Fayard Nicholas

October 20, 1914 – January 24, 2006

"We were tap-dancers, but we put more style into it, more bodywork, instead of just footwork," Harold Nicholas recalled in a 1987 interview.

Harold, who died in 2000, once likened his older brother's dancing to poetry, saying that he was "talking to you with his hands and feet."

From the New York Times obituary, "Fayard Nicholas, Groundbreaking Hoofer, Dies at 91"

To see the young Nicholas Brothers in motion, click on the link below. And then get hold of the 1943 movie Stormy Weather.

The Maxwell DeMille Productions Screening Room Presents the Nicholas Brothers

Google and censorship

In today's news:

Google Inc. launched a search engine in China on Wednesday that censors material about human rights, Tibet and other topics sensitive to Beijing -- defending the move as a trade-off granting Chinese greater access to other information.

Within minutes of the launch of the new site bearing China's Web suffix ".cn," searches for the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement showed scores of sites omitted and users directed to articles condemning the group posted on Chinese government Web sites.

Searches for other sensitive subjects such as exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama, Taiwan independence, and terms such as "democracy" and "human rights" yielded similar results.

In most such cases, only official Chinese government sites or those with a ".cn" suffix were included.

Google, which has as its motto "Don't Be Evil," says the new site aims to make its search engine more accessible in China, thereby expanding access to information.

Yet the move has already been criticized by media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, which also has chided Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.com for submitting to China's censorship regime.

"When a search engine collaborates with the government like this, it makes it much easier for the Chinese government to control what is being said on the Internet," said Julien Pain, head of the group's Internet desk.

Curious, I typed in "dalai lama" this morning. With google.com, there are three news results -- links to articles from the Hindustan Times, Jerusalem Post, and Washington Post. The first site listed is the official site of the Government of Tibet in Exile. Google returns 5,070,000 results for "dalai lama."

With google.cn, there are no news results. The first site listed is a page from the China Internet Information Center. A sample of the propaganda to be found therein:

Donning the cloak of "religious leader'', he travelled around to spread rumors to mislead international opinion. Out of their own need, some in the West hailed him as the deity and lauded him as "the peace envoy'' and "human rights fighter''. However, it is this ex-leader of Tibetan Buddhism who, discarding the tradition of his predecessors of loving the motherland to trample on religious doctrines, hoodwink the religious sentiments of Tibetan Buddhists, organize an illegal government-in-exile, trumpet "Tibetan independence'' to split the motherland, and undermine internal unity and rules of Tibetan Buddhism. Indeed, he has gone far to betray the motherland and the Tibetan people.

Clear enough? Unless I'm missing something crucial in Chinese characters, Google.cn returns a mere 17,100 results for "dalai lama."

Interestingly, if one types "tibet.com" into Google.cn, a working link to the Government of Tibet in Exile results. And typing "tibet.org" returns a working link to Tibet Online. Whether someone in China would find these links working, I don't know. Perhaps Google still needs to get the kinks out of its censorship algorithms to really keep these sites from Chinese computer users.

Shame on you, Google.

Link: Google agrees to censor results in China (from the Associated Press)

A related post: "Human rights" and other four-letter words

A correction

From the Corrections page in today's New York Times:

A film review in Weekend on Friday about "Le Pont des Arts" misspelled a word in the title of a Monteverdi madrigal that a character sings on a recording. It is "Lamento della ninfa," not "ninja."

Pope's shield

For my 2601 students:

From the British Library, an extract from Alexander Pope's draft translation of the Iliad, with Pope's sketch of Achilles' shield. The Library's Online Gallery is a great site to get lost in.

Pope's draft

The British Library's Online Gallery

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"