Modernism and the "Orient"

For my 3703 students:

"Petals on a wet black bough": American Modernist Writers and the Orient, from the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University

If you click on the page for Harriet Monroe and the "Imagists", you'll see "In a Station of the Metro" as it appeared in Poetry in 1913.

Cheating redefined

Appearing in the wake of recent news reports about the declining literacy and numeracy of college graduates, an article from Saturday's Wall Street Journal makes interesting reading. Here's an excerpt:

Twas a situation every middle-schooler dreads. Bonnie Pitzer was cruising through a vocabulary test until she hit the word "desolated" -- and drew a blank. But instead of panicking, she quietly searched the Internet for the definition.

At most schools, looking up test answers online would be considered cheating. But at Mill Creek Middle School in Kent, Wash., some teachers now encourage such tactics. "We can do basically anything on our computers," says the 13-year-old, who took home an A on the test.

In a wireless age where kids can access the Internet's vast store of information from their cellphones and PDAs, schools have been wrestling with how to stem the tide of high-tech cheating. Now, some educators say they have the answer: Change the rules and make it legal. In doing so, they're permitting all kinds of behavior that had been considered off-limits just a few years ago.

The move, which includes some of the country's top institutions, reflects a broader debate about what skills are necessary in today's world -- and how schools should teach them. The real-world strengths of intelligent surfing and analysis, some educators argue, are now just as important as rote memorization.

The old rules still reign in most places, but an increasing number of schools are adjusting them. This includes not only letting kids use the Internet during tests, but in the most extreme cases, allowing them to text message notes or beam each other definitions on vocabulary drills. Schools say they in no way consider this cheating because they're explicitly changing the rules to allow it.

In Ohio, students at Cincinnati Country Day can take their laptops into some tests and search online Cliffs Notes. At Ensign Intermediate School in Newport Beach, Calif., seventh-graders are looking at each other's hand-held computers to get answers on their science drills. And in San Diego, high-schoolers can roam free on the Internet during English exams.

The same logic is being applied even when laptops aren't in the classroom. In Philadelphia, school officials are considering letting kids retake tests, even if it gives them an opportunity to go home and Google topics they saw on the first test. "What we've got to teach kids are the tools to access that information," says Gregory Thornton, the school district's chief academic officer. " 'Cheating' is not the word anymore."

I would suggest that "cheating" is indeed the word, and that "educators" like Mr. Thornton are cheating students in several ways: by cheapening the dignity and value of study (why bother when you can look it up during the test?) and by giving the false impression that learning is not a matter of knowledge and understanding but a matter of "accessing" "information."

This article follows up on Bonnie Pitzer's vocabulary test:

In Bonnie Pitzer's case, teacher Becky Keene says using the Internet helped the seventh-grader, but in the end, she aced the test because she demonstrated she could also use the word in a sentence. "I want the kids to be able to apply the meaning, not to be able to memorize it," says Ms. Keene.

I have several questions for Ms. Keene:

-- Aren't we better capable of understanding and applying meanings of words when we know them?

-- Won't your students encounter many situations in life in which they'll need to know what words mean without looking them up? Imagine one of your students interviewing for a job, no computer available: what happens then?

-- Doesn't someone who knows the words in a sentence have an advantage over someone who has to look them up? (E.D. Hirsch makes that point very clearly in Cultural Literacy -- that constantly having to look things up leads to a breakdown in comprehension.)

-- What makes you so sure that your student didn't find her sample sentence itself online? And if she did, what would be wrong with that? Why is making up an original sentence necessary? Wouldn't finding an appropriate sentence also be evidence of being able to apply the meaning of the word?

In the pre-Internet world, education theorists dismissed the value of memorization because one could look up everything in books. Now, it's the Internet: "It has everything," as someone says in the film Broken Flowers. But if education theorists and Ms. Keene were correct, I'd be a master of Greek and Latin and several other languages that I don't know.

"Legalized 'cheating'" (Wall Street Journal, subscription required)

"Study: College students lack literacy for complex tasks" (from CNN)

Makeover

There's nothing funner than being a nervous wreck trying to figure out how to modify a template to make things look the way I'd like them to look. I chose Douglas Bowman's Rounders template to get away from the "blanker whiteness" (to quote Robert Frost) that not so long ago I found appealing. The new style is less "orangey" but easier on "the" eyes, or at least my eyes. Reader, I hope you like it too.

Whose Homer?

(for Stefan Hagemann)

I'm teaching the Iliad again, in Stanley Lombardo's 1997 translation, and we just hit a line that always sticks in students' minds, Hector's rebuke of his brother Paris in Book 3. As the opposing forces mass for battle, Paris steps out and offers to fight the Greeks' best man to the death. Menelaus steps up -- he's not the best Greek, but he is Helen's husband after all. Paris, suddenly pale, runs back to the Trojan lines. Hector then speaks with impatience and contempt:

"Paris, you desperate, womanizing pretty boy!"

I just recommended Lombardo's Iliad to my friend Stefan Hagemann, so I'll make a case for my choice by looking at how the other members of the Big Four -- Richmond Lattimore (1951), Robert Fitzgerald (1974), and Robert Fagles (1990) -- handle this one line. Here's Lattimore:

"Evil Paris, beautiful, woman-crazy, cajoling."

Yes, Lattimore is close to the Greek (Lombardo too, as you can see here). The problem with Lattimore's line, to my mind, is that it's nearly impossible to imagine someone saying it in English. It's very difficult to hear cajoling, for instance, as a term of rebuke. And what's urgently missing is the word you, the inevitable pronoun of rebuke in English ("Why you little . . . .").

I love Robert Fitzgerald's Odyssey, but like many readers, I find him less at home in the Iliad. Here's Fitzgerald's Hector:

                                               "You bad-luck charm!
Paris, the great lover, a gallant sight!"

Fitzgerald leaves out any overt reference to Paris' beauty (in the Greek, he is "best in form," or "best in figure"), a curious omission, as Homer has just noted Paris' glamorous leopard-skin (he is the only warrior in the poem to wear one). As for "You bad-luck charm!" -- that phrase introduces a tone of high camp that I find bewildering in this context.

Robert Fagles has picked up all the establishment honors, but his translations of Homer (and Aeschylus) seem to me to strain too hard for a faux-lofty, Yeatsian rhetoric. Rarely do they, for me, ring true. Here's Fagles' Hector:

"Paris, appalling Paris! Our prince of beauty --
mad for women, you lure them all to ruin!"

What I first notice here is the sheer verbiage: what Homer does in five words, Lattimore and Lombardo in six, Fitzgerald in eleven, Fagles does in sixteen. Fagles' Hector speaks with stagey repetition (he seems to have a British accent, methinks) and (like Fitzgerald's Hector) with two! -- two! -- exclamation points. Another problem: Fagles' translation seems a little misleading for new readers of the poem, for Paris has lured neither Helen nor any other woman. (There is no "them all.") The Iliad presents Helen as the victim of a sexual kidnapping of sorts, a woman filled with contempt for her keeper. It's not at all clear that she's been "ruined": though she's filled with shame and self-hatred, the poem never passes judgment on her, treating her rather with compassion and generosity.

Facing multiple translations in a bookstore, it can be difficult to know what choice to make. Picking some scattered lines for comparison can sometimes illuminate the differences among translations to a remarkable degree. Looking at this line in four translations reminds me of why I choose Lombardo's Iliad when I teach.

Related posts

"Kcahou!"
Paris, pretty-boy
Translators at work and play
Aeschylus in three translations

Interview with Stanley Lombardo

Same as it ever was

From Dennis Dutton, "Hardwired to seek beauty":

Throughout history and across cultures, the arts of homo sapiens have demonstrated universal features. These aesthetic inclinations and patterns have evolved as part of our hardwired psychological nature, ingrained in the human species over the 80,000 generations lived out by our ancestors in the 1.6 million years of the Pleistocene.

The existence of a universal aesthetic psychology has been suggested, not only experimentally, but by the fact that the arts travel outside their local contexts so easily: Beethoven is loved in Japan, Aboriginal art in Paris, Korean ceramics in Brazil, and Hollywood movies all over the globe.

Our aesthetic psychology has remained unchanged since the building of cities and the advent of writing some 10,000 years ago, which explains why The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, remain good reading today.

Read the rest by clicking here. Link via Arts & Letters Daily.

A Glenn Gould story

My AM 740 experience (see here) has left me wondering about Glenn Gould and Toronto radio. Did he listen perhaps to "Pet" Clark on CHWO? I've found nothing to suggest that he did, but I did find an interesting Gould story while looking:

One woman that knew him believes the mystery is impenetrable even 15 years after his death. Marilyn Kecskes has been the superintendent of 110 St. Clair Ave. West since 1973. She first met Gould on the elevator when he was wearing gloves and covering his face with a handkerchief for fear of catching her germs. Kecskes said she had never met anyone like him: a maverick and eccentric who was also a raging hypochondriac. She knew he was special, too, because his mailbox was the only one that had been tampered with. Someone had once tried to force it open in hope of getting a bit of his mail.

Kecskes took the elevator to the top floor of this still stylish Art Deco building. Gould, she said, was messy ("orange juice and milk cartons everywhere"), and intensely private (he fired his cleaning lady of about five years "because she liked to gossip about him"). Kecskes added that he covered his bedroom window with a bookcase, that he was a terrible driver who frequently drove his big Lincoln Continental into one of the concrete pillars in the downstairs parking lot and that he disliked intrusions. "Once he called me on the telephone," she said with a smile, "'There's someone knocking on my door. Could you see what they want?' Imagine!"

When the elevator stopped, Kecskes opened the heavy doors next to what was once Gould's apartment and mounted the stairs to the roof. She pointed to what used to be his window. "I used to sit up here, after I had done my cleaning, and I would listen to him play all night long," confessed Kecskes, blushing at the memory. "He never knew I was up here, or else he would have been angry with me, I suppose, but I had the moon and the stars and his music and there was nothing more beautiful."

From Deirdre Kelly, "The Gould Rush" (The Globe and Mail, September 20, 1997).

I found this article quoted in "A Glenn Gould Tour of Toronto and Area," compiled by Michael Davidson. The Globe and Mail online archives go back only to 2002, so it's especially fortunate that Michael Davidson has given this story (which I've seen nowhere else) a life online.

» "A Glenn Gould Tour of Toronto and Area"

The dowdy world on radio

Driving across the great prairie last night, my wife Elaine and I were searching for something suitable on the radio. The usual classical FM station was playing something by musicians from the "Cold-hearted Club," as Elaine put it, and the usual oldies station did not quite fit the moment. So we tried the radio's scan function. We started with AM, where we picked up station after station filled with talk of a sort that held no interest for us. Often one word was enough to send us scanning again - diadems, eternity, blood. We listened for a short time to a talk show about Kentucky auctioneers, but as much as I like the odd and arcane, that was too much even for me.

Then we found it - AM 740, playing "big band" music, lively, harmonically sophisticated, and free of references to damnation. We had found "the dowdy world" on our radio. The music was a treat, but the commercials were even better. First, a spot for "Bruno's Fine Foods," featuring Scottish smoked salmon and 5-lb. lasagna trays. Then a spot for a cd called A Little Breath of Scotland. Where was this station coming from?

Finally, we heard the ID: AM 740, CHWO, Toronto. Three hours south of Chicago, we'd picked up George Jonescu's Sunday night big-band program.

I talked to George briefly by cellphone: he was playing two versions of "Stealin' Apples," by Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, and was polling the audience on which it preferred. Elaine and I thought Goodman was better, no contest. George's listeners agreed: in a (small) landslide, Goodman won, 45 to 14. The toll-free number - "good anywhere in North America" - should have been my first clue that picking up this station wasn't quite as extraordinary as I'd thought. The second should have been George's lack of surprise that we'd picked up his show. As I learned this morning, CHWO is a 50,000-watt clear-channel station.

The AM 740 website is a wonderful thing:

With access to the largest active music library in Toronto radio, AM 740 features a wide range of specialty programming, from big bands and 50s crooners, to the early rock’n’rollers, folk singers, country cross-over artists, and many of today’s top artists specializing in 'retro-sounds'.

AM 740 is much more than a well-stocked juke-box though. With newscasts every half-hour weekday mornings, and hourly through the day, information flows consistently with news, sports, traffic, weather and plenty of time-checks too. Hourly 'Prime Time Moments' focus on travel, gardening, finances and car-care. AM 740 on-air personalities are friendly, cheerful companions who help you through your day.

Tune us in anytime, just about anywhere, for the All Time Favourites – AM 740!

AM 740 certainly helped brighten our drive through the darkness last night.

» AM 740

» AM 740 schedule   A sample: "Bob Sprott features a spotlight on Les Brown, covering the lengthy period between 1936 and 2001."

» AM 740 photo gallery   I especially enjoyed the photos from the re-opening of Woolcott's Shoes, "Comfort Shoe Specialists Since 1937."

» Bruno's Fine Foods   "Yes . . . there really is a Bruno."

» Denis Snowdon's page   Snowdon is the AM 740 on-air personality who compiled A Little Breath of Scotland.

MLK

15 January 1929 - 4 April 1968

» The Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project
» Frequently requested documents and audioclips Texts and audio clips (Acrobat, Quicktime, and Realmedia) of "Letter from Birmingham Jail," "I Have a Dream," King's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Beyond Vietnam," and "I've Been to the Mountaintop."

A good place to study, in two languages

[Advice for students.]

Here's a suggestion for the start of the semester: Find a good place to study and make it your own. The more time you spend in that place, the more it will become associated with the work of learning.

A good place to study isn't necessarily one that's comfortable. In his book Creative Reading, the poet Ron Padgett offers a funny account of his teenaged attempt to create a "nirvana" for reading — pillows, background music, a Do Not Disturb sign, cold drinks, and cookies. The only problem was that he ended up falling asleep.

Good places to work are as various as individual students. If you like quiet, find a lesser-used area of the library. The bound periodicals or the A and Z stacks (if your library uses Library of Congress Classification) might be likely places to start. If silence is deafening, look for a livelier setting. If your dorm room would be a perfect place except for the noise in the hallway, try an ambient sound from iSerenity to mask the distractions.

When I'm not working at home, my favorite spot to work is a table on the third floor of my university library. I've been working at this table for so long that I've come to think of it as my own. There's room to spread out books and papers (much more room than in a professorial carrel), and the public computers are far enough away that checking my e-mail isn't a great temptation. The nearby books, mostly on urban renewal, are not a browser's paradise. There is little to do at this table but drink bottled water and work.

When I'm walking to this table, I sometimes think about all the work I've already done there. That history itself makes this table a place where I'm likely to get stuff done. While the semester is young and full of new possibilities, find a place that helps you get stuff done too.

[Renzai, a Japanese student, asked to translate this piece. You can now read "A good place to study" in Japanese via the link below. Renzai has also provided a link to an image file of the translated text (for browsers that cannot display Japanese characters). Thanks, Renzai!]

勉強しやすい場所 [A good place to study]

Headline

Politics can get ugly, even at the college level:



Yecch.