Collegiate pastoral

The images of college life found in collegiate promotional materials offer an abiding version of the pastoral in our world. Therein it's always spring; a small group of shepherds and shepherdesses (i.e., students) sit on the grass. There is always grass. The grass is lush and green, so it must have rained, but not so recently as to make the ground unpleasant to sit upon. (Hey, it's pastoral.) The students are speaking to one another, not into cell phones. They may well be speaking in iambic pentameter and rhyme.

Such scenes, minus meter and rhyme, can on occasion be found in reality of course. What photographs of such scenes fail to suggest is how noisy even the most pastoral collegiate moment is likely to be. One student with powerful speakers and open windows can pollute the emptiest, greenest quad with noise. Loud music also comes from official sources: it's increasingly common for athletic teams to practice -- even during final-exam week -- with music blasting from a PA system. A skateboard might be grinding away just beyond the edge of the picture. Not long ago I heard for the first time a minibike going up and down a sidewalk in the middle of campus, the whine of its engine bouncing off the walls of four buildings. (Yes, the minibike was traveling up and down, for sport, not transport.) And at times nothing more than an occasional shout might break the pastoral mood: "Hey, faggot!" I heard one student hail a friend a while back, at a distance of perhaps thirty yards. Some version of pastoral!¹

¹ This last sentence is a tip of the hat to William Empson's critical study Some Versions of Pastoral (1935).

Archimedes Palimpsest

From tomorrow's New York Times:

An ambitious international project to decipher 1,000-year-old moldy pages is yielding new clues about ancient Greece as seen through the eyes of Hyperides, an important Athenian orator and politician from the fourth century B.C. What is slowly coming to light, scholars say, represents the most significant discovery of Hyperides text since 1891, illuminating some fascinating, time-shrouded insights into Athenian law and social history.

"This helps to fill in critical moments in ancient classical Greece," said William Noel, the curator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters Art Museum here and the director of the Archimedes Palimpsest project. Hyperides "is one of the great foundational figures of Greek democracy and the golden age of Athenian democracy, the foundational democracy of all democracy."

The Archimedes Palimpsest, sold at auction at Christie's for $2 million in 1998, is best known for containing some of the oldest copies of work by the great Greek mathematician who gives the manuscript its name. But there is more to the palimpsest than Archimedes' work, including 10 pages of Hyperides, offering tantalizing and fresh insights into the critical battle of Salamis in 480 B.C., in which the Greeks defeated the Persians, and the battle of Chaeronea in 338 B.C., which spelled the beginning of the end of Greek democracy.

The palimpsest is believed to have been created by Byzantine monks in the 13th century, probably in Constantinople. As was the practice then, the durable and valuable vellum pages of several older texts were washed and scraped, to remove their writing, and then used for a medieval prayer book. The pages of the older books became the sheaths of a newer one, thus a palimpsest (which is pronounced PAL-imp-sest and is Greek for "rubbed again").

A Layered Look Reveals Ancient Greek Texts (New York Times, registration required)

Archimedes Palimpsest (archimedespalimpsest.org)

Anita O'Day (1919-2006)

“I’d decided O’Day was groovy because in pig Latin it meant dough, which was what I hoped to make.”

Anita O'Day died yesterday in Los Angeles.

Anita O’Day, 87, Hard-Living Star of the Big-Band Era and Beyond, Dies (New York Times, registration required)

Here’s Anita O'Day at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, from Aram Avakian and Bert Stern's film Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1960).

Proust

I finished reading In Search of Lost Time last night, five months and two days after I started. The final volume, titled Finding Time Again in the Penguin translation, took me only six days, during which I began to have the awful thought that if "anything" were to "happen to me" (that odd euphemism), it could happen before I had finished reading Proust. I had to keep reading! How strange then to find that as In Search of Lost Time nears its end, the work's still-unnamed narrator, after finally coming to understand his vocation as a writer, fears that something might happen to him before he is able to finish his work.

Proust really seems in such ways to be a kindred spirit. He seems to have understood in so many ways what it is that "we" (recurring word in the novel) experience in our relations to people, places, and things in time. He is, for me, the writer of consciousness and memory. His explorations of both, alas, make the stream of consciousness of Ulysses -- e.g., "Sardines. Little things. Good with toast." -- seem a bit like a dated gadget. (That's a made-up sample of Joyce. But if I'm reading correctly, some of the comments in Finding Time Again on the representation of consciousness in fiction appear to be aimed at Joyce's work-then-in-progress.)

I finished reading Proust for the first time: that's what I should've written above. I plan to go back, soon. Before I do, I want to read Pleasures and Days (sketches and short stories), a volume of letters, Céleste Albaret's memoir Monsieur Proust (CA was Proust's housekeeper), Edmund White's short bio, and Howard Moss' The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust (a used-book find). And I plan to dip, at least, into the large biographies, Gilles Deleuze's Proust and Signs, and, of course, the French text and the earlier translations. And I'm wondering whether I want to read Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life. He already has.

Here's one passage from Finding Time Again, in which the narrator is contemplating what a book might be. I've corrected one typo in the Penguin paperback:

How much better life seemed to me now that it seemed susceptible of being illuminated, taken out of the shadows, restored from our ceaseless falsification of it to the truth of what it was, in short, realized in a book! How happy the writer of a book like that would be, I thought, what a labour awaited him! To give some idea of it, one would have to go to the most elevated and divergent arts for comparisons; for this writer, who would also need to show the contrasting aspects of each character to create depth, would have to prepare his book scrupulously, perpetually regrouping his forces as in an offensive, and putting up with the work like tiredness, accepting it like a rule, constructing it like a church, following it like a regime, overcoming it like an obstacle, winning it like a friendship, feeding it up like a child, creating it like a world, without ever neglecting its mysteries, the explanations for which are probably to be found only in other worlds, while our occasional inklings of them are what, in life and in art, move us most deeply. In books of this scope, there are parts which have never had time to be more than sketched in and which will probably never be finished because of the very extent of the architect's plan. Think how many great cathedrals have been left unfinished! One feeds a book like that, one strengthens its weak parts, one looks after it, but eventually it grows up, it marks our tomb, and protects it from rumours and, for a time, from oblivion. But to return to myself, I was thinking about my book in more modest terms, and it would even be a mistake to say that I was thinking of those who would read it as my readers. For they were not, as I saw it, my readers, so much as readers of their own selves, my book being merely one of those magnifying glasses of the sort the optician at Combray used to offer his customers; my book, but a book thanks to which I would be providing them with the means of reading within themselves. With the result that I would not ask them to praise me or to denigrate me, only to tell me if it was right, if the words they were reading in themselves were really the ones I had written (possible divergences in this regard not necessarily always originating, it should be said, in my having been wrong, but sometimes in the fact that the reader's eyes might not be of a type for which my book was suitable as an aid for self-reading).

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003), 342-343

[Pictured, the last manuscript page of À la recherche du temps perdu, via Gallica Proust.]

Proust posts, via Pinboard

Overheard

While waiting for a concert to begin:

"He said, 'I'm the reason you're gonna be able to buy that cheaper now.'"

"Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

Proust on perception

Doubtless, objects present man with no more than a limited number of their immeasurable attributes, because of the poverty of our senses. Things are coloured because we have eyes; how many other epithets might they not deserve if we had hundreds of senses? But this different aspect that they could have had is made easier for us to understand by what in life is a minimal incident of which we know only a part, believing it to be the whole, and which someone else perceives as if through a window on the other side of the house giving a different view.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, translated by Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003), 646

Only (?) 342 pages of In Search of Lost Time to go.

Proust posts, via Pinboard

Mom, dad, son, hand, thumb

My son Ben and I were playing music -- Sufjan Stevens' "Jacksonville" (Ben, banjo; I, guitar).

"Your hands move the same way when you play," Elaine said.

"We each have an opposable thumb," I said.

"Evolution!" said Ben.

Vanity plates for TCHRS

There's a revealing account in the Chronicle of Higher Education of an assistant professor's experiences at orientation sessions for new faculty. "Graham Bennett" is an assistant professor of English at an American research university. Like many honest commentators on higher education, he is writing under a pseudonym. Here's a sample:

As part of the session on improving classroom discussion, participants were asked to imagine what their teaching philosophy would look like if it were the vanity plate for their car. We were allowed 12 letters with which to represent ourselves. For five minutes, people silently scribbled on -- or, like myself, hostilely stared at -- the sheets of paper that had been given to us for this little exercise.

When the person sitting next to me (who was similarly not writing anything down) asked why I wasn't participating, I explained that this was exactly the sort of activity I loathed as a student, that I found such activities useless and annoying. Two other people at my table sighed with relief and nodded their heads in agreement. It seems I'm not the only one with little patience for "out of the box" exercises (so many of which turn out to be recycled from the same irritating, warm-and-fuzzy, "I'm pretending this activity is original even though it's completely derivative" edutainment box).

Read the whole piece and find out what Bennett wrote for his license plate.

(Dis)Orientation (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Proust: "That's her!"

The narrator is in Venice, about to dine with his mother and Mme Sazerat in a private room in a hotel. He has just told the ladies that Mme de Villeparisis is in the hotel restaurant. Mme Sazerat seems about to faint:

"Couldn't I look at her for a moment? I have dreamed of this all my life."

"Yes, but don't take too long, Madam, for she will soon have finished dining. But why should she interest you so?"

"Because it was Mme de Villeparisis, the Duchesse d'Havré by her first marriage, as beautiful as an angel but as wicked as a witch, who drove my father mad, ruined him, then left him forthwith. And yet! Although she acted like a common whore and caused me and my family to live in straitened circumstances in Combray, now that my father is dead, I console myself with the thought that he loved the most beautiful woman of his day, and since I have never seen her, despite everything it will be a relief . . ."

I led Mme Sazerat, who was trembling with emotion, to the restaurant and pointed out Mme de Villeparisis.

But, like the blind, who direct their eyes everywhere but where they should, Mme Sazerat failed to focus her gaze on Mme de Villeparisis's dinner-table, and sought out another corner of the room.

"Well, she must have left, I can't see her where you say."

And she continued to hunt for the detestable, adorable vision that had haunted her imagination for so long.

"No she hasn't, she's at the second table."

"We must be starting our count from different ends. At what I call the second table there's only an old gentleman sitting beside a horrid little old lady with a red face and a hunchback."

"That's her!"

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, translated by Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003), 598-599

(415 pages of In Search of Lost Time to go.)

Proust posts, via Pinboard

Zadie Smith on reading

[Welcome, Boing Boing readers!]

Zadie Smith tells it like it is. These are useful, useful words for any student of literature:

But the problem with readers, the idea we're given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don't know, who they probably couldn't comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That's the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It's an old moral, but it's completely true.

Bookworm interview: Zadie Smith (KCRW FM, Santa Monica, CA, via kottke.org)

Related posts
George Steiner on reading (excerpt from "The end of bookishness?")
Words, mere words (excerpt from Mark Edmondson's Why Read?)