Overheard

Heard while walking down the street (Madison Avenue, NYC, to be exact):

"It was like a perfect high school reunion — no red wine."

Link » "Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

I am in the Wall Street Journal.

That's something I've never had occasion to say before today. (And I may never have occasion to say it again.) I'm quoted in the Wall Street Journal, in "Lost in Translations," an article by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg on recent translations of great literature. In a sidebar listing various translations, I comment on Lydia Davis' translation of Swann's Way: "Extremely readable in all its complexity, that complexity being the complexity of Proust's sentences." I'm proud to have used the word complexity three times in a single sentence.

Link » Lost in Translations: Flood of Re-Translated Classics Hits Shelves, Igniting Debate (Wall Street Journal)

Link » Proust posts, via Pinboard

What not to wear: Back-to-school edition

I find myself shifting among various personae with regard to dress. Sometimes I want to feel my connection to the late sixties, to the radical politics that inspired me as a student. I wear jeans on those days, and sometimes even dig an old blue work shirt from the closet. I also have a few billowing shirts like those worn by Russian peasants, and I wear these whenever I lecture on Walt Whitman, considering them as a kind of teaching aid. Whenever I lecture on T.S. Eliot, I try for a more formal manner of dress. Eliot, after all, was a London publisher by profession, and he favored traditional suits with a bowler hat and rolled umbrella as accessories. Last year when teaching The Waste Land I put on an old pinstripe, and it felt right in that context. For the most part, I find myself most comfortable in something from the L.L. Bean catalogue.

Jay Parini, The Art of Teaching (New York, Oxford University Press, 2005)

Ah, academia.

Twilight comma

A headline from the local paper:

Twilight, mule races added to fair schedule

Mount Proust

Mount Proust, as seen on a midwestern Saturday afternoon. I'm climbing In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower and have made it to the top of the P of Proust.

Why do the last two books look different? I'm glad you asked. Because of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which keeps work out of the public domain for an extra 20 years after its maker's death (i.e., for 95 years, not 75), the new Penguin translations of the final three volumes of In Search of Lost Time — The Prisoner, The Fugitive, and Finding Time Again — have not yet been published in the United States. Aaron Matz explains:

Since Proust died in 1922, only those four volumes first published during his lifetime had passed into the American public domain by the time the Bono Act became law. It will therefore be at least 2018 before readers in the United States can find the final three installments of the new translation . . . in their local bookstores.

There is some good news: the final three volumes are available in the States, at least for now, from Amazon, in two British Penguin paperbacks (which can be found here and here). My copies took about a month to arrive, and I don't think I've ever been happier to have books in my hands. If I were interested in reading Proust in the Penguin edition, I'd order these now.

Link » In Pursuit of Proust, Aaron Matz on the last three volumes of In Search of Lost Time (from Slate)

Language police

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has ordered government and cultural bodies to use modified Persian words to replace foreign words that have crept into the language, such as "pizzas[,]" which will now be known as "elastic loaves," state media reported Saturday.

Link » Iranian Leader Bans Usage of Foreign Words
(from the Washington Post)

Overheard

From a long cell-phone conversation touching on broomsticks, the national deficit, the movie Predator, and more:

"No, she threw a dart at the mouse and killed it."

Link » "Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

Art and education

From the New York Times:

In an era of widespread cuts in public-school art programs, the question has become increasingly relevant: does learning about paintings and sculpture help children become better students in other areas?

A study to be released today by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum suggests that it does, citing improvements in a range of literacy skills among students who took part in a program in which the Guggenheim sends artists into schools. The study, now in its second year, interviewed hundreds of New York City third graders, some of whom had participated in the Guggenheim program, called Learning Through Art, and others who did not.

The study found that students in the program performed better in six categories of literacy and critical thinking skills — including thorough description, hypothesizing and reasoning — than did students who were not in the program. . . .

The results of the study, which are to be presented today and tomorrow at a conference at the Guggenheim, are likely to stimulate debate at a time when the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind has led schools to increase class time spent on math and reading significantly, often at the expense of other subjects, including art.

Link » Guggenheim Study Suggests Arts Education Benefits Literacy Skills (New York Times, registration required)

Frost and Sandburg

From an interview with essayist and editor Joseph Epstein:

Robert Frost once said of Sandburg, they were apparently to give a poetry reading together and someone said, "Where's Carl?" and Frost said, "He's upstairs messing up his hair."

Full enjoyment of Epstein's anecdote requires the understanding that Frost too was something of an actor, playing the role of the homespun, folksy, New England sage. Robert Lowell highlights the difference between the public performer and the private man in his poem "Robert Frost" (which begins by playing on the title of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Frost at Midnight"):

Robert Frost at midnight, the audience gone
to vapor, the great act laid on the shelf in mothballs,
his voice musical, raw and raw — he writes in the
    flyleaf:
"Robert Lowell from Robert Frost, his friend in the
    art."
"Sometimes I feel too full of myself," I say.
And he, misunderstanding, "When I am low,
I stray away. My son wasn't your kind. The night
we told him Merrill Moore would come to treat him,
he said 'I'll kill him first.' One of my daughters
    thought things,
knew every male she met was out to make her;
the way she dresses, she couldn't make a
    whorehouse."
And I, "Sometimes I'm so happy I can't stand myself."
And he, "When I am too full of joy, I think
how little good my health did anyone near me."

When I was an undergraduate, one of my professors told a story of seeing Frost backstage before a campus reading. Unhappy with the reading arrangements, Frost was kicking a student.

Link » Interview with Joseph Epstein (from identitytheory.com)

George Steiner on reading

In his essay "The end of bookishness?" George Steiner anticipates the near-disappearance of what he calls "classical reading," reading that "takes place in a circle of silence which enables the reader to concentrate on the text." Here is reading's future, as Steiner imagines it:

I would not be surprised if that which lies ahead for classical modes of reading resembles the monasticism from which those modes sprung. I sometimes dream of houses of reading — a Hebrew phrase — in which those passionate to learn how to read well would find the necessary guidance, silence, and complicity of disciplined companionship. . . .

The tale is told of how Erasmus, walking home on a foul night, glimpsed a tiny fragment of print in the mire. He bent down, seized upon it and lifted it to a flickering light with a cry of thankful joy. Here was a miracle. A return of that sense of the miraculous in the face of a demanding text would not be altogether a bad thing.

George Steiner, "The end of bookishness?" Times Literary Supplement (8-14 July 1988), 754

A "sense of the miraculous in the face of a demanding text": what every teacher of literature should aim to inspire in the residents of her or his house of reading.

Related posts
» American reading habits
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