the island's mythical king, Makar or Makareus. Makar was one of the Heliades — son of Helios and Rhodos — and came to Lesbos from Rhodes. Makareus was the son of Krinakos and grandson of Zeus a wise legislator. He came to Lesbos from Holenos in Achaea and subsequently colonized Chios, Samos, Rhodes and Kos. The daughters of this mythical king, Mytilene, Methymna, Antissa, Arisbe, Issa, Agamedes or Pyrra, and his son Eresos, gave their names to the island's cities.
In Homer's Iliad Lesbos is mentioned as the kingdom of Makaras and its name is used to define the geographical extent of Priam's realm. In the Odyssey Nestor tells Telemachos that it was on Lesbos that he, Diomedes, and Menelaos prayed to Zeus to show them the sure way home. A Lesbian variation of this episode of the returning warriors, involving only the two Atreides (Agamemnon and Menelaos), links the most important popular cult on the island with the dynasty of the Atreides, from whom the leading lineages of the Lesbian cities traced their ancestry.
Lesbos is the setting for Homer's struggle between Odysseus and Philomeleides "out of discord," though the poet is particularly vague on how Odysseus came to the island and the identity of his adversary.
One of the secondary campaigns mounted by the Achaeans in the Troad was the destruction of Lesbos. Homer speaks of the taking captive of seven Lesbian women and romantic adaptations of the myth include the tale of the love between Peisidike, daughter of the king of Methymna, and Achilles, and the betrayal of her fatherland.
The myth of the "retribution" of the god Dionysos is also associated with Lesbos. Through his intervention, equity triumphed over the violence and injustice caused by the sacrilege of Makareas, his priest on Mytilene.
Makareas, wishing to misappropriate the gold entrusted for safekeeping in the temple of Dionysos, slew the stranger who had left it. He and his innocent relatives paid for his impious sin with their lives.
On the contrary, Phaonas, an aged ferryman who carried passengers between the city's harbours, was rewarded by Aphrodite for his kindness and humanity. The goddess, disguised as an old woman, asked him to row her in his boat. This Phaonas willingly did and asked no payment, for which she transformed him into a handsome young man.
Myth also links the island music and poetry, Lesbos, with Orpheus. After he was rent apart by the Thracian maenads, his head and lyre were washed up by the sea on its shore, and continued to recite poems, to sing, and to make prophecies. His oracle was near the Bakcheion at Antissa and his lyre hung in the temple of Apollo at Mytilene for many years.
A bronze lion that roamed Lesbos and guarded the island was the work of the god Hephaestus.

In the new building there was a room of heads. One was a clay head of an old man with deep-set prominent eyes; his nose and mouth — the earthlier features — had been rubbed smooth by time. The blankness of the lower half of his face combined with the fierce expressiveness of his eyes gave the whole a haunted, haunting look — as if the eyes had survived two millenia intact by sheer force of will.

There was also a room full of bas-reliefs from graves, all depicting the same thing: the newly deceased on a horse walking towards a tree, presumably at the entrance to the Underworld. In the tree is a serpent, sometimes reaching out to the rider, and, if I'm not mixing the bas-reliefs up with another story, fruits are hanging in the tree. To see this over and over again in glistening white marble, as one walked around the room, was like hearing a line of music that repeats and repeats, and can get no further, full of the contrast between the sad inexorability of the horse's trot and the seductiveness of the serpent, and the mysterious promise of the fruit, the opposite of death. I wanted to ask Eleni what it all meant.

Also in the new building is a large mosaic floor telling the story of Danae and her son Perseus, who were thrown into the sea in a wooden chest by Danae's father Acrisius, and washed ashore unscathed. Eleni helped dig this up.

Neues Grünes Gewölbe, part of the Staatliche Kunstsammlung in Dresden

On display is a part of the royal treasures of the Saxon kings. Some objects are just rich — a huge green diamond — but most are both rich and exquisitely elaborate; one object combines an ordinary material with extreme elaboration: one hundred faces carved on a cherry pit.
The only descendant of this kind of craftsmanship we have is kitsch, so it was illuminating to see precious knickknacks from a time when such things were an admired art form.

Among the most remarkable pieces: a large galleon, with billowing sails, carved entirely out of ivory; the Court of the Grand Mogul, which reminded me of the Met's set for Turandot; Daphne, her sprouting hands and hair made out of coral; concentric ivory spheres on an impossibly thin pedestal; an ostrich whose body is — an ostrich egg! The ostrich's face has that foolishly indignant look typical of its species.

The ivory objects were so exquisite they made me realize that when Jane Austen describes her writing as "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour," she was not being as modest as I'd thought.

There was a room full of little figures of hunchbacks, cripples, beggars, carved in ivory or assembled from mother of pearl and the most precious materials. Even the museum wall text remarked on the strange juxtaposition of wretchedness and treasure. Oddly, though, the little figures evinced compassion rather than cruelty.

Neues Grünes Gewölbe

2007-08-02T05:03:00.000-07:00

A Tribute to the Life of Eleni Hatzivassiliou

2007-07-14T15:27:00.000-07:00

Genga di San Vittore

Ten minutes away by foot from where I was staying are the celebrated "Grotte di Frasassi," a cave system in a hollow hill (really a mountain). One of my earliest memories is of visiting caves with my parents. This was in southern France; I was three. I sat on my father's shoulders and thought about how hard it was to pronounce "shoulders" and "soldiers" properly.

In Frasassi we first walked through a long man-made tunnel. It was a bright, breezy day, and the shock of the darkness, the chill, the stillness was disorienting. Then, through a heavy sliding door, we entered the main hall of the cave system. It's hard to give an idea of how huge it is, but here are the numbers: it measures 200 meters at its highest point; the floor is 165 by 110 meters; the Duomo of Milano could fit into it. At the top, through a tunnel, is the crevice through which amateur cave crawlers discovered the cave system in 1971. As for distant objects, they were even bigger than they looked: having no point of reference, we were unable to gauge the size of these extraordinary shapes, but the guide informed us that the largest stalagmites were as tall as a building of 5 storeys. He also warned us not to touch any stalagmites: the grease from our fingers would prevent the dripping water from depositing its minerals, the stalagmite would turn black and "die." I saw a few of these dying formations along the way. (They can be cleaned and restored to life.) At first I thought that was an odd way to talk about rocks, but as we went deeper and deeper into the mountain, as the guide explained how different formations grew, and as I heard the constant drip of water and felt the walls glistening with moisture, I was won over by the metaphor. It was as if the creatures in the cave had simply decided to withdraw to slower time, to draw out every sensation so that each drop of water was an event. Slowly, slowly the shape nicknamed "piccolo Niagara" would flow over its ledge. Fifty years to grow a straw; fifty thousand to grow a giant. Some of the formations were were red (iron), and looked crumbly, but many were white, and smooth, and sparkling (calcium). They looked like warm wax, like cream, like sheets; it was hard to believe that if I threw myself at them I would get hurt.

(There is a website — www.frasassi.com — but even the wide angle shots in the "virtual tour" don't give a sense of the grandeur of the place.)

After an hour and ten minutes the visit was over; we had walked through one kilometer; the whole cave system is 25 kilometers. I didn't want to go back to the hotel right away, so I walked along the road very slowly, and discovered a stairwell down to the river (torrent) Sentino, on the other side of the road from the entrance to the caves, and somewhat down the hill. The Sentino is lined by cliffs on both sides, and its lowering is somehow linked to the birth of the caves, millions of years ago. There was a tiny pebbly beach at the bottom of the steps, and a couple with a baby, and on the other side of the torrent, a man sitting on a rock in swimming trunks, washing mud off a long rope, and then a rubber bag. I wandered around looking for fish, and wondering what he was doing — his things didn't look like fishermen's gear. Then two of his companions appeared around the bend, walking down the Sentino (which is fast-moving, but shallow and full of rocks). They wore helmets, and coveralls, and were covered in mud from head to toe. A-ha! Spelunkers! They too sat on rocks and started washing their things. Then I found a spring that fed right into the Sentino. It was a small cave — big enough for a beaver to explore, at most — and the water gushing out of it smelled of sulphur. I'd never seen a real spring before, so this was very exciting. Just before that on the beach was a puddle, and the water in it was not still. How could that be? And where did it come from? It seemed quite separate from the spring and the torrent. I looked and looked, and laid twigs on its surface, and finally figured out that one end of this puddle was a tiny tiny spring. At most I could fit three fingers into its opening, which was beside a rock nearly covered in pebbles. If I had dug out the rock I would have figured out more, but that seemed disrespectful. The water was coming out rapidly but soundlessly, without any bubbling or gushing or even burbling, and the crevice and its puddle, so modest and quietly serious, seemed fragile and precious.

I came back that night with some acquaintances, and they were as amazed and moved as I was by the little spring. I'll post a picture soon.

2007-05-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, Phil A. and some friends of his said that they thought David Brooks was OK, as conservative columnists go. I don't know other conservative columnists, but I loathe David Brooks. At the time I couldn't quite explain why. His column today on Al Gore — "The Vulcan Utopia" — gives me an opportunity.

First, something so obvious it's easy to miss: he doesn't deal with the substance of Gore's book; instead he attacks Gore on style. Gore, we are told, is a "robot." (Haven't we heard that before?) The evidence: he thinks machines are important; his prose style is clunky. Ergo, Gore is not made of flesh and blood, he doesn't understand emotions, passions, relationships. This is as mean, unscrupulous, and spurious (and, unfortunately, as effective) a strategy as questioning someone's patriotism. It's impossible to prove and impossible to refute, and it sweeps away all substantive issues.

Brooks cloaks his essential frivolity in smug invocations of virtue and justice. (He does this in all his columns, or at least all the ones I can bring myself to read.) These are empty catchphrases in his mouth, though I must say I'm surprised he mentions "justice": that brings the conservative doublethink to new heights. "Virtue" of course is an old favorite with them, though Cheney almost ruined it when (in an implicit slap at his predecessor) he sneeringly called conservation efforts a mark of "personal virtue."

To be sure, "family, friendship, neighborhood, and just face-to-face contact" are important, but how is that relevant to public policy? (Brooks once wrote a column arguing that what the poor really need is "connections." Rich and powerful ones, naturally.) Emotions are important too — Brooks mentions fear in particular — but what should be the role of emotions (which emotions?) in politics and civic life? Republicans can't talk about this with any honesty, because they owe too much to fear (and greed, and hatred). Brooks's glorification of emotions is a veiled defence of Republican demagoguery.

And if emotions are important (and they are), why doesn't Brooks go after rational-choice economists?

Does Brooks disagree with Gore's view of television? If so, why doesn't he argue against it, instead of merely holding up Gore's words for ridicule?

It's strange to read a political columnist who, in the first paragraph of every column, negates the premises for rational argument and then descends to innuendo and name-calling on the level of "your mommy dresses you funny" (Gore is "exceedingly strange"), all the while pretending that he's taking the high road. It's strange to hear someone talk about virtue, while heaping scorn on an exhortation to do good. I know Brooks is considered a moderate, a "reasonable" Republican, but I don't think that's a fair description of someone who offers, in column after column, a defence of demagoguery and an attack on Enlightenment values.

2007-05-28T18:12:00.000-07:00

February
Sense and Sensibility (Austen)
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, with selections from the Journals, Sermons, and Correspondence (Sterne)
Macbeth (Shakespeare)
Passing (Larsen)
The Thieves of Ostia (Lawrence)

March
We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families (Gourevitch)

April
Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (Gadda) (took me forever to get through)
The Scarecrow and his Servant (Pullman)

May
A History of the Roman World 753-146 (Scullard)
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Baum)
The Marvellous Land of Oz (Baum)

2007-04-27T07:12:00.000-07:00

I'm attending some lectures on the Inferno, and I'm forced to confront, yet again, my dislike of this masterpiece. It reminds me of Paradise Lost, which (hem, haw) I dislike for similar reasons:

The constant tone of denunciation, the pressure of hatred. I understand that there's genuine political passion and intelligence behind it, but I find it wearying, page after page of something at once diffuse and oppressive. (The fact that the first work by Milton that I read cover to cover was his Defensio pro Populo Anglicano may have colored subsequent experiences.)

A pomposity that pervades the whole and that makes even the good parts seem hollow and graceless. (Maybe if I read them out of context I'd appreciate them more; but I feel like a failure if I don't read works cover to cover.)
Some of Milton's word choices just make me grit my teeth. In a Milton lecture I once muttered under my breath, "atrocious," just as the lecturer was saying, "It's wonderful, isn't it?"

(this just for Dante) The thinness of the format — characters drift onto the scene, have their little outbursts, and then disappear for good. It all seems third hand.

Reading ancient epics throws into relief the poverty of these Christian epics. In the Æneid, for example, Virgil is able to inhabit so many different characters; even bit characters come to life and seem to speak as themselves, not through some editorialist's puppet. (And I actually find Virgil's Latin easier than Dante's Italian.)

Or take the battles in the Iliad: yes they're tedious, but the monotony seems meaningful; all the details of blood and sweat are so idiosyncratic and finely observed, at once so random and so revealing that I don't doubt it all happened exactly as Homer describes it. The battle scenes in Paradise Lost look like videogames next to the Iliad.

Another thing I don't like are the long explanations of astronomy or topography, which I can never follow (because I get so bored). It's like reading instruction manuals for home appliances, or pages and pages of stage directions. The fact that scholars are so taken with these passages, and spill so much ink debating the most mechanical points makes me suspicious. ("They must have nothing better to talk about"... "If they find this interesting, we'll probably disagree on everything.)

Another epic I don't like is The Faerie Queene. Don't even get me started on that!

I complained to Beatrice about Dante, and she tried to explain why she liked it. I found her more convincing than the lecturer (partly no doubt because she has no professional stake in the matter; and because she hasn't been preaching these things for 50 years, so she can conceive of disagreement). She recited her favorite bits and it was then that I thought if I only read excerpts I might conceive a fondness for the Inferno at least.

She says I should read Orlando Furioso. He's been on my list for years.

I loved Faust, so it's not as if I hate every modern epic. Or even every Christian epic: I liked Paradise Regained.

2007-04-27T07:10:00.000-07:00

Miranda Gaw is reading Northanger Abbey, on my recommendation, and liking it. When I saw this I ran to get my own copy, so that I could relive the experience at the same time that it was all happening to her. (That's how badly I want to be reading books with people.) My copy fell open to this page:

'My horse! oh, d— it! I would not sell my horse for a hundred. Are you fond of an open carriage, Miss Morland?'
'Yes, very; I have hardly ever had an opportunity of being in one; but I am particularly fond of it.'
'I am glad of it; I will drive you out in mine every day.'
'Thank you,' said Catherine, in some distress, from a doubt of the propriety of accepting such an offer.
'I will drive you up Lansdown Hill to-morrow.'
'Thank you; but will not your horse want rest?'
'Rest! he has only come three-and-twenty miles to-day; all nonsense; nothing ruins horses so much as rest; nothing knocks them up so soon. No, no; I shall exercise mine at the average of four hours every day while I am here.'
'Shall you indeed!' said Catherine very seriously, 'that will be forty miles a day.'
'Forty! aye, fifty, for what I care. Well, I will drive you up Lansdown to-morrow; mind, I am engaged.'
'How delightful that will be!' cried Isabella, turning round; 'my dearest Catherine, I quite envy you; but I am afraid, brother, you will not have room for a third.'
'A third indeed! no, no; I did not come to Bath to drive my sisters about; that would be a good joke, faith! Morland must take care of you.'
This brought on a dialogue of civilities between the other two; but Catherine heard neither the particulars nor the result. Her companion's discourse now sunk from its hitherto animated pitch, to nothing more than a short decisive sentence of praise or condemnation on the face of every woman they met; and Catherine, after listening and agreeing as long as she could, with all the civility and deference of the youthful female mind, fearful of hazarding an opinion of its own in opposition to that of a self-assured man, especially where the beauty of her own sex is concerned, ventured at length to vary the subject by a question which had been long uppermost in her thoughts; it was, 'Have you ever read Udolpho, Mr. Thorpe?'
'Udolpho! Oh, Lord! not I; I never read novels; I have something else to do.'
Catherine, humbled and ashamed, was going to apologize for her question, but he prevented her by saying, 'Novels are so full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except the Monk; I read that t'other day; but as for all the others, they are the stupidest things in creation.'

And so it goes for pages, one long drawn-out dissonance after another, delicious and painful and funny but also — poor Catherine — a bit sad too.

2007-03-31T21:52:00.002-07:00

I'm reading L.M. Montgomery's Emily of New Moon with a long-term student, a middle-schooler. (My assignment: to teach whatever I want. She's a very good student, so it's not a question of remediation.) We take turns reading out loud. I read it when I was in middle school, and it made a huge impression on me. It's sentimental, and there are frequent patches of purple prose (which I thought very fine back in the day), but on the whole I'm delighted and astonished by just how good it is — much better than Anne of Green Gables, which is saying a lot — the Anne books, at least the first two or three, deserve their reputation. The descriptions in Emily of New Moon may be too rich, but they're very imaginative and well-written, and the dialogue is great — especially the way Emily tries to redefine terms in arguments in which she's being bullied. And her eagerness to make friends, her interest in underdogs and outcasts, her curiosity about old family stories and town legends — it's all very good. Last but not least, she wants to be a writer, and there's a lot on the impulse to write and the process of writing, all of which is accessible to a middle school student without being in the least condescending.

Maybe I'm getting carried away, but I think the Emily books offer an education in Romanticism: I have in mind Emily's appreciation for natural beauty, her fascination with fragments and unfinished things, again her sympathy for misfits, her constant fight against the philistines of Blair Water. I think it was under the influence of the Emily books that I sought out anonymous poetry. (In fact for about a year I scorned poetry by known authors.)

And she's a free thinker: I remember that in Emily Climbs she boards with a very strict Presbyterian aunt who's active in her church, and a local newspaper assigns her to review the new pastor of her aunt's church. She thinks his sermons are incoherent and formulaic invective, but of course she can't say that. So she writes both a dishonest review, and (for her own satisfaction) an honest review, and by mistake sends in the honest review, which gets published. Her aunt is incensed, etc etc. It's very funny.

When I read her father's deathbed farewell I coughed and sniffed and all but burst into tears, until my young student said gently, "Maybe I should read."

2007-03-31T21:52:00.001-07:00

I went to hear André Schiffrin, the editor, talk about his new book, A Political Education. He said some interesting things about Yale and Cambridge in the 1950s, and some things about what's happening to publishing (which I'd heard before, but he made it sound very dire). At one point he said that independent publishing was a key — perhaps "the key" — to democracy. Now I'm all for independent publishing houses, but I felt a twinge of resistance: surely other things are more important, like intrepid journalism, civic associations, and, of course, schools that produce curious, skeptical, articulate citizens. I felt a bit churlish for taking exception, but afterwards I was able to put my finger on the reason for my resistance. Schiffrin thinks we need new ideas in order to make political progress, and how would those new ideas be propagated if not through books? I don't agree; I think the pursuit of new ideas is a huge diversion. The ideas are all there, we just need the will, the energy, and a healthy capacity for indignation.
But we all try hard to justify what we do.

2007-03-31T21:51:00.000-07:00

A piece of very good news:

A middle school student I tutored pro bono for almost a year between 2005 and 2006 won a full scholarship to one of the best New England boarding schools!

!!!!

She's homeless, so (as Kaveri says) two birds with one stone.

The first essay she wrote for me was on the topic "The best things in life are free. Agree or disagree." (I did not choose it! It was randomly assigned!) She agreed, and adduced the example of public libraries. Still, it was a cruel assignment.

2007-03-31T21:50:00.002-07:00

Whenever my cleaning lady crosses the threshold I feel sheepish about the state of my apartment, and worry that I'm her messiest client. But today she told me about an apartment she once cleaned in which the refrigerator was full of maggots, the walls were crawling with cockroaches, and the floors covered with thirty years of papers and dust. She ended up carrying forty bags of trash out of the place. But the worst was this: the woman who lived in this house of horrors said, "I think my cat is dead, but I don't know where it is. Probably somewhere under all those papers." And so it was.
And I was worried about a few dusty piles of junk mail!

2007-03-31T21:50:00.001-07:00

I went to an awful talk a few weeks ago. I hesitate to publicize this, because in the grand scheme of things, who cares? How much harm can a lecture for graduate students and faculty do? On the other hand, life is short, and I wasted two hours. And I worry about what kind of teacher someone who thinks along these lines might be.
So, the paper was prefaced by this observation: "My scholarship is inspired by Derrida's insight that we don't know what it is to read, and we don't know what it is to write." You may as well say, we don't know what it means to eat a ham and cheese sandwich, we don't know what it means to look into a human face. "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of the roar that lies on the other side of silence." But never mind. This bit of pretentious nonsense was laid down and never mentioned again. (Thankfully.)
There followed an extremely detailed discussion of "flowers," known to font fans as "ornaments" or "fleurons." (Most word processing programs come with one such font.) They became extremely popularly in the sixteenth century. Typesetters sometimes made mistakes in assembling the patterns. Did they take apart flower forms after having printed an edition, or did they preserve the forms for use in another book? The speaker had gone through countless volumes, trying (by keeping track of "mistakes" in patterns) to see if the forms were used in different books. Results inconclusive. Then: what did these decorations mean? Were they associated with a particular author? A genre? No, no. After twenty minutes of fruitless speculation (and many, many overhead transparencies), a half-conclusion: at most one might say that the books of members of the same coterie on occasion might have shared the same pattern of decoration. (An acquaintance remarked, "It sounds like cinema of the absurd.")
Last point: editions of sonnets often had a strip of flowers at the top and bottom of the page. It was put forth that sonneteers wrote with this frame "in mind." Ergo —? With what consequences? None were suggested. (Not one poem was mentioned in the whole talk.) Why adduce a cause for an imperceptible — a nonexistent — effect? (Marcel Duchamp: "If no solution, then maybe no problem.") In the Q&A a grumpy old professor asked if the speaker "had any evidence" for this assertion. (Uncomfortable laughter from the audience. But I felt relieved.) Of course not. "But when I write a 1000-word review, I'm acutely conscious of the word limit." Surely a sonneteer is acutely conscious of the fourteen-line limit, and the restrictive rhyme pattern. Once one has signed on with poetry's most demanding form, what difference could a strip of flowers in the header and footer possibly make?
Kaveri tells me about the harsh comments people make in MFA critiques. (Sometimes too harsh: "Your art is nothing.") And I can't help thinking, "Why aren't people a little tougher in humanities seminars?" I don't want anyone to run to the bathroom in tears, but this is ridiculous. Then I realized: maybe people aren't just being polite: I'd half-assumed that the laudatory (fulsome) comments and questions were less than sincere, but one listener assured me (on another day) his admiration was sincere. One man's medicine, another man's poison. I guess.

2007-03-31T21:49:00.001-07:00

I went to hear Christopher Ricks at the Y. I like him a lot! His books, of course, and now I can say I like him as a speaker. He apologized for the scruffiness of his talk, but it didn't matter. On the level of insights and sentences it was a treasure chest. The older I get the more I think, "To hell with essay structure. Sentences are what really matters." (Within limits — the conclusions of Hazlitt's essays are sometimes so flat I wonder if he was doing it on purpose.)

2007-03-31T21:47:00.000-07:00

A two-part anecdote:

Last spring my supervisor (one of them) left a message on my voicemail: "You should read your student evaluations, which were very positive. I always read them after a term is over — it's heartening."
In spite of this friendly encouragement, I was too afraid to read them. (Asking one of the secretaries to find my file seemed, conveniently, like an imposition.)

Then last October I was in the computer room and happened to read this entry "On being observed." In the sixth paragraph White Bear begins to describe "That One Bad Evaluation." It sounded like every single evaluation I got in the PGCE. For example: "She went on to give advice like how to turn all my difficult, open-ended questions into yes-or-no questions. She said I should make each of them "especially those immigrant kids" give a response to one question per class, going around the room. She said I shouldn't read aloud... "
By the time I finished reading the entry I was shaking. "I must see those evaluations!" I thought, and raced up the stairs. But both the secretaries were out to lunch. As I dashed past my pigeonhole I noticed something. What's this? A big envelope. I sat on the floor and poured out its contents. The first thing I saw was a smiley face. ("Do you have any additional comments?") Then I read them. They were good. They really were. In one class all the students (as if by agreement) had ended their evaluations with "I [heart] her!" I nearly wept with gratitude and relief.
(I still can't believe the coincidence.)
I know, according to the observer, it doesn't matter what students think. But it does, of course.

I wonder how many positive evaluations it will take to undo the damage of the PGCE.

2007-03-31T21:46:00.000-07:00

Beatrice's figures of speech from nature:

"Lo so che sono un po' orsa." = "I know I'm a bit of a bear,"

orsa: an unsociable woman. (orso: an unsociable man.)

"Cosa farei, lì come un carciofo?" = "What would I do there, like an artichoke?"

carciofo: a silly, useless, incompetent person.

These are dictionary definitions. The bear idiom makes sense, but how did artichoke get to mean "silly, useless, incompetent"?! I always thought of it as a mysterious, elegant vegetable. But then I thought of the way an artichoke stands on its stalk — once in my life I saw a thicket of artichokes — like a stumpy, fat, too-earthly flower, and the way it seems (naturally) so unconscious of its ridiculousness. It began to make sense.

2007-03-14T22:16:00.001-07:00

Tony Nuttall has died. I just found out. It's hard to believe. I wish I had studied with him! Something, anything. I went to one of his lectures at the beginning of the term and loved it — so concentrated and so lively. I resolved to attend them regularly, but in the end couldn't because of some schedule conflict. (I think it was the PGCE — God help me) I thought nonchalantly: "I'll audit some time in the future." Then he retired, and now he's gone. He was so friendly and approachable.

2007-03-14T22:15:00.000-07:00

I've seen The Lives of Others twice, and highly recommend it. I'm haunted by Sebastian Koch's face, a face that holds, that withholds, so much. And by his manner, which is such a canny mixture of caution and innocence. Canny's the wrong word: it seemed completely unconscious, an aura of divine favor. Consider, for example, the way so much of he said was not really offensive to the regime, and at the same time not hypocritical either. He was always honest, and he never compromised himself.

The face of Ulrich Mühe also gained depth at a vertiginous rate, even though his expression never changed. Depending on where you let your eyes focus, you saw in their faces a blank wall, or infinitely complicated reserve.

And the first time you see them you think you have their measure: smug egotist; sadist.

I was reminded of:

Divided We Fall: the man whose job it is to spy and persecute turns by imperceptible shades, almost without knowing what's happening to him, into a saviour.

The White Rose: for the chessboard interrogations in German.

and, maybe because I'm reading We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, Hotel Rwanda, again for the tightrope negotiations with an evil power.

2007-03-14T22:14:00.000-07:00

I read Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy and "The Brahmine's Journal." They're not masterpieces — the Journal lacks his usual verve, is in fact boring and repetitive — but I found them both very moving, and when I finished, I would have straightaway started re-reading Tristram Shandy, if I'd had my copy.

That's not quite fair: the Sentimental Journey, which reads like a supplement to Tristram Shandy, has some brilliant passages. It's almost entirely set in Calais, Paris, and Versailles (shades of Shandy, in which the protagonist is born only in the second half of the novel). Sterne did in fact make it to Italy, but the book was published two weeks before his death; perhaps he had given up on finishing it, or needed the money. (He was in the enviable position of knowing that anything with his name on the cover would be lapped up in several countries.) It reminded me a bit of Hamsun's Hunger for the comical hypersensitivity of the narrator, adrift in a large city, to every gesture, expression, and modulation of tone — a kind of grasping at straws, because the city itself is unreadable. And for the way in which the author and narrator are indistinguishable, and for his bursts of love for all mankind, which are always so hard to express. (They both try.) In Hamsun these effusions are balanced by bouts of misanthropy and misogyny, and an inability to communicate. Not so in the Sentimental Journey — it's as joyful and exuberant as Tristram Shandy.

There's a very funny episode in which — but here it is:

The Passport — Paris

When I got home to my hotel, La Fleur [Yorick's French valet] told me I had been enquired after by the Lieutenant de Police — The duce take it! said I — I know the reason. It is time the reader should know it, for in the order of things in which it happened, it was omitted; not that it was out of my head; but that, had I told it then, it might have been forgot now — and now is the time I want it.
I had left London with so much precipitation, that it never enter'd my mind that we were at war with France; and had reached Dover, and looked through my glass at the hills beyond Boulogne, before the idea presented itself; and with this in its train, that there was no getting there without a passport. Go but to the end of a street, I have a mortal aversion for returning back no wiser than I set out; and as this was one of the greatest efforts I had ever made for knowledge, I could less bear the thoughts of it; so hearing the Count de *** had hired the packet, I begg'd he would take me in his suite. The Count had some little knowledge of me, so made little or no difficulty — only said, his inclination to serve me could reach no farther than Calais, as he was to return by way of Brussels to Paris; however, when I had once pass'd there, I might get to Paris without interruption; but that in Paris I must make friends and shift for myself — Let me get to Paris, Monsieur le Count, said I — and I shall do very well. So I embark'd, and never thought more of the matter.
When La Fleur told me the Lieutenant de Police had been enquiring after me — the thing instantly recurred — and by the time La Fleur had well told me, the master of the hotel came into my room to tell me the same thing, with this addition to it, that my passport had been particularly asked after: the master of the hotel concluded with saying, He hoped I had one — Not I, faith! said I.
The master of the hotel retired three steps from me, as from an infected person, as I declared this — and poor La Fleur advanced three steps towards me, and with that sort of movement which a good soul makes to succour a distress'd one — the fellow won my heart by it; and from that single trait, I knew his character as perfectly, and could rely upon it as firmly, as if he had served me with fidelity for seven years.
Mon seigneur! cried the master of the hotel — but recollecting himself as he made the exclamation, he instantly changed the tone of it — if Monsieur, said he, has not a passport (apparemment) in all likelihood he has friends in Paris who can procure him one — Not that I know of, quoth I, with an air of indifference. — Then, certes, replied he, you'll be sent to the Bastile or the Chatelet, au moins. Poo! said I, the king of France is a good-natur'd soul — he'll hurt nobody. — Cela n'empeche pas, said he — you will certainly be sent to the Bastile to-morrow morning. — But I've taken your lodgings for a month, answer'd I, and I'll not quit them a day before the time for all the kings of France in the world. La Fleur whispered in my ear, That nobody could oppose the king of France.
Pardi! said my host, ces Messieurs Anglois sont des gens tres extraordinaires — and having both said and sworn it — he went out.

The Passport — The Hotel at Paris

I could not find in my heart to torture La Fleur's with a serious look upon the subject of my embarrassment, which was the reason I had treated it so cavalierly; and to shew him how light it lay upon my mind, I dropt the subject entirely; and whilst he waited upon me at supper, talk'd to him with more than usual gaiety about Paris, and of the opera comique. …
As soon as the honest creature had taken away, and gone down to sup himself, I then began to think a little seriously about my situation. —
— And here, I know, Eugenius, thou wilt smile at the remembrance of a short dialogue which pass'd twixt us the moment I was going to set out — I must tell it here.
Eugenius, knowing that I was as little subject to be overburthen'd with money as thought, had drawn me aside to interrogate me how much I had taken care for; upon telling him the exact sum, Eugenius shook his head, and said it would not do; so pull'd out his purse in order to empty it into mine. — I've enough in conscience, Eugenius, said I. — Indeed, Yorick, you have not, replied Eugenius — I know France and Italy better than you — But you don't consider, Eugenius, said I, refusing his offer, that before I have been three days in Paris, I shall take care to say or do something or other for which I shall get clapp'd up into the Bastile, and that I shall live there a couple of months entirely at the king of France's expence. I beg pardon, said Eugenius, drily: really I had forgot that resource.
Now the event I treated gaily came seriously to my door.
Is it folly, or nonchalance, or philosophy, or pertinacity — or what is it in me, that, after all, when La Fleur had gone down stairs, and I was quite alone, I could not bring down my mind to think of it otherwise than I had then spoken of it to Eugenius?
And as for the Bastile; the terror is in the word — Make the most of it you can, said I to myself, the Bastile is but another word for a tower — and a tower is but another word for a house you can't get out of — Mercy on the gouty! for they are in it twice a year — but with nine livres a day, and pen and ink and paper and patience, albeit a man can't get out, he may do very well within — at least for a month or six weeks; at the end of which, if he is a harmless fellow, his innocence appears, and he comes out a better and wiser man than he went in.
I had some occasion (I forgot what) to step into the courtyard, as I settled this account; and remember I walk'd down stairs in no small triumph with the conceit of my reasoning — Beshrew the sombre pencil! said I vauntingly — for I envy not its power, which paints the evils of life with so hard and deadly a colouring. The mind sits terrified at the objects she has magnified herself, and blackened: reduce them to their proper size and hue, she overlooks them — 'Tis true, said I, correcting the proposition — the Bastile is not an evil to be despised — But strip it of its towers — fill up the fossé — unbarricade the doors — call it simply a confinement, and suppose 'tis some tyrant of a distemper — and not of a man which holds you in it — the evil vanishes, and you bear the other half without complaint.
I was interrupted in the hey-day of this soliloquy, with a voice which I took to be of a child, which complained "it could not get out." — I look'd up and down the passage, and seeing neither man, woman, or child, I went out without further attention.
In my return back through the passage, I heard the same words repeated twice over; and looking up, I saw it was a starling hung in a little cage — "I can't get out — I can't get out," said the starling.
I stood looking at the bird: and to every person who came through the passage it ran fluttering to the side towards which they approach'd it, with the same lamentation of its captivity…
I vow I never had my affections more tenderly awakened; [n]or do I remember an incident in my life, where the dissipated spirits, to which my reason had been a bubble, were so suddenly call'd home. Mechanical as the notes were, yet so true in tune to nature were they chanted, that in one moment they overthrew all my systematic reasonings upon the Bastile; and I heavily walk'd up stairs, unsaying every word I had said in going down them
Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, Slavery! said I — still thou art a bitter draught! and though thousands in all ages have been made to drink of thee, thou art no less bitter on that account.
…
The count de B****, of whom the bookseller at the Quai de Conti had spoke[n] so handsomely the night before, came instantly into my mind — And why should I not go, thought I, to the Count de B****, who has so high an idea of English books, and English men — and tell him my story?
…
I found no difficulty in getting admittance to Monsieur le Count de B***. The set of Shakespeares was laid upon the table, and he was tumbling them over. I walk'd up close to the table, and giving first such a look at the books as to make him conceive I knew what they were — I told him I had come without anyone to present me, knowing I should meet with a friend in his apartment, who, I trusted, would do it for me — it is my countryman the great Shakespeare, said I, pointing to his works — et ayez la bonté, mon cher ami, apostrophizing his spirit, added I, de me faire cet honneur-la.
The Count smiled at the singularity of the introduction; and seeing I look'd a little pale and sickly, insisted upon my taking an arm-chair: so I sat down; and to save him conjectures upon a visit so out of all rule, I told him simply of the incident in the bookseller's shop, and how that had impelled me rather to go to him with the story of a little embarrassment I was under, than to any other man in France — And what is your embarrassment? let me hear it, said the Count. So I told him the story just as I have told it the reader. — And the master of my hotel, said I, as I concluded it, will needs have it, Monsieur le Count, that I should be sent to the Bastile — but I have no apprehensions, continued I — for in falling into the hands of the most polish'd people in the world, and being conscious I was a true man, and not come to spy the nakedness of the land, I scarce thought I lay at their mercy. — It does not suit the gallantry of the French, Monsieur le Count, said I, to shew it against invalids.
An animated blush came into the Count de B****'s cheeks as I spoke this — Ne craignez rien — Don't fear, said he — Indeed I don't, replied I again — …
The Count heard me with great good-nature, or I had not said half as much — and once or twice said — C'est bien dit. So I rested my cause there — and determined to say no more about it.
The Count led the discourse: we talk'd of indifferent things — of books, and politics, and men — and then of women — God bless them all! said I
…
The Count said a great many civil things to me upon the occasion; and added, very politely, how much he stood obliged to Shakespeare for making me known to him — But, à propos, said he, — Shakespeare is full of great things — he forgot a small punctilio of announcing your name — it puts you under a necessity of doing it yourself.

There is not a more perplexing affair in life to me, than to set about telling any one who I am — for there is scarce anybody I cannot give a better account of than myself; and I have often wish'd I could do it in a single word — and have an end of it. It was the only time and occasion in my life I could accomplish this to any purpose — for Shakespeare lying upon the table, and recollecting I was in his books, I took up Hamlet, and turning immediately to the grave-diggers' scene in the fifth act, I laid my finger upon YORICK, and advancing the book to the Count, with my finger all the way over the name — Me voici! said I.
Now whether the idea of poor Yorick's skull was put out of the Count's mind by the reality of my own, or by what magic he could drop a period of seven or eight hundred years, makes nothing in this account — 'tis certain the French conceive better than they combine — I wonder at nothing in this world, and the less at this; inasmuch as one of the first in our own church, for whose candour and paternal sentiments I have the highest veneration, fell into the same mistake in the very same case, — "He could not bear," he said, "to look into the sermons wrote [sic] by the king of Denmark's jester." Good, my lord! said I; but there are two Yoricks.
…
The poor Count de B*** fell but into the same error —
— Et, Monsieur, est il Yorick? cried the Count. — Je le suis, said I. — Vous? — Moi — moi qui ai l'honneur de vous parler, Monsieur le Comte — Mon Dieu! said he, embracing me — Vous êtes Yorick! The Count instantly put the Shakespeare into his pocket and left me alone in his room.

I could not conceive why the Count de B**** had gone so abruptly out of the room, any more than I could conceive why he had put the Shakespeare into his pocket — Mysteries which must explain themselves are not worth the loss of time which a conjecture about them takes up: 'twas better to read Shakespeare; so taking up Much ado about Nothing, I transported myself instantly from the chair I sat in to Messina in Sicily, and got so busy with Don Pedro and Benedict and Beatrice, that I thought not of Versailles, the Count, or the Passport.
…
When I had got to the end of the third act, the Count de B**** entered with my passport in his hand. Mons. le Duc de C****, said the Count, is as good a prophet, I dare say, as he is a statesman — Un homme qui rit, said the duke, ne sera jamais dangereux. — Had it been for any one but the king's jester, added the Count, I could not have got it these two hours. — Pardonnez moi, Mons. le Count, said I — I am not the king's jester. But you are Yorick? — Yes. — Et vous plaisantez? — I answered, Indeed I did jest — but was not paid for it — 'twas entirely at my own expence.
We have no jester at court, Mons. le Count, said I; the last we had was in the licentious reign of Charles II. — since which time our manners have been so gradually refining, that our court at present is so full of patriots, who wish for nothing but the honours and wealth of their country — and our ladies are all so chaste, so spotless, so good, so devout — there is nothing for a jester to make a jest of —
Voilà un persiflage! cried the Count.

***
Isn't it delightful?! It never gets stale.

It would be unfair to judge the Brahmine's Journal, since Sterne conceived of it as therapy, not as literature. It's a journal written for the woman he loved, who had gone to India to join her husband. At first he meant to send it to her; later he changed his mind, and though he still addressed the entries to her, gave free rein to his fantasies about her husband's death. It was written in the last year of his life, when he was very ill. I could call it maudlin, self-indulgent, and obsessive, but that would be like losing patience with a friend because he's ill and unhappily in love, and not as entertaining as his wont. It's amazing that he wrote the Journey, so light and sparkling, at the same time as the Journal. But then we have the author's word that every sentence in Tristram Shandy itself was written "written under the greatest heaviness of heart."

The Journal can't be compared to Keats's letters, or to the letters and journals of Katherine Mansfield, but I was reminded of them because all three writers are dying of consumption, and detailed, happy plans for the future (when you can see "only 30 more pages to live") alternate with desperately needy pleas to the distant beloved.

Sterne, for example, describes in detail a sitting room he's furnishing for the Brahmine.

I particularly like Sterne's fondness for "sentiment." (It's in Tristram Shandy, but it's even more of a leit motif in the Journey and the Journal.) It's not something one naturally associates with his sparkling wit, but only because the word has become debased. A friend of mine once tried to redeem it, in writing and in speech. But we are so addicted to cheap irony that I'm afraid her efforts were unsuccessful.

Sometimes I think he uses the word "sentiment" as Austen uses the word "taste": it's what refined spirits recognize and appreciate.

By the way, Thackeray — a "sentimental" writer in the worst sense of the word — I hated Vanity Fair — penned a vehement denunciation of Sterne. The spirit of one age attacking the spirit of another. ("That's not fair." I know.)

I hope you've all read the brief but moving — sentimental! — exchange of letters between Sterne and Ignatius Sancho, Britain's "first black man of letters," a greengrocer by trade.

The other day someone told me that Jean Paul, Schumann's favorite author and the source of his butterflies, is like a German Laurence Sterne.

2007-03-14T22:11:00.000-07:00

Patrick was late to class. "Where's Patrick?" I asked. "Probably shovelling snow," a classmate suggested. At these words Richard turned around and demanded, emphatically, "Dude, do you think for one minute that Patrick would let shovelling snow get in the way of his education?" I had to smile. Partly because Richard teases Patrick to his face, so it was nice to hear him stand up for Patrick in Patrick's absence (not that the imputation was so scandalous). And partly because ever since I've known these children, which is to say ever since they were 10, they've shown — nearly all of them — an extraordinary commitment to learning, a kind of patient/eager organized curiosity.

2007-02-15T20:04:00.000-08:00

"A woman of seven and twenty," said Marianne, after pausing a moment, "can never hope to feel or inspire affection again, and if her home be uncomfortable, or her fortune small, I can suppose that she might bring herself to submit to the offices of a nurse, for the sake of the provision and security of a wife." — Sense and Sensibility

The first time I read anything by Jane Austen, I liked it, but found it a bit insipid. (My excuse: I was twelve.) I read Mansfield Park a few years later, and nearly gave up on Austen. Then when I was nineteen I read Persuasion, and when I was twenty-seven practically everything else, and loved it — especially the poisoned wit, the bitterness, the loneliness of her heroines, and Austen's exploration of all that goes into making moral judgments about about people. And I loved spotting echoes of Samuel Johnson, both in syntax and in the conviction that however awful other people might sometimes be, one cannot be good or useful outside of society. (such an extreme combination of misanthropy and sociability.) When I took up Sense and Sensibility last week I thought I hadn't read it, but I was wrong, as I realized from my notations in the margins. It just hadn't made as deep an impression as Emma or Northanger Abbey.
At first I found that the narrator's misanthropy makes the descriptions verge on the grotesque. It was too much, it was monotonous in spite of its cleverness, and I couldn't sympathize unreservedly with the anti-Romantic polemic. But I was soon drawn in by the depiction of grief and disappointment, and this sustained my interest for the rest of the book. My only gripe is that Austen (predictably) is whole-heartedly on the side of "sense": Elinor is above reproach; the only one who has to learn a lesson, as far as Austen is concerned, is Marianne. But one can indulge in self-control as much as in its opposite; not confiding in one's nearest and dearest can be the consequence not so much of admirable self-discipline as of a paralysis of spirit; there can even be something selfish about it. In making her sister her confidante, Elinor might have drawn Marianne's attention away from her own grief for a minute; the claim on her sympathy would have given her an opportunity to make herself useful. Expecting infinite sacrifices from yourself, and none from others, is a kind of narcissism.

2007-02-15T20:03:00.000-08:00

I read that the Puritans, newly arrived in New England, thought the harsh winters and scorching summers were God's punishment for some particular sin of theirs. I wonder how many seasons of despair and soul-searching it took for them to realize that the climate is just like that.

2007-02-15T19:58:00.000-08:00

According to the New York Times, the online University of Phoenix is in trouble with regulators. The allegations: papers graded without comment; most courses taught by part-timers; instructors who boasted about how little they taught; misleading course descriptions. I had to laugh when I read that. If the University of Phoenix feels singled out, I sympathize. Who are these regulators, and where do they come from? Where do they get their ideas about universities?? If their standards are really so high, their work will never be done.
I have to say this sounded exceptionally dreary: "its campuses, most of which are office buildings near freeways."

2007-02-11T20:03:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you too, dear reader, worry about desertification. If so, here's an article that will cheer you up: In Niger, Trees and Crops Turn Back the Desert.

2007-02-08T21:30:00.001-08:00

January
Greenwitch (Cooper)
The Grey King (Cooper)
Silver on the Tree (Cooper)
The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots
Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America: September 3, 1929-September 3, 1939 (Allen)
Oedipous the King (Sophocles)

2007-02-08T21:17:00.001-08:00

Scene on a subway:

The other day a man came into my subway car, stood silently as the train swung out of the station (but I knew he was going to speak) and then started telling us his story. A skilled construction worker, he had come from Vermont with his wife and child looking for work. He hadn't known, however, that to work on a construction site in New York you have to belong to a union. He didn't have forty-five days (he didn't elaborate, but apparently this is some requirement for union membership), so he enrolled in a course for security guards, with guaranteed job placement. His first day at work was the next day, but he needed $33 to finish paying for the course. If he didn't come up with the money, he would lose the job and his down payment. He hated doing this; he would be glad to show us the documents.
I have to say, I found this pretty convincing. The long pause before beginning (which spoke of reluctance), the wealth of detail, his appearance (he looked like someone from Vermont) — I believed him. I wasn't the only one. Sitting across from me was a red-haired man who contribued $20 to the cause. After thanking him effusively, the petitioner asked, "Can I show you the documents?" "Don't worry about it. I liked your spiel." The next person gave him $15. And here an argument ensued: "That's two dollars more than I need! Let me see if I can get you change." "Keep it, man! Buy yourself a coffee!" "I can't believe it! I haven't cried since the day my mother died!" He stayed on for many more stops, the whole while exchanging views with Ms Fifteen Dollars on how to make the world a better place: "If only people would…" "Just a little more trust…" "Jeez, wait till my wife hears! She didn't want me to do this!" And: "I still feel like throwing up. I can't believe I did this." And: "I was hoping someone would challenge me, so I could show the documents." And he described a conversation he'd had with the course supervisor, who turned down his request to deduct the $33 from his first paycheck. Everyone was listening and smiling
The fact that he stayed on the train for six more stops added to his credibility — he wasn't looking for a new audience.

2007-02-08T21:16:00.001-08:00

Conversation on a bus:

A middle-aged man came onto a crosstown bus at Fifth Avenue. His scarf was identical to mine, and when he sat catty-corner from me I said, "Merton." "Balliol." It was like getting the wrong password. In some consternation, we compared scarves and found the difference. He had done a second BA in English in the 1970s. Then he did a PhD at Yale. We found out that one of his classmates supervised my senior essay. His one regret, he said, was not having done the PhD at Oxford. "A friend of mine started a PhD at Yale after an MSt at Oxford, and then quit because he hated it so much," I said. "He made the right decision. I should have dropped out.… There were a lot of older genteel types — who were nasty. And then there were the younger deconstructionists — who were about to become nasty." me: ":D! That sounds just like Yale!" By then we were at Central Park West, and I had to get off.
I always feel a kinship with people who hate Yale — this summer, for example, two of my classmates were students at Yale (one graduate, one undergraduate), and they both hated it. "I'm in good company," I thought. It was quite wonderful to agree on the awfulness of Yale with a perfect stranger in the few minutes it takes to cross Central Park, and then to part ways.

2007-02-08T21:13:00.001-08:00

Storia degli Italiani, vol. I: very, very good. I had despaired of finding a book like this, but volume I of Procacci's history is as good as I could have wished. Three things stand out:

One is the tenuousness of men's hold over the land: people have lived in Italy at least since the Neolithic age, but there were ages of retrenchment and ages of expansion (settlement). During the periods of retrenchment the population declined (huddled in towns and castles) and vast regions became malarial swamp. Sometimes the causes of the swamps' expansion were political. I lose sleep over desertification, and it was interesting to come across an analogous circumstance. (But swamps — even malarial swamps — don't scare me nearly as much as deserts.)

Apparently the Venice/Genova dichotomy is a commonplace, but I found it fascinating:

La fortuna di Genova si veniva però sviluppando su basi assai diverse da quelle di Venezia. Il suo armamento era prevalentement privato, i suoi convogli mercantili e, talvolta, le sue stesse spedizioni militari delle "maone" organizzate da privati, i fondachi dei magazzini appartenenti a privati e i suoi viaggiatori degli avventurieri che non esitavano a mettere le proprie competenze al servigio di chiunque fosse to disposto a pagarle. Marco Polo, davanti al khan dei tartari o in prigionia non cessò mai di sentirsi un cittadino veneziano, per Venezia egli combattè e a Venezia si ammogliò e morì. Ma già agli inizi del XIV secolo noi troviamo un genovese, Manuele Pessagno, ammiraglio del re di Portogallo e un altro, Enrico Marchese, costruttore di navi sulla Senna per conto di Filippo il Bello. Essi sono i capostipiti di una progenie di genovesi per il mondo cui appartiene anche Cristoforo Colombo, scopritore delle Americhe per conto del re di Spagna.
Questo "individualismo" genovese, del quale si è tanto parlato e del quale non si può fare a meno di continuare a parlare, si riflette nelle strutture stesse della città. (p. 46)

Rough translation:

The fortunes of Genova developed from very different foundations from those of Venice. Its arsenal was predominantly private, its mercantile convoys and at times even its military ventures were privately organized, its warehouses were privately owned and its travellers adventurers who did not hesitate to put their abilities at the service of anyone willing to pay. Marco Polo, before the khan of the Tartars or in jail, never ceased to consider himself a Venetian citizen, for Venice he fought, in Venice he was married and died. But already at the beginning of the XIV century we find a Genoese, Manuele Pessagno, admiral of the king of Portugal, and another, Enrico Marchese, ship builder on the Seine for Philip the Fair [of France]. They are the forefathers of a line of globe-trotting Genoese that includes Cristoforo Colombo, discoverer of the Americas on behalf of the king of Spain.
This Genoese "individualism," of which much has been said and which we shall go on discussing, is reflected in the very structure of the city.

***

The fates of the two cities seem to be contained in this difference in mentality: after a financial crisis in the fifteenth century, in which many small savers were wiped out, Genova became the fief of an oligarchy — creditors who sat on the board of one single bank; it suffered periodic uprisings, and was a prey to outside intervention — what else could you expect when the whole city was mortgaged? Venice, with its formidable cohesiveness and civic pride, its single-minded mixture of diplomatic cunning and bravery, lasted over three centuries longer. It finally fell to Napoleon in 1797. This is another moment in history that brings my father to tears: "The British navy was around the corner ready to help, but Venice didn't lift a finger in her own defense." It reminds me of what Hans Scholl said about Paris in 1941. I can't help having some sympathy for Venice and Paris: occupiers may come and go (they must have thought), but a city this beautiful happens only once.

I like the neat symmetry of the dichotomy: Venice in the northeast, Marco Polo, China; Genova in the northwest, Columbus, the Americas.

I used to be unsympathetic to Venice because I thought that women were much less free there than in other cities. I think I was misinformed. Now I love it for its cosmopolitanism — its openness to the Byzantine Empire, later the Ottoman, Germany, and everything in between — for Aldo Manuzio's press, for its policy of religious toleration, and for standing up to the Vatican. (The whole city was excommunicated several times, and nearly became Protestant.)

The last thing that struck me was the explanation for place names such as Villafranca, Francavilla, and Castelfranco. I'd always foolishly thought these had something to do with the Franks, but as Procacci explains, towns with these names began as settlements of newly enFRANChised serfs (usually founded around the year 1000). I'll think of those freedmen the next time I pass through a town with "franco" in its name. (There are many.)

This is kind of interesting (from Wikipedia):

The ethnonym has also been traced to a *frankon—"javelin, lance" (Old English franca, compare the Saxons, named after the seax, and the Lombards, named after the battle-axe—the throwing axe of the Franks is known as the Francisca) but, conversely, the weapon may also have been named after the tribe. A. C. Murray says, 'The etymology of Franci is uncertain ('the fierce ones' is the favourite explanation), but the name is undoubtedly of Germanic origin.' [2]
The meaning of "free" (English frank, frankly) arose because, after the conquest of Gaul, only Franks had the status of freemen.

2007-02-08T21:11:00.000-08:00

The Borrowers: fantastic. Here's the Sunday Times blurb: 'Beautifully written, poetic and almost always alarming, the Borrowers books have something very mysterious, sad and exciting about them." And the description on the back: "The Borrowers own nothing at all; everything they have is borrowed from the 'human beans,' who don't even know they exist. That is, until Arrietty Clock makes friends with one. And from that moment danger is never far away, for, above all else, they must avoid the great disaster of "being seen."'

Here are some excerpts:

'She thinks my father comes out of the decanter,' said Arrietty, 'and one day when I'm older he's going to take me there and she'll think I come out of the decanter too. It'll please her, my father thinks, as she's used to him now. Once he took my mother, and Aunt Sophy perked up like anything and kept asking why my mother didn't come any more and saying they'd watered the Madeira because once, she says, she saw a little man and a little woman and now she only sees a little man…'
'I wish she thought I came out of the decanter,' said the boy. 'She gives me dictation and teaches me to write. I only see her in the mornings when she's cross. She sends for me and looks behind my ears and asks Mrs. D. if I've learned my words.'
'What does Mrs. D. look like?' asked Arrietty. (How delicious it was to say 'Mrs. D.' like that… how careless and daring!) (p. 54)

Arrietty was glad to see the morning room; the door luckily had been left ajar and it was fascinating to stand at last in the thick pile of the carpet gazing upwards at the shelves and pillars and towering gables of the famous overmantel. So that's where they had lived, she thought, those pleasure-loving creatures, remote and gay and self-sufficient. She imagined the Overmantel women — a little 'tweedy,' Homily had described them, with wasp waists and piled Edwardian hair — swinging carelessly outwards on the pilasters, lissom and laughing; gazing at themselves in the inset looking-glass which reflected back the tobacco jars, the cut-glass decanters, the book-shelves, and the plush-covered table. She imagined the Overmantel men — fair, they were said to be, with long moustaches and nervous, slender hands — smoking and drinking and telling their witty tales. So they had never asked Homily up there! Poor Homily with her bony nose and never tidy hair… They would have looked at her strangely, Arrietty thought, with their long, laughing eyes, and smile a little and, humminy, turn away. And they had lived only on breakfast food — on toast and egg and tiny snips of mushroom; sausage they'd have had and crispy bacon and little sips of tea and coffee. Where were they now? Arrietty wondered. Where could such creatures go? (p. 65)

Shadows danced every way and, in their shouting and scolding, they hardly noticed a sudden, silent thickening of night swerve in on the dusk; but they felt the wind of its passing, watched the candle gutter, and saw the moth was gone. (p. 180)

It was difficult to piece the story together from Spiller's terse sentences, but at last some coherence emerged. Spiller, it seemed, owned a boat — the bottom half of an aluminium soap-case, slightly dented; in this, standing up, he would propel himself about the stream. Spiller had a summer camp (or hunting lodge) in the sloping field behind — an old blackened tea kettle it was — wedged sideways in the silt of the stream (he had several of these bases it appeared, of which, at some time, the boot had been one) — and he would borrow from the caravans, transporting the loot by water; this boat gave him a speedy getaway, and one which left no scent. Coming up against the current was slower, Spiller explained, and for this he was grateful for the hatpin, which not only served as a sharp and pliable punt-pole, but as a harpoon as well. He became so lyrical about the hat-pin that Pod and Homily began to feel quite pleased with themselves, as though, out of the kindness of their hearts, they had achieved some benevolent gesture. Pod longed to ask to what use Spiller had put the half nail-scissor but could not bring himself to do so, fearing to strike a discordant note in so bland a state of innocent joy. (p. 202)

'Why have you got to go?' asked Arrietty suddenly.
Spiller, about to push his way through the screen of leaves, turned back to look at her.
Arrietty coloured. 'I've asked him a question,' she realized unhappily, 'now he'll disappear for weeks.' But this time Spiller seemed merely hesitant.
'Me winter clothes,' he said at last.
'Oh!' exclaimed Arrietty, raising her head — delighted. 'New?'
Spiller nodded.
'Fur?' asked Homily.
Spiller nodded again.
'Rabbit?" asked Arrietty.
'Mole,' said Spiller.
There was a sudden feeling of gaiety in the candlelit alcove: a pleasant sense of something to look forward to. All three of them smiled at Spiller and Pod raised his 'glass.' 'To Spiller's new clothes,' he said, and Spiller, suddenly embarrassed, dived quickly through the branches. But before the living curtain had stopped quivering they saw his face again; amused and shy, it poked back at them framed in leaves. 'A lady makes them,' he announced self-consciously, and quickly disappeared. (p. 216)

'No good being hasty, Pod,' Hendreary said at last. 'The choice of course is yours, but we're all in this together, and for as long as it lasts' — he glanced around the table as though putting the words on record — 'and such as it is, what is ours is yours.'
'That's very kind of you, Hendreary,' said Pod.
'Not at all,' said Hendreary, speaking rather too smoothly; 'it stands to reason.'
'It's only human,' put in Lupy: she was very fond of this word. (p. 287)

'These Borrowers do need warmth. They need fuel and shelter and water and they terribly need human beings. Not that they trust them. They're right, I suppose: one has only to read the papers. But it's sad, isn't it? That they can't trust us, I mean. What could be more charming for someone — like me, says — to share one's home with these little creatures? Not that I'm lonely, of course. My days' Miss Menzie's eyes became over-bright suddenly and the gay voice hurried a little — 'are far too full ever to be lonely. I've so many interests, you see. I keep up with things. And I have my old dog and the two little birds. All the same, it would be nice. I know their names now — Pod, Homily, and little Arrietty. These creatures talk, you see. And just think I'd' — she laughed suddenly — 'I'd be sewing for them from morning until night. I'd make them things. I'd buy them things. I'd — oh, but you understand…' (p. 405)

* * *

"I can't believe she's being set up to marry Spiller!" said Nina, after reading one of the middle volumes. "He's so uncommunicative — it's all wrong!"

Spiller has his good points: he's brave, loyal, and resourceful. And there's this:

'…But he will have kid — says it's hard wearing. It stiffens up, of course, directly he gets it wet, but he soon wears it soft again. And by that time,' she added, 'it's all colours of the rainbow.'
Arrietty could imagine the colours; they would not be 'all colours of the rainbow': they would be colours without real colour, the shades which made Spiller invisible — soft fawns, pale browns, dull greens, and a kind of shadowy gun-metal. Spiller took care about 'seasoning' his clothes: he brought them to a stage where he could melt into the landscape, where one could stand beside him, almost within touching distance, and yet not see him. Spiller deceived animals as well as gipsies. Spiller deceived hawks and stoats and foxes… and Spiller might not wash but he had no Spiller scent: he smelled of hedgerows, and bark and grasses and of wet sun-warmed earth; he smelled of buttercups, dried cow dung, and early morning dew…
'When will he come?' Arrietty asked. But she ran away upstairs before anyone could tell her. She wept a little in the upstairs room, crouched down beside the soap-dish.
To talk of Spiller reminded her of out of doors and of a wild, free life she might never know again. This new-found haven among the lath and plaster might all too soon become another prison… (p. 278)

* * *

But Nina's right: his silence, his disappearing acts, and his illiteracy mean he's really not good enough for dear Arrietty. "Don't worry," I said. "She meets another Borrower: a kind, articulate, well-read young Borrower." And I sang his praises to Nina, without, however, saying his name, which is almost the best thing about him. Here's the scene in which Arrietty first meets him:

Suddenly there was a sound. It was quite a small sound and seemed to come from the library next door. Arrietty stood up and, keeping her body covered by the brick support, peeked her head forward.
All was quiet. She watched and waited. From where she stood, she could see the tap and, to the left of this, the place where the tiles ended and the library floorboards began. She could see a little way into the library, part of the fireplace and the light from the long windows but not the windows themselves. As she stood there under the stove, still as the crumbled bricks which supported it, she could feel the quickening pulse of her own heartbeats.
The next sound was very slight. She had to strain her ears to hear it. It was a faint continuous squeak. As though, she thought, someone was working a machine, or turning some miniature handle. It grew — not louder exactly, but nearer. And then, with a catch of the breath, she saw the tiny figure.
It was a borrower — no doubt of that — a borrower with a limp, dragging some contraption behind him. Whatever the contraption was, it moved easily — almost magically — not like Spiller soap-box which was rather apt to bump. In this case, it was the borrower who bumped. One of his shoulders went right down with each step taken: he was very lame. And fairly young, Arrietty noticed, as he came on towards the tap. He had a soft mop of tow-coloured hair and a pale, pale face. The thing he dragged was on wheels. What a wonderful idea, Arrietty thought: why had not her own family ever owned such a thing? There had been plenty of old toys, she had been told, pushed away in the playroom cupboard at Firbank and some of them must have had wheels. It was these four wheels, she realized, which produced the fairylike squeaking.
When the young borrower reached the drain, he turned his truck so the rear end faced the eye-bath. Then, stooping down, he took a drink of water. Arrietty drew back a little when, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he moved towards the glass door which led to the garden. He stood there for some moments, his back to Arrietty, gazing out through the panes. "He's watching the birds," she thought, "or seeing what sort of day it is…" And it was a lovely day, Arrietty could see that for herself. No wind, pale sunlight, and the birds were starting to build. After a while he turned and limped his way back to the eye-bath. Stooping, he tried to lift it. But it seemed very heavy and was slippery with water. No wonder Homily had had no patience with such an object: there was nothing you could get a grip on.
He tried again. Suddenly, she longed to help him; but how to announce herself without giving him a fright? She coughed, and he turned quickly, then remained frozen.
Their eyes met. Arrietty kept quite still. His heart, she realized, must be beating just as hard as hers was. After a moment, she smiled. She tried to think of something to say. "Hallo!" might sound too sudden. Perhaps she should say "Good morning"? Yes, that was it. "Good morning," she said. Her voice, to her ears, sounded tremulous, even a little husky, so she added quickly, on a brighter, clearer note: "It's a lovely day!"
He was still staring at her, as though unable to believe his eyes. Arrietty returned his stare and kept quite still. She tried to hold on to her smile. "Isn't it?" she added.
Suddenly, he gave a half laugh, and sat down on the edge of the drain. He ran his hand rather ruefully through the mop of his hair, and laughed again. "You gave me a fright," he said."
"I know," said Arrietty, "I'm sorry…"
"Who are you?"
"Arrietty Clock."
"I haven't seen you before."
"I — we only came last night."
"We?"
"My mother and father. And me…"
"Are you going to stay here?"
"I don't know. It depends —"
"On what?"
"On whether it's safe. And nice. And — you know…"
"Oh, it's nice," he said. "Considering —"
"Considering what?"
"Considering other places. And it used to be safe…"
"Isn't it now?"
He gave her a small, half-rueful smile and shrugged his shoulders. "How can one tell?"
"That's true," said Arrietty. "You never know —" She liked his voice, she realized: he spoke each word so clearly, in a clipped kind of way, but the general tone was gentle.
"What is your name?" she asked.
He laughed, and tossed his hair back out of his eyes. "They call me Peagreen," he said, still smiling — as though she might find it ridiculous."
"Oh," said Arrietty.
"It's spelt P-E-R-E-G-R-I-N-E."
Arrietty thought for a moment. "Peregrine," she said.
"That's it." He stood up then, as though suddenly aware that all this time he had been sitting. "I'm sorry…" he said.
"What for?"
"For flopping down like that."
"You had a bit of a shock," said Arrietty.
"A bit," he admitted, and added, "who taught you to spell?"
"I — " Arrietty hesitated: suddenly it seemed too long a story. "I just learned," she said. "My father knew a little. Enough to start me off…"
"Can you write?"
"Yes, very nicely. Can you?"
"Yes." He smiled. "Very nicely.
"Who taught you?"
"Oh, I don't know. All the Overmantels can read and write. The human children used to have lessons in that library," he jerked his head towards the double doors. "It goes back generations. You only had to listen, and the books were always left on the table…"
Arrietty moved forward suddenly from between the bricks, her face alight and interested. "Are you one of the Overmantels?"
"I was until I fell off the chimneypiece."
"How wonderful! I don't mean falling off the chimneypiece. I mean — that you're an Overmantel! I never thought I'd meet a real Overmantel. I thought they were something in the past —"
"Well, they are now, I suppose."
"Peregrine Overmantel," breathed Arrietty, "what a lovely name… Peregrine Overmantel! We're just Clocks — Pod, Homily and Arrietty Clock. It doesn't sound very grand, does it?"
"It depends on the clock," said Peagreen.
"It was a grandfather clock."
"Old?"
"Yes, I suppose so." She thought a moment. "Yes, it was very old."
"Well, then!" said Peagreen laughing.
"But we mostly lived under the kitchen."
Peagreen laughed again. "Ah-ha," he said, and there was mischief in his face. Arrietty looked puzzled: had she made some sort of joke? Peagreen seemed to think so.
"Where do you —" she began and then put her hand to her mouth. She remembered suddenly that it was not done to ask strange borrowers where they lived: their homes, of necessity, must be hidden and secret — unless, of course, they happened to be one's relations.
But Peagreen did not seem to mind. "I don't live anywhere just at present," he said lightly, answering her half-asked question.
"But you must sleep somewhere —"
"I'm moving house. As a matter of fact, you could say I've moved. But I haven't slept there yet."
"I see," said Arrietty. Somehow the day seemed less bright and the future more uncertain. "Are you going far?"
He looked at her speculatively. "It depends what you call 'far'…"
He turned back to the eye-bath and laid his hands on the rim. "It's a bit too full," he said.
Arrietty was silent for a moment, then she said, "Why don't you tip a bit out?"
"That's just what I was going to do."
"I'll help you," she said.
Together they tilted the eye-bath. It had a lip on either side. As the water gurgled down the drain, they set it back on its base. Then Peagreen moved to his cart to push it nearer. Arrietty came beside him. "My father would like this truck," she said, running a finger along the curved front: the rear was open like a lorry without a tailboard. "What's it made of?"
"It's the bottom half of a date box. I have the top, too. But that hasn't got wheels. It was useful, though, when they had carpets."
"When who had carpets?"
"The human beings who lived here. The ones who took down the overmantel. That's when I fell off the chimneypiece." He went back to the eye-bath. "If you could take one lip, I'll take the other…"
Arrietty could and did, but her mind was reeling with what she had just heard: the overmantel gone, a whole lifestyle destroyed! When did it happen, and why? Where were Peagreen's parents now? And their friends and, perhaps, other children… She kept silent until they had set the eye-bath down on the lorry. Then she said casually, "How old were you when you fell off the chimneypiece?"
"I was quite small, five or six. I broke my leg."
"Did somebody come down and rescue you?"
"No," he said, "I don't think they noticed."
"Didn't notice that a little child had fallen off the chimneypiece!"
"They were packing up, you see. There was a kind of panic. It was night, and they knew they had to get out before daylight. Perhaps they missed me afterwards…"
"You mean they went without you!"
"Well, I couldn't walk, you see."
"But what did you do?"
"Some other borrowers took me in. Ground-floor borrowers. They were going too, but they kept me until my leg got better. And when they went, they left me the house, though, and some food and that. They left me quite a few things. I could manage."
"But your poor leg!"
"Oh, I can climb all right. But I'm not too good at running, so I don't go out of doors much: things can happen out of doors, when you have to run. It was all right, and I had the books…"
"You mean the books in the library? But how did you get up to the shelves?"
"Oh, it's easy: all those shelves are adjustable. There are notches out in the uprights, it's like climbing a rather steep staircase. You just prise out the book you want, and let it drop. But you can't put it back. My house got full of books."
Arrietty was silent, thinking all this over. After a while she said, "What were they like, those human beings — those ones who pulled down the overmantel?"
"Dreadful. Always pulling things down and putting things up. You never knew where you were from one day to another. It was a nightmare. They blocked up the old open fireplace and put a small grate there instead…"
"Yes, I saw it," said Arrietty. Even she had thought it spoiled the look of the room, with its glazed tile surround painted with writhing tulips — very snake-like, those tulips.
"Art-nouveau," Peagreen told her, but she did not know what that meant. "They said the old one was draughty, and it was rather: if you stood inside you could look up and see the sky. And sometimes the rain came down. But not often. In the old days, they burned great logs in it — logs as big as trees, the grown-ups used to tell us…"
"What sort of other things did they do? I mean, those human beings —"
"Before they went, they put in the telephone. And the central heating. And the electric light. Very newfangled they were: everything had to be 'modern'." He laughed, "They even put a generator into the church."
"What's a generator?"
"A thing that makes electric light. All the lights in the church can go on at one go. Not like lighting the gas jets one by one. But all the same…"
"All the same what?"
"They went, too. Said the place was creepy. In this house, you never know what you'r going to get in the way of human beings. But there's just one thing you can be sure of —"
"What's that?" asked Arrietty.
"They may come, — but they always go!"
"Why's that, I wonder?"
"It's because of the ghosts. For some silly reason, human beings can't abide them."
Arrietty swallowed. She put out a hand as though to steady herself on the rim of the date box. "Are there — are there many ghosts?" she faltered.
"Only three that I know of," said Peagreen carelessly. "And one of those you can't see: it's only footsteps. Footsteps never hurt anybody."
"And the others?"
"Oh, you'll see for yourself in time." He smiled at her and picked up the cord attached to his truck. "Well, I'd better be getting along: those Whitlaces will be up by seven."
Arrietty increased her grip on the edge of the truck, as though to detain him. "Can you speak to ghosts?" she asked him hurriedly.
"Well, you could. But I doubt if they'd answer you."
"I wish you weren't going," said Arrietty, as she removed her hand from the truck. "I'd like you to meet my father and mother: there's so much you could tell them!"
"Where are they now?"
"They're asleep in that stove. We were all very tired."
"In the stove?" He sounded surprised.
"They've got bedclothes and everything."
"Better let them sleep," he said. "I'll come back later."
"When?"
"When the Whitlaces have gone out." He thought for a moment. "About two o'clock, say? She goes down to the church and He'll be up in the kitchen garden, by then…"
"That would be wonderful," and she stood there watching as he pulled his truck towards the double doors and into the library beyond. The fairylike squeaking became fainter and fainter until she could hear it no longer. (pp. 565-571)

From the next chapter:

"What's he like?"
"Quite young. Well, at first, I thought he was not much older than me. His name is Peagreen."
Pod was silent. Thoughtfully, he pushed the combed back into his pocket as Homily appeared. She, too, Arrietty noticed, had tidied her hair. She came beside her husband and both stood quietly, looking at Arrietty.
"Your mother tells me he's an Overmantel," Pod said, at last.
"Well, he was," said Arrietty.
"Once an Overmantel, always an Overmantel. Well," he went on, "there's nothing wrong in that: they come in all kinds!"
"Not really —" began Homily excitedly. "You remember those ones in the morning-room at Firbank? They —"
Pod raised a quiet hand to silence her. "Does he live alone?" he asked Arrietty.
"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure he does. You see, it's like this…" And she told him, perhaps a little too eagerly, of Peagreen's accident, his early life, all the troubles and dangers and hungers and lonelinesses she had imagined for him (not that he had ever mentioned these himself) "… it must have been too awful!" she finished breathlessly.
Homily had listened silently: she had not known quite what to think. To feel pity for an Overmantel: that would be a development for which she would need time. (p. 573)

2007-02-08T21:09:00.000-08:00

The Anglo-Saxons looked at the Roman ruins that surrounded them and decided these structures must be the work of giants: mere human beings couldn't have built anything so grand and solid. Mitchell and Robinson write that "In both their poetry and their prose the Anglo-Saxons were very given to reflection on former civilizations and the people who built them, so much so that their language had a word for such meditation: dustsceawung, 'contemplation of the dust.'" I'm reading The Silver Chair to the fifth grade, and it occurred to me that the "ruined city of the giants" owes something to this Anglo-Saxon misapprehension. The same goes for the city of Jadis, in The Magician's Nephew.

2007-01-29T18:25:00.000-08:00

A metaphor:

The glory of God no man or angel shall know, preached Thomas Shepard; "their cockle shell can never comprehend this sea"; we can only apprehend Him by knowing that we cannot comprehend Him at all, "as we admire the luster of the sun the more in that it is so great we can not behold it." (in Perry Miller's essay "The Marrow of Puritan Divinity")

"their cockle shell can never comprehend this sea" — I like that.

Around the same time, Andrew Marvell's father wrote, in a request for funds for a school library, "Scholers are like other tradesmen, they cannot worke w'thout tooles, nor, spider like, weave their web out of their own bellyes." (quoted in Nicholas Murray's biography of Marvell)

2007-01-28T17:58:00.001-08:00

I was reading Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence over most of the vacation, and specifically The Grey King, the day I went to see The Magic Flute. At first I was struck by the similarities: two boys on a quest, helped by a magic instrument; mazes leading to vast halls where men in robes sit in chairs and ask riddles. (OK, no riddles in TMF; but it feels like an omission.) One boy committed to abstractions, the other not. I could go on, but really the similarities are all archetypes, so (on further thought) they don't seem so striking. But the comparison did make me realize that Cooper's Papageno/Sancho Panza/Dr. Watson is not true to type: he's an orphan, an albino (much is made of his startling appearance), and a prickly character; everyone's slightly afraid of him at first. This means that when he complains that the quest entails too much suffering, his protests have an authority that the protests of the jollier sidekicks lack. (Or maybe not? Sancho Panza is a man of the world compared to Don Quixote, isn't he?) And Cooper allows her hero to be outrageously tactless — it's extraordinary that when faced with the forces of evil he knows exactly what to do and say, but is tone deaf to human grief. Or at least very clumsy. I thought it was well done.
Reading these books I remembered my childhood obsession with Old English and Welsh. There's actually a line of Old English in The Dark Is Rising, and now that I've taken a course in Old English, I can read it!

2007-01-28T17:54:00.000-08:00

Fifth grade sentences:

Agnes:

We exchanged glances as the sub walked in.

Sam:

Wealth can make you cruel.

Fashion is boring and useless.

John:

Patience, little ones.

(That's my favorite.)

(In case you're wondering, "Why are they writing these sentences? Where are the hard words?" This was in an exercise on consonant blends and consonant digraphs. "Isn't that stuff for first graders, not fifth graders?" Yes it is, but occasionally I have to do what the office says I should do.)

2007-01-28T17:48:00.000-08:00

Kaveri subbed for me. When the sixth graders found out that she knows me, they asked, "Have you heard Ms — sneeze?" "Yes." "And have you noticed that she doesn't just sneeze once, but does ten, fifteen little sneezes at a time?" "Indeed I have. Ahem, moving on now…"

(Maybe this is too trivial to mention on this blog. But —.)

2007-01-14T19:44:00.000-08:00

Recommendation:

Cluny Brown, Lubitsch's 1946 film. More playing with forms so familiar that they can be stretched and parodied to ridiculous extremes. Here's the premise:

Lovely Cluny Brown (Jennifer Jones) is the niece of a London plumber; when her uncle is indisposed, Cluny rolls up her sleeves and takes a plumbing job at a society home, where she meets a handsome refugee Czech author (Charles Boyer). Hoping to cure her of her unladylike obsession with plumbing, Cluny Brown's uncle finds her a maid's position in a fancy country home, where she once more meets the Czech author, who is a house guest.

This is accurate, but it doesn't hint at the film's high silliness. Here's an exchange between two men in love with the same standoffish woman and commiserating:
__What are you going to do?
__I'll propose to her once or twice more, and then I'm washing my hands of her!

Many of the jokes revolve around the freedom to be outrageous rubbing against convention, and what happens when convention allows or requires one to be outrageous. It reminded me of Samuel Johnson:

It has been observed, I think, by Sir William Temple, and after him by almost every other writer, that England affords a greater variety of characters than the rest of the world. This is ascribed to the liberty prevailing amongst us, which gives every man the privilege of being wise or foolish his own way, and preserves him from the necessity of hypocrisy or the servility of imitation.

I had to root around in Johnson for a while to find that, and it occurred to me that "A Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage" attempts the same kind of trick that Erasmus tried in In Praise of Folly, but is more successful (funnier, more coherent).

In fact it's brilliant, everyone should read it! I hope this link works.

2007-01-14T19:41:00.000-08:00

Recommendation:

The Met's current production of The Magic Flute. The music is, of course, wonderful, but the costumes and choreography were almost as good. (which is saying a lot!) I haven't been so delighted by visual humor since, oh, I guess since I saw Miyazaki's Spirited Away a few months ago. Many scenes had a quality of sublime silliness, as if to say: "This is obvious," and then, "This is so obvious we can play with it." For example, Sarastro's men wear triangles, circles, and squares to signify their embodiment of reason.
My favorite moments were of Papageno eating: he tries to catch huge fruits, drumsticks, dumplings, etc, which are hovering in the air above him (a bit like Tantalus), and of Papageno singing "Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen": a bevy of ballerinas with goose necks and heads ("ein sanftes Täubchen") do a careful, mysterious, ridiculous, awkwardly graceful dance around him. Papageno is almost a bird himself, but a ruffled, garrulous, earthy kind of bird. These stylized Papagenas of his imagination are smooth, white, silent, dainty — a different species from Papageno. Luckily the real Papagena is just as comical and colorful as Papageno.

2006-12-31T16:57:00.001-08:00

A dream I had a few nights ago:

Every day, twice a day, I had to call the PGCE people to report on my doings and assure them that I was following their directives — as if I were on parole. I went through my spiel wearily, and the nameless person who was interrogating me sounded anxious, even a little desperate, as if he knew that there was an ocean between us, and there wasn't much they could do to me if I suddenly decided to tell the truth, or not to call at all. But we still went through the charade twice daily.

Then I was in a nearly empty airport, pushing a huge suitcase. On an escalator the suitcase — which was bigger than me — tipped over and tumbled down, down, down. I ran after it. When I got to the bottom of the escalator I saw that it had popped open, and its contents — a dead body — had fallen out. It was then that I remembered that I was a mortuary's courier, charged with bringing home the war dead — all the dead of all the world's wars: even those killed in their own homes had to be dragged through this limbo by me or one of my colleagues.

In retrospect this dream looks like a nightmare. But then and there I took everything in stride: without fear or squeamishness I packed the body back into its case, and continued lugging my burden through the deserted airport.

2006-12-31T16:31:00.000-08:00

Mastro-Don Gesualdo: Good, but not as good as I Malavoglia. It was relentless, unrelievedly grim; there was some respite in I Malavoglia. Not that Verga is brutal: he seems acutely aware of the suffering he inflicts on his characters, of the bleak lovelessness to which he condemns them. But this was too much.
Still, there was some breathtaking writing. The best description was of the two old brothers, Don Diego and Don Ferdinando, the last of the Trao line, doddering around their terrace, passing in review the plants. The flowers and leaves nod in the breeze like the old men, who wobble on feeble limbs, their heads unsteady with age, wisps of white hair floating. Except, of course, that the plants are growing, while the brothers are the living dead, and no one is taking care of them. Verga likes to compare his characters to animals — in fact for this novel he kept a list of characters, and next to each name a series of adjectives and the animal the character resembles. It seems a blunt way of saying: suffering makes you an animal, inarticulate as an animal. But the Trao brothers, who die slowly through hundreds of pages and hardly ever speak, seem to have sunk to the level of vegetables:

Da gran tempo, ogni giorno, alla stessa ora, donna Giuseppina Alòsi che stava al balcone facendo la calza per aspettare la passata di Peperito, don Filippo Margarone mentre rivoltava la conserva di pomidoro posta ad asciugare sul terrazzo , l'arciprete Burno nell'appendere al fresco la gabbia del canerino, fin coloro che stavano a sbadigliare nella farmacia di Bomma, se volgevano gli occhi in su, verso il Castello, al di sopra de' tetti, solevano vedere don Diego e don Ferdinando Trao, un dopo l'altro, che facevano capolino a una finestra, guardinghi, volgevano poi un'occhiata a destra, un'altra a sinistra, guardavano in aria, e ritiravano il capo come la lumaca. Dopo qualche minuto infine aprivasi il balcone grande, stridendo, tentennando, a spinte e a riprese, e compariva don Diego, curvo, macilento, col berretto di di cotone calcato sino alle orecchie, tossendo, sputando, tenendosi, all'inferriata con una mano; e dietro di lui don Ferdinando che portava l'annaffiatoio, giallo, allampanato, un vero fantasma. Don Diego annaffiava, nettava, rimondava i fiori di Bianca; si chinava a raccattare i seccumi e le foglie vizze; rimescolava la terra con un coccio; passava in rivista i bocciuoli nuovi, e li covava cogli occhi. Don Ferdinando lo seguiva passo passo, attentissimo; accostava anche lui il viso scialbo a ciascuna pianta, aguzzando il muso, aggrottando le sopracciglia. Poscia appoggiavano i gomiti alla ringhiera, e rimanevano come due galline appollaiate sul medesimo bastone, voltando il capo ora di qua e ora di là, a seconda che giungeva la mula di massaro Fortunato Burgio carica di grano, o saliva dal Rosario la ragazza che vendeva ova, oppure la moglie del sagrestano attraversava la piazzetta per andare a suonare l'avemaria. Don Ferdinando stava intento a contare quante persone si vedevano passare attraverso quel pezzetto di strada che intravvedevasi laggiù, fra i tetti delle case che scendevano a frotte per la china del poggio; don Diego dal canto suo seguiva cogli occhi gli ultimi raggi di sole che salivano lentamente verso le alture del Paradiso e di Monte Lauro, e rallegravasi al vederlo scintillare improvvisamente sulle finestre delle casipole che si perdevano già fra i campi, simili a macchie biancastre. Allora sorrideva e appuntava il dito scarno e tremante, spingendo col gomito il fratello, il quale accennava di sì col capo e sorrideva lui pure come un fanciullo. Poi raccontava quello che aveva visto lui: — Oggi ventisette!… ne sono passati ventisette… L'arciprete Bugno era insieme col cugino Limòli!…
Per un po' di giorni, verso i primi d'agosto, era venuto soltanto don Ferdinando ad annaffiare i fiori, strascinandosi a stento, coi capelli grigi svolazzanti, sbrodolandosi tutto a ogni passo. Allorché ricomparve don Diego, parve di vedere Lazzaro risuscitato: tutto naso, colle occhiaie nere, seppellito vivo in una vecchia palandrana, tossendo l'anima a ogni passo: una tosse fioca che non si udiva quasi più, e scuoteva dalla testa ai piedi lui e il fratello che gli dava il braccio, come andasse facendo la riverenza a ogni fiore. E fu l'ultima volta.

~to be translated~

And I learned some new words:

arrabattarsi__ to make a great effort in vain, often in pursuit of some worthless goal. From the Arabic "ribat," "attack on, attempt to convert, the infidels."

gattamorta__ person who, under a calm and innocent demeanor, hides a bitter and aggressive or malevolent character. Literally, "dead cat."

biascicare__ 1. to keep food in one's mouth for a long time, drooling and not chewing; 2. to mumble

It calls to mind strascicare, "to drag along."

Verga reminds me a lot of Hardy — the bitter grimness, the tragedy too dry for tears. In both authors the beauty of the prose owes a lot to everyday (country) speech

2006-12-31T16:29:00.000-08:00

Books:

August
The Bull from the Sea (Renault)
The Children (Wharton)
The Wild Palms (Faulkner)
Grandi Donne del Rinascimento Italiano (Vannucci)
For the Time Being (Dillard)

September
The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution 1763-1789 (Middlekauf)
A Season for the Dead (Hewson)
Indecision (Kunkel)
Selected Critical Writings (George Eliot)

October
The Other Side of Truth (Naidoo)
The Borrowers (Norton)
The Borrowers Afield (Norton)
The Borrowers Afloat (Norton)
The Borrowers Aloft (Norton)
The Borrowers Avenged (Norton)
Campo Santo (Sebald)

November
Storia degli Italiani I (Procacci)
Small World (Lodge)

December
Mastro-don Gesualdo (Verga)
Over Sea, Under Stone (Cooper)
The Dark Is Rising (Cooper)

2006-12-31T16:19:00.000-08:00

Throughout October and November I listened to Reynaldo Hahn's "À Chloris." It's stunning, in obvious ways — its beauty is patient and quiet but not subtle — lush, lush late Romantic, clear, pure, flowing (voice), and at the same time rich, weighed down (piano). It combines extreme tenderness with a sense of plodding toward the gallows — plodding but with little syncopations and grace notes. The left hand plays a melody of Bach's, which has a bracing effect on the melting lushness. But I try not to listen to the left hand — I like to hear its line as a vague tugging, an unplaceable magnet, rather than as an explicit melody.

Associations it sparks:

1. Bach

2. Hahn was Proust's lifelong companion. But I still haven't read Proust, so this doesn't mean much to me.

3. The words are by Théophile de Viau, whom Thomas Stanley translated and Andrew Marvell read. It may be that the names of shepherds and shepherdesses in pastoral poetry mean little (though I'm sure there are exceptions, like Thestylis in "Upon Appleton House"), but I can't help thinking of Marvell's "Damon and Chlorinda."

Here are the words:

S’il est vrai, Chloris, que tu m’aimes,
Mais j’entends, que tu m’aimes bien,
Je ne crois point que les rois mêmes
Aient un bonheur pareil au mien.
Que la mort serait importune
De venir changer ma fortune
A la félicité des cieux!
Tout ce qu’on dit de l’ambroisie
Ne touche point ma fantaisie
Au prix des grâces de tes yeux.

Jan Swafford's wonderful biography of Brahms had a lot on Brahms's debt to baroque and rococo.
Here's Hazlitt quoting Beaumont & Fletcher:

Or there are passages that seem as if we might brood over them all our lives, and not exhaust the sentiments of love and admiration they excite: they become favorites, and we are fond of them to a sort of dotage. Here is one:

'—Sitting in my window
Printing my thoughts in lawn, I saw a God,
I thought (but it was you), enter our gates;
My blood flew out and back again, as fast
As I had puffed it forth and sucked it in
Like breath; then was I called away in haste
To entertain you: never was a man
Thrust from a sheepcote to a scepter, raised
So high in thoughts as I; you left a kiss
Upon these lips then, which I mean to keep
From you for ever. I did hear you talk
Far above singing!'

A passage like this indeed leaves a taste on the palate like nectar, and we seem in reading it to sit with the Gods at their golden tables: but if we repeat it often in ordinary moods, it loses its flavour, becomes vapid, 'the wine of poetry is drank, and but the lees remain.'

-from 'On the Pleasure Hating'

2006-12-31T15:59:00.000-08:00

I overheard Sueun, (a fifth grader) say to a new student: "Ms — went to Yale. It's an honor to be taught by her."

I was subbing for Steven, and when I walked into the classroom of sixteen-year-olds Timothy introduced me (unnecessarily, since I'd already taught six of those eight students) as "the smartest lady in the world!" "Tell everybody where you went to graduate school!" I was feeling shy, and didn't answer, so he said encouragingly (teasingly), "…dramatic pause…"

2006-12-31T15:52:00.000-08:00

Today Patrick asked (out of the blue, before class) if Alcibiades was really a traitor, and as bad as people say, or have historians given him short shrift.

During break I heard Richard (ever the provoker) say to Patrick, "You lied?! I thought you were a good boy!" Patrick (ironically): "Robert is trying to taint my reputation because he's jealous." Robert didn't catch the irony: "I'm not jealous! Why would I be jealous?"

Yvonne, another seventh-grader, commented to Steven, "Patrick is so smart, and so humble too. I don't think I could be like that."

2006-12-31T15:51:00.000-08:00

(I wrote this back in September; I don't know why I didn't post it then.)

All the students in my fifth grade class are new to me. As soon as I walked in Samuel begged to be moved: "I want to concentrate, and I can't concentrate if I sit next to John!" I saw the glint in his eyes and thought, "'I want to concentrate' — a likely tale!" Besides, John looked pretty stolid and undistracting. Samuel giggled and waved his arms around in a manner that did not inspire confidence in his determination to concentrate. I was going to say no, but then I noticed that there were too many people in his row anyway, so I gave in. And it soon became clear that he had meant it: he really did want to concentrate. The whole class did. I stepped out for a few minutes to go to the office, and when I came back their little heads were bent over their desks, tongues sticking out in effort. No one even looked up.

(Actually, no one's tongue was sticking out. But that's how cute they are, and how serious.)

2006-12-31T15:48:00.000-08:00

In case anyone has noticed my long silence: I apologize. I had three halfdays off between the end of October and Thanksgiving in total, and things have hardly been less hectic since then. Now, finally, I can look forward to two weeks of semi-vacation.

2006-12-31T09:08:00.000-08:00

Today two great New York bookstores bite the dust: Ivy's Books & Curiosities/Murder Ink, and Coliseum Books. I'll miss them.

2006-12-13T21:05:00.000-08:00

This blog has migrated to http://gentilelett.blogspot.com

Unfortunately gentlereader was taken already. I couldn't decide between gentilelettrice or gentilelettore (after all, everyone's welcome), so that's how I ended up with gentilelett. I know it's clumsy. Sorry.

2006-09-25T18:53:00.000-07:00

I saw The History Boys. I'd wanted to like it, but I didn't.

One reviewer praised the play for being chock full of one-liners. This is true, and it's a problem. All subtlety and slowness are sacrificed for the cheap laugh, and the shallowness of it is exhausting. Because the characters are vehicles for one-liners, they're not real people. The more developed a character was, the more he seemed a caricature. This was especially true of the headmaster, Irwin, Hector, and Posner. Posner is the kind of ostentatiously sensitive, utterly defenseless gay teenager, full of comically rueful appraisals of himself, whom you only come across on a Broadway stage. I don't think he would have lasted very long in that school, or any school. The other boys were wisecracking slouches, which was more believable, but they were even more one-dimensional than Posner. More one-dimensional but less caricatured, like objects seen from a distance, since Bennett doesn't expend much effort on them. (Part of the problem might be this: the boys want nothing more than to be funny, whereas Posner, caricature though he is, wants to be taken seriously, yet Bennett forces him to deliver jokes anyway.)

And you never saw the boys adjusting to one another, or even hesitating and not knowing what to say, as they would in real life; that would have entailed attenuating their exaggerated features and rationing the one-liners, and Bennett loves his caricatures.

There's a similar problem with the sentimental Broadway showtunes that the boys regularly sing (complete with dance routines). I couldn't think of them as schoolboys; instead I saw theater people wallowing in nostalgia and acting out their professional self-love.

I like showtunes, and I like teenagers. But I've never known a teenager who loved camp, let alone a whole classroom of teenagers. And this play didn't for a minute convince me that it could happen.

Another reviewer said that you get to know all the boys; they're all individuals. In fact you really only get to know four of them, and all of these are defined by their attitudes (varied but clichéd) toward sex. This is the only kind of individuality that Bennett is capable of breathing into them. It's strange and regrettable, considering how many scenes of lessons there are in the play, and the infinite ways in which personality can manifest itself in a classroom. But then none of these scenes lasts more than three minutes — long enough to deliver a barrage of one-liners, but not long enough for character development.

But all this is incidental to the biggest problem, which is the play's premise. It offers two versions of education: a messy, passionate affair, for its own sake and unto itself, represented by the Falstaffian Hector; and an exercise in glibness, purveyed by the sleek future TV host, Irwin. Hector is on his way out; he represents the beloved past of education; Irwin represents the future, and we're meant to hate what he represents (if not the man himself). He has been hired to get the boys into Oxford or Cambridge. They have the grades, thanks to another teacher, dry, solid but unimaginative; what they need now is polish and class, and the way to impress admissions interviewers, Irwin tells them, is boldly to take the most counterintuitive view of a historical event or development, secure in the knowledge that brazenness will win the day.

There are several problems with this:

— I know that admissions interviewers would say that they're not looking for flash or class, but for something, anything, beyond a plodding recitation of facts — analysis, passion, opinion supported by evidence. It's an unanswerable position, and one that the play doesn't — can't — consider.
— Passion and appreciation are essential, but they're not the alpha and omega of education, even in the humanities. There's also the painstaking business of getting to know the language from all angles, of using it effectively, of matching words to things, and of learning to read closely. There was none of this, because rhetoric in this play is Irwin, is spin, TV, polish, cynicism, shallowness, etc. On the other side of this false dichotomy we get the boys' reenactments of love scenes from classic films (shallowness?), and Hector's self-involved ruminations. Of course there's such a thing as neat rhetoric that masks an intellectual vacuum, but that's just a higher stage in the battle for clarity and eloquence. It's not a short-circuit, and good teachers and students are not powerless against demagogic rhetoric. In fact, that may be what annoyed me most: the suggestion that good teachers are by definition helpless mumblers, insightful by the fireside (so to speak), but unable to defend themselves against fast talkers from the hard and shiny real world.

The big irony is that for all Hector's (and presumably Bennett's) disdain for style, flash, and class, The History Boys is as guilty of glibness as Irwin.

2006-09-25T18:52:00.000-07:00

Before class my seventh-graders were all abuzz about their new school:
R __ P already got rejected by two girls!
P __ What?!
me __ P, just don't respond.
P __ OK.

Hours later I saw the humor in this. What tickles me is that this exchange, brief as it is, reveals two conspicuous features of the boys' personalities — R's outrageousness, P's sweet equanimity.

I asked that class to write a list of things they wanted to study. Here are the three responses I got:

Patrick
My recommendations for this semester are:
— Latin
— Old English
— word origins

Viren
1. Latin advanced from chapter 4
2. anything except this packet
3. reading — a book that is not boring
4. Latin
5. Latin
6. if nothing else — Grammar

Richard
— Latin
— Greek
— Little History of the World [Gombrich's book]
— No packet
— Grammer [sic]

(The hated packets are vocabulary exercises. It's useful for them to focus on style, usage and syntax apart from questions of logic and paragraph and essay structure, but I can see how the packets might get tedious.)

So I took those three out of the classroom and we did some Latin. As I gave them the handouts I said,

__This is from a college textbook, and the vocabulary notes are quite detailed and technical —
Viren__Oh, come on! [="Give us some credit!"]
me__ — so you're not responsible for everything in the notes.

But he's right; I shouldn't talk like that.

Note: I took a college course in Latin last year, and we used a middle school textbook. It turned out to be OK, because the teacher was good, but when I saw all those cartoons my heart sank. (And I'm glad the course was a review for me; I'd have been irritated to first encounter those things in such a book.)

2006-09-17T18:52:00.000-07:00

What people are saying:

S: Lauren Bacall & Shimon Peres are cousins. I looked it up. It's true.

Kaveri: She toured some mansions in Newport (top recommendation: Château sur la mer), and one of the audio tours, by an architectural historian, featured several plugs against the federal income tax: "Of course, none of this would have been possible after 1913… Just think what you could do if there were no federal income tax!" I thought of FDR, who raised the top income tax rate to 90% and was accused of being a class traitor. "I welcome their hatred," he said. Kaveri: "What a guy!"

Amber: 1) This is something she told me a few years ago. She was playing violin for a costume ball in a decaying palace in the middle of a wood in eastern Germany. The way she described it, it sounded like the wood was so lush, the roads so neglected, that it was hard to reach the front door: "like Sleeping Beauty without the rosebushes." The palace had once been grand, and the owners had hired an Italian to paint the ballroom's walls and ceiling, which are now very faded, but still beautiful. All comers have to be in costume, but some buy a plastic dress from a party supplies shop, and some spare no effort or expense. During World War II Soviet troops occupied the palace. They ripped up the parquet in the ballroom for firewood, so the floor is now just rough planks, and someone wrote, in huge Cyrillic letters over the faded wall paintings: S T A L I N.

2) She played in an opera in Cesky Krumlov, in the Czech Republic. In the 18th century trade routes forsook the town, and the theater was locked up, to be reopened only quite recently. Props and machinery were all still there, in a fragile state, but one could nevertheless figure out what they had been about. The performance she was in was meant to be historically accurate, down to the blocking, and she was surprised, she said, that the singers moved very little, and that what movements and gestures they did make were very stylized. "It was like being in a painting — a painting that's alive. And it didn't end at the edges of the stage; the sets were an extension of the painted walls and ceilings of the theater" — illusion upon illusion, the borders between each level elided. "I used to think rococo was all about lack of restraint, ornate excess, but now I realize that when it's done well it's very still and concentrated."

Yes — Couperin & Marvell.

2006-09-17T18:51:00.000-07:00

This was originally meant as an amazon.com review — I was incensed to see that all reader reviews of this book were positive, someone had to warn the unwary browser! — but it was not accepted. At first I thought this was because I refer to other reviewers, so I took out those references. Then I realized I was above the 1000 word limit, so I trimmed and pruned until I got down to 999 words. Admittedly, one editing strategy was to jam words together. After all this it still was not published. Either my agglutinations didn't make it past some clever computer, or my review was deemed spiteful (one of many the prohibitions). I'm still too angry to keep it to myself, but maybe some day I'll regret my intemperance. Not yet.
(I know it's a mess, a rant more than a review; I wrote it in one go giving no thought to structure, and have not been able or willing to muster the loving delicacy necessary to edit properly.)

A monstrous unbearable stale perverse book

Faulkner's sentences are very long, but they're not constructed; rather, they're piled on. He throws mud, lumber, and nails into a heap and calls it a house. "But where's the door?" asks the poor reader. "There's no way in." His prose doesn't create a world; rather, he uses the same twenty words over and over again, clumsily and without, one suspects, really knowing what they mean: maybe wind can "chuckle" (though it's hard to imagine) but what does it mean to say that the wind is "risible"? Yet he says this again and again, for several pages. In another passage, lasting about ten pages, he uses the word "derision" in a similarly blunt and insensitive way. He injects these words into the reader, forcing a mood upon one that he cannot achieve by legitimate means.

You too can write like Faulkner if you pepper your writing with the following words:

immemorial
profound
violent
unbearable
monstrous
sober (a word that, one suspects, held depths of meaning for an alcoholic, but fails to impress the non-alcoholic)
furious
grim
stale
stagnant
perverse
derisive
frenzy
incredible (a word for lazy writers if there ever was one; "incredible" to whom?)
immolation
savage

And be sure to use unnecessary suffixes, as in "abstractional" and "outragement." (What's wrong with "abstract" and "outrage"? Nothing, except that Faulkner needs the suffixes to hide the fact that he has nothing to say.)

Elsewhere he writes: "The coffee was weak, oversweet and hot, too hot to drink or even hold in the hand, possessing seemingly a dynamic inherent inexhaustible quality of renewable heat impervious even to its own fierce radiation."

"impervious even to its own fierce radiation": just what does that mean? That the heat of the coffee cannot penetrate ("even") the hot coffee? Explain, please. And what's the result of lavishing all these big words on a cup of coffee? Locally, it makes even the words that make some sense meaningless, like "inexhaustible quality": we know it's not inexhaustible, but even that bit of hyperbole has to be topped by something completely meaningless. A cup of coffee simply collapses under the weight of so many words that do more to overwhelm the reader, as she tries to make sense of them, than to make anything vivid. And page after page of this fog, this contempt for meaning, this laughably portentous bombast simply numbs the reader. So that when someone is described as being "incredibly calm" I could only think, "Nothing in this book is incredible, because nothing is credible."

One character says, a propos of nothing, "Set, ye armourous son, in a sea of hemingwaves." I just couldn't believe it. Are we supposed to think, "How clever"? Are we supposed to laugh? But this is a book that has banished laughter, so one is left with the assumption that this neologism is meant to be clever and somehow profound.

Here's another excerpt:

"We got to get somewhere."
"Dont I know it? A fellow on a cottonhouse. Another in a tree. And now that thing in your lap."
"It wasn't due yet."

Those last two sentences make it seem as though the woman had given birth. This comes as a surprise, because we've been with her the whole time and nothing was said about her being in labor. But a few pages later it becomes clear that she hasn't given birth yet. Is this confusion deliberate? If so, what would the point be? Or is it merely careless?

The characters are either dull, blank, and impenetrable, or they're hysterical cardboard caricatures straight from pulp fiction; it's hard to say which is more boring.

One of the messages of the novel is that women with husbands are desirable, whereas women with children are not. Faulkner would probably call this a perverse paradox, a stagnant immolation. (Charlotte might seem to be an exception, but she is redeemed by her utter indifference to her children.) Wild Palms takes a tragic turn when Charlotte becomes pregnant and insists on having an abortion: "It's not us now. I want it to be us again, quick, quick." The convict has to leave a job he likes when he seduces, or rapes — we never know, and it's characteristic of the novel that it hardly seems to matter, either to the benumbed characters or to the reader, who has been brutalized by Faulkner for 200 pages — anyway, he gets into trouble with the wife of another worker. His fellow convicts are surprised that he never made any advances to the woman who has gone through thick and thin with him for several weeks and has made no attempt to rejoin the father of her baby, and the fact that she has a child is offered as an explanation.

I'm perplexed by the reviewer who says that this is a pro-life novel; I see no implied criticism of the lovers' justification that a child would be unaffordable (because they prefer not to work), and would put an end to their passion. To the end Charlotte and Harry are presented as anti-heroes bravely challenging bourgeois conformity.

Many of the reviewers assume, and Faulkner would have us believe, that the lovers are "doomed" from the start. Whatever this might mean, their only problem for the first 150 pages is that Harry refuses steady work, and forces Charlotte to quit her job, out of a fear of becoming bourgeois. He looks for a job, sporadically, and when he finds one, or even talks about finding one, Charlotte screams at him. It's hard to be patient with these people.

The last line of the novel is
"Women, shit," the tall convict says.

The whole novel is full of similarly unintelligent statements about women (aka "female meat"), generalizations about unreasoning instinct, etc etc. Here's one:

Not thrift, not husbandry, something far beyond that, who (the entire race of them) employed with infallible instinct, a completely uncerebrated rapport for the type and nature of male partner and situation, either the cold penuriousness of the fabled Vermont farmwife or the fantastic extravagance of the Broadway revue mistress as required, absolutely without regard for the instrinsic value of the medium which they saved or squandered and with little more regard or grief for the bauble which they bought or lacked, using the presence and absence of jewel or checking account as pawns in a chess game whose prize was not security at all but respectability within the milieu in which they lived, even the love-nest under the rose to follow a rule and a pattern…

I'll spare you the rest of that sentence. But it's typical of Faulkner that he has to coin a useless, ugly word — "uncerebrated" — to express a cliché.

"Up the corridor, beyond an elbow, he could hear the voices of two nurses, two nurses not two patients, two females but not necessarily two women even… two nurses laughing not two women…"

What kind of distinction is he drawing between "females" and "women"? We never meet these two nurses, but I imagine he means that they're unattractive. It's a characteristically random and clumsy bit of nastiness, and it seems to issue more from Faulkner than from Harry, who at the moment has other things to worry about.
On the next page two doctors come "…up the corridor and [talk] to one another in clipped voices through their mouth-pads, their smocks flicking neatly like the skirts of two women, passing him without a glance and he was sitting down against because the officer at his elbow said, 'That's right. Take it easy' and he found that he was sitting, the two doctors going on, pinch-waisted like two ladies, the skirts of the smocks snicking behind them…"
The hatefulness of the doctors seems to have everything to do with their effeminacy.

In the same scene doors "clash" "soundlessly." If you insist on cancelling the connotations of words, sooner or later all your words will lose connotations. For me this happened on page 2 of this awful novel.

2006-08-23T18:50:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-08-23T18:49:00.001-07:00

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.

2006-08-23T18:49:00.000-07:00

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.)

2006-08-23T18:48:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-08-17T18:48:00.000-07:00

Joan Bos, at the Mad Monarchs website, paints a very difference picture of Don Carlos.

2006-08-07T18:47:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-08-07T18:46:00.001-07:00

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.

2006-08-07T18:46:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-07T18:44:00.000-07:00

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…"

2006-07-19T18:44:00.000-07:00

I've never loved Rome, the city where I was born. I had only the vaguest impressions until I visited it several times about seven years ago, and decided it wasn't for me. Its will to impress, to take one's breath away, seemed clumsy and overbearing; the churches, with precious objects heaped up alla rinfusa, seemed more like treasure chambers than churches. It lacked the delicacy of Medieval and Renaissance cities, like Venice, Florence, or Bologna; it lacked the humane, sturdy cheerfulness of those last two, and the splendid melancholy of the first; in fact I couldn't read any expression in it beyond, "Bow down to my wealth and power." The ruins were impressive and sobering, but entirely discontinuous with the modern city; they stick up suddenly, like skeleton fingers from an unsuspected grave.

That has all changed. I know what I was thinking, which buildings I was looking at, but I see other things too now. Partly because I know more. (You can be perfectly ignorant and still fall in love with Venice, but not Rome.) Partly because I've been taking public transportation. (Last time I hung on for dear life behind my friend & host, a daring motorcyclist.) But for another reason too. I went to dinner at the Cortesi (who told me the dove story) following Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Lots of pompous, heavy, boring buildings. "Take via del Governo Vecchio on your way home," they suggested. It runs parallel to Corso Vittorio Emanuele (which might as well be called "via del Governo Nuovo"), and it's another world — narrow, winding, quiet and mysterious but (because of all the cafés and restaurants) lively at the same time, the buildings full of leering, laughing, weeping stone faces; glowing lanterns shedding irregular light on the street signs, which have always looked like grave stones to me. (cp. the street signs in Florence — cheerful blue and white ceramic, like Delft.)

And so behind most square, flat, regular things in Rome I think there's something winding, irregular, round and deep. The ruins, once no doubt the most regular, imposing things in the world, embody this doubleness, but many other things do too.

There's a curved street with a curved apartment building on the concave side of the curve; the reason for the building's unusual shape is that it's built on the old Teatro di Pompeo; a colonnade extended several hundred meters from the theater to the civic complex of Largo Argentina, and the Cortesi say that in their building's basement there are the stumps of some of these columns. Those blocks are now a warren of little streets, and I like to think of the columns still marching (furtim) from basement to basement to their old destination, the site of Caesar's assassination. (I would say "like a ground-bass," but that sounds too much like a pun.)

There are other things: Rome is much more appealing at night — at least in this season — than during the day. And there's the good nature, the energy, and (in some neighborhoods at least), the vigorous informality. I can even say that sometimes, in certain lights, the heavy buildings remind me not so much of power, arrogance, and a ton of bricks, as of a big, clumsy, shaggy dog, eager to please and to make its presence known. It steps on a lot of toes, but means no harm.

2006-07-19T18:43:00.000-07:00

Here I am in Rome, studying Latin. My mother reported to me that her friends had asked, what was I going to do with it? And so I said that after I finish this course I'll be able to teach more advanced students, and that Marvell wrote some poems in Latin, and I'm interested in neo-Latin poetry. All of which is true, but I think it's a bit rich of these academics to ask why I should want to study Latin. Why do they do what they do? It's their job, fine. But does their job feed anyone? How can it be justified? In the end you're left with an article of faith: thinking about these things is a good in itself. I'm actually quite happy to say that studying literature and history equips us for our own lives, but I know my mother is against this means-to-an-end argument: she believes in history for history's sake. No compromises with expedience. I'll accept that, but she shouldn't question how I spend my summer. Especially after teaching so much this year, I feel no compunctions about abandoning myself to the luxury of study for two months.
There's also the feeling: we owe it to the past — to the legions of dead who were once so alive — to think about them. I know that's something R. F. feels strongly too; why else would he draw our attention to the shrug of the shoulders, the wry, half-finished joke, the saltiest colloquial moments? Why else, to point out the obvious, would he speak in Latin? He often says, "This morning, friends, this happened this morning," about something that in fact happened 2000 years ago. (But: this approach scants extra-ordinary uses of language — we hardly do any poetry at all.) I don't think we'll measure up so well to posterity: we produce too much excruciatingly bad prose. In comparison to the Romans — to anyone before the 20th century — we shall seem humorless, wooden, false, pompous, inhumane.

Update: I told my mother to read Alexander Stille's chapter on R. F. in The Future of the Past, and now she's thrilled about my course — prompts me to talk about it in company, etc.

2006-07-05T18:42:00.001-07:00

A horrible story:

(This happened to friends of friends in Rome.)

A dove* flew into an apartment, and kept very quiet, perhaps hiding in a corner, or under a bed. Then the owners left for vacation. When they came back the stench, of course, was unbearable, but even more striking was the amount of damage the bird had done in its death agony, weakened though it must have been by hunger. Any number of glass and ceramic objects were in pieces, and even the glass on picture frames had been shattered. Perhaps the bird thought they were windows.

*"colomba." You can think of it as a pigeon if that makes it any less awful.

2006-07-05T18:42:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago my sixth grade was going to critique Danny's essay in response to this question: If you could spend an afternoon with any author, living or dead, with whom would you spend it? What would you talk about?

Danny can be annoying, he's often lazy, but every once in a while I realize I don't give him enough credit; in any other class he'd be a star. He wrote his essay on Dave Pilkey, author of the Captain Underpants series (which I'd never heard of, but his classmates knew what he was talking about). His essay contains the following endearing passage:

We could exchange ideas for books that he is planning to write, or make comic books. I always run out of ideas when I try to write a story or a comic book, and after I finish it sounds lame from a lack of ideas. He could help me when I get stuck and we could have fun writing, drawing, and reading books.

I like the good-natured honesty of "lame from a lack of ideas."
The transcripts of student essays that I hand out are anonymous, but of course they're all eager to know who the author is, and since Danny is the class expert on the literature of silly and indecent humor, I and Danny, in his way, were the only ones keeping up the pretense of anonymity. Danny was torn between embarrassment and pride, and he dealt with his mixed emotions by hamming it up: whenever we pointed out a flaw (but mostly we said good things), he'd shake his head and sigh, "I can't believe the author made such a foolish mistake." In my printed transcript I had written "Dan" for "Dave," and Danny asked me, "Ms —, how could you make such a mistake?" And I answered in the same sorrowful tone that he was using, "Well Danny, some students' handwriting is not what it should be." The class erupted in laughter: "Ooh, she got you there!" Danny was laughing too.

2006-05-22T18:41:00.000-07:00

I've had more than a thousand pages of US history in the past month, and I'm getting tired of it. Not that the books I'm reading aren't very good, and not that the subject isn't interesting, but I've had enough. Now I'm reading Middlekauf's The Glorious Cause. He's clear, funny, and detailed, but I miss Wilentz's passion. Wilentz could be funny too, but his humor was mordant; Middlekauf's is airy and light. He seems to think that everyone was getting a little too excited.* Of course, he never says this; it's in his tone. And actually I'm sure he doesn't think it either. In fact, I'm being terribly unfair, and perhaps it's just like what happened when I heard the Brahms Requiem and the Mozart Requiem in one day, in that order: the juxtaposition made Mozart sound like fluff. I hated myself for thinking that, but couldn't help it. Moral of the story: eighteenth century first, then nineteenth century. Never the other way around.

*which is one's suspicion about the American Revolution to start with. Middlekauf's introduction insists that there's no irony in the title. Later on, he admits, "On the surface the Americans' preoccupation with their property … seems petty, demeaning, poor stuff with which to make a revolution." He tries to explain why it wasn't, but... One just has to assume that the ideas of "rights" and "property" were on a seamless continuum — not such a hare-brained notion in the days when small farmers could be economically independent, before the crop-lien system. But still!

2006-05-22T18:40:00.000-07:00

I've loved the past few days of rain. They've made me happier than I could ever be on a sunny day, brimming over with happiness, at one with the raining world.
And the curious thought occurred to me: it wouldn't be so awful to be dead if it rained like this on one's grave, one's humble mound. Partly in the banal sense, that even gray, sad things are necessary for life, partly like this:

Ninetta mia, crepare di maggio ci vuole tanto e troppo coraggio,
Ninetta bella, dritto all'inferno avrei preferito andarci d'inverno.

But largely, I think, because the wateriness of it all made the dissolution of identity seem less terrible.
Sort of the opposite of a thought that obsessed me when I was an impatient teenager: I can't falter, because I'm frozen. My frozenness makes me strong.
(Am I not still impatient? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! But the rain made me content to shrug my shoulders and stay indoors, instead of going out and devouring the world with my eyes.)

2006-05-09T18:40:00.000-07:00

Books:

February
Lucy Gayheart (Cather)
Storia della Linguistica (Mounin)
The Glimpses of the Moon (Wharton)
We (Zamyatin)

March
The Ruby in the Smoke (Pullman)
The Shadow in the North (Pullman)
Parallel Lives (Rose)

April
Only Yesterday (Allen)
The Book Against God (Wood)
The Rise of American Democracy, Jefferson to Lincoln (Wilentz)

2006-05-09T18:39:00.001-07:00

I finished Sean Wilentz's The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln the other day. I highly highly recommend it — through all its 796 pages it never got boring. Even some of the footnotes were worth reading. Here are some of the most memorable quotations:
"You have come into Life with advantages which will disgrace you, if your success if mediocre," Vice President John Adams wrote to his son [John Quincy Adams] in 1794. "[I]f you do not rise to the head not only of your Profession, but of your Country, it will be owing to your own Laziness Slovenliness and Obstinacy." (p. 257)

And this, on Bleeding Kansas:
The Yankees originally found themselves outnumbered by thousands of pro-slavery Missourians who had crossed the border and set down stakes. Few of the Missourians or emigrants from other slave states actually owned slaves, but they despised the New Englanders for what they saw as their air of moral superiority and their sickly love of blacks. Mocked as "pukes" and "border ruffians" by the free-staters, the pro-slavery men were determined to harass the abolitionists out of Kansas by any means necessary. ("We will be compelled to shoot, burn & hang, but the thing will soon be over," the ever violent [Missouri] Senator David Atchison predicted.)

Elsewhere Wilentz describes Atchison as "profane and provocative." But this takes the cake:
The territorial legislative elections in March 1855 turned into an even nastier and more corrupt proceeding than the delegate elections four months earlier. With Atchison once again the chief instigator, thousands of Missourians — some of them members of a new semisecret pro-slavery society, and many identified by a badge of hemp, the area's chief slave cash crop — poured over the border to vote illegally. "There are eleven hundred coming over from Platte County to vote," Atchison shamelessly exclaimed, "and if that ain't enough we can send five thousand — enough to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the Territory." (p. 686)

There's a town in Kansas named Atchison; it's Amelia Earheart's hometown.

I now understand why Goodwyn is so scornful of Progressives; they're firmly in the Whig tradition of self-improvement. Some of Wilentz's best pages are on the Democrats vs. the Whigs:

There was, without question, a dominant antistatist cast, both symbolic and substantive, to Jacksonian economic politics. The neo-Jeffersonian motto of Blair's Washington Globe … — "That government is best, which governs least" — powerfully expressed the antigovernment creed. Yet as Jackson himself always made clear, the Jacksonians opposed large government not because it burdened business but because they believed it was a creature of the monied and privileged few, constructed in defiance of popular sovereignty, that corrupted democracy. "Experience will show," the New York Evening Post said, "that this power has always been exercised under the influence and for the exclusive benefit of wealth. Too rarely have historians understood or even taken seriously the Jacksonians' repeated claims, after as well as during the BUS veto battle, that they aimed not to liberate private business interests from a corrupt government, but to liberate democratic government from the corrupting power of exclusive private business interests. Too rarely have historians appreciated the Democrats' willingness to wield federal power forcefully, over economic issues no less than over nullification, when they thought doing so was necessary to protect the democratic republic. (p. 438)

From this rejection of archaic Federalist politics followed a number of important consequences. The Whigs contended that in the United States all freemen shared a basic harmony of interests that had effectively banished the existence of classes. The older, tough-minded conservatism of John Adams, shared, in part, by James Madison and other Republicans [Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans], assumed that the clash between rich and poor would forever shape politics and government, even in the American republic. In the new conservative view, America was a great exception among nations, fundamentally different from Europe, where, as Webster remarked, there was "a clear and well defined line, between capital and labor." Thanks to America's abundance of land and wealth, its shortage of free labor, and its lack of hereditary aristocracy, the idea of the few and the many had been banished — and, contrary to the Democrats, rendered permanently antithetical to the genius of American politics. In America, rich and poor alike were workingmen, and all workingmen were capitalists, or at least incipient capitalists, ready to strike out on the road to wealth that was open to everyone. The Jacksonians and their labor radical friends understood nothing about this blessed nation, where expanding commerce and manufacturing, according to the American Quarterly Review, placed "within the reach of even the very poorest, a thousand comforts which were unknown to the rich in less civilized ages." What was good for the wealthy of the country was inevitably good for those of aspiring wealth, and what was bad was bad — worse for the aspirants than for the already affluent. "It is moneyed capital which makes business grow and thrive, gives employment to labor and opens to it avenues to success in life," one Whig publicist observed. "The blow aimed at the moneyed capitalist, strikes over the head of the laborer, and is sure to hurt the latter more than the former."
A second corollary was political: Jacksonian politicians, and not privileged businessmen, were the true oppressors of the people. In place of the monied aristocrats whom the Democrats disparaged, the Whigs substituted what they described as a new class of selfish elected officials and appointees, led by King Andrew I — connivers who had turned government into their trough, robbing the people of their money as well as their power. (p. 486)

Democratic corruption was spiritual as well as material, the Whigs asserted. Playing off the stigma attached to freethinking radicals, Frances Wright above all, and the nativist fears of dissipated pro-Democratc immigrants, chiefly the Irish, Whig propagandists proclaimed their opponents dangerous to the very foundations of pious respectability and secure democratic government. If every Democrat was not an infidel, libertine, or a drunk, the Whigs assured the upright, surely every infidel, libertine, and drunk was a Democrat. "Wherever you find a bitter, blasphemous Atheist and an enemy of Marriage, Morality, and Social Order," Greeley charged, "there you may be sure of one vote for Van Buren."
For the Whigs to purport to represent the people, they had to talk more like the people, or how they thought the people talked. Some of the party's Federalist and National Republican predecessors had already experimented with popular campaigning… Some Jeffersonians-turned-National Republicans, most famously the gregarious Henry Clay, were excellent treaters and braggers on the campaign stump — forms of public performance that long predated the democratic breakthroughs of the Jeffersonian era. Suddenly, in the mid-1830s, Whig "cracker-barrel" philosophers and down-home wits began appearing in print. The most successful of them was the transformed fictional Major Jack Downing. As invented by Seba Smith, the sage of Downingville was a humorous figure who poked fun at Jackson and his coterie. In the mid-1830s, however, "new" Major Downings appeared — the most brilliant of them being the creation of Charles Davis, a close friend of Nicholas Biddle's and a director of the New York branch of the Second Bank of the United States. Davis's Downing was a Whig ideologue through and through, praising bankers as benevolent people who "in the nature of things" would "never do any thing agin the gineral prosperity of this country," and who were locked in a struggle against the true "monied aristocracy" of "politicians [who] manage to git hold of the mony of the people, and keep turnin it to their own account —… buy up a party with it." Better a government of enlightened businessmen than of politicians out "jest to git into office; and then, to keep themselves in office." The first modern conservative folk hero was born in a branch office of the Second BUS.
There were other Whig populist heroes, some real, some imaginary, and some a combination of the two. David Crockett's emergence as a buck-skinned Whig celebrity was widely imitated. Whig favorites suddenly showed a fondness for manly, plebeian nicknames, including Tom "The Wagon Boy" Corwin, Henry "The Natick Cobbler" Wilson, and Elihu "The Learned Blacksmith" Burritt. Henry Clay, known widely as "Harry of the West," "The Great Compromiser," and even "Prince Hal," began to favor a name supposedly pinned on him in his youth, "Mill Boy of the Slashes" — a bit wordy but definitely down-home. On a more elevated level, the Whigs tried to match the Democrats' hard-money pamphlets with popular defenses of the credit system, the BUS, and high tariffs, the best of them written by Matthew Carey's son, Henry C. Carey.
Binding together these new-school Whig themes — American classlessness and underlying social harmony, the oppression and corruption of Democratic government, Whig populism — was the doctrine of self-improvement and reform. Attacks on the Jacksonians' dishonesty and class-war demagogy could only carry the Whigs so far in reimagining America for the electorate. Even in the Whigs' classless pastorale, some citizens were better off than others, and despite rapid economic development, the curses of crime, pauperism, and drunkenness appeared to be growing worse, not better. How could these disparities and pathologies be explained? Not, the Whigs insisted, with sinister talk of systemic social inequalities, class warfare, or corrupt institutions (apart from those the Jacksonian politicians had inflicted). Rather, the problems were individual and moral and their solution lay in individual self-reform, or what Boston's eminent Whig Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing called "Elevation of the Soul" — an elevation that benign Whig government could help to encourage.
Whig self-reform adapted ethical precepts from across the spectrum of post-Calvinist American Protestant belief, evoking the emotional revivalism of the Presbygationals [a hideous word] and more proper of the southern evangelicals as well as Channing's rationalist Unitarianism. Their common theme, sacred and secular, was the all-surpassing importance of moral choice. The wealthy did not make the poor lazy and thriftless; the sober did not make the drunkards drink; law-abiding, decent men and women did not make murderers murder, or thieves rob, or wife-beaters beat their wives. Rather, the lazy, the drunk, and the criminal chose wrongly, succumbed to sensuous temptation, and failed to exercise human faculties of self-control that could elevate their souls. What was at stake in the United States, the Whigs proclaimed, was nothing less than a battale over these self-evident facts — a momentous conflict between those who understood the basic moral conditions of human existence and those who rejected them. "We have in truth, in the last eight or ten years, been in a continual state of moral war," the Tennessean John Bell said when he announced, in 1835, that he was joining the Whig Party. That war, as the Whigs depicted it, was essentially a democratic conflict, not between the privileged and the people or the wealthy and the poor, but between the righteous and the unrighteous.
Self-reform in turn became the basis for an uplifting idealism that defined Whiggery as a spiritual cause as well as a political party. Later writers have mistaken this aspect of Whig ideology as a belief in the corrective, liberal, "positive" state, in stark contrast to a Democratic laissez-faire, backward-looking liberal "negative" state. In fact, like virtually all American political parties and movements, the Whigs and the Democrats blended aspects of both "positive" and "negative" government. In some spheres, notably with regard to the currency and the national bank, Whigs greatly preferred private to public power. and tried to limit government regulation. They wanted to halt what they called the Democrats' "war on the currency of the country… on the merchants and mercantile interests" — a war they said was designed "to support the power of the federal government." But the Whigs did promote the uses of government to help direct and even coerce individuals toward what they considered personal improvement — the basis, as they saw it, for social and political progress. Materially, this program had already reached its apotheosis in Clay's American System, a coordinated plan of federal-supported commerical expansion anchored by a privately managed BUS. Morally, it led new-school Whigs in the late 1830s, most auspiciously the more liberal Whigs in New York, to call for increased state support of institutions that would help keep the young on the path of righteousness and help lead the fallen toward the elevation of their souls: public schools, benevolent societies, rehabilitative prisons, reformatories, and for the truly unfortunate, insane asylums.
"Of all the parties that have existed in the United States," John Quincy Adams's dyspeptic grandson Henry would later remark, "the famous Whig party was the most feeble in ideas." Given the subsequent intellectual history of other political parties, that judgment now seems severe. (pp. 486-489)

Among more orthodox religious liberals and evangelicals alike arose the more compelling feature of a new-school Whiggery, a broad Christian humanitarianism of the sort that had nourished the movements against Indian removal and, in the North, for the abolition of slavery. Just as post-Calvinist churchmen denounced human coercion and unbridled passion as unchristian, so they rejected everyday cruelties — the beating of children, wife abuse, the harsh treatment of convicts, and (according to some) the physical and mental torments of slavery — which other Americans took for granted as natural and even necessary forms of correction and social order. (p. 490)

The Democrats, scornful of the opposition's mediocre nominee, tried to exploit Clay and his supporters' bitter disappointment — with disastrous results. Shortly after the convention, the pro-Van Buren Baltimore Republican baited the Whigs with an insult reportedly delivered by a Clay man against Harrison: "Give him a barrel of hard cider, and settle a pension of two thousand a year on him, and my word for it, he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin." The superannuated general — "Old Granny" Harrison, some Democrats called him — was simply too old, too befuddled, too undistinguished to be a credible president. But the insult played directly into the hands of Weed as well as the old-guard Whigs. Richard S. Elliott, a Harrisburg Whig editor, was one of the first to grasp fully the implications, in a postconvention conversation over some rare Madeira with the banker Thomas Elder at Elder's mansion on the Susquehanna. The Van Burenites' mockery could, the two figured out, become the Whigs' pride, projecting Harrison and his party as paragons of plain rustic virtue while condemning the Democrats (the possibilities grew rich with each sip of the Madeira) as scornful, out-of-touch nabob politicos. And so the Whigs' famous Log Cabin and Hard Cider campaign began, with an enormous Harrison transparency mounted in Harrisburg depicting a log cabin with a cider barrel by the door. New-school party managers were fully aware of political genius behind the ballyhoo. "The Log Cabin is the symbol of nothing that Van Burenism knows, feels, or can appreciate," Weed later explained to the readers of the Albany Evening Journal. "It tells of the hopes of the humble — of the privations of the poor —… it is the emblem of rights that the vain and insolent aristocracy of federal office-holders have… trampled upon."
The Democrats, not taking this new Whig campaign symbolism at all seriously, entered the lists in their time-tested ways. Van Buren, outwardly unflustered as ever, did not reply to the volley of personal attacks on him, preferring to have his supporters calmly restate his positions on the issues and leave it to the state and local Democratic campaign committees to stir up the faithful.
…The length of the workday, said the self-proclaimed champion of labor Horace Greeley, ought to be left to "mutual agreement" between workers and employers: "What have Governments and Presidents to do with it?" Shipyard workers thought differently. Looking back, a free black Washington Navy Yard hand named Michael Shiner wrote in his diary that "the Working Class of people of the the United State Machanic and laboures ought to never forget the Hon ex president Van Buren for the ten hour sistom… his name ought to be Recorded in evry Working Man heart."
…Early in the campaign, Democrats remained confident that their old campaign weapons would suffice, and that the Whigs' demagogy about "Old Tippecanoe" Harrison, the heroic Indian fighter, would flop. "The Logg cabin hard cider and Coon humbugery is doing us a great service every where," Andrew Jackson wrote to Van Buren from his retirement at the Hermitage, "and none more so than in Tennessee." When the Whig chorus swelled ever louder, puzzled Van Buren men responded unavailingly with sweet reason. "The question is not whether Harrison drinks hard cider," William Cullen Bryant remonstrated, "… The question is what he and his party will do if they obtain the power." Bryant may have been right, but he missed the point by a mile.
The Democratic side contributed the only intellectually forceful product of the 1840 campaign, an astonishing, rebellious essay by George Bancroft's discovery, Orestes Brownson, entitled "The Laboring Classes."…
"The Laboring Classes," formally a review of a brief book on Chartism by… Thomas Carlyle, appeared in the Boston Quarterly just as the presidential campaign heated up. In part it was a biting restatement of the radical economic ideas that had become mainstream Democratic principles, directed against "the chiefs of the business community" — "nabobs, reveling in luxury," while "building miniature log cabins, shouting Harrison and 'hard cider.'" Some of the essay's fiercest diatribes pierced through the moral reformism typical of new-school Whigs — "priests and pedagogues," Brownson called them, who "seek to reform without disturbing the social arrangements which render reform necessary." (pp. 497-500)

(Jennie once e-mailed me long portions of Gibbons's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "I wish I could be a professional transcriber!" she wrote.)

I'm glad I don't live in the last quarter of the nineteenth century — would I have voted after Emancipation & the end of Reconstruction (if I could have voted) for the party of big business and abolition, or the party of slavery and the common man? Today's manichean party system suits me much better. (But NB: There were antislavery Democrats — Van Buren eventually became one — though their star began to wane in 1852. The Whigs collapsed under the pressure of the slavery controversy, and the Republicans, who sprang up in their place, were a motley crew united only by opposition to slavery. They were admirable & admirably effective for a few decades, but they sold out with astonishing speed and thoroughness. I'm about to find out how that happened.) Frederick Lewis Allen calls the Democrats in the 1920s "that coalition of incompatibles." The same could be said of the Whigs.
Here's an interesting contrast: in the US the left-wing party has a more or less continuous genealogy; it's the right-wing party that has collapsed and recast itself again and again (Federalists - Whigs - Republicans). In the UK the opposite is true (Whigs - Liberals - Labour — oder?). The Tories and the Democrats are the two oldest political parties in the world.

2006-05-09T18:39:00.000-07:00

In 2004 I heard Angela Hewitt play Couperin's "Mysterious Barricades" on the radio. It reminds me of Handel's "Harmonious Blacksmith," or maybe just the connotations of the title — a quiet, joyful pleasure in work. Now I have all three of her CDs of Couperin's "Ordres." Here are some of my favorites:
Les langueurs tendres
Gazoüillement
Les Bergeries
Le Ménetou
Les lis naissans
Le rossignol-en-amour
Les favètes plaintives
Le Dodo, ou l'Amour au Berceau
Le Turbulent
Le tic-toc-choc
Le Gaillard Boiteux
La Muse Plantine
L'Amphibie
La Convalescente
L'Épineuse

Aren't the titles wonderful?! Not that I understand every single word. ("Ménetou"? "Gazoüillement"?) Here are the titles of the miniatures in the 25th order: (I was going to say sketches, but they're too finished. But "miniatures" may not be right either — some of them are five minutes long.)
1. La Visionaire
2. La Misterieuse
3. La Monflambert
4. La Muse Victorieuse
5. Les Ombres Errantes

It's like wandering through a formal garden full of statues at dawn.

A-ha! I just looked up "gazouille*" on artfl. Here's the definition:
GAZOUILLER. v. n. Faire un petit bruit doux & agreable, tel que celuy que fait le cours d'un petit ruisseau sur les cailloux, ou celuy des petits oiseaux. On entend le soir les oiseaux qui gazoüillent. ce ruisseau gazoüille agreablement sur les cailloux.

How appropriate.

Here's another extraordinary set of titles, the 13th order. None of these is more than a minute long:
1. La Virginité sous le Domino couleur d'invisible
2. La Pudeur sous le Domino couleur de roze
3. L'Ardeur sous le Domino incarnat
4. L'Ésperance sous le Domino vert
5. La Fidelité sous le Domino bleu
6. La Persévérance sous le Domino gris de lin
7. La Langueur sous le Domino violet
8. La Coqueterie sous le différens Dominos
9. Les Vieux Galans et les Trésorieres Suranées sous des Dominos pourpres et feuilles mortes
10. Les Coucous Bénévoles sous des Domino jaunes
11. La Jalousie Taciturne sous le Domino gris de maure
12. La Frénésie, ou le Désespoir sous le Domino noir

He can be as warm, confident, calm and expansive as Handel, in "Mysterious Barricades" and also in "Le Dodo, ou l'amour au berceau," but he's Bach's match for poisonous, paralyzing bitterness. See "La Muse-Plantine" for gentle bleakness. Or he can weave together extremes, as in "La Convalescente" — fleeting consonant intervals like hints of forgiveness.

Other pieces are simply the epitome of exquiteness and delicacy. You want to hold your breath so as not to disturb the birds and flowers.

I lent these to Mark and he said, "Some of them are run of the mill, but the best ones are astonishing." I would have agreed with him when I first became acquainted with the pieces, but the more I listen the more I think, "Couperin invented his own language, and anything he says in it is fascinating."

Because of the paintings on the covers of the CDs, I thought, "This is rococo music." And then it occurred to me that Marvell is rococo poetry — not just "Picture of Little TC in a Prospect of Flowers" and "On a Drop of Dew," but practically all the lyric poems, or all the ones that treat nature as art.

2006-05-09T18:38:00.000-07:00

Until I was switched to a fifth grade, I also taught the less good sixth grade; one of my students in that class, Jiwon, almost never spoke, either in class or during break. His voice has the muffled thickness of the voice of a boy I knew in high school who also never spoke — as if their vocal chords were out of shape, as if the machinery creaked when it was set in motion, and never got beyond the creaking stage. I think he's shy, but more importantly, he's only learning English. One might think, observing his awkward silence, that he had no English at all, but one would be wrong. He writes better, more fluently and more thoughtfully, than anyone in that class. Once we read a passage on Tecumseh's efforts to unite the midwestern tribes against the settlers. The students were then supposed to recreate the debate at the powwow where Tecumseh tries to convince the other chiefs to join him. Most students just gave two sentences summing up Tecumseh's position, but Jiwon produced a page and a half of dialogue, including Tecumseh's arguments, the chiefs' counterarguments, and Tecumseh's (and his allies') responses. He even had parenthetical directions: "[angrily]," "[hesitating]," "[with passion]." These stood out, because Jiwon himself speaks in a halting monotone.

I also teach a ninth grade consisting of four boys and one girl. It's no fun. They do what I tell them to do, and they study, but they never talk. But last week something interesting happened, finally. I'd asked them to write an essay on "a world upside down that you would like to see come true." Andrew wrote about a world where athletes and movie stars toil in obscurity while doctors, teachers, and garbage collectors are lionized and showered with praise. "What's this?" He'd erased something from his list of worthy professions. "Oh, uh, I originally included lawyers." His piece was a fierce rant, and he seemed surprised when I said that this kind of essay could be funny. I look forward to reading the second draft. [Update: it includes, on my suggestion, magazines and fansites on the social lives of plumbers and gardeners. I was a bit disappointed that he didn't go beyond my suggestion. But maybe he's not interested in being funny.]

Sixth grade:
In a sentence like "The dentist cleaned my teeth," they were supposed to label complements. They all got that "teeth" was the direct object, but one student labeled "my" as an indirect object. "It's just a plain old possessive adjective," I said. Then Diana showed me her paper. She had made the same mistake, and she understood why it was wrong, but, she explained (without using the terminology), she'd thought of "my" as a kind of dative of reference — which is exactly how that sentence works in other European languages. Could she and her classmate have had Spanish in mind?

I taught Mrs. Dalloway last week. It was a surprise to me, when I was re-reading the beginning in preparation for the class, how much I remembered of it, how clearly. I haven't opened it in nearly a decade, and yet I remembered so much of it, long descriptions as well as the tiny perfections — a look, a gesture that makes for a "decisive moment." I'd been half-afraid that I wouldn't be as impressed with it as I was when I first read it, but no, it still seemed perfect. And the rush of excitement that comes from teaching a work one loves to bits — there's nothing like it. Actually, there was something else: it's a hard book; the students knew it & I know it. And so I felt very useful. So often with novels I think, "What's there to explain or even talk about? It's all on the page." Of course, there's no telling what students won't understand, or, to put it more hopefully, what unusual interpretations they'll come up with, but I'm often disoriented.* That didn't happened in my Mrs. Dalloway class: I knew exactly what would be hard. (But actually I'm never at a loss for words when discussing works I love, even if they're as straightforward as The Witch of Blackbird Pond.)

*For example, Joyce thought that Henry Foster, in Brave New World, is being sincerely kind to Bernard when he offers Bernard soma. She'd missed the significance of "Let's bait him." And another example: Jae suggested that the Duke of Browning's poem is actually warning his future bride's emissary: "My next duchess had better have eyes only for me." I think that gives him rather too much credit for controlled calculation, but not for subtle cleverness, so it's a useful way of considering the poem.

2006-05-09T18:37:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago my second grade teacher got in touch to say that he was coming through the city. Could we meet? I hadn't seen or heard from him since second grade, so I was very surprised and really delighted. I remember him as tall, stern, demanding, authoritative; someone who would give a lot if you worked hard. I learned a great deal under his tutelage, but most importantly, he introduced me to the chronicles of Narnia. I had read the Little House in the Big Woods books, and many Nancy Drew books, and The Secret Garden (twice), and possibly The Little Princess (or maybe that was later?), and Bambi and Bambi's Children, and Mr. Popper's Penguins, and I loved all those, but Narnia was the world I lived in through the next few years.
He said he hadn't changed much in appearance, and this was true; he's still tall and physically imposing, and though he doesn't have a moustache anymore his face was as I remembered it. I hadn't noticed in second grade what a westerner he is — the drawl, the wide-brimmed hat which he never took off. But the biggest surprises had nothing to do with appearance. He said, for example, that he had learned a great deal in his year with us. At the time I thought he knew everything! He said he had been in awe of us, our parents, and the city. I have to confess that it was hard to hear this — one doesn't want an admired teacher to admit weakness, even years after the fact. On the other hand, everyone's human. He called himself a "farm boy," and in his case it's not a figure of speech — he had to miss several months of school every year to help out on his family's farm. There was only one book in his parents' house, the Bible, and nobody ever read that. Little by little, through his twenties, he challenged himself to read harder books — this the man who helped me so much as a reader when I was seven! If only he had had himself as a teacher.
As we spoke I couldn't help thinking of Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes: "In the first years of the nineteenth century, shepherds in the Cheviot Hills maintained a kind of circulating library, leaving books they had read in designated crannies in boundary walls. The next shepherd who came that way could borrow it and leave another in its place, so that each volume was gradually carried through a circuit of 30 to 40 miles, on which the shepherds only occasionally met." They "drew inspiration from a whole subgenre of self-improving literature[, including] G.L. Craik's The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties (1830-31)."

2006-04-09T18:36:00.000-07:00

Some eighth grade essays:

"A current event about which I feel strongly."

Ranny

In 1992, under the order of then President Clinton, U.S. planes fired thirteen missiles at a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. This action was taken in response to evidence that this plant was producing nerve gas for Al-Qaeda. Now, thirteen years later, the company still awaits an apology from the U.S.
Every year, on the anniversary of the attack, the company demands an apology from the U.S. They also make the U.S. look like the bad guys. This is because this pharmaceutical company is the only one that does research on a "nodding disease" unique to a small portion of Sudan. Many people agree that the U.S. was wrong to attack the plant, but I am divided on the issue.
I think that the U.S. was wrong and right to attack the pharmaceutical plant. First, I think they made the right choice to attack the plant because the owner is Osama bin Laden's best friend so he is probably a terrorist too. But I also think that they were wrong because the U.S. didn't have any solid evidence that the company produced nerve gas.
I also think that the U.S. should just apologize to the pharmaceutical company because there is already a lot of anti-American feeling in the world. I think the U.S. should try to make more friends and decrease the number of enemies it has. I think the U.S. should apologize because the company will not clean up the debris left from the attack until a formal apology is issued.
In conclusion, I think the decision the U.S. made was right and wrong. But when it comes to the issue of apologizing, I think the U.S. should apologize.

The attack took place in 1998, but otherwise I'm impressed that he had all those facts at his fingertips. (This was a write-an-essay-at-the-drop-of-a-hat assignment — they didn't have a chance to prepare.)

C—

"Describe a family meal — not only the food, but the people and the conversation as well."

During the blizzard of 2006 my parents and I trudged through the snow to satisfy our seafood craving. The restaurant was lit up in a cheery yellow glow in the midst of the gray-and-white wintery [sic] atmosphere, so we chose to eat there. I braced myself for another mundane evening with my family.
As soon as we were seated on rickety wooden chairs, my father opened his mouth and I was positive that he would initiate another boring conversation about high schools. To my relief, he slipped a piece of kimchi into his mouth and didn't say anything. The rest of our stay at the restaurant went on this way, with me dreading the moments he opened his mouth, but him using that time to eat a bit of sashimi, fish, or tofu and chewing back what he wanted to say. My mother was quite the opposite. She was engaged in her own eating frenzy, chewing for no longer than five seconds per mouthful as if she had been fasting for days. Her ambition was to eat, and save the thinking for when the bowl was clean.
I was caught between the two silences, and so I resorted to judging the dishes. Our appetizers were the usual mixed with a few innovative ones: kimchi (naturally), a block of tofu marinated in soy sauce, vegetables fried in tempura batter, eel, and potato salad. The sashimi was slimy and smelled of tap water. Besides that, the other dishes were mediocre but what they lacked in taste they made up for in portion.
At that moment, my dad decided to talk (in Korean). "Did you know I bragged to so-and-so's father about your acceptance to X—— and Y——?" I nodded and tried to seem happy with what he had done, but inwardly I was exasperated.
[unfinished]

Daniel, the eighth grader who supposedly got into Harvard, told me before class that he liked Browning's "My Last Duchess." (The class was somewhat resistant to it when we read it a few weeks ago.)
And I read the first chapter of Pullman's The Ruby in the Smoke to the eighth graders. As usual, I was full of trepidation: would they like it? Were they bored out of their minds? When I finished I asked if there were any questions. Silence. Any comments? Amitoj raised his hand. "Amitoj?" "That's a good book." His classmates nodded, and I felt very relieved.

I have a wonderful new student! He's a fifth grader too — just what I need, good fifth graders to get me excited about next year, when I'll lose my wonderful 6th and 8th graders. He knew about Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch. World War II started, he said, when Germany invaded Belgium. Me: "That's was Germany's first move in World War I." Pakdee: "Oh — Poland! Poland!" He smacked his forehead in embarassment. He even knew that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the 1930s was a Nazi sympathizer, and spent the war in Germany!
(Little known fact I just found out: the Grand Mufti was Arafat's uncle.)
I realize that history is more than a collection of odd facts, but the reason I'm so delighted when my students surprise me with their knowledge of the past is that it seems a symptom of insatiable curiosity. I let Pakdee read National Geographic under his desk (as long as he doesn't do it too much) because I know he doesn't need to have things explained to him two or three times.
Most of my students are Korean; the exceptions are Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and Pakistani. Pakdee and his sister are my first Thai students. They have a long and melodious last name — six syllables long! It's quite a change from "Lee" and "Kim."

2006-03-30T18:35:00.000-08:00

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).

2006-03-30T18:34:00.000-08:00

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"

2006-03-30T18:33:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-03-26T18:32:00.000-08:00

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.]

2006-03-23T18:31:00.000-08:00

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

2006-03-21T18:31:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-03-21T18:30:00.000-08:00

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)

2006-03-21T18:29:00.000-08:00

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.