Context & Continuity

What a Coincidence! David Edelstein and A.O. Scott Find the Same Thing "Oxymoronic"

Oxymoronic.  How often do you hear that word in an eight-hour period?  Let me explain why that's the pertinent question this morning.

First I'll tell you what you already know: I have aggressive media consumption habits.  I tear through media like Henry VIII at a banquet.  My family believes it's an awesome and frightening habit. 

Second, at that banquet, i always make room for The New York Times and lots of airtime from National Public Radio and from NPR, I usually catch the program Fresh Air.

So, yesterday, while tearing through the Times, I came across A.O. Scott's review of the new George Clooney movie, The American and read this paragraph:

In addition to the priest, he befriends Clara, a prostitute — played by an actress with the splendidly oxymoronic name Violante Placido — who is so stirred by his bedroom prowess that she stops charging him and asks him out for dinner instead. (Some guys get all the breaks.) Meanwhile his business dealings with his client carry a sexual undercurrent that the American may or may not notice.  [entire review]

i noticed the use of the word "oxymoronic" because it was well played and not a word I read in the media on a regular basis.  --Until yesterday.

David Edelstein reviews movies for the NPR program Fresh Air and it wasn't a surprise to hear him queue up a review of The American because the movie was just released and that's how the media works.  What was a surprise was when he spoke this paragraph:

As in "Up in the Air," Jack does make a new friend, Clara, a prostitute played by the oxymoronically named Violante Placido. I wondered why she was so familiar, with her soft, open face and voluptuous body. It turns out she's the daughter of Simonetta Stefanelli, unforgettable as Michael Corleone's doomed Sicilian bride in "The Godfather."  [entire review]

I don't think the reviewers "borrowed" from each other.  Both David Edelstein and, especially, A.O. Scott are "made men" who don't have to struggle towards the top anymore.  Rather, i think that, just like when the lights are out, the room is "dark," if a character has the name Violante Placido, the name is oxymoronic.  Both reviewers noticed it and both called it out and neither could find a better word to describe it than oxymoronic. 

Interesting.

WSJ: Joyce and Carter and Maybe Even Pollack Are Too Smart.

Above, we see a picture of James Joyce and the person responsible for James Joyce being the literary legend we know today, Ms. Sylvia Beach of the bookstore / publisher, Shakespeare & Company in Paris, published Mr. Joyce and for that the world owes her an everlasting debt of gratitude.  But that isn't the point I want to make.

What brings me back to the blog is an article by Mr. Terry Teachout appearing in the June 26, 2010 issue of The Wall Street Journal.  Mr. Teachout, who I've bloged about before here, came across an academic paper that sparked an idea for Mr. Teachout's column about how Modern music, literature and other arts might be too complicated for us to understand.  Observe:

Are certain kinds of modern art too complex for anybody to understand? Fred Lerdahl thinks so, at least as far as his chosen art form is concerned. In 1988 Mr. Lerdahl, who teaches musical composition at Columbia University, published a paper called "Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems," in which he argued that the hypercomplex music of atonal composers like Messrs. Boulez and Carter betrays "a huge gap between compositional system and cognized result." He distinguishes between pieces of modern music that are "complex" but intelligible and others that are excessively "complicated"—containing too many "non-redundant events per unit [of] time" for the brain to process. "Much contemporary music," he says, "pursues complicatedness as compensation for a lack of complexity."

"You have turned your back on common men, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence," H.G. Wells complained to Joyce after reading "Finnegans Wake." That didn't faze him. "The demand that I make of my reader," Joyce said, "is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works." To which the obvious retort is: Life's too short.

I've been thinking, a lot, about Modernism lately and I'm starting to put these ideas down on paper.  But for the time being, I want to write here that maybe it's still too soon to judge the lasting merits of Finnegans Wake or Eliot Carter.  Perhaps.  But part and parcel of that notion is that it's probably far too soon to summarily dismiss them.

Oh, and here's a link to the paper Mr. Teachout cites, Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems.

NYRB: David Foster Wallace on Television and Writing.

As for me, I've read The Broom of the System, and either I'm not smart enough to understand it or ... whatever.  Bethatasitmay, I love the idea of David Foster Wallace, the enormously gifted and tragic writer who love writing and reading.  So I was catching up on the July 15, 2010 of The New York Review of Books and was enjoying Wyatt Mason's review of David Lipsky's book, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.  In the review, I cam across this: 

You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us…that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need, I think—and I’m not saying I’m the person to do it…is serious engaged art, that can teach again that we’re smart.

and then this...

The old tricks have been exploded, and I think the language needs to find new ways to pull the reader…. A lot of it has to do with voice, and a feeling of intimacy between the writer and the reader…. Given the atomization and loneliness of contemporary life—that’s our opening.

Now I need to consider taking a run at Infinite Jest.  

Sir Tom Leading t/ Charge Against Increase in Library Fees.

I'm a member of one of the oldest private libraries in United States, The Mechanics' Institute Library and Chess Club in San Francisco. Besides being a very nice library and an outstanding chess club, it's a terrific place to work and meet with people when I'm in San Francisco. 

I just discovered that Sir Tom Stoppard is president of The London Library, founded in 1841 and home to Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot, Rebecca West and Isaiah Berlin.  

I can't find out how much the London Library charges for membership but, according to the story in the Telegraph, the rise in membership is set at thirteen percent.  

Now, I'm obsessed about getting back to London and spending a day at the library.  And if you aren't of the same mind, then I suggest you watch the video I've embedded below.  

The London Library from Jeremy Riggall on Vimeo.

Jumpers: A Life Changing Experience.

In 1977 I sat down in a small theater on the campus of the University of Missouri - Columbia, watched the play Jumpers and was changed for life.

This was just five years after the play opened at the Old Vic with Diana Rigg in the leading role and a mere three years after the play opened on Broadway at the Billy Rose Theater. 

Somewhere in the dark, middle of the U.S., I sat in the theater and was transfixed.  This was, by far, the smartest thing I ever experienced.  It was a perfect melange of the smartest things from history.  For example:

It was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, as I will now demonstrate, that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright. 

It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.

How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.

Language is a finite instrument crudely applied to an infinity of ideas, and one consequence of the failure to take account of this is that modern philosophy has made itself ridiculous by analysing such statements as, "This is a good bacon sandwich," or, "Bedser had a good wicket."

To the Barricade: Stoppard Takes to the Street.

The Charter 97 website brings us news that that Sir Tom and cohorts have taken to the streets to protest against censorship in Belarus.  Observe:

Britain’s theatre community comes out against oppression and censorship in the “last dictatorship of Europe”.

Sir Tom Stoppard and actor/director Sam West Has led a protest of high-profile theatre practitioners outside the Belarussian Embassy at 6 Kensington Court, London, W8 5DL on Thursday 1st July at 11.30am.

They presented an open letter to President Alyaksander Lukashenko of Belarus calling for greater democratic freedom and for an end to censorship of the Internet. Other signatories include Mark Ravenhill, Howard Brenton, Alan Rickman, Laura Wade, Caryl Churchill, Henry Goodman, Henry Porter, Simon McBurney, Simon Stephens and Lyndsey Turner.

“We urge you to allow the people of Belarus the right to express and share their opinions freely, whether this is on the internet or not. We urge you to use your powers to prevent any further repression of citizens who hold alternative, and oppositional, beliefs to you. We urge that the practice of physical abuse and intimidation against any citizen, including those who dare to hold alternative and oppositional points of view, be stopped. Finally, we urge you to protect the right to freedom of assembly in accordance with Article 21 of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights to which Belarus is a state party,” – the letter says.  [more]

Sir Tom has worked very hard on human rights issues and this is but another example of his great work. 

The Last of the Bright Young Things, Teresa Jungman.

I came to Evenlyn Waugh late, the year after I left school.  What's worse is that I read the serious stuff first, Brideshead Revisited and then the Sword of Honour trilogy.  It was only during another trip to England and Scotland that I picked up some lovely paperback editions of Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies and Scoop Suffice it to say that I I scarcely had a chance to catch my breath from laughing so hard.  

So I was surprised and saddened when I read the obituaries of Ms. Teresa Jungman.  Ms. Jungman, better known as "Baby," has been mentioned as the model for Lady Julia Flyte but is probably more closely related to some of the lovely and energetic well-born ladies from Waugh's earlier works.  Wagh was so taken with Ms. Jungman he proposed to her, repeatedly.  It ws probably for the best the Ms. Jungman turned him down as she would have had an enervating effect on Mr. Waugh.  --I can't quite see Mr. Waugh enjoying those long, quite days that were necessary for his prolific production. 

Another age finally draws to a close.  I didn't know Ms. Jungman was still alive.  And now I find myself mourning her passing. 

Here are a sample of the obituaries:

The Sunday TimesThe Telegraph

The Telegraph

Tony Judt on "Words."

Because you've been paying attention, you've been keeping up with Tony Judt's installments of his autobiography.  But in case you haven't seen the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, then you need to know what Mr. Judt has to write about words.  Consider this:

Forty years on from the 1960s, there are not many instructors left with the self-confidence (or the training) to pounce on infelicitous expression and explain clearly just why it inhibits intelligent reflection. The revolution of my generation played an important role in this unraveling: the priority accorded the autonomous individual in every sphere of life should not be underestimated—"doing your own thing" took protean form.

Today "natural" expression—in language as in art—is preferred to artifice. We unreflectively suppose that truth no less than beauty is conveyed more effectively thereby. Alexander Pope knew better.1 For many centuries in the Western tradition, how well you expressed a position corresponded closely to the credibility of your argument. Rhetorical styles might vary from the spartan to the baroque, but style itself was never a matter of indifference. And "style" was not just a well-turned sentence: poor expression belied poor thought. Confused words suggested confused ideas at best, dissimulation at worst. [more]

Overall, Mr. Judt has written an excellent series and, specifically, this essay is highly recommended. 

A Shot at "To Kill a Mockingbird"

I'm not sure what one receives in return for attacking a beloved work of American fiction, but then I'm not Allen Barra, author of a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, who has some rather unpleasant things to express about To Kill a Mockingbird.  For example:

In all great novels there is some quality of moral ambiguity, some potentially controversial element that keeps the book from being easily grasped or explained. One hundred years from now, critics will still be arguing about the real nature of the relationship between Tom and Huck, or why Gatsby gazed at that green light at the end of the dock across the harbor. There is no ambiguity in "To Kill a Mockingbird"; at the end of the book, we know exactly what we knew at the beginning: that Atticus Finch is a good man, that Tom Robinson was an innocent victim of racism, and that lynching is bad. As Thomas Mallon wrote in a 2006 story in The New Yorker, the book acts as "an ungainsayable endorser of the obvious."

It's time to stop pretending that "To Kill a Mockingbird" is some kind of timeless classic that ranks with the great works of American literature. Its bloodless liberal humanism is sadly dated, as pristinely preserved in its pages as the dinosaur DNA in "Jurassic Park."

Harper Lee's contemporary and fellow Southerner Flannery O'Connor (and a far worthier subject for high-school reading lists) once made a killing observation about "To Kill a Mockingbird": "It's interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they are reading a children's book."

Fifty years later, we can concede both that Harper Lee's novel inspired a generation of adolescents and that Flannery O'Connor was right.  [more]

Well that's certainly harsh.  I'm not ready to wage an argument with Mr. Barra, but I do wish he wasn't so harsh about a book that most of America has read.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Somehow I don't think Mr. Jobs would approve.

It has come to light that the iPad comic book version of James Joyce's Ulysses has been redacted by Apple.  In all fairness, dear reader, we are not talking about the version that was banned in Boston some seventy-five years ago.  It's just a comic book and the whole story reeks of irony doesn't it? 

The work in question is Ulysses Seen which is amply explained and promoted here.  Let's hope that by the time Stephane Heuet's comic of Proust is available, it won't run into similar difficulties.  

Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky: What to read next

About a million years ago, when the internet was navigated with command line and one had to know what to do when confronted with "$" on the VT200 emulator, I joined a merry band of folks on a NYC community call Panix, still to this day, a high-quality, high-value vista on the internet superhighway.  Right away, I knew I was lost and needed help.  The Panix community was populated with Very Busy and Very Talented people, some of whom were happy to lend a hand to us hopeless newbies and clays was particuarly patient and helpful.  I came to learn that clays was the nom du net for Mr. Shirky who would become famous far beyond the Panix neighborhood. 

clays grew up and did a lot of good consulting work for, among others, Nokia, the BBC, Newscorp, Microsoft, BP, Global Business Network, the Library of Congress, the U.S. Navy, the Libyan government, and Lego.  Because he's a pretty good writer too, he's been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Times, Harvard Business Review and Wired.  He has a great perch at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University where Stacey Horn of EchoNYC     (another pioneer) has taught. 

Anyway, clays has already written a great book, Here Comes Everybody,  but his new book, Cognitive Surplus, looks to be even better.  Here's an extract from the flap copy:

Since we Americans were suburbanized and educated by the postwar boom, we've had a surfeit of intellect, energy, and time-what Shirky calls a cognitive surplus. But this abundance had little impact on the common good because television consumed the lion's share of it-and we consume TV passively, in isolation from one another. Now, for the first time, people are embracing new media that allow us to pool our efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind expanding-reference tools like Wikipedia-to lifesaving-such as Ushahidi.com, which has allowed Kenyans to sidestep government censorship and report on acts of violence in real time.

Shirky argues persuasively that this cognitive surplus-rather than being some strange new departure from normal behavior-actually returns our society to forms of collaboration that were natural to us up through the early twentieth century. He also charts the vast effects that our cognitive surplus-aided by new technologies-will have on twenty-first-century society, and how we can best exploit those effects. Shirky envisions an era of lower creative quality on average but greater innovation, an increase in transparency in all areas of society, and a dramatic rise in productivity that will transform our civilization.

The potential impact of cognitive surplus is enormous. As Shirky points out, Wikipedia was built out of roughly 1 percent of the man-hours that Americans spend watching TV every year. Wikipedia and other current products of cognitive surplus are only the iceberg's tip. Shirky shows how society and our daily lives will be improved dramatically as we learn to exploit our goodwill and free time like never before.

Okay, I'm hooked.  Can't wait.       

NYTimes, 4.19.10: Ex-Pat Paris as It Sizzled for One Literary Lioness

From today's NYTimes, a wonderful review of a new book, The Letters of Sylvia Beach.  Ms. Beach is the probably one of the most important figure in what we've come to call Modern Literature and, perhaps most famously, published James Joyce's Ulysses.  This was her "crowd"

Joyce, Stein, Pound Hemingway Fitzgerald and H.D. and many others. 

Beach was an unlikely champion of literary modernism. The daughter of a Presbyterian minister, she was the second of three daughters and grew up in Bridgeton and Princeton, N.J. She didn’t attend college but saw the world, working during World War I as a volunteer agricultural laborer in France and then as a Red Cross volunteer in Serbia. She was plucky. One letter home from Belgrade describes a springlike day ruined by the “bomby” air.

She was a bibliophile from an early age and debated opening a bookstore in New York or London. But in Paris she met and fell in love with a bookstore owner, Adrienne Monnier, who would become, Ms. Walsh writes in her introduction, “her lifelong personal and professional partner.” (This book’s dust jacket speaks of these women’s complicated “affair,” an odd phrase for a decades-long relationship. That phrase also goes farther than Beach does; she was reserved about her sexuality, and these letters are quite chaste.)

[more]

The Paris Review, 1988: The Interview w/ Mr. Stoppard

I can't imagine how I never came across this before, but I've discovered that The Paris Review did one of their "how-I-do-it" interviews with Mr. Stoppard.  This is from back in the Winter 1988 as Hapgood was about to be staged.  That's about six years after The Real Thing. 

From the interview:

As I was doing it I watched a documentary about Crick and Watson’s discovery of the structure of DNA—the double helix. There was only one way all the information they had could fit but they couldn’t figure out what it was. I felt the same. So the answer to your question is that the rehearsals are going well and enjoyably, but that I’m very busy with my pencil.

Here's a direct link to the .pdf 

NYBooks.com: 2.25.10 On Isaiah Berlin...

I should check, but I think I've already blogged here about my current reading, To the Finland Station, by Isaiah Berlin.  It is one of the major sources for Mr. Stoppard's trilogy, The Coast of Utopia.

But sharing my reading list with you isn't the point of this post.   Rather, I'm calling your attention, albeit belatedly, to two articles in the February 25, 2010 issue of The New York Review of Books.  In that issue are two brief sketches or reminiscences about Isaiah Berlin, one by Nicholas Kristof entitled Explorer and the other by Charles Rosen entitiled, Gossip.  These two stories are behind the paywall at NYBook.com, but just in can you are already smart enough to subcribe to NYRB online, here's the link to the stories.  (By the way, I'm not necessarily recommending the pay website for NYBR as I'm not sure it actually works right.)

The article in the dead tree edition is illustrated by the estimable Dominique Nabokov.  (Who for reasons beyond my understanding isn't included in Wikipedia and I'm far too lazy to even consider creating an article for her.)

Here are some snippets from the two articles that might inspire you to read more, or not.

No one surpasses Berlin as a guide through the tangled terrain of the twenty-first century.

<snip>

Berlin was a masterful historian and critic. He is widely known today for his brilliant essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” explicating the deep contradictions in Tolstoy’s genius, and he also breathed new life into many other great thinkers, from Machiavelli to Alexander Herzen. In particular, Berlin liked to explore the dark side—those philosophers who challenged the assumptions of the Enlightenment and, in some cases, laid the groundwork for modern totalitarian impulses. 

<snip>

“I am not a relativist,” he noted in “The Power of Ideas.” “I do not say ‘I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps.’” Finding the boundary between what can be tolerated with gritted teeth and what is morally intolerable may not be easy, but that does not mean that such a boundary does not exist.

<snip>

No author who has ever lived has shown such powers of insight into the variety of life—the differences, the contrasts, the collisions of persons and things and situations, each apprehended in its absolute uniqueness and conveyed with a degree of directness and a precision of concrete imagery to be found in no other writer. No one has ever excelled Tolstoy in expressing the specific flavour, the exact quality of a feeling—the degree of its “oscillation,” the ebb and flow, the minute movements (which Turgenev mocked as a mere trick on his part)—the inner and outer texture and “feel” of a look, a thought, a pang of sentiment, no less than of a specific situation, of an entire period, of the lives of individuals, families, communities, entire nations.

Nina Bourne ע״ה

Today's New York Times includes Nina Bourne's obituary.  Ms. Bourne was one of the great, if not the greatest, book publicists of all time.  (I worked for Lois Shapiro @ Dutton, so I know what I'm talking about.)  Ms. Bourne brought to market the Eloise books, Catch - 22, and all of Robert Caro's books.  --Just that would be a career. 

She also taught at the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Program where I was blessed enough to enjoy conversation with her over a glass of sherry. 

From the obituary:

Initially employed as a secretary to Richard Simon, one of the company’s two founders, she demonstrated a flair for writing advertising copy under the tutelage of the legendary Jack Goodman, whose restrained, even self-deprecatory, style influenced her deeply. On the side she wrote light verse, which The New Yorker published from time to time.

Ms. Bourne, fresh out of Radcliffe, gained entree into book publishing by writing a letter of application to Simon & Schuster in the form of a poem that presented her qualifications while weaving in the names of the company’s top writers and book titles.

[more]

J. D. Salinger, ע״ה

It would be entirely inappropriate for me to not mention the passing of J. D. Salinger especially as he has an important influence on my own writing.  But I'm an odd fan.  Catcher in the Rye is my least favorite of the Salinger canon.  Nine Stories, Raise High the Roofbeams... and Frannie and Zooey all appear on my list above Catcher in the Rye. 

For me, Salinger captured the isolation and frustration of gifted people making their way through a world that didn't quite live up to their exceptions and hopes.  In less capable hands, this friction between the world of the mind and the world of the real could come off as essentially elitist.  But Salinger was able to present different ways people can deal with that friction, from something self-destructive as a bullet to the brain to simple mental breakdowns, to finding a way to pass in this world.  Being smart, really smart wasn't necessarily an asset in Mr. Salinger's work. 

My guess is that Salinger will become part of the Canon.  My second daughter is taking her turn at Steinbeck's The Pearl.  How that became part of the curriculum, I'll never know.  I can hope that one day Steinbeck's seat will be vacated and Salinger can enjoy the view from he orchestra. 

Color me surprised...

As I skipped through the pages of this past Sunday's New York Times Book Review, I reached the final article, an essay that's usually worth the look.  And this week did not disappoint. 

I can't remember when I became attached to Fowler but I suspect it has something to do with one of the many articles I've read about the inner workings of the New Yorker.  But it had to be during my undergraduate days because the fly-leaf is inscribed with my name and student ID number.  One of my dearest friends from those halcyon days sent me a gift of three books, one being The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, and this book I've torn through and have re-read several passages already.  What's fascinating about the book is the comparision and contrast is makes between English and other languages. 

And what we find is that few, precious few of the wise people in positions of influence put their foot down and try to stomp out a certain type of usage.  For example, I recently became obsessed with the usage of "more: and "over."  Example:

The charity raised more than $3,000 for the orphans.

The charity raised over $3,000 for the orphans.

If you look it up in any book you'll probably find the same thing I do:   The second construction is not correct, but if you try to change it people will think you're a prig so get over it. 

NYTimes, 11.3.9: Lament on the Fading Culture of the Printed Word

Goodbye to All That

Over the years, how many people have read Joan Didion’s pointed, moody, celebrated essays and come to New York in the hope of writing some of their own? The path of those would-be writers is patently stubborn, given the tone Ms. Didion strikes in the essay so many name as their favorite, “Goodbye to All That.” It is a famous elegy for the passing of youth, but also a catalog of Manhattan’s enervating clichés, and, implicitly, a rejection of the New York literary scene she inhabited.

[more]

I arrived in NYC in 1981 along with most of the rest of the herd from the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course.  Most of us found work.  I think I held the record for one of the first to find a job:  three weeks.  Bad then, everyone was incessantly talking about how bad things were, but, in reflection, they were so bad afterall, not compared to today. 

Overall, I feel the same way I did then:  If one is very smart and is willing to work very hard, one can find work.  For everyone else, not so much. 

I might have found someone even more obssessed about Tom Stoppard than I am.

The Daily Telegraph, 7.6.9:  Tom Stoppard is the greatest living playwright

A while ago, I blogged effusively about Tom Stoppard. I recalled, in particular, staggering out of a performance of Arcadia 15 years ago, convinced that it was the supreme theatrical work of our era. One or two of you felt I was laying it on a bit thick so, now that the play has reopened, I thought I’d have another go.

[more]

Flannery O'Connor: On Mystery.

The New York Review of Books has the Obligatory Large Roundup Following a New Biography of an Author.  This issue, it's Flannery O'Connor's turn following the publication of the new biography by Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor.  There are a couple of gems in the article by the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates.  (What a great pairing:  Oates and O'Connor.) 

Here's what I want to pass on to you:

First, Oates comments on the fact that of O'Connnor's milleiu, including Capote and McCullers, O'Connor seems to be the one that is surviving into another generation. 

Then, there's this from one of Ms. O'Connor's letters:

If the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery....

Then, there's this:

Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

After reading Ms. Oate's piece, I was struck by how hard O'Connor struggled with a lifetime of illness, how devoted she was to her Catholicism and how solitary and isolated she was from the rest of the world.  It seems to me to be a life that was ripe with tragedy and yet, she created works of art that transcend time, space, background and so much more.  That's a life any one should be proud to live. 

Passport, please: Travels in the Republic of Letters.

I read a review of this book in the Wall Street Journal, where one frequently finds thoughts about thoughtful books.  This book is Worlds Made by Words and everything about it strikes me as very interesting.  this is from the Wall Street Journal review:

From the early 15th century until late in the 18th, such scholars formed what Anthony Grafton, in "Worlds Made by Words," calls the "Republic of Letters." It was a peculiar republic: "

It had no borders, no government, and no capital." It fostered a lofty notion of equality among the learned but stooped at times to "grubby practices," ostracizing those who seemed to flout its (unwritten) protocols.

And this there's this bit of description Amazon posts about the book:

In this book Anthony Grafton lets us in on one of the great secrets of scholars and intellectuals: although scholars lead solitary lives in order to win independence of mind, they also enjoy the conviviality of sharing a project sustained by common ideals, practices, and institutions. It’s like Masonry, but without the secret handshakes.

Grafton reveals the microdynamics of the scholarly life through a series of essays on institutions and on scholars ranging from early modern polymaths to modern intellectual historians to American thinkers and writers. He takes as his starting point the republic of letters—that loose society of intellectuals that first took shape in the sixteenth century and continued into the eighteenth. Its inhabitants were highly original, individual thinkers and writers. Yet as Grafton shows, they were all formed, in some way, by the very groups and disciplines that they set out to build.

In our noisy, caffeinated world it has never been more challenging to be a scholar. When many of our fellow citizens seem to have forgotten why we collect books in the buildings we call libraries, Grafton’s engaging, erudite essays could be a rallying cry for the revival of the liberal arts.

Now that's reads very appealing.

And then there's this bit, again, from the Wall Street Journal review:

In "The Public Intellectual and the Private Sphere," Mr. Grafton evokes the intense reaction that Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" provoked among Jewish intellectuals when it began appearing in 1963. He even revisits his own family table. Samuel Grafton, the author's father and a respected journalist, tried to interview Arendt for Look magazine, sending her pages of hard questions. Arendt refused to meet with him.

Mr. Grafton reconstructs this episode through his father's letters and notes -- the article was written but never published -- and his own recollections. Mr. Grafton is fair to Arendt, perhaps too fair, acknowledging her formidable intellect while attempting to set her outraged attacks on the Judenrat -- the Jewish councils compelled by the Nazis to assist in selections for death-camp transports -- in some sort of nuanced context. Strangely, he fails to mention her postwar, behind-the-scenes efforts on behalf of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, an unrepentant Nazi who had once been her lover. Arendt's arrogance comes through in his essay but not her duplicity.

Oh, my.  We like that last line, don't we? 

Okay, let's put this book on our list. 

James Purdy, of blessed memory.

I must confess straightaway, that I haven't read any of Mr. Purdy's work.  I think I'll fix that, and I'll let you know how that works out.  But in the meantime, I came across Mr. Purdy's obituary and found within it certain gems such as this:

Wayward and unclassifiable, Mr. Purdy, the author of the novels “Malcolm” and “The Nephew,” labored at the margins of the literary mainstream, inspiring veneration or disdain. His nearly 20 novels and numerous short stories and plays either enchanted or baffled critics with their gothic treatment of small-town innocents adrift in a corrupt and meaningless world, his distinctive blend of plain speech with ornate, florid locutions, and the hallucinatory quality of his often degraded scenes.

My goodness.  what wouldn't any of us give to leave this as a legacy?  So we should note that William Grimes wrote the obituary, someone who writes restaurant reviews and obituaries for the NYTimes.  (And there must be a story in Mr. Grimes, chosen specialization.) 

Here's another extract from the obituary:

Mr. Purdy, whose view of American culture was not optimistic, seemed to regard rejection as a badge of honor. “I don’t think I’d like it if people liked me,” he told one interviewer. “I’d think that something had gone wrong.”

And this:

“Reputations are made here, as in Russia, on political respectability, or by commercial acceptability,” he once said. “The worse the author, the more he is known.”

[Link to the obituary in the NYTimes.]

Harlan Ellison: The Irritable Man

It's probably been too long since I've read science fiction.  I took an exit off that highway when I reached Kurt Vonnegut and never really returned to that road.  Bethatasitmay, I quite enjoyed Harlan Ellison who has consistently and persistently complains that he doesn't write science fiction but then again, it turns out he complains about a lot of things and that's the topic of a very nice profile about Harlan Ellison in the blog, Nextbook and you can read it here.  Here's an excerpt: 

He writes shtick. “I’m Looking for Kadak” (a story in Wandering Stars) follows Evsise, a blue, eleven-armed Jew, as he travels around the planet of Zsouchmuhn searching for Kadak, who hasn’t been seen since he got fed up and renounced his faith, seventeen years before, during Purim services. The nine remaining (blue, eleven-armed) Jews on Zsouchmuhn need Kadak to complete their minyan so that they can sit shivah for the planet, which is soon being hauled to another solar system.

And here's a bonus:  This is an interview conducted by Kurt Andersen of Harlan Ellison.  Kurt Andersen is another of my favorites and always puts a very nice finish on all his work. 

 

The Mechanics' Institute Library: Forgotten Classics.

The Mechanic's Institute Library is almost the last of the indulgences I allow myself.  It is a private library in San  Francisco, located at Fifty-Seven Post Street.  I justify my membership by using the library rather like an shared office in downtown San Francisco, a place to meet people and relax before or after meetings elsewhere in the city.

The library has many charms, chief among them is that it's the home of the oldest chess club in North America (take that, New York) and it has some very lively book groups especially including a long-standing Proust book group. 

The library has just announced the formation of another book group, this one titled Forgotten Classics and I'm positive you can divine the focus of the group from its appellation (eventhough I think there's an inherent contradiction).  This stalwart band of readers are tackling Vanity Fair on the evening of February 5th and I applaud them for their dedication to their mission.  Next up are Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed, Honore de Balzac's Pere Goriot and Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavrandatter:  The Bridal Wreath, The Mistress of Husaby and The Cross.  (We think there's a comparative lit major in the room.) 

Should you ever find yourself in San Francisco and you need to retreat to a swath of civilization to catch your breath, find your bearings and collect yourself, you certainly could do worse than The Mechanic's Institute Library, my desk in San Francisco.

Stoppard in Conversation with the Hartford Courant.

Another posting in the vein of All Things Stoppard.

Stoppard has an affection for the newspaper profession, having left school in England at 17 to be a journeyman journalist in Bristol in 1954. "I loved it," he says. "Being a junior reporter on a morning newspaper in a city of a quarter of a million is pretty glamorous compared with being in boarding school. People I went to school with all disappeared into offices."

When asked if his news writing shaped his playwriting, he says, "I may be the last person to know that answer because I'm not that self-aware. But just the daily practice and necessity of making decent sentences and finding the right word for something, that in itself must have been helpful.

...

"But more than that, I think the arts come from somewhere else. A meaningless phrase, I know. But. I don't think the arts are something you teach and learn. But. I'm missing the point I'm trying to make — which is that there is something about creativity that escapes the physical world, even escapes mathematical law. Artists aren't subject to that. It's hard to explain."

But that doesn't stop Stoppard from trying.

"When you're working well, and this may be true for all kinds of disciplines, you take leave of yourself in some sense in order to make that [thing happen]. I think one benefits from the subconscious in a very important way when you do creative work. What I'm aware of is that I don't know how I do what I do. I really don't know how it's done."

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Wall Street Journal: Lessons From The Great Books Generation.

These were not just any books, but "Great Books of the Western World," marketed by Encyclopaedia Britannica. The authors included Aristotle, Aquinas, Milton, Locke, Hume and Mill along with some especially dense texts such as Apollonius' "On Conic Sections." The celebrities who bought the special Founders' Edition at $500 per leather-bound set included David Ben-Gurion, Frank Capra, Marshall Field, Conrad Hilton, Henry Luce and Walter Lippmann.

The rest of the article.

Dear Mr. Crovitz: 

In 1975, I was a sophomore at Northside High School in Fort Smith, Arkansas and intensely aware that I was well beyond the pale of intellectual America and, probably, the civilized world.  Then, I found "that low door in the wall" through which I gained admittance into that world I yearned for.  In my sophomore year, I took an advanced placement English class based on The Great Books. 

That year, we followed a program leading us through those Great Books and the course resolved with each of us using the Syntopicon to study a single great idea through history.  In my case, the idea was truth.  And I'm writing to tell you this about the experience:

Standing in front of a set of Great Books, even in the foothills of the Ozarks, I could see the breadth and depth of What Is Important.  It brought all the best and greatest ideas, literally, into my grasp and suddenly, I knew it might be possible to learn something that could get me somewhere.  The Great Books defined what it was to be learned and illuminated a path leading towards that destination.  Taking that course gave me the confidence that "I can do this." 

Due to an early romance with Journalism, I attended the University of Missouri and promptly enrolled in its two-year Humanities program, a study of Western Thought.  And following my years in Missouri, I confidently enrolled at Radcliffe to learn how books are published.  And I held my own in a small class of enormous intellects gathered up to be shepherded into Book Publishing and become its stewards.

Today, I just read too much and try my best to pass along my enthusiasm.  Alas, it is a challenge.  My daughter doesn't "get" Romeo and Juliet even when I screen the Bas Luhrmann vision.  And when I review the table of contents of her English reader, I admire the work done to make it up-to-date, but sigh about what's been left behind.

Last week, I read that Milton's Paradise Lost has been translated into English prose to make it easier for people to read.  Oh dear.  This month, Book Publishers are deciding to stop buying manuscripts.  Oh dear.  And one of my colleagues from Radcliffe sent me a DVD of the movie Fahrenheit 451 for my birthday this year.  --And the sly joke wasn't lost on me at all.

Best regards,
Brian D. Johnson
California.

Lost in Translation.

As I've been following the adventures of my sophomore-year (high school) daughter studying Shakespeare, I've been given again to think about the language, its meaning and accessibility.

In the study of Torah, we learn -- very quickly -- that any translation out of Hebrew is reading an entirely different text -- all but stripped of the meaning except for the grossest elements of plot and character.  Adding even vowels and cantillation mutes the original. 

Having read Proust and Cervantes in translation, I am convinced that I haven't read these masters at all.  In school, I read Chaucer in Middle English and, apart from feeling quite smug about that, I can now bore people at cocktail parties by reciting the first forty lines in a sonorous and  ponderous voice.  But I do feel that reading it in the 'original' gave me a much better understanding of the work.  (Ask me about The Faerie Queene and I'm likely to give you a different answer.) 

Then comes along this bit of news recently posted on a New York Times blog:  Paradise Lost has just been published into translation. 

From the article: 

Danielson is well aware that it might seem odd to translate a poem into the language in which it is already written. Dryden turned some of “Paradise Lost” into rhymed verse for a libretto while Milton was still alive; but that was an adaptation, not a translation. There are of course the Classic Comics and Cliff Notes precedents; but these are abridgments designed for the students who don’t have time to, or don’t want to, read the book. Danielson’s is a word-for-word translation, probably longer than the original since its prose unpacks a very dense poetry. The value of his edition, he says, is that it “invites more readers than ever before to enjoy the magnificent story — to experience the grandeur, heroism, pathos, beauty and grace of Milton’s inimitable work.

Danielson borrows the word “inimitable” from John Wesley, who in 1763 was already articulating the justification for a prose translation of the poem. Wesley reports that in the competition for the title of world’s greatest poem, “the preference has generally been given by impartial judges to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’” but, he laments, “this inimitable work amidst all its beauties is unintelligible to [an] abundance of readers.” Two hundred and fifty years later, Harold Bloom made the same observation. Ordinary readers, he said, now “require mediation to read ‘Paradise Lost’ with full appreciation.”

I am vain, but I'm not so stupid as to disagree with Harold Bloom, but you must forgive me a moment to mourn the passage of another great work into the mists. 

The Guardian, 9.6.8: You can't help being what you write

After 40 years, the problem remains, each time. You can't start writing until you know what you're doing, and you don't know what you're doing until you start writing. I still have to resist the false intuition that I need to know as much as possible in advance. The essential thing is to know as little as possible. Ideally, when things fall out well, you shouldn't feel clever, you should feel lucky.

Highly recommended. 

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The Carnegie Library.

I grew up in the Carnegie Library in Fort Smith.  Now, it's the Fort Smith Library.

I remember the wooden floors, the enormous wooden rails on the stairs leading up to the children's room, and the fact that it was so convient that the Dr. Seuss books were shelved so that I could easily reach them.  My favorite was his first book, And to Think That I Saw it on Mulbury Street.  My second favorite book was his second, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.  I regarded the Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, and its successors as the author lowering his sights and playing to the crowd.  My library card was pale blue with rounded corners and there was a metal tag affixed to it.   I can remember exactly how the library smelled. 

Books also give off special smells. According to a recent survey of French students, 43 percent consider smell to be one of the most important qualities of printed books—so important that they resist buying odorless electronic books. CaféScribe, a French on-line publisher, is trying to counteract that reaction by giving its customers a sticker that will give off a fusty, bookish smell when it is attached to their computers.

From The Lbrary in the New Age, The New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 10, June 12, 2008

The Carnegie Library in Fort Smith was one of four libraries endowed by Carnegie in Arkansas.  The four Carnegie Libraries in Arkansas pale in comparison to the the 165 Carnegie Libraries in Indiana. 

And in 1919, when the last grant was given, more than half (1,689) libraries in the U.S. were Carnegie Libraries. In all, Carnegie endowed 2,509 libraries around the world. 

Carnegie Libraries advanced the innovation of open stacks, shelved books open to the public, something we all take for granted now.  Imagine. 

Andrew Carnegie was a wicked man in many respects, but I can't help but second the person who called him the patron saint of the library.  I would not be me, if it weren't for the Carnegie Library and the Fort Smith Public Library.  It's impossible for me to calculate how many hours, days I spent there.  For my mother, it was a combination of childcare and a priceless gift that created ... me. 

In New York, the first place I lived was the Harvard Club which is, basically, a library.  It was all leather and cozy and that summer tasted like Tom Collins.  The New York Public Library had a system whereby the copy machines worked when a special token was inserted in it, a token the library sold.  I discovered, by accident, that the token was identical to a subway token in every respect except for it's price which was fifteen cents less and I arbitraged that spread to pay for my newspapers and magazines and coffee.

Now, in my wallet I only keep three cards:  My Amex, bank card, insurance card and my Library card and I keep the library card so that its covers the others and it is the first thing someone sees when I open my wallet.

In San Francisco, the metropolitan center I live next to, it took me some years before I discovered The Mechanic's Institute Library, a private library I joined about four years ago.  Professionally, I was in need of something like a office pied-a-terre, someplace quiet where I could cool my heels, perhaps do some work, and maybe even use for meetings.  Hotel lobbies are sometimes good for this and I've used many fine hotel lobbies in my time, but there's something about San Francisco hotel lobbies that don't especially strike me as welcoming or conducive to day-long sitdowns the way many NYC hotel lobbies are.  Coffee shops are far to noisy, and the rent on a chair measured in vente lattes is neither healthy for my physical or financial self.  I was familiar with the idea of private libraries and was glad of heart when I discovered The Mechanic's Institute Library as it is Very Affordable, centrally located, chock-ful of character, has requisite technological conveniences and is quite lovely to lounge around in.  I've taken the family there for some of the events hosted there and almost joined the Proust Society that meets there every month (but declined as I had finished my marathon and, frankly, needed to put that obsession behind me for a while).  The oldest chess club is affiliated with the library and meets in rooms that are consecutive from the library and the players there add even more color to the library.  I keep my library card to Mechanic's Institute Library in my back-up wallet in my bag.   Everyone  reading this who lives in  or  near San Francisco should subscribe to and support the library.   

Finally (and I almost forgot this), I've embarked on a project for my synagogue's library.  As the library is without a set of Talmud, and as Talmud is almost essential to the deep study of Torah, I've launched a fundraiser to acquire a set of the "Oral Torah" and perhaps even contract with student librarian to help our library along a bit.

And this is all true.

Regarding Elizabeth Hardwick...

The following is from  Darryl Pinckney's essay in the Valentine's Day edition of the New York Review of Books.  This is what it means to read.   He quotes Ms. Hardwick in her class at Barnard: 

"The only way to learn to write is to read." She brought in Boris Pasternak's Safe Conduct, translated by Beatrice Scott. She said she hated to do something so "pre-Gutenberg," and then began to read to us in a voice that was surprisingly high, loud, and suddenly very Southern:

The beginning of April surprised Moscow in the white stupor of returning winter. On the seventh it began to thaw for the second time, and on the fourteenth when Mayakovsky shot himself, not everyone had yet become accustomed to the novelty of spring.

When she got to the line about the black velvet of the talent in himself, she stopped and threw herself back in her chair, curls trembling. Either we got it or we didn't, but it was clear from the way she struck her breastbone that to get it was, for her, the gift of life.

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