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.

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

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)

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'

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…"

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."

(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.)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

German cognates I've only just noticed:

Knoblauch || knob-leek (garlic!)

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

Schmerz || smart

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

Some others: Eiweiß (protein) || eggwhite

schmecken || "it smacks of"

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've just finished reading this, so I'm alert to suggestions of dualism.

The New York Times has published a letter I sent them:

To the Editor:

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

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

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

New York, Aug. 18, 2006

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

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

To the Editor:

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

Bologna, Italy, Aug. 2, 2006

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

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

From Yumi:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kaveri commented:

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

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

Books:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confraternità de' Musici

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.)

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)

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.

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.

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.

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)."

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."