October 22: Victorian Must -- the worst fragrance ever

Is "Vanity Fair" any good? I can't imagine that it is after reading this excerpt from Thackeray's essay on Jonathan Swift's love problems. Note that this is economizing, Harvard Classics style -- this way they shove two classic authors in one entry. Way back earlier this year I read Robert Louis Stevenson on Pepys. What's interesting is that Thackeray and Stevenson smell much more strongly of camphor and lavender, than the even older authors they write about (disclaimer: in fact I haven't read that much Swift, so I 'm bullshitting a little (more than usual)). Here's an example of Thackeray, as intricate as a little old lady's doily:

Who hasn’t in his mind an image of Stella? Who does not love her? Fair and tender creature: pure and affectionate heart! Boots it to you, now that you have been at rest for a hundred and twenty years, not divided in death from the cold heart which caused yours, whilst it beat, such faithful pangs of love and grief—boots it to you now, that the whole world loves and deplores you? Scarce any man, I believe, ever thought of that grave, that did not cast a flower of pity on it, and write over it a sweet epitaph.

"Boots it to you" and "whilst"? Reading stuff like this, my instinct is to run sprinting for the nearest absinthe bottle, crying, "Are there no workhouses?" With authors like these, it's amazing the British even had an empire, but maybe wars in malaria-ridden foreign lands start to look good, when the alternative is staying in England and reading magazines with articles by Thackeray.

About Swift's love life, which I guess is one of those things literate people used to know about but now require research (someday Yoko Ono will be like that), I have no opinion. It seems a little creepy that the love of his life is a girl he started tutoring when she was 8, but these things happen -- ask Woody Allen. But I'm sort of on Swift's side now, just because I hate to see him written about the way he is in today's, I mean yesterday's, reading.

October 5: Can we have class outside?

Sure, they look attentive. But they're actually looking at the reflection in the window of a guy doing devil sticks.

The Shorter version of today's reading, by Cardinal Newman (though written before his title, I believe, back when he was just plain Larry Oliver*) is that ancient Athens was awesome. This can't be good news for those who are trying to beat back the Newman is gay rumor:

But a freshman like Eunapius soon got experience for himself of the ways and manners prevalent in Athens. Such a one as he had hardly entered the city, when he was caught hold of by a party of the academic youth, who proceeded to practise on his awkwardness and his ignorance.

However, as to this Eunapius, Proæresius took a fancy to the boy, and told him curious stories about Athenian life. He himself had come up to the University with one Hephæstion, and they were even worse off than Cleanthes the Stoic; for they had only one cloak between them, and nothing whatever besides, except some old bedding; so when Proæresius went abroad, Hephæstion lay in bed, and practised himself in oratory; and then Hephæstion put on the cloak, and Proæresius crept under the coverlet.

Of course, what can you expect, right? When in Greece, etc. And speaking of Greece, one of the downsides of the otherwise perfect Athenian campus is that it was located, literally, in a shithole:

Learned writers assure us distinctly that the houses of Athens were for the most part small and mean; that the streets were crooked and narrow; that the upper stories projected over the roadway; and that staircases, balustrades, and doors that opened outwards, obstructed it;—a remarkable coincidence of description. I do not doubt at all, though history is silent, that that roadway was jolting to carriages, and all but impassable; and that it was traversed by drains, as freely as any Turkish town now.

But it doesn't matter, not to Newman, because you didn't come here for the wireless in the dorm or the meal plan, dammit:

It is but a crib or kennel,—in which he sleeps when the weather is inclement or the ground damp; in no respect a home. And he goes out of doors, not to read the day’s newspaper, or to buy the gay shilling volume, but to imbibe the invisible atmosphere of genius, and to learn by heart the oral traditions of taste...No awful arch, no window of many-coloured lights marks the seats of learning there or elsewhere; philosophy lives out of doors. No close atmosphere oppresses the brain or inflames the eyelid; no long session stiffens the limbs. Epicurus is reclining in his garden; Zeno looks like a divinity in his porch; the restless Aristotle, on the other side of the city, as if in antagonism to Plato, is walking his pupils off their legs in his Lyceum by the Ilyssus.

Yes -- they have class outside; the most distracting form of class, in my opinion (though classrooms in the age of texting must also rank up there). Isn't it wonderful? Short answer: no. In my opinion.

Leaving Academe aside, this passage does bring up one of the key differences between L.A. and other cities, which is that your place is less likely to be a hovel than it is in other, more crowded cities -- the apartment we owned in Brooklyn would seem minuscule to us after all this time here. But the advantage of the laughably tiny urban apartment is that it makes you go out, makes you be a public person. Here you can just get drunk in your backyard and it's perfectly pleasant. And when you get drunk in someone else's backyard, you have to get yourself driven home. It's not authentically Athenian. Newman wouldn't approve.



*Joke stolen by me, but I can't remember from whom. Also, h/t to my dad for the America link.

June 12: I'm in love with Massachusetts (Short post)

Today this man:

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.

Somehow reminds me of this man:

I'm in love with modern moonlight
128 when it's dark outside
I'm in love with Massachusetts
I'm in love with the radio on

YouTube excerpts of Thoreau live are hard to come by, but here's a version of fellow New England eccentric Jonathan Richman:



My only other note is that Thoreau, like a punk songwriter, likes to say the same thing over and over:

No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non fit.

Thoreau, again like Jonathan Richman, wants you to see what he's driving at.

June 21: Reading is hard, which makes us awesome for doing it

I kind of thing they should have had this reading by John Ruskin as early in January, to set the tone for the year and make you think you're doing something more than what you actually are:

When you come to a good book, you must ask yourself, “Am I inclined to work as an Australian miner would? Are my pickaxes and shovels in good order, and am I in good trim myself, my sleeves well up to the elbow, and my breath good, and my temper?” And, keeping the figure a little longer, even at the cost of tiresomeness, for it is a thoroughly useful one, the metal you are in search of being the author’s mind or meaning, his words are as the rock which you have to crush and smelt in order to get at it. And your pickaxes are your own care, wit, and learning; your smelting-furnace is your own thoughtful soul.

And your fellow-readers? Those are the guys who are going to knife you in your sleep and steal your theses. And college towns, they're like those mining towns where you can get cheap beer and floozies in exchange for a few grains of precious insights. And then people who read a lot, and very intensely, become the richest people in the world!

He flatters us bookish types further, by making us intellectual Green Berets, the best of best:

Do you deserve to enter? Pass. Do you ask to be the companion of nobles? Make yourself noble, and you shall be. Do you long for the conversation of the wise? Learn to understand it, and you shall hear it. But on other terms?—no. If you will not rise to us, we cannot stoop to you. The living lord may assume courtesy, the living philosopher explain his thought to you with considerate pain; but here we neither feign nor interpret; you must rise to the level of our thoughts if you would be gladdened by them, and share our feelings, if you would recognize our presence.

I admit a certain fondness for this attitude -- as if the books are saying that it's your job to be relevant to us. It's not a very innovation-friendly attitude, it's not pro-freshness, but there's something temperamentally appealing about it -- maybe because when we have a canon we have a common tongue between generations, even with the dead; but when we confine ourselves to the strictly contemporary one finds oneself middleaged and bald and at seas on Facebook. (I'm not even sure that's a good reference -- see the point?)

The second half of the reading is a pitch for knowing etymologies, especially for our mongrel English tongue, which I am certainly in favor of (you can fool around here if you agree), although there is a section where Ruskin is making a pitch for plain Anglo-Saxon and uses the word "contumely," which made me smile. There follows a close reading of a passage of "Lycidias," which is left to the fan of close reading. (I am one myself; but that because, as I aspire to the condition of a water beetle, I can't do it.

Photo courtesy flickr user sansanparrots used with Creative Commons license.

May 4: Science, again!

Thomas Huxley, the guy who called himself "Darwin's bulldog" way, way back in the 1860s, is presented to us today, and he's arguing against the primacy of the famous British classical education -- of what use is it to privledge knowing Greek and Latin, when there's a great scientific world around us? And perhaps you might nod as you watch Huxley fight this battle, knowing, as you do, that the outcome is decided -- we compromised, nowadays people are ignorant of both science and Greek -- and then you come to this:

The notions of the beginning and the end of the world entertained by our forefathers are no longer credible. It is very certain that the earth is not the chief body in the material universe, and that the world is not subordinated to man’s use. It is even more certain that nature is the expression of a definite order with which nothing interferes, and that the chief business of mankind is to learn that order and govern themselves accordingly.

Italics mine; the italics are the express the shock that this assertion, made in its of-course-we-all-know-it's-true voice, dates from the era of horses, and yet could not be made by any elected official, or indeed university president, in this country now. The horses are gone but the dislike of man being very small remains. Progress!

Mar 27: The lighter side of failures to communicate

To get things out of the way: "Truth of Intercourse". Heh heh huh huh.

This is an essay where allowances must be made, for Robert Louis Stevenson writes in the full Anglo pipe-n-slippers style -- the kind of thing where "Alas!" is used unironically. Consider this opening sentence:

AMONG sayings that have a currency in spite of being wholly false upon the face of them for the sake of a half-truth upon another subject which is accidentally combined with error, one of the grossest and broadest conveys the monstrous proposition that it is easy to tell the truth and hard to tell a lie.

It ends well, but it takes forever to get there. (I should talk, with my syntax.)

The whole essay is like this -- interesting thoughts dressed up in old-fashioned clothes so they seem uninteresting. It's like eating Lobster Newburg or something -- quality ingredients, but prepared in this heavy noncontemporary style. Look, here's a picture:

And here's the prose:

An orator makes a false step; he employs some trivial, some absurd, some vulgar phrase; in the turn of a sentence, he insults by a side wind, those whom he is labouring to charm; in speaking to one sentiment he unconsciously ruffles another in parenthesis; and you are not surprised, for you know his task to be delicate and filled with perils. “O frivolous mind of man, light ignorance!” As if yourself, when you seek to explain some misunderstanding or excuse some apparent fault, speaking swiftly and addressing a mind still recently incensed, were not harnessing for a more perilous adventure; as if yourself required less tact and eloquence; as if an angry friend or a suspicious lover were not more easy to offend than a meeting of indifferent politicians!

Two sentences, is all that is! (Not counting the one with the "O" -- which is in storage with the "alas"es.) But the idea that, when you're having a fight with, say, your wife, you need to have more skill than a professional talker -- that's an interesting observation.

In fact, one begins to suspect RLS of writing this one from life:

The world was made before the English language, and seemingly upon a different design. ... I hate questioners and questions; there are so few that can be spoken to without a lie. “Do you forgive me?” Madam and sweetheart, so far as I have gone in life I have never yet been able to discover what forgiveness means. “Is it still the same between us?” Why, how can it be? It is eternally different; and yet you are still the friend of my heart. “Do you understand me?” God knows; I should think it highly improbable.

Yeah, I'm sure that worked. Nothing defuses the tension in an argument with your loved ones than trying to redefine the terms philosophically. More seriously, I find myself agreeing with Stevenson's point -- we can only come close to understanding each other, never fully arrive there -- and the kind of sherry-scented way he makes helps his case. It's as if a local humor columnist, tired of writing about how funny it is that people never use their turn signals, instead focused their whimsy on the impossibility of human communication.

It's interesting, too, that Stevenson closes his essay in a rush. In the penultimate paragraph, he (again) is in the midst of an argument -- a "Mr. and Mrs.," as a French friend of mine described them.

Sometimes we catch an eye—this is our opportunity in the ages—and we wag our tail with a poor smile. “Is that all?” All? If you only knew! But how can they know? They do not love us; the more fools we to squander life on the indifferent.

That's some head-in-the-oven awesomeness, right? But, like a performance of Hamlet where everyone jumps up to sing a closing number, he tacks on a happy ending:

But the morality of the thing, you will be glad to hear, is excellent; for it is only by trying to understand others that we can get our own hearts understood; and in matters of human feeling the clement judge is the most successful pleader.

He doesn't hold out much hope, it seems. But he does it so kindly-like!

Feb 23: Not the thing itself but ideas about the thing

Good thing I hadn't put away Volume 28 -- we're right back at it, because it's Pepys' birthday. And what better thing to read today than the great diary itself! Except it's not in the Harvard Classics. So what next better thing to read than an essay about it -- by Robert Louis Stevenson, a name I bet hasn't been mentioned at actual Harvard for 50 years.

However. My father -- in addition to being the #1 reader of this blog -- is a huge Pepys' Diary enthusiast, so I am always happy to be in the company of another one, even if Stevenson has a certain twee mustiness ("We have now to read our author.") I admit that I may be imposing that style on him, maybe because I almost read Stevenson as a boy and so associate him with grand outmoded adventures.

But so to our assignment, which is to read a classic in which someone reads a classic. Having dabbled in Pepys's diary, bio, etc., but not really knowing what the state of the scholarship is, Stevenson's reading seems fine to me. I enjoyed this observation:

Although not sentimental in the abstract, he was sweetly sentimental about himself. His own past clung about his heart, an evergreen. He was the slave of an association. He could not pass by Islington, where his father used to carry him to cakes and ale, but he must light at the “King’s Head” and eat and drink “for remembrance of the old house sake.”

Enjoyed it up to the point where RLS calls it "childish egotism," that is, because I am exactly the same -- just yesterday I was driving past Universal, where I picketed, and thinking that I'll probably always drive by it and remember that I picketed there. Then again, I would have difficulty getting myself exonerated from charges of childish egotism.

Other than that I have not much else to say in this third-order blog post -- except that, writing every day as I am doing now, I do find it's an unavoidable and welcome shape in the landscape of the day, and so I'll close where our excerpt does:

The greatness of his life was open, yet he longed to communicate its smallness also; and, while contemporaries bowed before him, he must buttonhole posterity with the news that his periwig was once alive with nits.... [The diary] was his bosom secret; it added a zest to all his pleasures; he lived in and for it, and might well write these solemn words, when he closed that confidant forever: “And so I betake myself to that course which is almost as much as to see myself go into the grave; for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me.”

Feb 21: The Cardinal pipes up for meatspace*

It's the first part of Cardinal Newman's essay "The Idea of a University" (Vol. 28, "Essays English and American"). It starts off promisingly enough: " IF I were asked to describe as briefly and popularly as I could, what a University was,..." but just when you think it's going to be brief and popular -- "I should draw my answer from its ancient designation of a Studium Generale, or 'School of Universal Learning.'"

Okay, so it's one of those. The expository prose I find to be the toughest going; it's reading the essays, in general, where I long for our modern invention of punchiness.

Oh, and I almost forgot that this has the best intro yet from the DRG: "Does Football Make A College?" Even in 1908! The Cardinal would answer "no" -- which is why, although he enjoyed a distinguished career, he was pretty clearly never a university president.

Basically this essay, or the portion of it we're to read, is an answer to the question, "What can you get at college that you can't get in books?" (Books like the Harvard Classics -- the whole rationale of the series is that it's just as good as a college education.) Here's Newman's formulation of the question:

Considering the prodigious powers of the press, and how they are developed at this time in the never-intermitting issue of periodicals, tracts, pamphlets, works in series, and light literature, we must allow there never was a time which promised fairer for dispensing with every other means of information and instruction. What can we want more, you will say, for the intellectual education of the whole man, and for every man, than so exuberant and diversified and persistent a promulgation of all kinds of knowledge? Why, you will ask, need we go up to knowledge, when knowledge comes down to us? ... works larger and more comprehensive than those which have gained for ancients an immortality, issue forth every morning, and are projected onwards to the ends of the earth at the rate of hundreds of miles a day. Our seats are strewed, our pavements are powdered, with swarms of little tracts; and the very bricks of our city walls preach wisdom, by informing us by their placards where we can at once cheaply purchase it.

And that was even before Us Weekly.

Newman's answer: FTF. Of course, this being the nineteenth century, which was not known for its summarizing acronyms, he goes further:

...if we wish to become exact and fully furnished in any branch of knowledge which is diversified and complicated, we must consult the living man and listen to his living voice. ... no book can convey the special spirit and delicate peculiarities of its subject with that rapidity and certainty which attend on the sympathy of mind with mind, through the eyes, the look, the accent, and the manner, in casual expressions thrown off at the moment, and the unstudied turns of familiar conversation. ..The general principles of any study you may learn by books at home; but the detail, the colour, the tone, the air, the life which makes it live in us, you must catch all these from those in whom it lives already. You must imitate the student in French or German, who is not content with his grammar, but goes to Paris or Dresden: you must take example from the young artist, who aspires to visit the great Masters in Florence and in Rome.

In fact, Newman even goes further and argues for the city as teacher (an argument very much to my taste):

...Thither come up youths from all parts of the country, the students of law, medicine, and the fine arts, and the employés and attachés of literature. There they live, as chance determines; and they are satisfied with their temporary home, for they find in it all that was promised to them there. They have not come in vain, as far as their own object in coming is concerned. They have not learned any particular religion, but they have learned their own particular profession well. They have, moreover, become acquainted with the habits, manners, and opinions of their place of sojourn, and done their part in maintaining the tradition of them. We cannot then be without virtual Universities; a metropolis is such[.]

Sure, you get mugged. But that's part of your education too.

Two other things of note in this reading. First, those of you who have to go to scholarly conferences can now take comfort in the fact that this ritual is defended by someone who may one day be declared to be a saint:

Such gatherings would to many persons appear at first sight simply preposterous. Above all subjects of study, Science is conveyed, is propagated, by books, or by private teaching; experiments and investigations are conducted in silence; discoveries are made in solitude. What have philosophers to do with festive celebrities, and panegyrical solemnities with mathematical and physical truth? Yet on a closer attention to the subject, it is found that not even scientific thought can dispense with the suggestions, the instruction, the stimulus, the sympathy, the intercourse with mankind on a large scale, which such meetings secure. A fine time of year is chosen, when days are long, skies are bright, the earth smiles, and all nature rejoices; a city or town is taken by turns, of ancient name or modern opulence, where buildings are spacious and hospitality hearty. The novelty of place and circumstance, the excitement of strange, or the refreshment of well-known faces, the majesty of rank or of genius, the amiable charities of men pleased both with themselves and with each other; the elevated spirits, the circulation of thought, the curiosity; the morning sections, the outdoor exercise, the well-furnished, well-earned board, the not ungraceful hilarity, the evening circle; the brilliant lecture, the discussions or collisions or guesses of great men one with another, the narratives of scientific processes, of hopes, disappointments, conflicts, and successes, the splendid eulogistic orations; these and the like constituents of the annual celebration, are considered to do something real and substantial for the advance of knowledge which can be done in no other way.

Sorry for such a long excerpt but I wanted to show how lovingly he discusses what your whole weekend will be like.

Finally, when the Cardinal closes with:

Such is a University in its idea and in its purpose; such in good measure has it before now been in fact. Shall it ever be again? We are going forward in the strength of the Cross, under the patronage of the Blessed Virgin, in the name of St. Patrick, to attempt it.

I am sorry, but I can only think of this:
Good luck, Eminence.


*Defined here.

Jan 19: Poe on Poetry

Yes, of course, it's Poe's birthday. So “Essays English and American” tonight (Volume 28), with Poe (“Regarded in Europe as one of America’s greatest writers” – if you sent it to France, it would taste imported, I guess. “Here he unravels the fabric of which all poetry is woven.” Somehow the metaphor sticks out to me – I guess because it could be anything. He provides the recipe from which all poetry is simmered. He diagrams the play from which all poetry takes it to the hoop. He provides the drywall of which all poetry is constructed.

Well, it’s not Poe’s fault. Let’s go to “The Poetic Principle”…oh, wait, another thing occurs to me. The description says that Poe

-- originated the detective story
-- perfected the mystery short story, and
-- produced America’s first great poems.

…and that’s why we’re making you read his essays. Bizarre – but that’s Poe-like too!

-- I must note that I get lost in Stevenson’s essay on Samuel Pepys, who I like, but who is a particular favorite of my dad’s.

-- There’s also an essay on “The Elevation of the Laboring Classes” – which I tend to think of the HC as being, although really it’s more the striving middle class who’s supposed to buy the volumes. Whatever – the point is that this effort failed; nobody’s elevated at all, and, in fact, the question of “elevatedness” is much in dispute. I miss it, myself – hence this project – but I can’t miss it too much or I wouldn’t find the “elevated” tone – the tone of which all pretension shares – so hilarious.

Okay, this time for reals.

-- Poe hates long poems which you can hardly find these days, so another round of laudanum for E.A., please! It can’t sustain the degree of excitement, it’s like prog rock, or something.

-- Poe approvingly quotes a lyric of Shelly’s thusly: “Their warm, yet delicate and ethereal imagination will be appreciated by all; but by none so thoroughly as by him who has himself arisen from sweet dreams of one beloved to bathe in the aromatic air of a southern midsummer night.” These days, of course, you can get arrested for that. Actually, in Poe’s time, you probably could too.

-- “The demands of Truth are severe; she has no sympathy with the myrtles. All that which is so indispensable in Song is precisely all that with which she has nothing whatever to do.” I begin to admire Poe, and not just as a fellow over-italicizer. When I was made to read “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in 7th grade the phrase “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty” seemed asserted but not proven. And I still don’t believe it these days, but the sentiment persists among the airy-fairy set, I guess. Not Poe. Another round of laudanum!

-- And then, right after excoriating the “theory-mad,” he divides “”the world of mind into its three most immediately obvious distinctions.” No wonder he was popular in France.

-- Poe turns out to be a great believer in rhythm as necessary for poetic greatness. Sure, I’ll go along with that. I might even claim that it might be a particularly American sentiment, but I’ll duck as I say it; I don’t have any evidence for it, except for the way our hot rhythms have swept the world repeatedly.