Envoi

Since the first discovery of the arts, war, commerce, and religious zeal have diffused, among the savages of the Old and New World, those inestimable gifts: they have been successively propagated; they can never be lost. We may therefore acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion that every age of the world has increased, and still increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human race.

Gibbon, "General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West".

Only a few days left

Of the WKCR Bach Festival, that is. It ends Tuesday. Click on the link to listen.

(Thanks to The Agonist for reminding me.)

Great books!

Via Arts & Letters Daily, a review of a book about the Harvard Classics' successor project -- The Great Books of the Western World. (You must say the title in your deepest voice.) It's interesting. Here's a quote:

Beam is a columnist for the Boston Globe, not a cultural theorist. He correctly locates the Great Books among other middle class diversions like the Saturday Review of Literature and the Book of the Month Club. Newly affluent Americans wanted the trappings of learning – and the faux-leather volumes of the Great Books of the Western World fit the bill.

But beyond this, Beam doesn’t give much consideration to Hutchins’s brand of cultural uplift. Does establishing a canon of cultural greatness aid the preservation or defence of democracy? It’s not an easy question to answer...

First of all, I totally see the Harvard Classics as a piece of upwardly mobile furniture -- the equivalent of something cool from Pottery Barn. (In fact they'd be great in the background of Pottery Barn photo shoots.) I'm sure that's why my great-grandfather 1) bought them but 2) never seems to have opened them.

But the question of whether cultural greatness = more democracy is an easy question to answer. The answer is "No." It seems to me, after a year of reading this stuff, that there's nothing inherently democratic, or inherently undemocratic for that matter, about cultural greatness. The instinct to make culture is universal and will persist under almost all political conditions -- except famine, maybe. The twentieth century is full of cultured barbarism; to avoid the obvious Furtwanglery example, look what happened to all the Russian arts institutions that only flourished under Communism.

Personally I'm skeptical of whether we can derive any political use from culture. Or to shade this statement a little bit, that we can derive any consistent or predictable use from it. It's part of my greater skepticism of the "Good For You" argument that seems to be the way they sold these Great Books series. Not that high culture, which we might define as works that have trouble paying their own way, isn't Good For You -- it's just that if it were only Good For You I'd say the hell with it.

Attention 18th Century Fans!

Addison and Steele's "Spectator" is available as a blog.

17th century fans will have to continue to content themselves with Pepys (which my dad loved).

Noted

Our Girl In Chicago, who really should post more, has an excellent appreciation of "To Autumn" (dealt by me very superfically here last month). This is how it's supposed to be done

OT: You know you're in Los Angeles when

1. You get mail from the "Gregory Peck Reading Series" from the LA Public Library.

2. You open the envelope and the top third of the mailer says "Presents Robert Wagner and Jill St-John"

3. You unfold the mailer and it says, "Reading from A.R. Gurney's Play "Love Letters."

But of course. I can't help thinking that there are two random actors checking a book out of the L.A. Public Library right now who you'd rather see doing this; and besides, I think of "Love Letters" as something you see a poster for at a playhouse in a summer resort, with people from, like, "Law & Order" in one or both of the roles. It's actually kind of surprising it hasn't been made fun of in passing on "The Simpsons."

I confess to knowing nothing about the play, however. Is it any good? Why don't you ever see it done with a gay couple? Wouldn't more people show up if "Love Letters" was being read by George Takei and, say, Richard Chamberlain? Is it because the plot hinges on something like, I don't know, breast augmentation? (I've been in Hollywood too long.)

So many questions. So little interest in looking up the answers myself.

Two links from the aggregator

• Objects in this close reading may be less significant than they appear.

• From Quick Study:

Can anyone argue with this point by Doug?

I think newspapers have hurt themselves greatly by the ways they've come to think about arts coverage. There's a huge audience out there, but newspapers have pursued a dumb strategy when it comes to A&E coverage.

I've never really considered myself a journalist, at least not primarily, but have enjoyed writing for newspapers over the years (even at the cost of having to put up, from time to time, with the usual cheap and ignorant condescension by academic towards reporters); and the piecemeal destruction of serious cultural coverage by newspapers has been painful to watch, since it is often accompanied by efforts to be that much more "hip, hot, and happenin'" in ways that are almost always pretty cringe-inducing.

You'd think, what with newspapers becoming a luxury good, they'd try to focus more on the carriage trade; but the opposite appears to be happening. I suspect that all newspapers, outside of NYC, should adopt a your-readers-are-our-shoplifters attitude -- or, go completely tabloid and lurid. LA, in particular, could use a tabloid, because it would provide narrative for a metro area that could use it.

OT: George and Ira Eliot

So Beche-la-mer over at Two Cents (a blog that linked here, thanks very much) notes that it's both George Gershwin's and T.S. Eliot's birthday today. She wrote this:

One of these mornings
You're going to rise up singing,
Then you'll spread your wings
And you'll take to the sky.
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.

And I reply thusly:

I'll build a stairway to paradise
At the first turning of the second stair
With a new step every day
I turned and saw below
I'm going to get there at any price
The same shape twisted on the banister
Step aside, I'm on my way
Under the vapor in the fetid air
I've got the blues, and up above it's so fair
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
Shoes, come on and carry me there
The deceitful face of hope and despair
I'll build a stairway to paradise
At the second turning of the second stair
With a new step every day.

One could do this all day.

Classics in action

From Dial "M" for Musicology on old Nonesuch records:

"There was a triumvirate: Nonesuch, Penguin Books, and Dover. Impossibly obscure stuff reprinted and made available to you—you! The impoverished student with bizarre interests! You have friends and benefactors!—for a song. Penguin: Bede, Celtic Miscellany, Chaucer (that one wasn’t a very good translation, actually), Dante, Virgil, Pliny the Younger, Adam Smith…for a song, folks. The stuff you only see cited elsewhere is yours! Dover: music availability, old books, Debussy’s M. Croche, Jamews Huneker on Chopin… Surely they’re taking a loss on this stuff! I worked fast food jobs for a while, and would bring Penguin classics to get me through. Remember Macchiavelli’s account, from his exile from Florence, about dressing in his best clothes every evening and dwelling among the Ancients and conversing with them? That was me at 19, minus the good clothes—Virgil and Pliny on my break, and the miserable Burger King on Holt Avenue in Pomona would fade into invisibility around me. I mean, come on! Pliny was talking about aqueducts!"

He's right about the translations, too.

...And Grind The Children Who Must Mind The Thought

When I went to look this poem up, one of the google hits was a blog that had the attitude of oh-the-bloggers-are-quoting-this-poem-again, but even so I don't care if it's a cliche. I have more of a respect for cliches, in fact, from doing this project, but that's a subject for another day.

My own children are past this point but they do start new schools today.

September, The First Day Of School

I

My child and I hold hands on the way to school,
And when I leave him at the first-grade door
He cries a little but is brave; he does
Let go. My selfish tears remind me how
I cried before that door a life ago.
I may have had a hard time letting go.

Each fall the children must endure together
What every child also endures alone:
Learning the alphabet, the integers,
Three dozen bits and pieces of a stuff
So arbitrary, so peremptory,
That worlds invisible and visible

Bow down before it, as in Joseph's dream
The sheaves bowed down and then the stars bowed down
Before the dreaming of a little boy.
That dream got him such hatred of his brothers
As cost the greater part of life to mend,
And yet great kindness came of it in the end.

II

A school is where they grind the grain of thought,
And grind the children who must mind the thought.
It may be those two grindings are but one,
As from the alphabet come Shakespeare's Plays,
As from the integers comes Euler's Law,
As from the whole, inseperably, the lives,

The shrunken lives that have not been set free
By law or by poetic phantasy.
But may they be. My child has disappeared
Behind the schoolroom door. And should I live
To see his coming forth, a life away,
I know my hope, but do not know its form

Nor hope to know it. May the fathers he finds
Among his teachers have a care of him
More than his father could. How that will look
I do not know, I do not need to know.
Even our tears belong to ritual.
But may great kindness come of it in the end.

-- Howard Nemerov

Dilettanti!

The Golden Asses, 1761. Little did they know that the painting would come to reside in crazy America.

Yesterday, while I had the pleasure of a notes call, the wife and son went to the Getty Villa out Mailbu way, and it turns out their current exhibition is about the Society of Dilettanti, 18th-century British dudes who gave our language the word "dilettante," like so:

The Society of Dilettanti was dedicated to "encouraging, at home, a taste for those objects which had contributed to their entertainment abroad." The group's name introduced the word dilettante (from the Italian dilettare, "to delight") into English and celebrated the interests of the amateur. From informal gatherings in Italy to ceremonial meetings in London, the Dilettanti cultivated a sense of kinship and conviviality. Seria ludo (Serious Matters in a Playful Vein), one of the group's principal toasts, expressed its blend of the learned and the lively.

To delight! Seria ludo! Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you today proud to be a dilettante.

(They also had their ribald/pictures of phalluses side, according to my wife, but my son skipped that room to go look at the gardens.)

OT: Still life with children

My one-year-old niece is staggering around while the grownups try to put themselves in the same condition. Gin-vermouth is 5:1, to those scoring at home.

OT: Drunk history

Just because I haven't put up any videos in a little while, here's the story of A. Hamilton:

OT: A real classic

My favorite books are appreciated in the Wall Street Journal by Joseph Epstein (who predictably gives a damn-hippies sting at the end, but I pay it no mind).

Hello Sweeneyites

I see where my old friend Julia Sweeney, with whom I have shared the occasional Bacardi, has sent folks my way. Hello, and enjoy the dilletantism!

Today's reading (the Koran!) to follow sometime, maybe tonight.

OT: Clever

And a book I've always wanted to read, although it will probably have to wait until next year. Unless someone wants to summarize it for me, hint hint...

(Via Edge of the American West.)

Thank you Overthinking it

for my new visitors. I am always happy to be linked to by a blog that has "Anna Nicole Smith" and "dialectic" as two of its tags. (They recently got a lot of traffic from their "Lord of the Rings Nazgul Vs. A Labradoodle" post being linked to on IMDB.)

OT (kind of)

Via Crooked Timber, a parody philosophy exam which are also generating principles for my daily posts:

Philosophy Exam – First Year

Answer two questions

Two hours

1. Patch together some things you have heard in lectures, in no particular order.

2. Has this question vexed philosophers for centuries?

3. Create an impression of original thought by impassioned scribbling (your answer may be ungrammatical, illegible, or both).

There's more over there -- it didn't seem fair to excerpt the whole thing.

Also worth noting

Readers who enjoy this kind of high culture jazz may also like Arts & Letters Daily. It's a bit Tory in its sensibility -- which to me is a feature, not a bug, even when I don't agree with the point of view.

More upper-middlebrow YouTube

That Kant ad made me think of "Strindberg and Helium," so here's one:



Although it seems antithetical to the whole Strindberg project, enjoy!