Deresiewicz v. D’Agata

“It kills me to think that there are going to be people walking around who believe that Socrates was an essayist because a self-important ignoramus named D’Agata told them so”: William Deresiewicz writes in the Atlantic about John D’Agata’s conception of the essay and his blithe disregard for fact.

I gave up on D’Agata on the second page of The Lifespan of a Fact (2012, co-authored with Jim Fingal). Curious about the anthology The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009), I just looked at Amazon to see what D’Agata says about Thomas Browne. A sourceless sentence that D’Agata presents as George Orwell’s made me curious:

It is Browne’s introspection which shifted us from the outside world of rhetoric, to the inner and private world of mystery and wonder.

It turns out that the sentence is impossible to find online. As far as I can tell, it cannot be found in Orwell’s work. And it turns out that a reviewer wondered about this very sentence in 2010. I did find a version of the sentence in David Shields‘s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010):

It is Sir Thomas Browne’s introspection that shifted us from the outside world of rhetoric to the inner and private world of mystery and wonder.

In Shields’s book the sentence is attributed only to “Orwell,” without further detail. Shields quotes from or cites D’Agata frequently. I think it’s reasonable to wonder whether the sentence about Browne is really from Orwell. Surely D’Agata must know.

But that’s the end of my look at John D’Agata’s work. Arthur Schopenhauer: “A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”

[Does the sentence even sound like Orwell?]

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December 15: I e-mailed D’Agata asking about a source for the sentence and received an automated “away” message making it clear that he will not be replying.

A related post
Make it known (Four sources for three D’Agata epigraphs: Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, John Ashbery, and the poet who first put those three together, Douglas Crase)

Quadrille revival

From Honoré de Balzac’s novella The Duchesse de Langeais:

“What is the matter, my dear Antoinette? You look frightful.”

“I will revive after a quadrille,” she answered, giving her hand to a young man who had just appeared.

The Human Comedy: Selected Stories , trans. from the French by Linda Asher, Carol Cosman, and Jordan Stump (New York: New York Review Books, 2014). This story translated by Cosman.

Also from Balzac
“Easily five foot eight or nine”
Orgy-related

Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams

Washington Phillips. Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams. Dust-to-Digital. 2016.

Mother’s Last Word to Her Son : Take Your Burden to the Lord and Leave It There : Paul and Silas in Jail : Lift Him Up That’s All : Denomination Blues — Part 1 : Denomination Blues — Part 2 : I Am Born to Preach the Gospel : Train Your Child : Jesus Is My Friend : What Are They Doing in Heaven Today : A Mother’s Last Word to Her Daughter : I’ve Got the Keys to the Kingdom : You Can’t Stop a Tattler — Part 1 : You Can’t Stop a Tattler — Part 2 : I Had a Good Father and Mother : The Church Needs Good Deacons

Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (Folkways, 1952) was first issued with extraordinary cover art: a Theodor de Bry drawing of a celestial monochord, a one-stringed instrument, tuned by a hand emerging from a cloud. The instrument is a representation of musica universalis, the music of the spheres, the harmonies of heavenly bodies in motion. In the 1960s the mystical gave way to social realism: Folkways replaced the de Bry drawing with a photograph of a Depression farmer. But the monochord returned for the anthology’s 1997 CD reissue. There is no getting away from the music of the spheres.

It’s unfortunate that Washington Phillips did not find a place in the Smith anthology. A monochord is, in essence, a zither, and Phillips (1880–1954) was a zitherist of extraordinary ability, playing, it seems, two zithers, joined (again, it seems) to make a single instrument played with two hands. Phillips called his instrument the manzarene (a play perhaps on “Nazarene”). Its sound is unique in American music. It suggests to my ears a celeste, a harp, a kora. Between 1927 and 1929 Phillips’s manzarene and voice were preserved on eight 78s, not by a folklorist or musicologist but by Frank Walker, a producer and talent scout for Columbia Records, who discovered Bessie Smith and later signed Hank Williams.

Phillips’s music is blissful stuff, a plaintive tenor voice with celestial-sounding accompaniment. Where Blind Willie Johnson knocks you down with his power, Phillips invites you to sit and visit a while. He sings of Jesus as a friend and easer of burdens, and as the one truth that makes all theological disputes irrelevant: “But you better have Jesus, I tell you that’s all” (“Denomination Blues”). Several songs concern relations between parents and children, and the necessity of having children “under good control” (“The Church Needs Good Deacons”). Phillips is skeptical of book learning, twice rhyming school and fool. Consider this maxim:

Education is all right
I will tell you before you start,
Before you educate the head,
Try to educate the heart (“Train Your Child”)

And though Phillips sings of hell, his depiction of the world’s badness is fairly mild, centering on everyday pleasures and domestic treachery: card playing, dancing, making dates with married men, buying dresses for women other than one’s wife. A lost two-part recording, “The World Is in a Bad Fix Everywhere,” may present a more dire picture.

The most affecting performance here is from Phillips’s final recording session, “I Had a Good Father and Mother.” Its story is poignant but without self-pity, with Phillips alternating between his tenor voice and an ethereal, wordless falsetto. This song might be the music of the spheres.

Dust-to-Digital has produced the definitive edition of Washington Phillips’s recordings, with excellent remastering. For the listener who (like me) knows the music from previous reissues, Michael Corcoran’s liner notes make this release a must, with photographs, extensive documentation of Phillips’s life, recollections from neighbors and relatives, and the clearest account we are likely to have of Phillips’s instrument. Misconceptions corrected, one after another.

Here’s a page about this release: Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams. Thanks to Dust-to-Digital for a review copy of this recording.

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11:28 a.m.: The link to the image of the celestial monochord is fixed. It was a Blogger problem.

[An aside: I first saw de Bry’s drawing of the celestial monochord in the April/May 1969 issue of Sing Out! magazine, still on my bookshelves. That issue had the first installment of a John Cohen interview with Harry Smith.]

A new rubric

“Because I can no longer claim with any credibility that reading, writing, and critical thinking are essential skills for 21st-century success, I have revised the grading rubric for your papers accordingly”: Daveena Tauber, “Post-Election College Paper Grading Rubric” (McSweeney’s).

But shouldn’t it be “Post-Election College-Paper Grading Rubric”? Or “Post-Election College Paper-Grading Rubric”? I guess I just wasn’t made for these times.

A related post
Matthew Crawford on making judgments (Against rubrics)

Thanks, Elaine, Jim, and Luanne.

Lies and inconsistencies

At Daring Fireball, John Gruber unpacks the lies and illogicalities in a three-sentence statement from the president-elect’s transition team: 235 words to parse just 42.

I recall the long-infamous 2002 statement from “a senior adviser” to George W. Bush, widely reported to be Karl Rove:

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.”

And we know how well that worked out through eight years of W. “We create our own reality,” or more recently, “There‘s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts”: it’s postmodernism with a vengeance.

See also George Orwell on historical truth and totalitarian history.

For Nancy Ritz

[Nancy, June 13, 1949. Notice the deep-focus camerawork.]

A post with some perhaps unobvious bits of advice: How to do well on a final exam. A comment on the post: “This teacher is amazing :) I listened to him and got a 90 on my final exam!”

[To the commenter: Thanks. Your check is (still) in the mail.]

Christian music

“Wholly Cats” (Benny Goodman) and “Royal Garden Blues” (Clarence Williams–Spencer Williams). Benny Goodman and His Sextet: Goodman, clarinet; Georgie Auld, tenor sax; Cootie Williams, trumpet; Count Basie, piano; Charlie Christian, electric guitar; Artie Bernstein, bass; Harry Jaeger, drums. November 7, 1940.

I’m still making my way through my dad’s CDs: Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, Ivie Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Fred Astaire, Mildred Bailey, Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Art Blakey, Ruby Braff and Ellis Larkins, Clifford Brown, Dave Brubeck, Joe Bushkin, Hoagy Carmichael, Betty Carter, Ray Charles, and now, Charlie Christian.

Also from these CDs
Mildred Bailey sings “Georgia on My Mind” and “Honeysuckle Rose” : Tony Bennett sings “Sweet Lorraine”

[Damn those YouTube ads: there’s no way to avoid them when embedding.]

From the Saturday Stumper

A beautifully clever clue from today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Frank Longo. It’s 28-Across, seven letters: “Inflationary spiral?” No spoilers: the answer is in the comments.

I find that I increasingly prefer the plain difficulty and flashes of wit in Newsday puzzles to the strained humor of The New York Times.

The Netflix DVD problem

It can be summed up thusly:

Queue: twenty-nine movies, some of which we don’t really even want to see.

Saved: fifty-eight movies, twice as many, all of which one or the other or both of us would really like to see, all with availability “Unknown.”

What’s not available from Netflix on DVD is often more interesting to us than what is available.

John Glenn (1921–2016)

[“Fish eye view of Project Mercury astronaut John Glenn training in a mock up of the planned space capsule.” Photograph by Ralph Morse. 1959. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

The New York Times obituary: “John Glenn, American Hero of the Space Age, Dies at 95.”