Rough Draft

Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices

2011-01-02T10:36:00.000-08:00

Noah Feldman, Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices. New York: Twelve, 2010. Hardcover. 433 pages. $30.

When FDR took office in 1933, the United States was in the midst of the Great Depression. Unemployment peaked that year at an astonishing 25%, but the financial markets which had been at the epicenter of the crisis were still unreformed and unregulated. FDR took office with an ambitious plan to repair the American economy that became known as the first New Deal, but as he attempted to implement his plans through sweeping legislation like the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), he was consistently blocked by a conservative majority on the United States Supreme Court.

The Court in 1933 was dominated by justices who consistently interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment, in particular, as guaranteeing “liberty of contract,” a concept which the Court used to protect the interests of big business. The Court consistently found unconstitutional Progressive measures like minimum wage laws and restrictions on the length of the work week. In frustration, FDR conceived a plan to increase the membership of the court—nowhere was it written that the Supreme Court must have nine members—and create a new liberal majority that would support the New Deal.

The “court packing” plan failed, but during FDR’s long tenure as President he was able to reshape the Court in a way that had profound effects on American jurisprudence and American society. The direct influence of FDR’s appointees culminated in the landmark 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, but their legacy lives on in the influential constitutional theories that the greatest of his appointees developed during their time on the Court.

Feldman’s fantastic book focuses on the four greatest of FDR’s Supreme Court Justices: Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, and William O. Douglas. Each rose from humble origins to assume an important place in FDR’s inner circle and a seat on the Supreme Court. Each was dazzlingly brilliant and fiercely ambitious. Together, in the words of Frankfurter’s former law clerk Alexander Bickel, they were like “scorpions in a bottle.” Feldman shows how, out of their individual backgrounds and personalities and their collective conflicts, FDR’s Justices made history.

Hugo Black, for example, had in the late 1920s won a Senate seat from Alabama largely on the strength of his membership in the Ku Klux Klan. He later repudiated his membership in the Klan, and went on to become the moral force behind the Brown decision and the Court’s advocacy of the rights of racial minorities. Black’s effort to redeem his personal honor from the taint of racism can be seen as a driving force behind his actions on the Court.

During his record thirty-six years on the Court, Black developed the now highly influential constitutional theory known as “originalism,” which looks to the original meaning of the Constitution, and the Framers’ original intent, as the basis for judicial decision-making. Feldman points out that “the deep wellspring of Black’s originalism was the distinctly Protestant method of biblical interpretation that he had used for two decades as a Sunday school teacher in Birmingham.” Feldman explains: “There is an overlap between the Protestant idea that the Bible can be interpreted by any individual without the mediating authority of the Church and the originalist idea that the meaning of the Constitution may be ascertained without reference to binding precedent” (145).

Black developed originalism as a means of remedying what he considered the overreaching of an earlier conservative court, which had smuggled the concept of “liberty of contract” into the Constitution, even though the concept was unsupported by the text itself. For Black, at least in the beginning, originalism was a liberal constitutional theory which stood behind his efforts to insure equal justice to minorities. But later in his career, Black’s consistent originalism led him to oppose decisions of the Warren Court based on the “right to privacy,” which he argued was (like “liberty of contract”) a concept that appeared nowhere in the text of the Constitution.* Black, once the most liberal Justice on the Court, became increasingly perceived as conservative as the Warren Court embraced the “legal realism” (or “judicial activism”) of Black’s one-time ally William O. Douglas. A consistent application of originalism produced results that were liberal in the context of the 1940s and 1950s, and conservative in the changed circumstances of the 1960s and beyond. On the present Court, of course, originalism is the Constitutional creed of the conservative standard-bearer Justice Antonin Scalia. Douglas, on the other hand, was consistently liberal because his philosophy of judicial activism led him to see the Supreme Court as an engine for social change.

Black was a Sunday school teacher with no theological training, a self-taught historian, a Justice with no previous experience as a judge. He thought originalism opened up an understanding of the Constitution to anyone with a copy of the text. Ironically, as Feldman points out, the doctrine of originalism has given rise to the highly specialized field of constitutional history, as historians ferret out the original contexts, intents, and meanings of Constitutional concepts.

While Black was working out originalism as his guiding constitutional philosophy, his colleague Felix Frankfurter was guided by “judicial restraint,” another concept which has become associated with judicial conservatism. Feldman brings out the irony of Frankfurter, once a lawyer for the ACLU and a driving force behind the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, upholding the constitutionality of the World War II Japanese internment camps and eventually being seen as one of the Court’s conservatives.

One of the great pleasures and virtues of Feldman’s book is that he can explain, in clear and compelling terms, the often specialized Constitutional issues at stake while maintaining the drama and excitement of a good story with memorable characters. There are times when the story of Justice Robert Jackson, the proponent of judicial pragmatism, has the feel of a Greek tragedy: a stunning rise to power and prominence from humble beginnings; a damaging clash with Black that doomed Jackson’s shot at becoming Chief Justice; an international spotlight as chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, where the pressures of cross-examining Hermann Goering made him come spectacularly unhinged; a hospital bed signing of the unanimous opinion in Brown, a decision about which he had deep reservations. Jackson died believing he’d been a failure, but his tradition of judicial pragmatism has been enormously influential on the Supreme Court, particularly in the swing votes of Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy.

Feldman tells his interwoven stories with brilliance and flair, demonstrating that history is best understood as a confluence of massive societal forces and individual personalities, and that there is still value in studying the lives of great men whose influence has become woven into the fabric of American life.

* The landmark “right to privacy” case Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), in which Black issued a dissenting opinion, actually drew on opinions of Justice James Clark McReynolds, one of the “Four Horsemen” on the Supreme Court who consistently struck down New Deal legislation prior to 1937.

Disclaimer: I received a free review copy of this book from the publisher as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.

"George Eliot in Love"

2010-10-27T05:27:00.000-07:00

Brenda Maddox, George Eliot in Love. Palgrave Macmillan 2010. Hardcover. 222 pp. $25.

George Eliot was born Mary Anne Evans in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, in 1819. She was a brilliant but unattractive girl. Her father adored her, but her mother thought she was ugly. Even when she was the most famous novelist in England, her ugliness was the first thing people remarked upon when they had met her. Henry James called her "magnificently ugly, deliciously hideous" and a "great horse-faced blue-stocking." Even her obituary in the Times called her ugly. Throughout her life, she suffered from a lack of self-confidence, and from poor health, and from an aversion to having her photograph taken. When she was a young woman, men (like Herbert Spencer) fell in love with her intellect, but were repulsed by her looks. When she finally settled down happily with ugly George Henry Lewes (nicknamed "the Ape"), Spencer piggishly published an essay on "Personal Beauty" in which he seemed to describe George Eliot's face as the paradigm of ugliness.

As a girl, Mary Anne (or Mary Ann, or Marian) was first drawn toward evangelical Christianity, and aspired toward sainthood. She later lost her faith, and became notorious for living in sin with another woman's husband. She had sympathies with Positivism, but in the end settled down, in good English fashion, to attending the Anglican church without believing a word of it. She was complicated. She had a brilliant mind, and was the most successful novelist of her time, and lived for twenty-five years with a married man, but she was essentially conservative. She rejected the idea of giving women the vote, and was lukewarm at best in her support for women's higher education. Her brilliant novels often disappoint modern feminists with their message of female self-sacrifice and domesticity. Some women fell madly in love with her (at her funeral, one of them knelt down and kissed her coffin), but she preferred men.

Brenda Maddox's brief biography is a fresh, fluid, and sympathetic introduction to George Eliot's life. It ably captures the contradictions in Eliot's life, the brilliance and insecurity, the ugliness and beauty, the rebellion against social norms and the essential conservatism. It suggests how George Eliot's own life—her childhood and family, her deep need to be loved, her struggles to find a place for herself in a man's world—informed her fiction, without reducing her brilliantly complex novels to veiled autobiography. Maddox writes so fluently and well that I read the book in two sittings. She has an ear for the telling anecdote and the pointed quotation which makes her biography of George Eliot both entertaining and informative.

Blog Vacation

2010-08-10T16:36:00.000-07:00

Rough Draft will be in hiatus for the next few weeks.

Solar Power and Flossing Monkeys

2010-08-03T14:40:00.000-07:00

Will is leaving on Monday for his year in Lopburi, Thailand, as a Rotary Youth Exchange student. Lopburi Province lies about 150 kilometers north of Bangkok, and is known among tourists primarily for its monkeys—the crab eating macaques who infest the city of Lopburi. Recently, researchers have observed the monkeys using human hair to floss their teeth, and teaching their young how to floss. Here's a video:

Monkeys teach young to floss their teeth using human hairs
Uploaded by ITN.

Lopburi is also slated to be the site of the world's largest photovoltaic (solar) generating plant. Construction of the massive 158 megawatt solar array begins this month. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has approved a $70 million (USD) long-term loan for the project.

According to a report in Thailand's Pattaya Daily News, "ADB Vice President for Private Sector & Co-Financing Operations Lakshmi Venkatachalam stated that the Thai government’s clear and attentive policy promoting alternative energy sources and the great potential of the nation were the main reasons behind the ADB decision to help in funding the solar project."

Reading Journal: "The War That Made America"

2010-07-30T15:32:00.000-07:00

Fred Anderson, The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War. New York: Viking, 2005.

This year is the 250th anniversary of the end of the French and Indian War, the war that left Great Britain in control of Canada and brought to a close the conflict between Britain and France over disputed territory west of the Allegheny Mountains. 1759 was the annus mirabilis for Britain, the year in which British forces defeated the French in engagement after engagement over several continents, and took control of Québec in the decisive battle on the Plains of Abraham. In Britain and her American colonies, that battle made a national hero of General James Wolfe, who fell on the Plains of Abraham as his troops were surging to victory. The war also gave Britain's American colonists a keener sense of their own rights as British subjects, and set the stage for American independence.

The French and Indian War began in 1754, when a 22-year old Virginian militia officer led a small detachment from his regiment into a lopsided 15-minute engagement with French troops in southeastern Pennsylvania. The officer was George Washington.

Fred Anderson's book, published as a companion volume to a PBS series, is a first-rate introduction to the French and Indian War. Anderson is excellent at revealing the motivations and understanding the actions on all three sides of the conflict: the French, the British, and the Indian. His writing is clear and engaging, and the text is well-illustrated. This has to be the best general introduction to the French and Indian War for the general reader. But for readers who want a more in-depth study of the war, with footnotes, Anderson is also the author of the magisterial Crucible of War: The Seven Years War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).

Vetch

2010-07-25T08:29:00.000-07:00

The flowers are a little past their peak, and have begun to produce miniature pea pods, but the drifts of purple and white flowers in the Upper Arb are still beautiful on a sunny Sunday morning.

Salmon with Chu Chee Curry Sauce

2010-07-18T17:51:00.000-07:00

In a medium saucepan, gently heat 1/4 of a 14 oz. can light coconut milk, whisking in 2 teaspoons each Thai red curry paste and Thai chili paste until dissolved. Add the rest of the can of coconut milk, 2 tablespoons fish sauce and 2 teaspoons palm (or brown) sugar. Simmer for five minutes. Remove from heat. Serve over grilled salmon, with rice, and garnished with Thai basil leaves and a slice of lime.

This is a slightly reduced fat version of Fried Salmon with Chu Chee Curry Sauce from Khamtane Signavong's Lemongrass and Sweet Basil: Traditional Thai Cooking (Interlink Books 2005), substituting grilled salmon for salmon fried in oil, and light coconut milk for coconut cream and coconut milk.

Reading Journal: "The Curate's Wife"

2010-07-14T12:27:00.000-07:00

E.H. Young, The Curate's Wife. Virago Modern Classics 1984. Originally published in Great Britain in 1934.

A cursory examination of my bookshelves reveals several novels, all written by women, with titles like The Curate's Wife, The Rector's Daughter, Her Son's Wife and The Optimist's Daughter—in other words, novels whose titles are taken, not from a woman's name, but from a woman's relationship, as wife or daughter, to a man.

Jane Austen's novels—inevitably, we come back to Jane Austen—are essentially Regency coming-of-age stories. They're about how Catherine Morland or Elizabeth Bennett or Emma Woodhouse grow up, find themselves, and find romance into the bargain. The novels end with a marriage—but don't go any further to imagine how that marriage is sustained over the years that follow.

In so many of the great Victorian novels, the marriage plot is given an extra twist, and becomes a remarriage plot. An unsuitable first marriage—David Copperfield to Dora, Dorothea to Casaubon, Helen Graham to Arthur Huntingdon, Mr. Rochester to the mad woman in the attic—is set up as an obstacle to the two true lovers. We do see husbands and wives working hard at their relationships, or resigning themselves to relationships that don't work at all, but the death of one spouse usually brings resolution. The novel ends with a marriage after all. The first marriage is only a test, or in David Copperfield's case, a kind of toy marriage.

The Curate's Wife is a sequel to Jenny Wren—a novel that takes its title from the female protagonist, Jenny Rendall, a self-centered girl struggling to find her place in the world. It's a kind of coming-of-age story. Jenny's sister, Dahlia, marries the dull, earnest, and thoroughly smitten Rev. Cecil Sproat, and becomes the eponymous curate's wife. Her story is more about how relationships are sustained. It's a novel about marriage—not marriage as a happy ending, but marriage as a career.

"It has to be a career," Dahlia says, "not just the happiness you think it will be, or the unhappiness it may turn out."

At the same time, Jenny, who has remained unmarried, finds herself in a Jane Austen plot—so much so that Austen's own Lady Catherine De Bourgh makes an unexpected comic appearance in the novel. E.H. Young acknowledges her own deep debt to Jane Austen, while at the same time acknowledging that there is a real story beyond the happy ending.

Also, unlike Austen, Young acknowledges that her men and women are physical beings who experience sexual attraction and long for physical intimacy. The most unsympathetic and maladjusted character in the novel is a woman who "would never forgive [her husband] the physical intimacy of their youth," and has been left with "an unacknowledged, unreasonable feeling that she had been insulted." In a way that seems remarkable for 1934, E.H. Young acknowledges that a healthy sexual relationship is an important part of a successful marriage.

Blogging on Blog Divided

2010-07-14T09:44:00.000-07:00

Today I published my first blog post for Blog Divided, a community blog that focuses on the history of the period from 1840 to 1880—the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods. The primary purpose of the blog, and of the House Divided Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, is to provide resources for classroom teachers to explore this period in American history. I've been asked to provide blog posts on the Greek and Roman classics in the education and culture of the period.

Here's my first post. From now on, my posts will be aggregated over in the right sidebar.

Labyrinth

2010-07-12T07:49:00.001-07:00

Prairie

2010-07-12T05:51:00.001-07:00

Civil War Naval Cannon in Waconia, Minnesota

2010-07-11T11:41:00.000-07:00

This naval cannon, located in City Square Park, was cast at the famous Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia in 1846.

History Trivia Quiz #1

2010-07-06T17:31:00.000-07:00

Name five Civil War generals who served, either before or after the war, as college presidents. Also give the names of the colleges. (Answers in the comments.)

Mapping the Civil War

2010-07-04T05:08:00.000-07:00

Last night I finally came to the end of a long and hard-fought campaign. I finished reading The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. I might not have fought through to the end had it not been for the reinforcement of a good atlas. Much of the book is a description of the movement and positioning of troops, and of the territory over which they passed. Like Grant's army, I started to get bogged down in the bayous around Vicksburg. Here's a representative passage:

Lieutenant-Colonel [James H.] Wilson of my staff was sent to Helena, Arkansas, to examine and open a way through to Moon Lake and the Yazoo Pass if possible. Formerly there was a route by way of an inlet from the Mississippi River to Moon Lake, a mile east of the river, thence east through Yazoo Pass to Coldwater, along the latter to Tallahatchie, which joins the Yallabusha about two hundred and fifty miles below Moon Lake and forms the Yazoo River.

This is much easier to follow on a good map, such as the map that Lieutenant-Colonel Wilson produced.

To guide me through the hard terrain of Grant's Memoirs, I relied on the National Geographic Atlas of the Civil War: A Comprehensive Guide to the Tactics and Terrain of Battle (256 pp., $40). The atlas begins with an essay on the importance of cartography in the Civil War. "Southerners," the essay concludes, "had the advantage of fighting this war largely on their own soil, but that was offset as the conflict progressed by the superior mapmaking resources of the North." The Union armies had to penetrate deep into Confederate territory, and face an opponent who was familiar with the lay of the land, so mapmakers like Wilson were essential to the Union's success. And the maps they made continue to be essential for those attempting to follow the movements of the armies a century and a half later.

The National Geographic Atlas is full of colorful, easy-to-read large format maps, most of them either contemporary or produced soon after the war. Some of the most remarkable maps are those produced by Robert Knox Sneden, a Union soldier, mapmaker and painter who produced a remarkable illustrated diary, much of it composed secretly while he was being held in Andersonville Prison. The diary was rediscovered in 1994, and currently resides in the Virginia Historical Society. Go here to see Sneden's map of the investment of Petersburg, one of the maps included in the atlas.

Another atlas that I occasionally consulted was Aaron Sheehan-Dean's Oxford Concise Historical Atlas of the U.S. Civil War (112 pp., $25). This is a small paperback book with maps produced by the author using GIS and Adobe Illustrator. For a reader attempting to follow the movements of Grant's army, the Oxford atlas falls short. Its strength lies in its inclusion of data maps that illustrate census data such as agricultural productivity in the United States at the outbreak of the Civil War. These maps are often surprising. For example, the map of agricultural productivity shows that, although the South is generally thought of as agricultural and the North as industrial, the North actually generated more agricultural wealth in 1860. Wheat produced by free labor was more lucrative than cotton produced by slaves, and the North produced more commodities for home consumption, while the South relied too heavily on staple crops for export. These maps, and the accompanying text, are extremely useful in providing some socioeconomic context for the war, but the actual battle maps are disappointingly lacking in detail.

For the neophyte like me, I would recommend the National Geographic Atlas. It's beautifully illustrated, easy to read, admirably comprehensive and, at $40, reasonably priced for such a large and well-illustrated book.

MCA Results: What Do They Mean?

2010-07-02T15:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the Minnesota Department of Education released the results of the spring 2010 MCA tests (MInnesota Comprehensive Assessment). The MDE's official press release begins with the teaser: "Data reveals success of strong high stakes graduation requirement." The press release goes on to tout improvements in test scores over previous years.

Northfield schools continued to score higher than the state average, while schools in Faribault generally fell below the state average at each grade level, despite improvements over last year. Unsurprisingly, Faribault's superintendent, Bob Stepaniak, is "frustrated," and Northfield's superintendent, Chris Richardson, is "encouraged."

What does this mean? What does it mean that Northfield outperformed a school district only fifteen miles away?

Part of the answer surely is in demographics. Faribault has a higher percentage of "free and reduced price lunch" students—a measure of poverty—than Northfield. In Northfield, the median family income is $61,000; in Faribault, it's not quite $50,000. Socioeconomic factors certainly have an impact on standardized test scores. These factors are largely outside the control of the school districts, and are not taken into consideration in determining whether districts are making "adequate yearly progress" toward a goal of 100% proficiency in 2014.

Behind the aggregate numbers are individual students, each with his or her own strengths and weaknesses, each with individual needs. As Northfield superintendent Richardson told the Northfield News, "The best information...lies below the surface of the data. Parents and educators...will learn much more by looking at individual students' data, considering the areas in which they performed well and struggled."

Let's imagine an average 4th grade classroom. The state average in reading is 72.5% proficient. As you can imagine, there are all sorts of scenarios by which a classroom might be "average." With twenty students per classroom, the numbers might look like this: 10 students at 90% proficiency; 5 students at 70% proficiency; 5 students at 40% proficiency. Half the class is very high performing (90%), a quarter of the class is about average, a quarter of the class is well below average. The significant information here is not the aggregate score (72.5%, the state average), it's the performance of the individual students. What can the teacher do to continue to challenge the students at 90% and to improve the outcomes of the students at 70% or 40%? This, not the aggregating of numbers and the making of graphs, is the real challenge for educators. How do you help real students who are more complex than mere numbers?

Iv'e plugged in some simple numbers in a small sample size. Imagine the situation in a classroom of 30 or more in the Faribault Public Schools. The challenge becomes even more daunting.

The aggregate data fails to see students as individuals, and the determination of whether schools are "failing" or "succeeding" fails to see that data in context. I would much rather see the data put in context, and used to provide targeted instruction for individual students, than used in aggregate as a simplistic and decontextualized method of determining whether schools are "passing" or "failing."

To me, the aggregate numbers mean little. More important is how the school works with each individual student to assess and address his or her strengths and weaknesses. Assessment results should be part of a feedback loop that provides information to teachers to help them target their instruction. Those results should not be part of a system of punishment and reward.

The Popcorn Theory of Economics

2010-06-22T11:07:00.000-07:00

A conversation at ARTech Charter School between two middle schoolers:

Boy: Why is popcorn sold at movies?

Girl: They sell popcorn to make you thirsty, so you have to buy a large drink, which makes you have to pee, so that when the DVD comes out you have to buy it to see the part of the movie you missed while you were in the bathroom.

Reading Journal: "Jenny Wren"

2010-06-14T05:53:00.000-07:00

E.H. Young, Jenny Wren. Virago Modern Classics 1985. First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Limited, 1932.

Comparisons to Jane Austen are inevitable. "Jane Austen" becomes a kind of shorthand for an English novel that concerns itself primarily with the lives and relationships of women, and in particular their pursuit of husbands. Jenny Wren centers on the lives of two sisters, Dahlia and Jenny Rendall, who live with their mother in the upscale suburb of Upper Radstowe, where the widowed Mrs. Rendall keeps a boarding house. The girls' father, Sidney Rendall, was a scholar who married below his class, and his younger daughter, Jenny, has inherited his cultured distaste for her mother's rusticity. She dreams of marrying a squire—and when she actually meets one, she hides the shame of her mother's origins, and the deeper shame of her mother's affair with the farmer Thomas Grimshaw.

Like Jane Austen, E.H. Young has a a subtle sense of humor, a satirical attitude toward the British class system, and a beautiful prose style. Like Jane Austen, E.H. Young explores the conflicts between the inner lives of her characters and the external reality in which they are forced to live and interact with other people. Jenny, with her prejudices and her self-absorption, is in many ways an unsympathetic character, but Young is interested in exploring the ability of people to love each other despite, and perhaps even because of their flaws. One of the most affecting aspects of the novel is the relationship between Louisa Rendall and her daughters: Young beautifully renders the ways in which their antagonism—Jenny's shame, Louisa's resentment—shades into loyalty and mutual affection.

Unlike Jane Austen, E.H. Young is acutely aware that her characters possess physical bodies, with all of the desires or aversions that accompany those bodies. In her longing for intimacy, unfulfilled in her unequal marriage to Sidney Rendall, Louisa has an extramarital affair with Thomas Grimshaw. The pious young curate, Cecil Sproat, discovers, in his attraction to Dahlia, that he can be motivated by concerns of the flesh as well as by concerns of the spirit. Miss Morrison, a spinster who would have been more at home in a novel by Barbara Pym, comes to realize that, having entirely repressed her sexual nature, her charm even for a pious curate is incomplete. Sidney Rendall represents mind and spirit; Louisa Rendall represents sexuality: the question is whether Jenny and Dahlia can reconcile both sides of their inheritance, and express them in a healthy and fulfilling manner in their own lives.

E.H. Young writes beautiful sentences, many or which are like short stories in themselves. Here, for example, is a description of Miss Morrison, who comes to board with the Rendalls: "Here was the desired respectable spinster, without the fussiness Dahlia feared: here, also, was money punctually paid, but Miss Morrison's desire to be at home in Beulah Mount, to be sisterly with her young hostesses, sympathetic with their mother and comradely with Mr. Cummings, to assert, by practice, her belief that all was right with the world, had the nature of a lesson disguised as a play."

I wish I could regularly write sentences that say so much, so flowingly, and that come around to such a witty and astute summing up.

Recommended Poet: Alexandra Teague

2010-05-30T13:18:00.000-07:00

Alexandra Teague, Mortal Geography. New York: Persea Books, 2010. Winner of the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry. 88 pp. $15.

In poems about teaching English to immigrant students, Alexandra Teague beautifully explores the intersection between language and experience. In my favorite poem from her debut collection, "English Fundamentals," Teague observes a student diagramming sentences with colored markers. She writes: "She has given me/grammar as a stained glass window..." Where another poet might compose an ars poetica, Teague creates an ars grammatica, seeing significance of grammar as a means of fashioning meaning and beauty out of one's experience.

She also writes about relationships, about art (Georgia O'Keefe, Frida Kahlo and Edward Hopper all inspire her poetry), and about the human body. What she knows, and what her poetry skillfully conveys, is that there is more than one way of looking at anything—even a poem. One poem is titled "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Poem"—but every poem seems to offer alternate paths to meaning. In "Two Drafts Written After a Fight," for instance, the poet shows how the placement of punctuation, a slight change of emphasis but not of wording, can change the meaning of a poem entirely.

I first heard of Alexandra Teague on Poetry Daily, where I read her poem "Adjectives of Order." It was like hearing a really great song on the radio and wanting to buy the entire album. More of her poems can be read online at her website, but I recommend finding a copy of her book so you can explore more of her "mortal geography."

Reading Journal: "Every Man Dies Alone"

2010-05-23T07:21:00.000-07:00

Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone. Brooklyn, Melville House. Paperback. 539 pp. (with afterword). $16.95. Originally published as Jeder stirbt für sich allein in 1947.

Rudolf Ditzen was an alcoholic and a morphine addict. He was also, under the pseudonym Hans Fallada, a brilliant and popular author, who was intermittently in and out of favor with the Nazi authorities. He had come under suspicion when his 1932 novel Little Man, What Now? was made into a film by Jewish producers. But his 1937 novel Wolf Among Wolves attracted the favorable attention of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, who pressed Fallada to write an anti-semitic novel. Eventually, Fallada snapped from the pressure and ended up in a Nazi insane asylum. After his release near the end of the war, he sat down and feverishly composed the novel Every Man Dies Alone in a space of just twenty-four days. The novel is a masterpiece: a vivid depiction of life in Berlin under the Nazis, a detective story, a story of resistance, an affirmation of goodness and humanity in the face of overwhelming evil.

The story revolves around Otto Quangel, an austere carpentry shop foreman, and his wife Anna, who resist the Nazis by writing anti-Nazi postcards and dropping them in office buildings around Berlin. Most of the cards are immediately turned in to the Gestapo. The center section of the novel follows the efforts of Gestapo inspector Escherich to track down the writer of the postcards.

The conventions of the detective novel generally ally the reader on the side of the detective rather than that of the criminal. In this case, those conventions place the reader in an uncomfortable position. It's hard to resist the patient and methodical Escherich, who has a job to do and who does it well. But, of course, he's working for the Gestapo, and the criminals he seeks are not criminals at all, but ordinary decent people determined to stand against the evil of Nazism. But it's difficult for a reader not to fall into collaboration with literary convention.

Fallada's novel skillfully places the reader into a world turned upside down, in which the goodness and decency are criminalized, and the murderers are in charge. He makes the reader wonder, "What would I have done?" The novel brilliantly and disturbingly recreates the fear and suspicion that gripped wartime Berlin, and the arbitrariness of evil under the Nazis. Fallada's characters are all brilliantly realized, from the craven informers to the brutal thugs to the ordinary decent people whose plain humanity becomes heroic.

Fallada's writing is clear, calm, often wryly humorous. He never seems to raise his voice or become emotional, but his words are compelling and their impact quietly devastating. I found the novel nearly impossible to put down. Michael Hofmann's translation is astonishingly good. It captures the film noir feel and sound of Fallada's world, the patois of drunks and swindlers and Gestapo thugs, and the unsentimental striving of good people to hold onto their humanity.

Sensitive

2010-05-20T05:58:00.000-07:00

Me: You're so sensitive.

Her (pouting): Don't call me sensitive. It hurts my feelings.

Jack-in-the-Pulpit

2010-05-18T19:38:00.000-07:00

Photographed on Tuesday, May 18, 2010, in the Upper Arboretum.

Reading Journal: "The River of Doubt"

2010-05-15T06:19:00.000-07:00

Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey. Anchor Books 2005. Paperback. 416 pp. (with notes and index). $15.

It was a day or two before Christmas, and my son still had to find me a present, so he did the best thing he could possibly do. He walked down to Monkey See, Monkey Read, where Jerry had the perfect suggestion: Candice Millard's gripping account of Theodore Roosevelt's 1914 expedition down a previously uncharted tributary of the Amazon, the River of Doubt. Millard, an editor for National Geographic, delivers a perfect mix of biography, natural history, and adventure as she chronicles Roosevelt's fight for survival on the deadly river.

In 1912, Roosevelt was disenchanted with his Presidential successor William Howard Taft and the Republican party's abandonment of his own progressive principles. He decided to make another run for President at the head of the Progressive, or Bull Moose, Party. In a crowded field (Taft, Wilson, Roosevelt, and Debs), Roosevelt split the GOP vote and helped send Woodrow Wilson to the White House.* At loose ends, and suddenly a persona non grata with his former party, Roosevelt decided to fulfill a childhood dream of being a real explorer. So he set out on a poorly planned expedition down a mysterious South American river that exposed him to piranhas, cannibals, malaria, and a life-threatening infection that nearly ended his life.

Millard knows how to create suspense and a sense of the dangers that beset Roosevelt's expedition, without sacrificing historical or scientific accuracy. My only qualm is that she occasionally seems to anthropomorphize the menace of the Brazilian rain forest. For example, she writes: "Yet the same evolutionary competition that filled each branch, shadow, and muddy puddle with an unparalleled diversity of living things also ensured that those forms of life were virtually invisible to Roosevelt and his men. Those glimpses of activity that they did manage to see, moreover, were often calculated for the specific purpose of confusing and misleading them. Rarely in the rain forest do animals or insects allow themselves to be seen, and any that do generally do so with ulterior motives" (emphasis added). The attribution of calculation and ulterior motives to nature seems to me to misrepresent the mechanism of natural selection. But perhaps this is a minor criticism in the context of a true-life adventure story that aims to give the reader a vivid sense of the danger that surrounded Roosevelt and his men on their descent of the River of Doubt.

Millard tells a thrilling story, and as always, Theodore Roosevelt emerges as a compelling, larger-than-life figure.

*The story of the 1912 election is well told in James Chace's 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs—The Election that Changed the Country (Simon and Schuster 2004). It was Chace who suggested to Millard the idea of writing about Roosevelt's expedition on the River of Doubt.

Reading Journal: "Sheppard Lee"

2010-05-11T06:42:00.000-07:00

Robert Montgomery Bird, Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself. New York Review Books Classics 2008. Originally published in 1836. Paperback. 425 pp. $16.95.

Sheppard Lee has been left a prosperous estate by his father, but soon manages to lose most of it. Out of sheer laziness, he watches his 40-acre farm go to ruin, and he allows an unscrupulous overseer to cheat him out of the rest of his patrimony. He's reduced to digging for Captain Kid's gold, which according to local legend has been buried somewhere on his farm. While he's out digging in the middle of the night, he stumbles upon the dead body of a wealthy Philadelphia brewer who's been hunting in the area, and he discovers a new way out of his difficulties. He wishes he could trade places with the brewer, and—before he realizes what's happening—his soul passes out of him and reanimates the brewer's body. This begins a picaresque series of adventures in which Sheppard Lee passes from body to body in search of happiness.

He discovers that every body, no matter how well-circumstanced it appears from the outside, carries with it its own pack of troubles. The wealthy brewer, for example, suffers from gout and a shrewish wife, which combine to drive Sheppard Lee in search of another dead body to reanimate. What most of the secondhand bodies have in common is that their owners live off inherited wealth, or speculation, or credit, or the prospect of inheriting or marrying well. No one seems to do an honest day's work. No one is as fortunate as he seems from the outside.

Eventually, the Sheppard Lee ends up in the body of Tom, a slave on a Virginia plantation. The modern reader will find this section the most troubling. Tom has a kind, paternalistic master who requires little work from his slaves and smilingly allows them to cheat him at every turn. As Tom, Sheppard Lee finds some provisional happiness—until an abolitionist tract falls into the hands of the plantation's slaves, and foments a bloody insurrection. This section has to be read in the context of Nat Turner's slave rebellion in 1831, and the subsequent suppression of "incendiary" abolitionist publications by the post office in 1835. At the time, abolitionism was still out of the mainstream, and even opponents of slavery like John Quincy Adams worried that their tactics would lead to bloody slave insurrections.

Bird depicts the slaves, in easy and comfortable circumstances under a kind-hearted master, being stirred to a murderous frenzy by a pamphlet. In his previous incarnation, Sheppard Lee had been destroyed by a false story, and Bird is fascinated with the notion that stories—rumors, lies, false promises, uninformed public opinion—can come to have the force of fact. But the modern reader can't help but find his depiction of slavery highly objectionable.

The novel was originally published in 1836. In that year, President Jackson had issued the Specie Circular, an executive order requiring purchases of government land to be paid for in specie. This caused the state banks to start hemorrhaging gold and silver. At the same time, he had withdrawn federal funds from the Second Bank of the United States, which damaged credit by taking federally-backed paper currency out of circulation. Meanwhile, speculation in public lands in the west reached a fever pitch and finally collapsed, leading to bank failures, record high unemployment, and a five-year long depression.

Bird's novel is a kind of extended parable on financial speculation, as Sheppard Lee speculates on various incarnations in the hope of improving his financial condition and his stock of happiness. Along the way, he learns that appearances are deceiving, and that happiness can only be purchased with the specie of honest hard work.

Illustrations by Robert Montgomery Bird (1806-1854).

Difference

2010-05-11T06:02:00.000-07:00

Lydia weighs 88 pounds and Michelle weighs 67 pounds—

"Clouds are made out of water," she says, staring out the window. "So are humans."

"Are we clouds?" I ask.

"No. We're too heavy."

Mother's Day at Target Field

2010-05-10T14:37:00.000-07:00

The Twins blanked the Orioles on Sunday afternoon behind a strong performance by pitcher Nick Blackburn, who was backed up by three-run innings in the third and fourth. In the third inning, the Twins roughed up the O's starter, Brian Matusz, with five straight hits, and finally chased him from the game in the fourth. The final score was 6-0.

During the seventh inning stretch, the Northfield High School choirs sang "God Bless America" from the roof deck in center field. The arrangement was by the choir's director, Dwight Jilek. On the radio, Twins announcer John Gordon enthused, "Well, 'God Bless America' was sung by the Northfield High School choirs, and boy did they do a good job." Our son Will was singing in the tenor section, and Clara and I were sitting in field box in the corner of left field—where we couldn't see the the choir on the jumbotron, but where we had a great view of every catch made by Delmon Young in left and Denard Span in center.

We drove up to Minneapolis early, parked far from Target Field in the nearly deserted Leamington transit hub ramp near Orchestra Hall ($5), and walked up Nicollet Mall and 7th Street to the field. Not at all a bad way to do it. Target Field itself is beautiful—from the real grass to the great views both of the field and of the city of Minneapolis beyond. Our tickets weren't cheap ($32), but it was worth the price for a great Mother's Day outing, and our first experience of outdoor Major League baseball in Minnesota.

Word Problems: Subtraction

2010-05-05T07:40:00.000-07:00

Nicholas weighs 6 pounds—

“Who’s Nicholas?” she asks. “Why is he so small? Is he a baby? That’s small for a baby. I weighed more than that when I was born, and everyone said I was a small baby.”

She stares out the classroom window. Her attention seems to lengthen the further it wanders from the sheet of word problems on her desk.

The girl weighs 98 pounds. The bird outside the window weighs almost nothing. The wind ruffles its black feathers.

“I can’t stop looking at it,” she says.

See how the wind tosses the branches of the tree, and how the bird holds on, and even opens its beak to sing.

I may not be the best person to tutor her in math. I also would rather sit and watch the black birds in the tree outside the window. Now there are two birds, now one bird, and now that bird is gone.

“I can’t stop looking at the place where it used to be,” she says.

Reading Journal: "The God of the Hive"

2010-04-29T05:35:00.000-07:00

Laurie R. King, The God of the Hive. Bantam 2010. $25. I read the novel in Advance Uncorrected Proofs, through LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

In The Beekeeper's Apprentice (1994), Laurie R. King introduces readers to Mary Russell, a fifteen year old girl walking the Sussex downs with her nose in a text of Vergil. On her walk, she stumbles upon "a gaunt, graying man in his fifties" who mistakes her for a boy. The man is Sherlock Holmes, who has retired from detection to become a beekeeper. Inevitably, Russell and Holmes are drawn into an adventure together, and a new detective partnership—and a new detective series—is born. In the course of ten books, Russell and Holmes solve crimes, escape death, engage in espionage, revisit the scenes of canonical Holmes adventures (such as Dartmoor), develop a close intellectual affinity, and get married.

That marriage, between partners separated by nearly forty years, is one of the improbable elements in the Russell-Holmes series that Laurie R. King somehow manages to make work. The novels are for the most part not standard cosy murder mysteries in the Agatha Christie vein, with a body and a slow process of working out the problem. They are more thrillers, or "novels of suspense," than mysteries, and Russell and Holmes occasionally do more spying than detecting—thanks to King's transformation of Holmes's older brother Mycroft into the prototype of the British spymaster. But King is also playfully aware of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle standing in the background, and for Holmes enthusiasts there are plentiful references to the detective's earlier career.

In fact, The God of the Hive opens with Russell fleeing from danger with Estelle Adler, the daughter of Damian Adler, who is Holmes's son by his former nemesis, Irene Adler (introduced in the Conan Doyle story, "A Scandal in Bohemia"). My progress through the opening chapters of the story was slowed by the fact that The God of the Hive is, in fact, a sequel, picking up the action where it was left at the end of the previous Russell and Holmes novel, The Language of Bees. It would be best to read the two books in order, but King does a good job of bringing the lapsed reader like me up to speed. (I had only read the first six of the nine previous novels in the series.)

Most of the novel follows the attempts of Holmes and Russell to keep Damian and Estelle safe from a madman out for their blood. Along the way, a dangerous plot involving Mycroft Holmes develops. For most of the novel, Russell and Holmes are forced to separate: Holmes is on the run with Damian and a feisty, red-haired Scottish doctor; Russell is on the run with Estelle, an American pilot, and a mysterious Lake District woodsman. In King's skilled hands, all the moving parts fit together to create a highly satisfying and suspenseful entertainment.

The novel is set in 1924, soon after the election of Britain's first Labour government. In the background of the novel is a sense of political and social change. Holmes, who was at home in the London of the 1890s, has begun to find the City in many ways unrecognizable. He and Mycroft are beginning to feel their age as a new generation comes to power. King is fascinated with the contrast between Britain's rural and pagan traditions and its busy urban modernity. In the end, it's a case of Puck versus the bureaucrat.

Seasoned readers of the Russell-Holmes series know that Mary Russell speaks several languages, including Hebrew, and has an uncannily accurate throwing arm that allows her to bean six villains in the head with heavy stones in the middle of a pitch-black night. Russell herself is the most improbable of the improbable elements in the novels. But King makes her work, and makes her hold together these wild tales of mystery and suspense—and even has a little fun at the expense of her improbable creation. In one of my favorite bits of dialogue in the novel, Holmes is talking to the Scottish doctor, and mentions his wife.

"She read theology at Oxford," he explains.

"Of course she did," the doctor replies.

Russell, like much of King's marvelous series, is too good to be true. Fortunately, she's fictional, and keeps coming back for more skillfully written and highly entertaining adventures.

Reading Journal: "Greeks & Romans Bearing Gifts"

2010-04-26T05:20:00.001-07:00

Carl J. Richard, Greeks & Romans Bearing Gifts: How the Ancients Inspired the Founding Fathers. Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. Paperback. 202 pp. (with index). $16.95.

Dr. Willard entered largely into the field of ancient history, and deduced therefrom arguments to prove that where power had been trusted to men, whether in great of small bodies, they had always abused it, and that thus republics had soon degenerated into aristocracies. He instanced Sparta, Athens, and Rome. The Amphictyonic league, he said, resembled the Confederation of the United States; while thus united, they defeated Xerxes, but were subdued by the gold of Philip, who brought the council to betray the interest of their country...

Mr. Randall said [that] the quoting of ancient history was no more to the purpose than to tell how our forefathers dug clams at Plymouth; he feared a consolidation of the thirteen states.

(from the minutes of the Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, January 1788)

For a brief period in the late eighteenth century, the United States passed through an awkward and fascinating neoclassical age. Most of the the Founders, like Adams and Jefferson, were exceptionally well-educated in the Greek and Roman classics, and looked to the ancient world for guidance in setting up their own experiment in republican government. Jefferson established Greek and Roman architecture as the primary model for public architecture in the United States; poets extolled the new nation in neoclassical epics that strove to rival Homer; and politicians—particularly Federalist politicians—quoted the classics as precedents for their own positions on contemporary issues. This neoclassical period was short-lived, however, as American politics and culture became increasingly homespun and democratic. Although classically educated Federalists like Dr. Willard carried the day in 1788, it was men like "plain Benjamin Randall" who came to dominate a more democratic American society. But the influence of the classics was undeniably significant for the founders of the American republic.

A few years ago, I taught a course at Carleton called "America and the Classics." One of the difficulties in teaching the course was that most of my students did not have a particularly strong background in the classics, which made it difficult for them to understand the classical references made by the Founders. What, for example, was the Amphictyonic league that Dr. Willard talks about?

Carl J. Richard's new book, Greeks & Romans Bearing Gifts, does admirably what I tried to do in the first half of that course. In eight lively and thorough chapters, he provides a crash course in Greek and Roman history, and then briefly discusses some of the lessons that the American Founders drew from that history. For a reader with little grounding in the classics, this book provides an admirable introduction, with chapters on ancient Sparta, Athenian democracy, the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, the rise of Rome, the fall of the Roman republic, and imperial Rome. Each chapter focuses primarily on the ancient background, but concludes with a brief examination of the lessons the Founders drew from that ancient material. Readers who want a more in-depth exploration of the influence of the classics on the Founders can then turn to Richard's The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Harvard University Press 1994).

I'm currently assigning the book as the textbook in the version of "America and the Classics" I'm teaching for the Cannon Valley Elder Collegium. My students, most of whom are in their seventies and eighties, have found the book fascinating and highly readable.

Rice County Wilderness Area (East Side), April 2010

2010-04-23T07:45:00.000-07:00

To Whom It May Concern

2010-04-20T13:06:00.000-07:00

Note: It's been a while since I published any original poetry here. Since it's National Poetry Month, here's the poem I wrote when R— F— asked me for a letter of recommendation.

To Whom It May Concern:

Imagine, sir or madam,
the world you would create
if you could people it
from your imagination.
What fantastics
your friends could be!
What impossibilities!
How you would love
and envy them for being
what you could only imagine!
But sometimes the world as it is
brings forth such prodigies
(although prodigy is a word
she might herself disclaim)
that any madman such as myself
would be proud
to claim them as figments:
as soon as you meet her,
you feel a piece of the imaginary world
falling into place, becoming real.

© 2010 Rob Hardy

Reading Journal: "Empire of Liberty"

2010-04-16T11:27:00.000-07:00

Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic 1789-1815. Oxford University Press, 2009. 778 pp. (including index). Hardcover. $35.00.

In a recent revision of the state standards in social studies, the Texas Board of Education removed Thomas Jefferson from "a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th and 19th century." As the New York Times reported, "Jefferson is not well-liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term 'separation between church and state.'" If the conservative members of the board had read Gordon S. Wood's remarkably thorough and balanced history of the early Republic, Empire of Liberty, they would have known that in the early nineteenth century, Jefferson's notion of "a wall of separation between church and state" was popular among the growing evangelical denominations, such as the Baptists and Methodists, because it severed the connection between the the former established churches, the Congregationalists in New England and the Anglicans in the South, and political power. Evangelicals were, in fact, among Jefferson's most enthusiastic supporters. But as Wood writes: "It was not enlightened rationalism that drove these evangelicals but their growing realization that it was better to neutralize the state in religious matters than run the risk of one of their religious opponents gaining control of the government."

Wood's book, the latest volume in the magnificent Oxford History of the United States, beautifully elucidates the complexities of American politics and culture in the crucial years 1789 to 1815, when the young United States was struggling to survive and to define itself as a nation. The book is a perfect antidote to those who seek to make history a vehicle for promoting their own narrow political ideology.

Wood's thorough treatment of Jeffersonian Republicanism, for example, shows that Jefferson was at the same time an aristocratic intellectual and a fervent champion of the common man; he was an agnostic who had a strong following among evangelical Christians; he was an ideological proponent of limited government who, through the Embargo Act, was responsible for a breathtaking expansion of Presidential power; he was a fiscal conservative who paid $15 million for the Louisiana Territory; he was a prophet of freedom and equality, and an owner of slaves; he wanted America to remain primarily rural and agricultural, but through his embargo he hastened the development of American industrialism.

History is seldom as simple or as ideologically straightforward a narrative as our politically motivated "standards" attempt to make it. Any serious student or teacher of American history will benefit from Wood's admirably balanced account. The book covers the Presidencies of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, with thorough and lucid treatments of religion, slavery, the position of women, diplomacy, economy, Western expansion and relations with native Americans, and artistic and literary culture. Running through the entire book is the story of the declining influence of the aristocratic Federalists and the rise of a more democratic society, which in the North especially led to the remarkable expansion of commerce and to the beginnings of a middle-class culture that was distinctively American.

Wood, a distinguished historian of the early Republic and a professor at Brown University, writes clearly and cogently, and his volume (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize this year) is a worthy companion to the other volumes in this series. (See my reviews of Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought and James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom.)

Final note: Thomas Jefferson, who spoke of separation of church and state, as President regularly attended church services that were held in the House of Representatives.

Reading Journal: "When Everything Changed"

2010-04-14T09:59:00.000-07:00

Gail Collins, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present (Little Brown 2009). 471 pp. (including notes and index). Hardcover. $27.99.

Gail Collins is one of the most consistently thoughtful and entertaining op-ed columnists at the New York Times, and she brings those qualities, along with an impressive amount of research, to the story of the women's movement from 1960 until the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. I was born in 1964, a few months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which included an amendment prohibiting discrimination on the basis of a person's sex. Although I had lived through much of the history covered in Collins' book, I found that I really knew very little of it. I knew about Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, of course, but I new nothing about many of the "ordinary" women whose persistence and courage helped to bring about such remarkable change in American society over the past half century—women like Lorena Weeks, the plaintiff in a landmark lawsuit against her employer, Southern Bell, that struck a major blow against sex discrimination in the workplace. Nor did I know about the bill, cosponsored by Walter Mondale in the early 1970s, that would have provided universal free or subsidized childcare for American workers. The bill passed both the House and Senate with bipartisan support, only to be vetoed by President Nixon at the urging of conservative staffers led by Pat Buchanan, who feared the bill would lead to "the Sovietization of American children." Collins is a lively writer, and her combination of archival research and oral history presents a colorful picture of the period. When Everything Changed is a fast, captivating, and often inspiring read.

Note: One of the lesser-known heroines of Collins' book is the late Republican state Assemblywoman from New York, Constance Cook, who introduced the first state law legalizing abortion, in 1970. The law became the model for the decision in Roe v. Wade. Constance Cook represented Ithaca, New York, and was a familiar name when I was growing up in her district in the 1970s.

Suspended Animation

2010-03-27T07:59:00.000-07:00

In Robert Montgomery Bird's 1836 novel Sheppard Lee, the title character (and narrator) discovers that he possesses an unusual ability: he is able to make his spirit leave his body and reanimate the body of another person who has recently died. In the third section of the novel, his current incarnation, a wealthy businessman, pulls a drowned young man from a river and wishes to be in the young man's place—he would rather be drowned than suffer the torments of gout and a shrewish wife.

Almost immediately, his wish is granted—although, at first, he thinks he might have ended up in hell. He smells whiskey and tobacco smoke, and perceives a group of "devils" gathered around to torture him:

One of them, and I took it for granted he was the chief devil, stood by me, pressing my ribs with a fist that felt marvellously heavy, while with the other he maintained a grasp upon my nose, to which ever and anon he gave a considerable tweak; while another, little less dreadful, stood at his side, armed with some singular weapon, shaped much like a common fire-bellows, the nozle of which he held at but a little distance from my own.

As he begins to revive in his new body, he overhears a conversation among the "devils":

"But," continued the same voice, "we'll never finish the job till we roll him over a barrel. He'll never show game till the water's out of him."

Another voice replies: "No rolling on barrels," it said, "nor hanging up by the heels"—(hanging up by the heels! thought I)—"it is against the rules of the Humane Society..."

In the early nineteenth century, the Humane Society referred not to an animal rescue organization, but to a society (in the words of the Philadelphia Humane Society, founded in 1780) "for the recovery of persons apparently drowned, and other cases of suspended animation."

The first humane society was founded in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1767, and local societies soon sprang up in London and in various communities in America. The societies published manuals for distribution that described the proper methods of resuscitating drowning victims, including the use of a hand bellows to force air into the lungs—and, strangely enough, to force tobacco smoke into the rectum. The stimulant qualities of tobacco were thought to promote resuscitation.

The state of the body of a drowning victim, apparently dead but capable of being resuscitated by the proper methods, was called "suspended animation." As one writer put it in 1807: "The body, during this temporary suspension of animation, resembles a clock: upon its pendulum being accidentally stopped, its works are not mutilated or shaken out of their proper places, but are competent to renew their functions the moment the former is touched by some friendly hand."

The medical literature in both Britain and America from the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries is full of treatises on the causes of "suspended animation" and proper methods of resuscitation. In America, one of the earliest such treatises was David Hosack's An Enquiry into the Cause of Suspended Animation from Drowning; with the Means of Restoring Life, published in New York in 1792. Dr. Hosack is especially concerned to combat "that most pernicious practice, rolling the body upon a barrel, and holding it up by the heels..."

Robert Montgomery Bird was himself a physician, and was undoubtedly familiar with the medical literature on suspended animation, such as Hosack's treatise. (Hosack died in 1835, the year before Sheppard Lee was published.)

The image above is of a smoke enema kit assembled by one of the early nineteenth-century humane societies. It has been suggested that the phrase "blowing smoke up one's ass" is derived from skepticism about the efficacy of smoke enemas.

Reflections

2010-03-26T18:46:00.000-07:00

This morning, the reflections on the water of Spring Creek, near the entrance to the Lower Arboretum, reminded me of a classic photo that my fellow Northfield blogger, Penny Hillemann, posted on Penelopedia two years ago (May 2008). The Siberian squill is beginning to bloom along the banks of the creek. On this date a year ago, Mary Schier, at My Northern Garden, blogged about seeing the first budding squill of the year. If nothing else, our blogs may provide a kind of phenological record of the changing seasons here in Northfield.

Reading Journal: "Balancing Act"

2010-03-23T18:09:00.000-07:00

Meera Godbole Krishnamurthy, Balancing Act. Penguin India/Zubaan 2009. 236 pp. Available on Amazon.com.

I met Meera Godbole Krishnamurthy at Oberlin College in 1985. Reading her excellent first novel, Balancing Act, it’s impossible for me not to feel the powerful presence of an old friend. I feel in her writing the same humor and quirky intelligence that drew me to her a quarter century ago, the same enthusiasm and passionate sense of the beauty and wonder of the world. It’s difficult not to see Meera herself in her narrator, Tara Mistri. Tara shares some of the essential features of Meera’s curriculum vitae. Born in India, she trained as an architect in the United States, and interrupted her career to become a stay-at-home mother. But this trajectory in life, from career to full-time parenthood, is familiar to many women—and to some men—and many readers who have never met the book’s author will see their own stories reflected in Tara’s struggle to reconcile motherhood and career. As Meera explained to me, “While the details may differ, in spirit the stories is the same.”

Tara has a handsome and successful husband, a beautiful home, devoted friends, and two adorable and adoring children. But she’s still haunted by the might-have-beens of her earlier life as a promising young architect. She’s occasionally visited by a yakshi, a Hindu fertility spirit with feminist sensibilities. With yakshi urging her to resume her career, and mounting resentment toward friends who seem to regard her as no more than a perfect housewife, Tara sends out her resumé and lands an interview with an architecture firm. But Tara learns that going back to work isn’t necessarily the answer to her dilemma, or the way to find balance and satisfaction in her life.

Architecture is central to the novel, both as Tara’s chosen field and as a metphor for creating balance and structure in one’s life. Tara is obsessed with the Salk Institute in nearby La Jolla, designed by the Estonian-born architect Louis Kahn. The Salk becomes Tara’s icon as she attempts to construct a coherent life for herself as a feminist, an artist, and a mother. It seems to represent both balance and contradiction, the inspiring and the pedestrian, the ordered and the chaotic—the material of both art and life. In the novel, the Salk is likened both to a monastic cloister and the sort of building that might contain dentists’ offices. It’s both transcendent and mundane, like life.

The book is teeming with ideas, and the author’s intellect is apparent on every page, but the novel not merely cerebral. Every detail of Tara’s life as mother is beautifully and authentically rendered. You can hear the laughter of the children on the playground, see the Cheerios and juice boxes, feel the urgency as Tara rushes to turn off the television before Barney comes on. Every detail of Tara’s world rings true.

After our paths diverged in the late 1980s, Meera went on to Columbia and the University of Virginia, to work as an architect and a new life as a stay-at-home mother and writer. I went to Brown University, was employed briefly as a professor of classics, and became a stay-at-home father and writer. I’m happy our lives finally converged again in this wonderful novel.

For a set of images of the Salk Institute taken by Carleton College professor emeritus of art Lauren Soth, click here. Thanks to my friend and fellow blogger Patrick Ganey for arranging to have a copy of the novel sent from India before it became available on Amazon.com.

"A Wretched Man"

2010-03-22T12:55:00.000-07:00

Note: Below is a reposting of the feature I wrote for Northfield.org on the new novel A Wretched Man by Northfield writer R.W. "Obie" Holmen.

Northfield writer R.W. “Obie” Holmen’s newly-published novel, A Wretched Man, begins with a vivid evocation of the landscape of the ancient Middle East. Readers are often surprised to learn that Holmen has never visited the Holy Land, and that the landscape he so brilliantly evokes is the creation of the writer’s imagination, assisted by some meticulous research.

Holmen began working on his novel almost four years ago. He was interested in writing a historical novel about the Apostle Paul, a complex and controversial figure who, in Holmen’s view, was responsible for much of the development of early Christianity. Holmen spent three years researching the novel, working to get the history, the characters, and the setting “as realistic as possible.” At the same time, he worked at “honing the craft of being a storyteller.” Holmen, a former trial lawyer with a B.A. in history, had to learn how to write fiction.

As a novice fiction writer, Holmen found the classes and community at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis invaluable for helping him learn the craft of fiction. Taking classes at the Loft was, Holmen says, “a first-rate experience.” The Loft also brought him into contact with the writer Kate St. Vincent Vogl (author of Lost and Found: A Memoir of Mothers), who worked with Holman as an editor and writing coach. Vogl read Holmen’s draft and came back with “notes on virtually every page” that helped him “color between the lines” and add to the depth of his characterizations.

A draft of the novel was completed in the fall of 2008. Holmen worked with Vogl in the first months of 2009, and in May 2009 was ready to beginning working with Bascomb Hill Publishing Group, a small publisher in Minneapolis.

The past year has been spent producing and marketing the book, something that’s entirely different from the creative process of writing, but which Holmen still finds exciting. Now that the book is in print and available in bookstores and online, Holmen has a pair readings and booksignings scheduled in Northfield—at Monkey See, Monkey Read on Tuesday, April 20 at 7:30 pm, and at the Northfield Public Library on Saturday, May 15 at 1:00 p.m. He’ll also be Paula Granquist’s guest on ArtZany, her arts program on KYMN radio (1080 AM), on Friday, April 16, at 9:00 a.m.

The early reviews of the novel have been excellent. Barrie Wilson, a theologian at York University in Toronto, says Holmen's novel "opens up the reality of the world of Paul and his contemporaries in a way no other work does." Rev. Jeffrey Bütz, a theologian at Penn State, calls the book “a stunning fictional account of the early church that reads like real life.” He calls it “a story that will both shock and inspire any Christian who is truly searching to find and follow the historical Jesus.”

But Holmen insists that his novel is “historical fiction, not Christian fiction.”

At the center of the novel in Paulos, the Apostle Paul, and his struggle against James, the brother of Jesus, to define the message of Christianity. It was Paul, Holmen says, who insisted upon the divinity of Christ, and who began to shape many of the “rituals, symbols, and myths” of Christianity. Holmen is also interested in understanding what lay behind Paul’s attitude toward homosexuality, since Paul’s writings has historically provided much of the Biblical support for “gay bashing.” Holmen’s conclusions are compelling and controversial.

Obie Holmen grew up in Upsala, Minnesota, attended Dartmouth and the University of Minnesota, served in Vietnam, and worked as an attorney in St. Cloud for twenty years before his retirement in 1999. He and his wife recently moved to Northfield, attracted by the community’s rich intellectual and cultural life. Obie remains active in the Lutheran church, and writes a regular blog, Spirit of a Liberal, that explores religious issues from a progressive standpoint.

R.W. Holmen’s A Wretched Man is available locally at Monkey See, Monkey Read, the St. Olaf Bookstore, and the Carleton Bookstore. Holmen will be reading and signing books at Monkey See, Monkey Read on Tuesday, April 20, at 7:30 p.m., and at the Northfield Public Library on Saturday, May 15, at 1:00 p.m. You can view a "trailer" for the novel here.

Spring Biking Obstacles

2010-03-21T11:28:00.000-07:00

The bike trail under Highway 3, Riverside Park, linking to the bike and pedestrian bridge to Sechler Park.

Flooded.

The roads aren't in any better shape.
Eighth Street between Water and Division Streets.

Another Sign of Spring

2010-03-20T14:47:00.000-07:00

I love the latest seasonal variation of the Northfield.org logo that appears at the head of the website:
The site currently features an anthology of videos of the ice going out on the Cannon River in downtown Northfield, including large sheets of ice crashing over the Ames Mill dam. Meanwhile, the Cannon River, which seems to have peaked on Tuesday, has begun to recede a little.

Thomas Who?

2010-03-17T17:10:00.001-07:00

From the New York Times (on the Texas School Board's new "standards" for American history textbooks):

"Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term 'separation between church and state.')"

There is so much that's wrong about this, but I have to enjoy the irony of Texas conservatives writing out of history the early republic's most influential activist for states rights, limited government, fiscal conservatism, and American exceptionalism.

This is what happens when you attempt to simplify history to promote your own narrow, self-serving agenda.

What's Next?

2010-03-11T11:17:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the last day of classes for the winter term, and my last day of teaching at Carleton College. My intermediate Latin students surprised me with a cake and an enormous card. After class, one of the students headed off to the library to work on a final paper, only to return a minute later to give me a big hug.

"I just realized I might not see you again," she said.

I've had a wonderful time teaching at Carleton off and on since 2006. Carleton students are exceptionally bright and friendly and engaged, and I've enjoyed every minute I've spent in the classroom with them.

Now it's time for something new. Tomorrow afternoon, I'm heading down to Faribault to serve as a judge for the science fair at the Cannon River STEM School, and in two weeks I start teaching a class for the Cannon Valley Elder Collegium. The class is called "America and the Classics," focusing primarily on the influence of the Greek and Roman classics on the American Founders. I've also been working with a Prairie Creek Community School fifth grader to assemble his honors project on Ancient Greece, and I've started working with a St. Olaf senior planning a summer internship with Northfield.org. Finally, I've promised to translate Sophocles' Antigone for a production at Carleton in two or three years.

I'm sure I'll find plenty of uses for my time in my "retirement," but I'm still going to miss my students at Carleton very much.

Reading Journal: "Nights at the Circus"

2010-03-09T13:29:00.000-08:00

Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus. Penguin 1985. 295 pp.

Nights at the Circus is like a 295-page Decemberists song, a bizarre feminist fable about a circus aerialiste with enormous purple-feathered wings, a story that begins in a London music hall dressing room and ends in a shaman's hut in Siberia on the first day of the twentieth century. It's strange, meandering, often peculiarly florid, and frequently mesmerizing. New characters and situations materialize out of nowhere, perform their tricks, and disappear from the narrative. There are bravura set pieces, often involving clowns. There are hallucinatory episodes, also involving clowns. There is, in the last third of the novel, a spectacular train wreck, which the reader maybe tempted to take as emblematic of the entire novel. The novel often seems like a work of academic feminism reimagined by Tim Burton. Strange and daring, if not always entirely successful. Here's a sample of Carter's writing:

The Shaman and Walser did not live alone. There was a bear, a black one, not yet a year old, still almost a cub. This bear was part pet, part familiar; he was both a real, furry and beloved bear and, at the same time, a transcendental kind of meta-bear, a minor deity and also a partial ancestor because the forest-dwellers extended considerable procreational generosity toward the other species of the woods and there were bears in plenty on the male side of the tribal line.

The novel, like the bear which is both a real bear and a meta-bear, is a strange hybrid of storytelling, philosophy, and feminist anthropology that compulsively glosses and deconstructs its own artifices. Is Fevvers, the pinioned aerialiste, fact or fiction? Is she genuine or fraudulent? Is she a protagonist or a metaphor?

"She found herself turning, willy-nilly, from a woman into an idea," Carter writes of Fevvers, in the last pages of the novel.

It's a tough act to pull off. The narrative juggles so many ideas while swooping around from place to place on the gaudy purple wings of Carter's prose. It's dizzying, exhausting, and unlike anything else.

Marat/Sade at Macalester College

2010-03-01T07:40:00.000-08:00

A production of Peter Weiss's 1963 play Marat/Sade is running for three more nights, Thursday through Saturday, March 4-6, at the Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center at Macalester College. The production, directed by Rachel Perlmeter, features powerful original music by Noah Keesecker, Joshua Clausen, and J. Anthony Allen. The production is staged in a white box built entirely on the proscenium stage of the theatre, with tight tiers of seats surrounding the sunken stage on four sides, like an operating theater. Though the script sets the action in the asylum of Charenton in 1808, this production sets it in a dystopic future, giving the play an Orwellian feel. I found the production unexpectedly gripping, not just because I was transfixed by the beautiful performance of my friend Peytie McCandless as Charlotte Corday. She was surrounded by a strong cast, especially Russell Schneider as Sade and Drew Callister as Marat. There's a chaotic little taste of the production in this video trailer produced by Noah Keesecker.

Marat-Sade Trailer from Noah Keesecker on Vimeo.

You can reserve tickets by calling the Macalester College box office at 651-696-6359.

Behind the Scenes

2010-02-28T14:00:00.000-08:00

Not much going on at this blog lately, so if you're looking for new blogs to read, here are some new blogs from friends of mine that take you behind the scenes at two different theatrical productions:

A Farm in Harmony. Ethan Angelica, a former Latin student of mine and a professional actor based in Brooklyn, is on the road with Theatreworks/USA's production of Click, Clack, Moo. Follow his adventures as Farmer Brown, and see him in a chicken suit, here.

Neverwhat? Maren Robinson is a professional dramaturg in Chicago. Her current project is a production of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. She and the director team up to blog their work-in-progress here.

50

2010-02-25T19:59:00.000-08:00

Note: For those of you who couldn't make it to the Northfield Arts Guild this evening for the special reading in honor of the NAG's 50th anniversary, here's the poem I wrote for the occasion.

Fifty

In celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Northfield Arts Guild

Unless, like Nicolas Copernicus,
it happens to be your birthday,
no one celebrates February 19th,
the fiftieth day of the year.
Fifty is ordinary, not golden
(the atomic number of tin)
and not even as old as it once was:
fifty, we are told, is the new thirty.
Sure, fifty has some interesting
mathematical properties—
it’s the smallest sum
of two squares in two different ways—
but fifty percent is still only half:
half-hearted, half-empty,
a failing grade on any scale.
So I suppose what we celebrate,
after all, is not completion,
but the brief moment of equipoise
and everything that falls on either side—
so much putting up and taking down;
so many rehearsals,
the striking of so many sets;
so many lumps of clay,
so many empty bowls to fill.
What matters most in this poem
may be the word “unless,”
or it may be the shape of the whole—
the performance, the painting in its frame,
the bowl that you fill
with whatever part of yourself
you offer to the experience of art.
Or the most important part
may be what happens next,
when the poem supposedly ends,
and there is still so much more to say.

Reading Journal: "Mariana"

2010-02-06T06:57:00.000-08:00

Monica Dickens, Mariana. Persephone Books 2006/2008. Originally published in 1940.

Mariana opens as Mary Shannon, a young English wife, hears the news on the wireless that the naval destroyer on which her husband is serving has struck a mine. There are survivors—but in the midst of a storm, the telephone lines are down, and Mary has to wait until morning to go into town to get more news. Unable to sleep, she lies in bed and looks back on her life to this point: her childhood and education, her relationship with her independent mother and the rest of her extended family, and her faltering search for the right man. The title of the novel comes from Tennyson's poem of the same name, about a waiting woman whose lover "cometh not."

The novel is episodic. Mary is an engaging character, and Dickens is an engaging and humorous writer, but this long novel (377 pages) will not sustain the interest of every reader. It's the kind of leisurely, character-driven novel I enjoy, in the rather specialized genre of the English girl's interwar coming-of-age story. Other novels in the genre include Rosamond Lehmann's Dusty Answer (1927), E. Arnot Robertson's Ordinary Families (1933), and, from a slightly later period, Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle (1948). Of these, Robertson's and and Smith's are my favorites. Both are written in the first-person, and capture not only the stories, but the distinctive voices of their young narrators. Perhaps especially for me, as a male reader, the first-person narration further collapses the distance between me and the female narrator, and makes it easier to enter her experience through her voice in my head.

Harriet Lane, in her introduction to the Persephone edition, writes that Dickens's handling of her material is "cinematic." Some of the most successful scenes early in the novel—the train journey to the family's summer home, the exhilarating hunt scene—unreel with cinematic vividness. Mary's uncle is an actor who makes a specialty of portraying slightly dotty monocled aristocrats, and eventually receives the call from Hollywood. Mary herself briefly attends acting school, before following her mother into the dressmaking business. Dressing up is important in the novel—costuming, surfaces that don't always conceal depths. Mary puts herself into various scenes—acting school, a Parisian romance—searching for one in which the depths will be as beautiful as the surfaces, in which she'll feel like she's living her own reality, not simply playing a part in someone else's scene.

Early in the novel, Mary's uncle invites her out to a Tom Mix cowboy feature. But Uncle Geoffrey falls in with a group of his theatrical friends, and ends up leaving Mary to go to the cinema alone. For Mary, the experience is emancipating. "She was one with the dashing, miraculous cowboy." Some art, some films and novels, creates that feeling of identification, that complete absorption in another life. But I never felt entirely absorbed in Mary's life.

Reading Journal: Citizens of London

2010-01-31T20:33:00.000-08:00

Lynne Olson, Citizens of London (Random House 2010). Available February 2, 2010. I received my copy (the Canadian edition) through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.

In January 1945, my father-in-law, Pfc. John Shaw of the 84th Infantry Division, was in an Army hospital in Cirencester, England, recuperating from wounds received in the Battle of the Bulge. In a letter to his family back in Ohio, he wrote:

The village is about like all the rest of the English towns—a magnificent cathedral right in the center. It is very charming, I thin, although there’s no excitement—not that I’m seeking excitement. All the rest of the infantry guys stand around the corners, yelling, whistling, and making lewd remarks at the gals, and there’s plenty of them. The English must have a wonderful impression of the average American GI. Somehow, though, I can’t seem to have a good time, no matter what I do. I want to be in a quiet place; I love to listen and watch the civilians going about their business. I have all the respect and admiration in the world for them. They’re so sturdy and cheerful and friendly! So warm-hearted, and yet they seem to emotionless. They refuse to get excited or wrought up about anything.

My father-in-law was one of hundreds of thousands of Americans to pass through England during World War II. The Americans included GIs, military brass, journalists, and diplomats—all of them brought together with the British in a successful, and often tumultuous, alliance against Nazi Germany. The story of those Americans, and of that alliance, is brilliantly and beautifully told by Lynne Olson in her new book Citizens of London.

At the heart of the book are Edward R. Murrow, the American journalist who arrived to broadcast from London in 1939, and John Gilbert Winant, the United States ambassador. Both Murrow and Winant remained in London for the duration of the war, sharing in the danger and deprivation that Londoners faced during the Blitz, and becoming beloved figures in Britain who worked tirelessly to promote understanding and friendship between Britain and America. The book also follows the wartime career of Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease representative in Britain—a less admirable figure than Winant, but still a crucial player in the success of the Anglo-American alliance. The book is the story of that alliance—from its uncertain beginnings before America entered the war to the tensions that arose between the two countries over the shape of the post-war world—told through the stories of the people who lived it on the ground in London.

Olson is an engaging writer, who skillfully weaves together the diplomatic, military, and personal threads of her story to create a multidimensional picture of wartime London. She brings out the paradoxical character of the British people—stoic, undemonstrative, and suprisingly generous—that my father-in-law noticed on the streets of Cirencester:

Like other American reporters, Murrow was struck by the calmness, fortitude, and ironic humor exhibited by Londoners during these days and nights of terror. He enjoyed repeating to his friends the question that one city resident put to him at the height ot the Luftwaffe assault: “Do you think we’re really brave—or just lacking in imagination?” As Eric Sevareid observed, “This is what he loved about the British. They were steady. They didn’t panic, didn’t get emotional.”

Olson also brings out all the tensions that arose between the two proud and often mutually suspicous allies—especially between Roosevelt and Churchill, and between the top military brass from the two countries who shared the responsibility of running the war. The egos of men like Patton and Montgomery, British chief of staff Allan Brooke and U.S. air force chief “Hap” Arnold, were often massive obstacles to the success of the alliance. But as Olson shows, the supreme commander, General Eisenhower, was firmly committed to close cooperation between the allies, and like Murrow and Winant worked tirelessly to promote the special relationship between Britain and America.

Olson does a great service especially in resurrecting the reputation of Winant—a shy, soft-spoken idealist who emerges as one of the great forgotten men of history. Winant was a former history teacher, and a progressive Republican whose hero was Abraham Lincoln. In the spring of 1941, as London was being battered by German air raids and America was still reluctant to enter the war, Winant invoked Lincoln in a speech to the British people. Olson writes:

....Winant noted that, across the street from Parliament and Westminster Abbey, a statue of his hero, Abraham Lincoln, still stood. “As an American,” Winant said, “I am proud that Lincoln was there in all that wreckage as a friend and sentinel...and a reminder that in [his own] great battle for freedom, he waited quietly for support for those things for which he lived and died.”

Citizens of London is the best and most moving general audience history book I’ve read since Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. Like Goodwin’s book, it’s a story of often bitter rivals who had to find a way to work together to achieve success in war. Like Goodwin’s book, it’s impeccably researched and beautifully written. Like Goodwin’s book, it should reach a wide and receptive audience.

iPoetry

2010-01-31T07:06:00.000-08:00

Last night, between the haggis and the headache, I enjoyed the traditional Burns Night festivities and a whiskey tasting with about forty other people at the home of some Carleton friends. The guests were a mix of professors and IT people, all of whom came prepared to step up to the mic and read a Burns poem. (Clara and I actually read a letter Burns wrote to his friend Mrs. Riddell, apologizing for getting roaring drunk at her house.) Most of the professors read from pieces of paper or from old books of poetry, but one after the other the IT people stood up and read from their iPhones. It was an interesting mix of tradition and technology: reading the words of an eighteenth-century poet from a 21st-century handheld device.

It's always great to see poetry reaching new audiences and new technologies.

On Tuesday, I spent the afternoon at ARTech charter school, helping to judge the Poetry Out Loud competition. Seventeen students, most of the them ninth graders, took turns at the microphone, reciting the poems they had memorized. The audience of students who packed the big room at ARTech listened in rapt attention, and at the end of each recitation enthusiastically cheered their fellow students.

One of the girls, a frightened-looking ninth grader, had to take a moment to collect herself before she reluctantly stepped up to the microphone. Her poem was Mark Strand's "Keeping Things Whole." Her voice began to flow quietly into the mic, and in an instant she was transformed. The poem—the words of a seventy-five year old male poet—seemed to belong to her, as it this were exactly what she needed to say, as if she were what the poet had written. I had the feeling that I was experiencing something brief and beautiful and entirely new, like a butterfly just emerging from its chrysalis and moving its wings for the first time.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

The audience erupted into applause, and as she left the stage, the air moved in to fill the space where she stood.

Economics

2010-01-26T16:28:00.000-08:00

"The best song ever written explaining supply and demand graphs." (Song by Will Hardy)

Biopsy: "Six Feet Under"

2010-01-07T15:02:00.000-08:00

My brother-in-law, Jason Mittell, is a media scholar at Middlebury College, specializing in television. Last month, on his JustTV blog, Jason put together three separate lists of the best television shows of the decade 2000-2009. His top two shows of the decade, Lost and The Wire, are shows I haven't watched. In fact, I watch so little television that of his 35 or so best shows, I've watched the complete series of only three: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly. This makes it seem as if I am less a fan of television as a medium than I am of Joss Whedon as an auteur. But on New Year's Day, I started watching (at a rate of an episode a night) the first season of Six Feet Under, which originally aired on HBO from 2001 to 2005, and it looks as if Joss has company.

In his retrospective of the "aughts," Jason writes of Six Feet Under: "I vacillate between thinking that this show is over- and under-rated; it certainly wasn’t as subversive, deep and profound as it often seemed to think it was. But it also was groundbreaking in its integration of black humor and drama, its treatment of adult subject matter like death, drugs, and sex in new ways for serial television, and its presentation of arguably the most mature and compelling gay relationship ever seen on American television." I'm only six episodes into the series, but I would like to go on record with a few of the reasons why I think it will take its place on my own list of "the best of the aughts."

1. The Creator. Alan Ball, the creator of Six Feet Under, wrote the screenplay for one of my favorite films of the decade prior to the "aughts," American Beauty (1999). I found that film breathtaking, and remember extravagantly comparing it to Euripides and Ibsen. You can see the hand of the writer of American Beauty in Six Feet Under, in its awareness of the fragile beauty of life, the contingent nature of happiness, the curious blend of light and dark, mature sophistication and innocent vulnerability.

2. The Dark Humor. I loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer because of the brilliantly successful mixture of drama and comedy, of seriousness and humor, of darkness and light. In both Buffy and Six Feet Under, death features prominently, along with the accoutrements of death—cemeteries, caskets, dead bodies. In both shows, the dead speak to the living, and the inevitability—the omnipresence—of death contrasts with the fugitive beauties and pleasures of life. It's interesting that, after the fifth and final season of Six Feet Under, Ball went on to create a new vampire show, True Blood.

3. The Ensemble. The triad of Whedon shows that I mentioned above had strong ensemble casts in which each character was a distinct and interesting individual, right down to the mannerisms and patterns of speech. One of the reasons that I found The West Wing tiresome was that all the characters seemed like avatars for Aaron Sorkin, like well-tailored machines for generating clever dialogue. After the first episode of Six Feet Under, I already had a sense of the distinct personalities of the Fisher family, and I was already invested in them.

4. The Theme Music. A brilliant minimalist earworm that beautifully sets the tone for the series. I should add that I love how the show begins, after the theme music, with a nod to television formula, and then bends that formula: like Law & Order, each episode starts with a death, but instead of following the implications of that death through the legal system, it makes the aftermath of that death the context for an exploration of the psyches and relationships of the Fisher family.

5. The Gay Couple. David and Keith are a compelling couple. After the first few episodes, both their attraction to each other and the conflicts in their relationship already feel real and complex, as does their religion. It's fascinating and moving to watch David struggle with being both gay and an essentially conservative, church-going, middle-class family man.

6. The Cute Red-Head. Lauren Ambrose, Alyson Hannigan, Jayma Mays. The reason color television was invented.

I'll be back with a postmortem after fifty-seven more episodes.

A Forum on Education Funding

2010-01-05T21:06:00.000-08:00

About 75 people gathered in the big room at ARTech charter school on Tuesday, January 5, for an evening of conversation with State Senator Kevin Dahle and State Representative David Bly. The main topic of the evening was education funding, and the impact on Minnesota public schools, and charter schools in particular, of the state budget crisis and the 27.5% holdback of state general education funds.

What is the 27% Holdback?

By statute, 10% of state per pupil education funding is held back from public schools in the state of Minnesota until after final enrollment figures are available for the school year. The money is generally paid to the schools in the first half of the following school year. This year, in an effort to address the state budget shortfall without raising taxes, Gov. Pawlenty increased the holdback to 27%. This means that 27% of the amount that schools have budgeted, and to which they are entitled according to the per pupil funding formula, is held back—payment to the schools is deferred.

This has put charter schools into a bind. Because 27% of their general education funding is being held back, schools are finding it necessary to secure loans in order to meet their expenses—to pay teachers. The interest payments then have to be included the school’s general education budget. In effect, funds that should have gone into the classroom are going into interest payments to banks—if, that is, the schools can secure loans at a time when banks are tightening credit.

The Impact of Charter Schools

The evening at ARTech was moderated by ARTech school board chair Joe Pahr, who also teaches at the school, and began with testimonials from parents and students about the importance of charter schools. All of those who spoke stressed the importance of the sense of community that charter schools create. Bo Aylin, a parent of two children at Prairie Creek, spoke of the “nurturing community” that charter schools create, in which fostering a love of learning is a priority. Jan Rowher, an ARTech parent, stressed the importance of a small school community that provides students with options and that recognizes individual learning styles. Amelia Schmelzer, an extremely poised and articulate ninth-grader from ARTech, described her school as being “like a big family gathering every day.” ARTech, she said, is a diverse and dynamic school community that prepares its students to live in a diverse and dynamic world.

The Fiscal Realities

Both legislators expressed their strong support for charter schools. The hard reality is that the state budget is facing a projected $5 billion shortfall in the next biennium. To this point, the stategy of Gov. Pawlenty has been to make cuts and accounting shifts, rather than to raise additional revenue.

Rep. Bly pointed out that this crisis has been brewing for some time. A decade ago, under Gov. Ventura, the primary responsibility for funding public education was shifted from local taxpayers to the state, but no permanent mechanism for funding the shift was enacted, creating a $1 billion “hole” in education funding. This was easier to fill at a time of state budget surpluses, as there were at the time. It has become impossible to fill in an recession.

Both Dahle and Bly stressed that the budget crisis cannot be addressed with spending cuts alone.

“We need more revenue,” Sen. Dahle said.

He argued that it has begun to reach the point at which the cuts will be more painful than the effects of raising taxes. He said that even with additional revenue, more cuts will be necessary. Without additional revenue, more jobs will be lost—especially teaching jobs.

Rep. Bly said that a bonding bill to stimulate job creation would be part of the coming legislative session. But with no end to the fiscal crisis in sight, and with Gov. Pawlenty holding firm in his refusal to raise taxes, Bly predicted that “this is probably going to be one of the most difficult sessions” in recent memory.

A Call to Action

Both Sen. Dahle and Rep. Bly stressed the importance of contacting legislators and mobilizing grassroots support for action on the issue of education funding. Concerned citizens need to “speak up,” Bly said, and let the legislature and the governor know that there’s support for raising taxes to fund services, like public education, that benefit the entire community.

Cold

2010-01-02T05:05:00.001-08:00

Wet Christmas, Part II

2009-12-25T11:59:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas!

Weather note: The Christmas storm of 2009 has mostly fizzled. Last night, when the predictions were for an inch of snow an hour, we took Pippi out for a Christmas Eve walk in the rain. More rain today has made it a slushy Christmas.

White Christmas, Part I

2009-12-24T10:19:00.000-08:00

Our house on the morning of Christmas Eve 2009

On Halloween 1991, I was in St. Peter, Minnesota, for a classics lecture at Gustavus Adolphus College, where I was a visiting assistant professor of classics. The heavy snow had begun to fall as I came out of the lecture. I spent that night in St. Peter, and in the morning I took advantage of a lull in the blizzard to shovel my car out of the driveway where I had parked it. It would have been wiser to stay in St. Peter, but classes at Gustavus had been cancelled, and I was eager to get home to Northfield, where Clara was alone with two-month old Will. So, as the snow began to fall more heavily again, I started out. Fortunately, I found myself behind a snowplow between St. Peter and Montgomery, and after two or three hours managed to make it home safely. When the snow finally stopped falling, there was more than 28 inches of snow on the ground.

This morning, we woke to nearly 8 inches of fresh snow—the official amount for Northfield was 7.50 inches—and another 8-12 inches is on its way tonight. The second wave of snow started a few minutes ago, right on schedule. This is predicted to be the heaviest snowfall in Minnesota since that Halloween Blizzard of 1991. Our usual Christmas plans—my brother-in-law's family down here from Roseville for Christmas Eve, and our family in Roseville on Christmas afternoon—have been scrapped. For the first time that we can remember, it'll be just the four of us at Christmas.

Books Reviewed in 2009

2009-12-23T12:38:00.000-08:00

Mary Cholmondeley, Red Pottage

Storm Jameson, The Georgian Novel and Mr. Robinson
Elina Hirvonen, When I Forgot
Tove Jansson, The True Deceiver
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show
Mrs. Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere
Rhoda Broughton, Belinda
Edmund Burke, Conciliation with America
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Jon Meacham, American Lion
Jane & Mary Findlater, Crossriggs
John Williams, Stoner
Louis De Bernières, A Partisan's Daughter
Victoria Clayton, Out of Love
John Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington
Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mr. Fortune's Maggot
Jetta Carleton, The Moonflower Vine
Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September
Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels
Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room
David Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin
Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl
V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival
James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom
Olivia Manning, School for Love
Sylvia Townsend Warner, The True Heart
Helen Humphreys, Coventry
Edith Henrietta Fowler, The Young Pretenders
Susan Glaspell, Fugitive's Return
Nella Larsen, Passing
Barry Unsworth, Land of Marvels
Jessie Redmon Fauset, Plum Bun
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Reading Journal: "Red Pottage"

2009-12-22T06:29:00.000-08:00

Mary Cholmondeley, Red Pottage. Virago Modern Classics 1985. Originally published in 1899.

Early in Red Pottage, Lord Newhaven confronts his unfaithful wife. During their conversation, which takes place in her bedroom, Lord Newhaven picks up a book—"an Imitation of Christ, bound in that peculiar shade of lilac which at that moment prevailed." It's a small, but telling detail, since Cholmondeley's novel is about what is real and what is imitation, what is true Christian behavior and what is pious cant, what is genuine and what is merely fashionable.

In a few pages, we are introduced to Sybell Loftus, a superficial woman who, Cholmondeley tells us archly, "had not the horrid perception of difference between the real and the imitation which spoils the lives of many." At Sybell's party, the conversation turns to Hester Gresley, a young woman who has written a popular novel set in the slums of east London. One of the pseudo-intellectuals at the party condemns the novel, saying, "it is a misfortune to the cause of suffering humanity—to our cause—when the books which pretend to set forth certain phases of its existence are written by persons entirely ignorant of the life they describe."

"To me they seem real," says Miss Gresley's friend, Rachel West.

Rachel has lived for many years in the slums of east London, working as a seamstress, before receiving an unexpected inheritance. An unexpected inheritance, an affair, a suicide pact—Cholmondeley's novel is full of elements of late Victorian sensation novels , but it's also a biting satire of society, a romance, and a novel of ideas. Cholmondeley is interested in the truth of art, the power of sympathy, and the plight of unmarried women.

At the heart of the novel is the theme of friendship between women. In a particularly heartfelt passage, Cholmondeley writes: "Here and there among its numberless counterfeits a friendship rises up between two women which sustains the life of both, which is still young when life is waning, which man's love and motherhood cannot displace nor death annihilate; a friendship which is not the solitary affection of an empty heart nor the deepest affection of a full one, but which nevertheless lightens the burdens of this world and lays its pure hand on the next." Red Pottage is dedicated to Cholmondeley's sister Victoria. It is interesting to see how sustaining the bond of sisterhood was to the New Women of the 1890s as they tested their independence, and began to claim their rights as individuals and their voices as writers.*

In Red Pottage, Hester dedicates her second novel, which she describes as being like a child to her, to Rachel. There is almost a kind of spiritual and intellectual marriage between the two women that sustains them through all of the sensations and setbacks of the novel's ingenious plot.

One other of Cholmondeley's novels is currently in print, her 1893 novel Diana Tempest, published by Valancourt Press. Red Pottage was a massive bestseller in both England and America in 1899. Like many of the novels I review on this blog, I believe it should still be more widely read.

*The Cholmondeley sisters were also intimate friends with the novelist sisters Jane and Mary Findlater.

The Best and Worst Years of the Decade

2009-12-20T05:48:00.000-08:00

The Best

For me, 2000 was a banner year. On the first day of school in the new year, I started substitute teaching in the Northfield Public Schools. I still remember fondly my first day of subbing in Mrs. Kohl's fifth grade class at Bridgewater Elementary School. I find it unbelievable that those little children are now juniors in college! Then, in the late winter of 2000, director Ruth Weiner, choreographer Devin Cary, and the Carleton Players began rehearsals for Euripides' Iphigeneia at Aulis, using the new translation I had made for the production. The production ran May 10-13, 2000. For me it was an unforgettable experience, and one of the highlights of the entire decade. 2000 also saw the publication of the anthology 33 Minnesota Poets (Nodin Press), which included a selection of my poetry and introduced me to fellow Minnesota poets like Joyce Sutphen and Scott King. Finally, the summer of 2000 brought our first family trip to England, where we spent a month living in Kenilworth, with a week-long holiday-within-a-holiday in the Lake District. I returned home to Minnesota to a new job writing scripts for The Writer's Almanac.

One of the choral dances from Iphigeneia at Aulis (2000)

2003 provided a welcome respite after two difficult years (see below). The highlight of the year was our family trip to France, where we stayed with Clara's brother at their sabbatical home in Baillargues, outside Montpellier. During our ten days in southern France, we visited Arles, Nimes, Orange, Aigues Mortes, Les Baux de Provence, and several spectacular ruined hilltop chateaux. We also enjoyed the markets, the seafood, and the wine. The downside: as we were taking off from Minneapolis to fly to France, the first bombs of the Iraq War were falling on Baghdad. And it was a bittersweet year personally: the last summer we spent with Clara's father before his death from cancer in 2004. Before we learned of the diagnosis, we spent a beautiful week with my father- and mother-in-law in Stowe, Vermont, followed by a summer with the whole family up north.

The Hardys and the Shaws at the Pont du Gard, March 2003

In 2005, my poetry chapbook, The Collecting Jar, was published. I spent the first half of the year teaching for Planet Homeschool, a homeschool cooperative in the Twin Cities, and the fall semester teaching Latin at the University of St. Thomas, my first college teaching position since 1992. The Planet Homeschool experience, begun in the fall of 2004, introduced me to Peytie, who has become one of my favorite people in the world. Like 2003, it was also a bittersweet year: my father died in December, after a long illness.

When 2006 started, I was teaching for the first time at Carleton College, and had a wonderful beginning Latin class. At the same time, I was meeting Peytie once a week at a Caribou Coffee in Apple Valley for Latin tutoring, and meeting with a small homeschool writing class once a month. It was a rich and rewarding year of teaching. Then, in August, our family left for a year in England. In the fall of 2006, from our home in Kenilworth, we made excursions to the Peak District and the Cotswolds, and in October we traveled to Salzburg, Austria, for several days of music and sightseeing.

On the Cleveland Way, between Whitby and Robin Hood's Bay, Yorkshire, April 2007

2007 was filled with even more memorable English experiences, including holidays in Yorkshire and the Lake District, a Jane Austen tour, numerous plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company, trips to London and Oxford, walks on the wonderful English footpaths, the world's best ale, and—well, for the full story, see my Sabbatical blog.

2009 has also been a good year, with two terms of teaching Latin 101 at Carleton, and with the massive accomplishment of helping to get the Cannon River STEM School on its feet. And in June, Clara and I celebrated twenty years of marriage. As the year has drawn to a close, we received the exciting news that Will is spending 2010-2011 as a Rotary Youth Exchange student in Thailand.

The Worst

2001 was not a good year. In January, the Bush years began, and on a Tuesday morning in September, the whole world changed. Meanwhile, I had started the MA.Ed initial licensure program at St. Kate's, lulled by my excellent subbing experience in Northfield into thinking I wanted to be an elementary school teacher. I took one course before abandoning that idea, and spent a stressful six-weeks as a long-term sub teaching Latin at South High School in Minneapolis.

If possible, 2002 was even worse, thanks to my foolish decision to accept a job teaching Latin at a middle school in one of the suburbs of Minneapolis. The entire experience—from the hellish morning commute starting at 5:00 am to the overcrowded classroom full of unmotivated students—was a disaster. Meanwhile, the Bush Administration was edging toward war in Iraq and, on October 25, Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash.

2002 was so bad that it makes 2008—a year in which I spent three months of excruciating pain with a herniated disk in my neck, followed by a hernia operation in July, followed by losing a school board election, followed by an emergency remodeling of our leaking upstairs bathroom that cost twice as much as the initial estimate—look like a fabulous year.

In the final analysis, the good years—2000, 2003-2007, 2009—massively outweigh the bad years. I was 35 in 2000, and now I'm 45. The decade was full of difficult midlife experiences—the deaths of fathers, career challenges, the hazards of homeownership, the aches and pains of a middle-aged skeleto-muscular system—but it also brought the new experiences of international travel and book publication, and introduced me to new places and new friends who have enriched my life.

December Reading: The Eighteenth Century

2009-12-18T15:52:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week I finally finished reading the first book of Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which ends with two famous chapters on the rise and persecution of the early Christian church under the Roman Empire. Chapter XVI closes with the assertion that internecine strife among Christians themselves claimed many more lives than did persecution at the hands of the pagan Roman emperors:

We shall conclude this chapter by a melancholy truth, which obtrudes itself on the reluctant mind; that even admitting, without hesitation or enquiry, all that history has recorded, or devotion has feigned, on the subject of martyrdoms, it must still be acknowledged, that the Christians, in the course of their intestine dissentions, have inflicted far greater severities on each other, than they had experienced from the zeal of infidels.

This is a long sentence—nearly seventy words—but carefully balanced. It appears to be based upon the structures and rhythms of Latin. Gibbon has paid extraordinary attention to the construction of his history, not only to the construction of individual sentences, but to the architecture of the whole.

Chapter IV, for instance, begins with the "mildness" of Marcus Aurelius, a philosophical gentleness and indulgence which results directly in the despotism of his pampered son and successor, Commodus. The chapter ends that begins with "the mildness of Marcus" ends with the "approaching misfortunes" of the Roman people. The next chapter begins with the general disorder into which the Empire has been thrown by Commodus, and ends with a partial restoration of order under Septimius Severus. The entire book is a carefully constructed narrative of reversals. Gibbon is interested in how mildness can lead to misfortune, how tolerance can lead to intolerance, how all things seem, over the course of time, to give rise to their opposites.

I am finding Edmund Burke a much less slippery character than Gibbon. Gibbon, as in the case of Marcus Aurelius, finds reason to condemn what he admires, and sometimes to admire what he condemns. Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1788), is clear and direct. The French Revolution is an unmitigated disaster. Burke supports "a manly, moral, regulated liberty," and condemns the descent into mere license that the revolution represents. The revolution is the result of rampant theorizing and innovation, and a dangerous departure from the established principles of an inherited constitution.

What I find most fascinating, especially at the end of this Darwin bicentennial year, is the central importance that Burke places on inheritance and the conformity of the English constitution with nature. Here is a long, but significant passage:

You will observe that from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity—as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right. By this means our constitution preserves a unity in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown, an inheritable peerage, and a House of Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties from a long line of ancestors.

This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection, or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it. A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides, the people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free, but it secures what it acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on these maxims are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement, grasped as in a kind of mortmain forever. By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of providence are handed down to us, and from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts, wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, molding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old or middle-aged or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections, keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.

For Burke, change must be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, part of the gradual and natural process of generational change.

It's interesting, in the light of Burke's ideas, to look at this graph showing the correlation between age and support for same-sex unions. Support is significantly higher among 18-29 year olds than among people in older age groups. Radical ideas and innovations are introduced into the system, and through the slow process of mental readjustment and legislative deliberation, change happens within the conservative structures of the constitution. Stability and change are compatible. Unfortunately, this Burkean model of gradual change, which is essentially the model of American democracy, is poorly adapted to deal with urgent crises like global climate change.

Burke is quite enjoyable to read. His Latinate eighteenth-century prose style simmers, unlike Gibbon's, with Irish temper, and occasionally reaches a boil.

Commonplace Book (12/16/09)

2009-12-16T17:10:00.000-08:00

Favorite quotations from today's reading.

"...that absorbed and inward look that only comes with whipped cream." Katherine Mansfield, "The Garden-Party"

"The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints." Edmund Burke, On the Revolution in France

CENTennial

2009-12-15T13:51:00.000-08:00

I was surprised to find in my change this morning a new 2009 Lincoln penny, with a redesigned image on the reverse of Lincoln standing in front of the Illinois state capital. The redesign, in honor of the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, was authorized by Title III of the Presidential $1 Coin Act of 2005, which called for four new reverse designs for the penny to represent the four periods of Lincoln's life: his birth and early years in Kentucky, his formative years in Indiana, his early career in Illinois, and his Presidency in Washington, D.C. The obverse of the penny remains the iconic image of Lincoln sculpted by Victor David Brenner (1871-1924) at the request of President Theodore Roosevelt. The Lincoln penny was first issued in 1909, the centennial of Lincoln's birth, and was the first U.S. coin to feature the portrait of a real person. It was also controversial for bearing the initials of the sculptor, V.D.B., which can now be seen below Lincoln's shoulder. The Lincoln penny, at one hundred years old, is the oldest U.S. coin in continuous circulation. (The Washington quarter was first issued in 1932, the Jefferson nickel in 1938, the Roosevelt dime in 1945, and the Kennedy half dollar in 1964.)

According to the U.S. Mint website, "At the conclusion of the 2009 Lincoln Bicentennial One Cent Program, the 2010 (and beyond) one-cent coin will feature a reverse design that will be emblematic of President Lincoln's preservation of the United States of America as a single and united country."

December on the Prairie

2009-12-14T12:29:00.000-08:00

Christmas Tree 2009

2009-12-13T19:44:00.000-08:00

The Domestic Novel

2009-12-07T14:28:00.001-08:00

On my Wordpress blog there's a long post up about Storm Jameson's essay "The Georgian Novel and Mr. Robinson" and the domestic novel.

A Journey of Disbelief

2009-12-06T08:27:00.000-08:00

Two years ago, I blogged about the bizarre evangelical Christian effort to purify Interstate 35 and make it a "Highway of Holiness" in supposed fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. Last night, as I drove to St. Paul for the choir concert, I noticed an interesting progression of Adopt-a-Highway signs on I-35 north of the exit for Northfield. The first sign indicated that the section of highway had been adopted by the Northfield Unitarian Fellowship. The next sign, several miles further along, indicated that the next section of highway had been adopted by the Minnesota Atheists.

The next sign, rather profoundly, said: "This Section Available."

Macalester College Choir Concert

2009-12-06T05:25:00.000-08:00

Last night, as a steady stream of cars was heading into Northfield on Highway 19 for the St. Olaf Christmas Festival, I was heading in the opposite direction, bound for the Macalester College Choir concert in St. Paul. Although less famous than the St. Olaf Choir, the Macalester choir has a distinguished history. For many years, it was conducted by the great Dale Warland, and was later conducted by Kathy Romey, who now conducts the Minnesota Chorale. The current conductor is Dr. Eugene Rogers, who led the three ensembles—the Singing Scotsmen, the women's Hildegard Singers, and the combined Concert Choir—in a varied and exciting program that included pieces by Monteverdi and Bach, as well as modern compositions and arrangements, and a new piece for choir and Persian ney by Macalester composer Jan Gilbert.

For me, the highlight was the Bach cantata, BWV 150 (Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich), because it featured a solo by my friend and former student Peytie McCandless. But the centerpiece of the concert was the new work, which featured Dr. Hossein Omoumi on ney (reed flute) and vocals. (Click here for a short video which shows the unique emboucher with which the ney is played.) The piece was a beautiful and fascinating blend of Persian musical traditions and western choral singing, and drew a standing ovation from the audience. There were quite a few Iranians in the audience. After the concert, an enthusiastic young Iranian woman approached Peytie and complimented her on how well the choir had sung in Farsi.

The concert ended, according to Macalester tradition, with the singing of "Loch Lomond."

Reading Journal: "When I Forgot"

2009-12-04T05:58:00.000-08:00

Elina Hirvonen, When I Forgot. Translated by Douglas Robinson. Tin House Books 2009. Originally published in Finland in 2005. 180 pp. $12.95.

Elina Hirvonen's first novel is set in the shadow of 9/11 and during the build up to the Iraq War that followed. The broken lives of its characters float downward like debris from the tragedy, carrying with them memories of a lost wholeness. Anna, the narrator, is suffering from survivor's guilt. Her troubled brother Joona was beaten by their father, and has landed in a mental hospital suffering from severe psychosis. Anna feels bound to him, she wants to help him, and she wants to forget him. Anna's lover, a visiting American academic named Ian, is the son of a Vietnam vet who came home shattered from the war. As America prepares to go to war in Iraq and anti-American demonstrations fill the streets of Helsinki, Anna and Ian painfully struggle to piece themselves together. Anna and Ian are like human twin towers, reduced to emotional rubble by the people and events—both personal and political—that collide with them.

The narrative shifts between present and past, and between the stories of Anna and Ian. Both were unpopular and persecuted in school. Both came from troubled families. Ian has become an academic—he originally comes to Finland to lecture on Virginia Woolf—and Anna has become a journalist. As the novel opens, Anna is sitting in a café, and seems to be reading Michael Cunningham's The Hours: "There's the book. There's the world I am allowed to enter. Three women on a single day in different time periods. The writer Virginia Woolf who filled her pockets with rocks and walked into the water."

The novel itself feels as if it has rocks in its pockets, pulled down by the pervasive tone of irredeemable despair and by the seriousness of its purpose. Hirvonen's writing lacks the lightness of touch that marks her countrywoman Tove Jansson's stories of loss and disillusionment. Hirvonen gives us the image of Virginia Woolf weighed down with rocks, walking into the river to drown herself. Jansson gives the image of her Anna's old furniture piled up on the ice out in the harbor, waiting for spring to break up the ice and pull it all down:

Far out on the ice lay a dark pile of rubbish waiting for the ice to break up, a monument to Mama and Papa's complete inability ever to get rid of possessions. How remarkable, Anna thought. The ice will go, and everything will sink, just go straight down and disappear. It's bold, it's almost shameless... Later it occurred to her that maybe it wouldn't sink, not all of it, maybe it would float to another shore and someone would find it and wonder where it came from and why. In any event, it was not even the least bit Anna's fault.

The ice holds things up, but even when it's gone, some things will float. In Jansson's world, there is some buoyancy—some of it is Anna's personal self-deception, much of it is the human will to stay afloat. At the end of Hirvonen's novel there is a moment of lightness, as her Anna seems to float above her reflection in the puddles of a spring thaw. For me, that lightness came too late.

Winter Projects

2009-12-03T14:08:00.000-08:00

Here's my desk at home, all set up for what I hope will be a productive winter. I'm hoping to complete, or make substantial progress, on two projects. The first is an essay for a collection of essays on writing titled Chapter & Verse. According to the prospectus, "Chapter & Verse provides perspectives on the many avenues to success that academic—and formerly academic—writers find, including writing and working outside the academy." The second project is the translation of primary sources to be included in Clara's book on Athens in 415 BCE. On the right-hand side of my desk, my big Greek lexicon and Oxford Classical Text of Thucydides are laid out so that I can work on translating the Melian Dialogue.

Reading Journal: "The True Deceiver"

2009-11-28T08:08:00.001-08:00

Tove Jansson, The True Deceiver. New York Review Books 2009. Translated from Swedish by Thomas Teal, with an Introduction by Ali Smith. Available December 1, 2009. I received an ARC from the publisher as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.

Finnish writer Tove Jansson (1914-2001) is best known for her series of children's books about little hippopotamus-shaped trolls called Moomins. Jansson created the Moomins as a form of escapism while she was working as a cartoonist for an anti-fascist magazine during World War II. Several books featuring the adventures of the Moomintrolls followed between 1945 and 1970. After her mother died in 1970, Jansson set aside the Moomins and turned to writing novels for adults in which the loss of her mother continued to resonate.

In her novel The Summer Book (1972), also published by New York Review Books, a child who has recently lost her mother spends a summer with her grandmother on an island in the Gulf of Finland. The novel beautifully depicts the relationship between the small child, Sophia, and her loving but often astringent grandmother. Loss permeates the book—both the mostly unspoken loss of Sophia's mother and the loss of youth and time that the grandmother increasingly feels.

"It all seems to shrink up and glide away," the grandmother says.

Summer on the island becomes a symbol of loss and loneliness and the shortness of time, but Jansson's touch is light and whimsical enough that the sadness and symbolism never weigh the story down. Her cover illustration for the book is perfect: the dark island, with two dark figures alone on the point, floats weightlessly above its dark reflection in an sea of pale yellow and blue. In the middle of the island, among the dark trees, a square of yellow light glows in the window of the house.

In one chapter in the middle of The Summer Book, Sophia sleeps out alone in a tent and, waking to the profound darkness, ventures out into the night to find her grandmother:

She really listened for the first time in her life. And when she got out in the ravine, she noticed for the first time what the ground really felt like under her toes and the soles of her feet. It was cold, grainy, terribly complicated ground that changed as she walked—gravel and wet grass and big flat stones, and every now and then some plant as high as a bush would brush against her legs. The ground was dark, but the sky had a faint, gray light. The island had grown tiny, floating on the water like a drifting leaf, but there was a light in the guest room window.

When we go through a period of darkness, Jansson implies, we begin to notice things we haven't noticed before: subtleties of the darkness, the light that waits for us, the complicated texture of the ground beneath our feet.

In The True Deceiver (1982), Anna Aemelin is, like Jansson, an illustrator of children's books. She creates meticulously detailed paintings of the forest floor, then populates them with floral bunnies. Her life, in the family villa known to the locals as the bunny house, is quiet and well-regulated. She spends the winter answering letters from children, and when the snow finally melts she returns to the forest to paint. But everything changes when the ruthlessly pragmatic Katri Kling comes to live with her and starts to reorganize her life.

As in The Summer Book, the time and place—deep winter in a small coastal village—become a dominant presence in the novel, and deft symbolism is joined with deep psychological insight. Katri is both honest and calculating. She has no illusions about other people. She sees only self-interest at work, and is ruthless in exposing dishonesty and falsehood. Anna, on the other hand, lives in a kind of sentimental dream world, idolizing her late parents and painting floral bunnies. Although she is the older woman, she has, in a sense, never grown up. The conflict between Katri and Anna, between the jaded and the rose-colored view of the world, lies at the center of the novel. Is a certain amount of deception, self-deception and the hiding of truth from other people, necessary for happiness? Is there more to honesty than a scrupulous keeping of accounts?

Katri convinces Anna that Anna has been cheated by everyone from the local shopkeeper to the toy companies who contract with her to create and market toy versions of her signature floral bunnies. Katri insists on going carefully through the accounts and contracts with Anna, figuring out percentages and profits. Katri is all business, but Anna insists on making the business into a game—a game that moves from the real numbers in Anna's account book to entirely made-up sums. Katri is uncomfortable with the shift into fantasy, but Anna still needs some element of make-believe to make the real world bearable. Anna is an artist, and art, after all, is a form of make-believe, a kind of deception, a insistence on something made up. But should art be purely escapist, or should it make us look more penetratingly at reality?

Here's a wonderful photograph of Tove Jansson, surrounded by Moomintrolls, her mouth set at a wry angle, her eyes wide and hard and penetrating, looking past childish things at something more complex out there in the dark.

Tove Jansson, 1956

Reading Journal: "Summer Will Show"

2009-11-22T12:09:00.000-08:00

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show. NYRB Classics 2009. Originally published in 1936.

In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s story “The Music at Long Verney” (1971), an old landed couple find themselves listening to music outside the window of their own large country house, Long Verney, which they have rented out to a sophisticated young couple from town. While the story seems to ally our sympathies on the side of the old couple and their attachment to the English countryside, Townsend Warner dismisses them at the end of the story as “impermeably self-righteous.” Fresh experiences, fresh opportunities for empathy and understanding of other lives, fail to penetrate them. They come away from listening to the music at Long Verney grasping at an excuse not to repeat the visit. They shun the opportunity to make a deeper connection.

Townsend Warner’s fiction is peopled with insiders who find themselves on the outside. Lolly Willowes, the daughter of a respectable family, becomes a witch. Mr. Fortune, an English bank clerk, becomes a missionary on a South Sea Island and an outsider among the natives. Ralph Kello, a vagrant fleeing from the plague, finds himself impersonating a priest in a medieval convent in The Corner That Held Them (1948). Ralph, who becomes known as Sir Ralph, is an outsider who finds himself on the inside, but who secretly remains outside the sanction of the church. The conflict in the Townsend Warner’s novels is often between who people are on the inside, and the different spheres in which they find themselves.

Sophia Willoughby, in Summer Will Show (1936), is another such character. Like the couple in “The Music at Long Verney,” Sophia is a member of the English landed gentry, at the same time bound by the expectations of her class and in mental rebellion against them. She’s bored and unhappy, with nothing to give meaning to her life but her children and the rituals of her class. Then her children die of smallpox, and Sophia travels to Paris, where she unexpectedly falls in love with her husband’s Jewish mistress, Minna Lemuel, and becomes caught up in the revolutionary struggles of 1848. The social insider becomes an outsider, living from hand-to-mouth, but always at the same time remaining, by virtue of her class and upbringing, outside the experience of the workers and revolutionaries who now surround her.

Sophia is caught between passionate engagement and critical detachment. She runs hot and cold. For Minna, life is art. She has an ability to pose with perfect sincerity. She is a talented storyteller, and it’s her stories that initially draw Sophia toward her. Warner is interested in the revolutionary power of stories, and in the revolutionary power of love, to change our lives and change the world. At the end of the novel, Sophia is gradually absorbed into words. “Absorbed” is, fittingly, the last word of the novel.

Summer Will Show is itself absorbing—a vivid, lyrical, bold and stimulating novel. It takes unexpected turns, and never gives its characters an easy way out. Warner has a particular genius for the historical novel, which allows her to recreate a world that is like our own, but with telling differences. The reader, like Warner's characters, is thoroughly absorbed, but at the same time stands at a critical distance—looking back, drawing connections, listening to a distant music.

When she wrote Summer Will Show, Sylvia Townsend Warner had begun a relationship with another woman, the poet Valentine Ackland. The two women became devoted Communists, helped to organize workers in rural Dorset, and made a trip to Spain during the Civil War to support the struggle against fascism. Sophia’s journey in Summer Will Show from the world of the landed gentry to the world of the revolutionary worker was in many respects like Warner’s own. Warner was the daughter of a schoolmaster at Harrow, an expert on Tudor church music, a poet and novelist. During World War I, she worked in a munitions factory, where she gained first-hand knowledge of industrial working conditions. She began to see the dissonance between middle-class romanticizing of the working class and the actual harsh conditions of labor.

In Summer Will Show, there are intellectuals who romanticize revolution, who see it as something essentially picturesque, and there are real working men and women for whom revolution is a final tragic act of desperation. Sophia, like Warner herself, can no longer romanticize, but she can never be an authentic member of the proletariat. She remains essentially an outsider. Summer Will Show stands on my bookshelf beside another NYRB Classic, Jessica Mitford’s Hons and Rebels, which has at its center a debutante turned Communist. Sophia, like Mitford, cannot step entirely out of the life into which she was born, but neither can she go back to it.

In a significant scene in the novel, Sophia finds herself listening to a conversation between Minna and the proto-Marxist Ingelbrecht:

What I feel, thought Sophia, is what I have seen painted sometimes on the faces of people listening to Beethoven; the look of those listening to a discourse, to an argument carried on in entire sincerity, an argument in which nothing is impassioned, or persuasive, or reasonable, except by force of sincerity; and there they sit in a heavenly thraldom, as blind people sit in the sun making a purer acknowledgment with their skin than sight, running after this or that flashing tinsel, can ever make. I cannot for the life of me see what Minna and Ingelbrecht are after; to me a revolution means that there is turmoil and after it people are worse off than they were before; and yet as I see them there...it is as though I were listening to music, able to feel and follow the workings of a different world. For it is there, that irrefutable force and logic of a different existence.

Unlike the old couple in “The Music at Long Verney,” who likewise stand outside the lives of others, Sophia listens.

Photo Gallery: Audubon Center of the North Woods

2009-11-21T13:53:00.001-08:00

Audubon Center of the North Woods, Sandstone, Minnesota

Grindstone Lake

Word Journal: Rhodomontade

2009-11-17T17:04:00.000-08:00

Loneliness was the famine which had tamed him; and in the release of having some one to talk to he forgot the where and the when, forgot the unintimacy between them, forgot even the lack of credence which she could not conceal as she listened to his rhodomontades.
—Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show (1936)

Sylvia Townsend Warner is a careful stylist, with an ear for the shape and the rhythm of her sentences. Here is an elegant tricolon, built upon the triple repetition of the word forgot. At the same time, excessive repetition is avoided. Townsend Warner might easily have written "forgot the lack of intimacy between them, forgot even the lack of credence...," but she creates variety by coining "unintimacy," a word that even the Oxford English Dictionary fails to recognize. The combination of repetition and variation in the sentence, the juxtaposition of the familiar and strange, is, like the rest of Sylvia Townsend Warner's writing, particularly artful and elegant.

The sentence ends with a word that sent me scurrying to the OED. Rhodomontade (or, rodomontade) means "a vainglorious brag or boast," and is first attested in English in 1612. It is ultimately derived from Rodomonte, the name of a boastful Saracen leader in the sixteenth- century Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto's epic Orlando furioso (1532).

Comment Moderation

2009-11-14T06:01:00.000-08:00

Recently, spam comments have significantly outnumbered genuine comments on this blog, so I've reactivated word recognition for comments. Comments will also continue to be moderated.

Reading Journal: "Robert Elsmere"

2009-11-08T12:02:00.000-08:00

Mrs. Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere. Oxford World's Classics 1987. Originally published 1888. 576 pp.

Mrs. Humphry Ward

Robert Elsmere was an instant and sensational bestseller when it was published in 1888. William Gladstone, in between terms as Prime Minister, wrote a forty-page review of the novel, finding fault with its rejection of Anglican orthodoxy. Oscar Wilde summed it up with a witticism, dismissing it as "Arnold's Literature and Dogma with the literature left out." Mrs. Ward was, in fact, Matthew Arnold's niece, and like Arnold, she objected to the literalism of orthodox Christianity, which was based on an unscientific acceptance of miracles. The underlying purpose of her novel was to suggest a new Christianity, based on historical knowledge, the humanity of Christ, and the ideal of social justice.

The novel begins in the Lake District, where the saintly and evangelical Catherine Leyburn brings comfort to her poor neighbors and holds her family together after the death of her like-minded father. The first part of the novel tells quite compellingly the story of Catherine's wooing by the young clergyman Robert Elsmere, fresh from Oxford and about to become the rector of a small parish in Sussex. Catherine struggles between her sense of duty to her family and neighbors, and her growing love and admiration for Robert. Finally, she accepts him, and Robert takes up his post in Murewell, Sussex, where he immediately becomes a force for good. At the same time, he comes under the spell of the scholarly and misanthropic Squire Wendover, with his fabulous library and his atheism. Under the Squire's influence, Robert comes to reject the miraculous basis of Christianity, which means that he can no longer accept the 39 Articles and therefore must leave the Anglican Church.

Elsmere, through his historical researches, comes to the conclusion that the miraculous elements of Christianity, like the story of the Resurrection, arose out of prescientific modes of thought and conventions of storytelling. Miracles made Christ's story compelling to a first century audience. But the scientific nineteenth-century had no need of miracles or the divinity of Christ: the self-sacrificing moral goodness of a purely human Christ was enough. There was no need to believe in the literal Resurrection when the example of Christ remained, though the work of his followers, a powerful force for social and moral regeneration.

Robert Elsmere represents a middle way between the evangelical orthodoxy of his wife Catherine—who becomes a less sympathetic character as she struggles intractably with her husband's heresy—and the thoroughgoing skepticism and atheism of Squire Wendover. Gladstone objected that the deck is stacked against orthodoxy because Ward gives the Church no intellectually formidable proponent in the novel to counter the influence of Wendover. For Catherine, Christianity is a matter of feeling, not thought, and she can only pray that her husband will return to the fold. At the same time, Robert doesn't follow the Squire's teaching to its logical conclusion, and become an atheist. The Squire is misanthropic, too absorbed in his scholarship, and dies bitter and alone. Atheism is a moral abyss.

The novel is full of attempts at salvation. Rose, Catherine's artistic younger sister, yearns to save the handsome morose Oxford tutor, Langham, from his lonely and disappointed life. A minor character, Charles Richards, wants to "reclaim" his alcoholic wife. Catherine wants to save Robert from heresy and damnation. Robert wants to save everyone. Salvation, Ward seems to say, is not worked out through the miraculous intervention of the risen Christ, but through human relationships, and human love. Christ was not the incarnation of God; rather, we are the incarnation of Christ when we work together in love for the betterment of the world. This is the essence of Robert Elsmere's new religion.

Storytelling is also central to the novel, and to Mrs. Ward's ideas about religion. Both in his Sussex parish and in his ministry to London workers, Elsmere institutes storytelling evenings, when he reads aloud to his parishioners. Like her uncle, Matthew Arnold, Mr. Ward saw that familiarity with the workings of literature was essential for understanding the metaphorical truths of Christianity. Storytelling also brings us into the lives of others. It draws people together, and becomes an agent of reconciliation. It's hearing from someone else the story of her husband's ministry to the London working poor that finally reconciles Catherine to her husband's loss of orthodox faith.

In the course of the novel, as Catherine becomes more rigid and less sympathetic, Elsmere himself becomes more idealized. One character talks, late in the novel, about "the spirit of devotion, through a man, to an idea." He says, "There is no approaching the idea for the masses except through the human life; there is no lasting power for the man except as the slave of the idea." Mrs. Ward, writing in the late nineteenth century, optimistically believed in the power of the charismatic ideologue to be a force for profound good. The twentieth century would show the other side of the coin.

Robert Elsmere is an absorbing, thought-provoking, beautifully written novel. Mrs. Ward has a sympathetic understanding of human character. Walter Pater called the novel "a chef d'oeuvre of that kind of quiet evolution of character through circumstance, introduced into English literature by Miss Austen..." The influence of George Eliot can also be felt throughout (at one point, Elsmere's influence is said to be "incalculably diffusive"—a quotation from the end of Middlemarch). Above all, Mrs. Ward has a deep Victorian moral earnestness. The novel is, as Gladstone, said, "eminently an offspring of the time," and as such offers a panoramic picture of late Victorian religious and intellectual life. It's a shame that Oxford has not included the novel in the latest reissue of the World's Classics series.

The Grand Obsolete Party

2009-11-05T14:37:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday, New York's 23rd Congressional District—my Republican father's old stomping grounds in his days as an administrative law judge for the New York Department of Labor—elected a Democratic congressman for the first time since the 1850s. According to a political history of the district—the northernmost congressional district in New York—part of the district (Franklin County) was, until Tuesday's election, more recently represented by a Whig (George Simmons, elected in 1852) than by a Democrat (the last Democrat was elected in 1850).

The Republican Party has strong historical roots in far upstate New York, going back to the founding of the party in the 1850s, when the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln and abolitionism. The most famous abolitionist of all, John Brown, lived on a farm in Essex County, which is part of the 23rd district, and Underground Railroad lines ran throughout the district, which borders on Canada.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Republican Party was the party of progressive social change, the party of civil rights and environmentalism, the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. In the antebellum era, it was the old Democratic Party that was invested in preserving the institution of slavery. Republicans abolished slavery, broke up monopolies, and pioneered the cause of environmental conservation. The new GOP website lays claim to African-American heroes like Frederick Douglass and John Mercer Langston, who were members of the party of Lincoln and abolitionism. Sadly, in this new century, the GOP has become the party of racism and opposition to climate change legislation and comprehensive health care reform.

The change in the party is probably most dramatically illustrated by the defection to the GOP of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond in 1964, at the height of the civil rights era. Originally a Southern Democrat, Thurmond left the party that had associated itself with civil rights and equal opportunity. But the shift in progressivism from the GOP to the Democratic Party began much earlier, even before the Democrat FDR introduced the New Deal. In 1912, the GOP was split between progressives, who supported former President Teddy Roosevelt, and conservatives, who supported the incumbent President, William Howard Taft.

In language that will seem familiar from the most recent Presidential election, Taft said of both his fellow Republican (Roosevelt) and his Democratic opponent (Woodrow Wilson): "The equal opportunity which those seek who proclaim the coming of so-called social justice involves a forced division of property, and that means socialism." (One of Taft's opponents in the crowded race was an actual Socialist, Eugene V. Debs.) Taft and the Republican Party declared themselves in 1912 the party of the status quo, of small government and big business.

For a fascinating account of the pivotal race of 1912, I recommend James Chace's 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs—The Election That Changed the Country (Simon & Schuster 2004).

Friends Signing Books

2009-11-04T05:46:00.000-08:00

Rob and Rebekah and BANR

Yesterday, after Latin class, I walked over to the Carleton Bookstore with Rebekah Frumkin, author of the short story "Monster," which is featured in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009, edited by Dave Eggers. A large group of friends and fans showed up at the bookstore to have Rebekah sign copies of the book. In a unique arrangement, the contents of BANR are selected by a committee of high school students in the Bay Area and in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who work with Dave Eggers to compile the anthology.

"They thought my story was creepy," Rebekah said.

Rebekah signed books for an hour before rushing off to write a computer program and study for her Latin quiz. There may be a few copies of BANR left at the Carleton Bookstore; otherwise it can be special ordered or ordered online. A large percentage of the proceeds from the book go to 826 National, a coalition of non-profits "dedicated to helping students, 6-18, with expository and creative writing."

Rebekah's story originally appeared in Post Road Magazine, an online literary magazine published by the English Department of Boston College. It shows once again the incredible quality and variety of creative work now appearing in online publications.

On Sunday, back in Oberlin, Ohio, Kerry Langan was signing copies of Only Beautiful & Other Stories, with my Amazon.com review projected onto a screen behind her to help boost sales. Next she'll be traveling down to Palmetto, Georgia, for a reading and book signing at StudioSwan Gallery on Saturday, November 7, at 5:00 p.m. I wish I could be there for the book event, and to celebrate the birthday that Kerry and I share on Sunday.

"Only Beautiful and Other Stories"

2009-10-31T15:04:00.000-07:00

Kerry Langan, Only Beautiful & Other Stories. Decatur, GA: Wising Up Press, 2009. 214 pp. $20. Available from the publisher or from Amazon.com, or by special order from your favorite independent bookselller.

In the first two stories in Kerry Langan's beautiful new collection of short stories, there are moments of silence. The silence in the first story, "Makeover," comes in the wake of a trauma: "The furnace shuts off and the house is gradually quiet, so silent I hear the spray of rain hitting the window." In the second story, "Lead Us Not," the silence marks an absence: "The room was so quiet I could hear the buzzing of the fluorescent lights overhead and the hiss from the radiators." One of Langan's gifts as a writer is her ability to listen intently, and to hear what is unspoken in every situation. She also has a great writer's eye for the significant detail, bringing entire life histories alive in a single moment of illumination. She achieves what the best writers of short fiction can achieve, combining an economy of narration with a depth of insight and sympathy that allows us to feel, in a few short pages, that we know her characters and live intimately among them.

"Makeover" is narrated by a fifteen-year old girl, Barb, who babysits for the children of a woman, Janet, whose marriage has recently broken up. Barb innocently fantasizes about being in Janet's place—a grown-up woman with a lovely house and a closet full of beautiful clothes—but ends up trespassing upon fantasies that are not nearly so innocent. Langan allows us to see the world through Barb's eyes—but unlike Barb, we can at the same time see through our adult eyes the more troubling aspects of Janet's life and relationships. It's a perfect opening story for the collection, because it explores the attractions and the dangers of entering into the lives of others—one of the major themes of Langan's fiction.

In the novella, "Only Beautiful," Langan tells the story of beautiful Mary Connolly in the voices of at least a dozen different characters. The novella is like a diamond of many facets, prismatic, as the characters illuminate not only Mary's life, but their own, with unexpected lights and colors. As in many of Langan's stories, the characters, bound up in their own anxieties and preoccupations, manage to misinterpret each other, to cause each other unintentional pain, and to muddle through—sometimes to a kind of unexpected grace. Langan's touch is so sure that we never fall out of sympathy with these flawed and fumbling, and ultimately very familiar characters. She knows how much we need each other, and how falteringly we fulfill that need.

In one of my favorite stories, "The Marshall Islands," Langan gives us a classic American short story with the Aristotelian unities of a suburban backyard barbecue, and an Aristotelian moment of recognition in which a father sees the epitome of his own life—his failures and his longings—in the life of his son. The story contains everything: the longing of parents for children, of men for women, of age for youth, of the present for the past. The Marshall Islands—where the United States conducted nuclear tests on the Bikini Atoll after World War II—become a symbol of poisoned relationships and of a longing for a fresh start. It's smart and potent storytelling.

Flu Update

2009-10-29T06:10:00.000-07:00

This subject heading has appeared in my email inbox three times in the past week. Another professor reports that he received five flu automailer messages in a single day. We are now in Week 7 of Carleton's nine-and-a-half week term, usually a stressful part of the term in the best of times. This fall, the flu is taking full advantage of the stressed and sleep-deprived student body. Currently, 30% of my Latin 101 class is out with what appears to be H1N1.

2009-10-28T14:20:00.000-07:00

The Historical Jesus and the Late Victorian Novel

2009-10-23T05:51:00.000-07:00

Ernest Renan

"The great problem of the present age," writes the translator of Ernest Renan's La Vie de Jésus, "is to preserve the religious spirit, whilst getting rid of the superstitions and absurdities that deform it, and which are alike opposed to science and common sense." Renan's book appeared in English in 1863, a few years after the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859), and invited similar criticism and outrage with its challenge to the traditional Christian world view. Renan (1823-1892) attempted to see Jesus in his historical context, not as the Son of God, but as an historical figure whose thought and actions were influenced by the intellectual, social, and political currents of his time, and by a long tradition of Jewish thought.

The influence of Renan's Life of Jesus pervades Mrs. Humphry Ward's great novel Robert Elsmere (1888). The title character is an Anglican rector whose historical and scientific investigations prompt a crisis of faith that ultimately leads him to reject the supernatural basis of Christianity. He is left with "the image of a purely human Christ—a purely human, explicable, yet always wonderful Christianity." Elsmere's crisis mirrors the intellectual and spiritual crisis of the Victorians in general as they faced the implications of the new scientific and historical views of the world.

It's important, in Robert Elsmere, that the rector is an amateur naturalist—like Rev. Farebrother in Middlemarch and like so many nineteenth-century Anglican clergymen. The study of natural history revealed to the religious mind the wonders of God's creation, but to a more critical mind like Elsmere's it revealed truths fundamentally at odds with his simple Christianity. Certain central Christian doctrines—the Virgin Birth, for example, and the Resurrection—were seen to be absurd in light of a scientific understanding of the world. But more importantly, science gave Elsmere a method by which he could scrutinize Scriptural evidence and see it as part of an historical process, rather than as a divine revelation.

Mrs Ward writes: "Perhaps it was his scientific work, fragmentary as it was, that was really quickening and sharpening these historical impressions of his. Evolution—once a mere germ in the mind—was beginning to press, to encroach, to intermeddle with the mind's other furniture. And the comparative instinct—the tool, par excellence, of modern science—was at last fully awake, was growing fast, taking hold, now here, now there."

Elsmere's crisis is precipitated when he reads about and ponders the latest historical criticism of the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament. Renan, among others, realized that Daniel was written centuries after the events it purports to narrate—that it is, essentially, a work of fiction—and that when Jesus quotes from it, he is not bringing a divine prophecy to fulfillment, but merely reflecting the purely human influence of Jewish tradition.

Mr. Grey, Elsmere's Oxford mentor, dissects Elsmere's loss of literal faith: "Well, the process in you has been the typical process of the present day. Abstract thought has had little or nothing to do with it. It has been all a question of literary and historical evidence. I am old-fashioned enough...to stick to the a priori impossibility of miracles, but then I am a philosopher! You have come to see how miracles are manufactured, to recognise in it merely a natural, inevitable outgrowth of human testimony, in its pre-scientific stages. It has been all experimental, inductive."

George Eliot—young Mary Ann Evans—went through a similar crisis of faith as the translator of D.F. Strauss's Life of Jesus (Leben Jesu, 1835), a pioneering German attempt to uncover the historical Jesus. As Eliot biographer Jenny Uglow writes: "She was reluctant to reduce the person of Christ, whom she regarded as an unparalleled charismatic teacher, to a mere pawn of cultural consciousness. Strauss seemed to drain Christianity of any application to life, and she realised, in rejecting his negative position, that she did value the symbolic importance of Christian teaching, indeed of all religions based on notions of self-sacrifice, of spiritual community, of supporting love."

That qualification—"the symbolic importance of Christian teaching"—is significant. Christianity could be seen as full of mythical elements—stories that nevertheless touched an essential chord in the human heart. Not surprisingly, the woman who would become a great novelist, known for the moral depth of her fiction, concluded that fictions could contain great truths. A scientific examination of the Bible reduced it to a collection of absurdities. As Matthew Arnold explained, the Bible only made sense, and only remained relevant, when read as a literary text.

Late Victorians like Arnold and Eliot and Mrs. Humphry Ward needed Christian teaching as the basis of their morality, and as the basis of liberal social action to alleviate poverty and suffering and injustice in the world, but they could no longer accept the Bible as the literal word of God. Renan wrote: "To have made himself beloved, 'to the degree that after his death they ceased not to love him,' was the great work of Jesus, and that which most struck his contemporaries." He continues, "If Jesus were to return among us, he would recognise as disciples, not those who pretent to enclose him entirely in a few catechismal phrases, but those who labour to carry on his work."

To live one's life so as to be loved: not a bad standard of conduct.

The work of Ernest Renan is also read by the title character in American novelist Harold Frederic's 1896 novel The Damnation of Theron Ware. Theron Ware is, like Robert Elsmere, a clergyman (in Ware's case, a Methodist) whose study of Renan, among others, leads to a loss of his Christian faith. Theron Ware is also, like Elsmere, a gifted preacher. But when Ware loses his faith, and can no longer in good conscience preach Christian sermons, he reapplies his talent in a typical American way: he becomes a salesman.

"Beyond Forgetting" Readings

2009-10-15T12:23:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow (Friday, October 16), I'll be taking part in two poetry readings from the anthology Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer's Disease (Kent State University Press). Joining me for both readings will be the book's editor, poet Holly Hughes; at the second reading, we'll be joined by Minneapolis poet Ethna McKiernan. The first reading is at 4:00 pm at Viking Theater, at St. Olaf College. The second reading is at the Northfield Retirement Community Chapel, starting at 7:00. I wrote about Holly, and the book, on Northfield.org in the spring. You can purchase the book for 15% off ($25.46) this week at the St. Olaf Bookstore.

Pumpkin Flower

2009-10-13T16:12:00.000-07:00

October has brought a harvest of new books from people I know or used to know. I'm beginning to feel like the one vine in the pumpkin patch that flowered like the rest, but never produced a pumpkin. Here are a couple of the prize pumpkins produced this October.

Kerry Langan, Only Beautiful & Other Stories (Wising Up Press). Kerry has been a friend since our desks faced each other in the Oberlin College Library in the mid-1980s. She was a young reference librarian and I was a student worker at the circulation desk. Kerry and I share a birthday, and a similar history. In the 1990s, she gave up the reference desk for a life as a writer and a stay-at-home mom. She has written and published numerous short stories, and several of them, along with a novella, are brought together in her new book.

Rebekah Frumkin is a student in my Latin 101 class this term. She won her first national writing contest at the age of seven, was a published fiction writer as a teenager, has contributed to McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and as a sophomore at Carleton has had a story chosen by Dave Eggers for Best Nonrequired Reading 2009. You can read her story, "Monster," here. Rebekah really makes me feel like a wilted pumpkin flower. She'll be signing books at the Carleton Bookstore on November 3.

Another Greuze

2009-10-13T06:57:00.000-07:00

Here, again, is Mrs. Humphry Ward's recollection of George Eliot's arrival at Lincoln College, Oxford, and her first sight of Mrs. Pattison, the Rector's young wife:

As we turned into the quadrangle of Lincoln—suddenly, at one of the upper windows of the Rector's lodgings, which occupied the far right corner of the quad, there appeared the head and shoulders of Mrs. Pattison, as she looked out and beckoned smiling to Mr. Lewes. It was a brilliant apparition, as though a French portrait by Greuze or Perronneau had suddenly stepped into a vacant space in the old college wall. The pale, pretty head, blond-cendrée, the delicate smiling features and the white throat; a touch of black, a touch of blue; a white dress; a general eighteenth-century impression as though of powder and patches:—Mrs. Lewes [George Eliot] perceived it in a flash, and I saw her run eagerly to Mr. Lewes and draw his attention to the window and its occupant...

Mrs. Humphry Ward

In an earlier post on Middlemarch, I mentioned how Eliot translated this scene to the Vatican, where the artist Naumann spies Dorothea and fetches Will Ladislaw to share his aesthetic experience. The striking scene in the Lincoln quadrangle lodged in Mrs. Ward's imagination, too, and found its way into her 1888 novel, Robert Elsmere. In the novel, the title character, a young clergyman, is showing his old Oxford tutor, Langham, around a remarkable private library belonging to the misanthropic scholar, Squire Wendover. Langham, the disappointed and detached middle-aged scholar, has begun to feel an attraction to Elsmere's spirited sister-in-law, nineteen-year old Rose. In the library, the two men at last come to a dreary room used "as a receptacle for the superfluous or useless volumes thrown off by the great collection all around." The room is filled with frayed and broken volumes, gradually crumbling to dust, and "a musty smell hung over it all." As he is leaving this room, a sudden vision arrests Langham's attention:

He passed the threshold again with a little sigh, and saw suddenly before him at the end of the suite of rooms, and framed in the doorways facing hiim, an engraving of a Greuze picture—a girl's face turned over her shoulder, the hair waving about her temples, the lips parted, the teeth gleaming, mirth and provocation and tender yielding in every line. Langham started, and the blood rushed to his heart. It was as though Rose herself stood there and beckoned to him.

The woman becomes a work of art, the work of art becomes a woman. There are traces of Pygmalion in these scenes, in the relationships between these old scholars and beautiful but intellectually unformed girls. Rose, it should he noted, is herself an artist, a violinist with a rare and exceptional talent. She is both artist and object of art.

Lady Dilke

In Robert Elsmere, Rose has an older sister, the puritanical Catherine, whose strong religious convictions make her call into question the value of art and the artistic temperament. Rose and Catherine seem to represent the aesthetic and ascetic impulses in Victorian women, the tension between the sensual and the spiritual that Dorothea wrestles with in Middlemarch. This tension is vividly illustrated in a memoir of Lady Dilke—the former Emilia Frances Strong Pattison—written by her second husband. In a striking passage, he writes about her days as a young art student in South Kensington: "In 1859, Miss Strong used to horrify her ordinary church friends by her studies in dissection and advocacy of the necessity of drawing from the nude; but, at the same time, still more greatly to shock them by her habit of doing penance for the smallest fault, imaginary or real, by lying for hours on the bare floor or on the stones, with her arms in the attitude of the cross." An aesthetic appreciation of the bodies of others contrasts with an ascetic mortification of her own flesh.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, "Souvenir"

The paintings of Greuze were enormously popular in the nineteenth century. Sir Richard Wallace collected nearly two dozen Greuzes at Hertford House (The Wallace Collection), where Lady Dilke viewed them. Their appeal may have lain in what she called their "immature beauty" and "vein of wanton suggestion." At left is one of the typical Greuzes from The Wallace Collection. Is her expression primarily sensual, or is there something spiritual in it as well, something of the ecstasy of St. Teresa?

In Robert Elsmere, Mrs. Humphry Ward explores the often conflicting facets of woman's nature, as the Victorians understood it. She's interested in the tension between spiritual and sensual, between being the artist and being the object of art, between self-fulfillment and being the fulfillment of someone else's desire.

Footnote: In 1908, Humphry Ward, the novelist's husband, traveled to Berkeley, California, to give a lecture on the development of the Louvre's collection. Ward was a prominent art critic. Although he declined to be interviewed after the lecture, "he did venture the opinion...that American women were good to look upon." He was amazed at the number of women who were able to show up for a morning lecture. The New York Times article on his lecture was headed: "HUMPHRY WARD LECTURES ON ART. Wonders Afterward That So Many Women as Hear Him Have Nothing to Do. BUT FINDS THEM PRETTY."

Related: Greuze works in the Wallace Collection, London

Student Journalism on Northfield.org

2009-10-12T05:40:00.000-07:00

During the fall term, I'm supervising a work study student, Maia Rodriguez, who's writing regular feature stories for Northfield.org. Maia is a senior history major and a student in Doug McGill's journalism class at Carleton. Her stories will be appearing once or twice a week on Northfield.org, and will be archived here. She's already posted stories on National Coming Out Day and the gay community in Northfield, and on the Pressville blog that features student work from her journalism class.

Maia is working for Northfield.org through a partnership with the ACT Center at Carleton, which places student workers in positions with community organizations.

This is my second experience supervising a student journalist at Northfield.org. In January, I worked with a student intern, Amy Sack, a senior from St. Olaf College.

Here's a link to a YouTube video of the multi-talented Maia as soloist with the Carleton a cappella group Exit 69.

Related: About NCO|Northfield.org

Reading is Fundamental

2009-10-08T05:22:00.000-07:00

During the the course of the nineteenth century, an interesting transformation took place in higher education in both England and America. Universities, which for much of their history had primarily trained clergymen, were now training scientists. One of the results of this was the decline and, in many cases, abandonment of the classical curriculum based on the study of Latin and Greek. At Harvard, which dropped Greek as an entrance requirement in 1887, President Eliot wrote:

Universities are called on to train young men for public service in new democracies, for a new medical profession, and for finances, journalism, transportation, manufacturing, the new architecture, the building of vessels and railroads, and the direction of great public works which improve agriculture, conserve the national resources, provide pure water supplies, and distribute light, heat, and mechanical power. The practitioners of these new professions can profit in so many directions by other studies in their youth, that they ought not all indiscriminately to be obliged to study Latin.

Latin was, he believed, increasingly irrelevant to the pragmatic, industrial, professionalized culture of America as it headed into the twentieth century.

In Oxford, the tide began to turn in the 1850s, when the new Museum of Natural History was opened as a corrective to what scientist Sir Henry Acland called the “intellectual one-sideness” of the University, which emphasized the study of the classics at the expense of scientific research. In his Memoirs, Mark Pattison wrote that the influence of the museum challenged “our naïve assumption that classical learning was a complete equipment for a great university.”

Matthew Arnold

Science became the controlling discipline. Thrown down from its privileged place in the curriculum, even classics attempted to become more scientific, emulating the scientific philology of the Germans, for whom classics was Altertumswissenschaft, the "science of antiquity." And although, with the advent of Darwinism, science was increasingly at odds with theology, theology itself attempted to be scientific. The poet and critic Matthew Arnold saw science and theology, as it was widely practiced, as two systems of dogma. The scientist observed and read nature literally, and theologians applied the same method to the Bible. Science and religious fundamentalism were strangely alike in their rigid standards of proof. The Bible was the theologian's laboratory, where absolute truth was established.

To Arnold, this was fundamentally wrong-headed. In Literature and Dogma (1873), he wrote: "The idea of a triangle is a definite and ascertained thing, and to deduce the properties of a triangle from it is an affair of reasoning. There are heads unapt for this sort of work, and some of the blundering to be found in this world is from this cause. But how far more of the blundering to be found in the world comes from people fancying that some idea is a definite and ascertained thing, like the idea of a triangle, when it is not; and proceeding to deduce properties from it, and to do battle about them, when their first start was a mistake!" For Arnold, who was also one of the three great English Victorian poets, the problem is that people try to read the Bible "scientifically"—as a source of "definite and ascertained" truths—instead of metaphorically, as a literary text.

The root of the problem is that people don't read enough, and aren't accustomed, through extensive reading, to the ways in which literary texts work. They lack critical thinking skills. They lack culture. Arnold wrote: "To understand that the language of the Bible is fluid, passing, and literary, not rigid, fixed, and scientific, is the first step toward a right understanding of the Bible. But to take this very first step, some experience of how men have thought and expressed themselves, and some flexibility of spirit, are necessary; and this is culture." Later, he continues: "For true culture implies not only knowledge, but right tact and justness of judgment, forming themselves by and with knowledge; without this tact it is not true culture. Difficult, however, as culture is, it is necessary."

In 2007, an AP-Ipsos poll indicated that 1 in 4 respondents had not read a single book in the previous year. Liberals were more likely to be readers than conservatives. Conservatives who read tended to read the Bible. If there is a culture war in this country, it may come down to something as fundamental as reading.

I'm heading out now to teach my Latin class, then I'm coming home to read a novel.

Autumnal

2009-10-07T13:57:00.001-07:00

Landscaping

2009-10-07T13:08:00.001-07:00

We finally got around to having a professional landscaper come in and remove the weeds that had taken over the flowerbeds around our house. A small stone wall and a few other touches were added at the same time. Here's the before and after.

Notice the weeds all around the foundation, and the out-of-control forsythia.

Notice the neat wall, trimmed forsythia, and lack of weeds. Grass will be planted along the right side to complete the project. Flowers and herbs will be planted inside the wall in the spring.

"A Grammarian's Funeral"

2009-10-05T13:20:00.000-07:00

"To the great, the fashionable, the gay, and the busy," Mark Pattison writes in his 1875 biography of the sixteenth-century classical scholar Isaac Casaubon, "the grammarian is a poor pedant, and no famous man."

In Rhoda Broughton's Belinda, Belinda is first drawn to Professor Forth, the character modeled after Pattison, after she hears him read Robert Browning's famous poem "A Grammarian's Funeral." The poem, written in 1855, is a mock heroic dirge sung by the students of a scholar as they bear his corpse to its final resting place on a mountain top. It shifts between the dignified style of the opening exhortation—"Let us begin.."—and humorously contrived Byronic rhymes. For example:

Image the whole, then execute the parts—
Fancy the fabric
Quite, ere you build, ere steel strike fire from quartz,
Ere mortar dab brick.

The scholar in the poem has devoted his life to learning, but has never gotten around to living. His patient studies are a preparation for life—the fully examined life of the wise man—but life slips away from him while he's involved in minute grammatical investigations. There's something heroic about the scholar's goal of comprehensive knowledge, but something pathetic about the execution.

In the last year of his life, Professor Pattison, who understood well the disappointments of a scholarly life, read Browning's poem and wondered "that such doggerel should in these days pass for poetry."

"The Wisdom of Dorothea"

2009-10-03T07:29:00.000-07:00

Gertrude Himmelfarb, "The Wisdom of Dorothea," in The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling (Ivan Dee 2006).

If the term "neoconservative intellectual" is not to be considered altogether an oxymoron, the appellation may be applied to the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. The wife of the late Irving Kristol and a student of Leo Strauss, Himmelfarb is a scholar of Victorian culture, the author of numerous books, and the recipient of a National Humanities Medal (2004). In 2002, she was one of three conservative scholars who decided to boycott an academic conference because Cornel West had been invited to speak. Her scholarship has been devoted to demonstrating the moral superiority of the Victorians, to demonstrating the superiority of the British to the French Enlightenment, and to demonstrating that Edmund Burke and George Eliot were Zionists.

In her essay "The Wisdom of Dorothea," Himmelfarb addresses the question: "Why did Dorothea marry Will Ladislaw?" This is a question that has troubled readers with feminist sensibilities since the novel was first published. It was a question that Florence Nightingale asked, and that Eliot herself anticipated when she wrote, at the end of Middlemarch: "Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother."

As Himmelfarb phrases the question: "Why could Eliot not have given us a Dorothea more congenial to modern feminists?" Phrased that way, we immediately see Himmelfarb's strategy: to expose such thinking as anachronistic. George Eliot was not a modern feminist. She was a Victorian woman, and very much rooted in the conventions of Victorian morality. Yes, she lived with another woman's husband, but in doing so she adopted all of the conventions of a Victorian marriage, referring to George Henry Lewes as her husband, and to herself as Mrs. Lewes. Himmelfarb writes: "Their twenty-four years together were spent in perfect domesticity and fidelity."

This ideal of traditional marriage, the forms of which she attempted to observe in her own unconventional relationship, is what Eliot adhered to in marrying Dorothea to Ladislaw. "The idea that only in marriage can Dorothea find her personal happiness as well as her moral mission seems perfectly Victorian," Himmelfarb writes. "And so it is."

Himmelfarb is, I think, perfectly correct about George Eliot. Eliot was a conservative, distrustful of radical change, more comfortable if she could align herself with traditional roles. Although her relationship with Lewes was unconventional, she observed the forms of traditional marriage. But more important to her was the substance of that relationship: the mutual commitment and affection, the shared responsibilities, the belief that marriage was a proper setting for the working out of a moral life.

In a sense, Mrs. Lewes was “passing” as a married woman. She was doing her best to align her own behavior with the expectations of the dominant culture.

It was a strain. In his review of a recent edition of Eliot’s Journals, Terry Eagleton writes: “From 1854, when she eloped with the philosopher George Henry Lewes and started these journals, to 1880, when her death brought them to a close, Eliot seems to have had a permanent headache. When she wasn't prostrate with migraine, she was bilious, palsied, depressed and despairing. She also complains about her teeth and of chronic melancholia." Eagleton suggests that Eliot’s maladies are the result of repressed guilt, to which her relationship with Lewes may have been a contributing factor. George Eliot, the strict Victorian moralist, was living happily in sin with a married man.

“What stokes Eliot's guilt most of all,” Eagleton writes, “is the fact that she is happy.”

Middlemarch is on one level the author’s wish-fulfillment fantasy. Casaubon’s faulty heart releases her from a stifling and unequal marriage that would have meant the slow death of her soul, and allows her, despite numerous obstacles set in her path, to marry the man she loves. Eliot knows that she herself stands somewhere on the margins of the moral culture she has so completely internalized. No wonder she has a permanent headache. In Middlemarch, she places Dorothea in the central moral position in Victorian culture—that of wife and mother—that she can never occupy herself.

Contemporary social conservatives like Himmelfarb tend to see same-sex marriages as an affront to “traditional marriage” and the traditions, rooted in Victorian culture, of family life. But I suspect that most same-sex couples want the right to marry for precisely the reasons that George Eliot found it so compelling: because it gives sanction to a relationship of love and mutual responsibility in which both partners have scope for their moral development.

An Imaginary Correspondence

2009-09-30T14:18:00.000-07:00

The Scottish man of letters Andrew Lang (1844-1912) was a friend of Rhoda Broughton, and in his book of "epistolary parodies," Old Friends (1890), he imagined a correspondence between Professor Forth in Broughton's Belinda and Mr. Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch. The correspondence also includes letters between other characters in the two novels. Having just read both Middlemarch and Belinda, I was amused by Lang's interweaving of the two plots. The complete correspondence, courtesy of Google Books, can be read below.

Reading Journal: "Belinda"

2009-09-30T05:51:00.000-07:00

Rhoda Broughton, Belinda. Originally published in 1883 in Great Britain. Reprinted by Virago Modern Classics in 1984.

"All my energy was directed upon one end," Professor Mark Pattison writes in his memoirs, "—to improve myself, to form my own mind, to sound things thoroughly, to free myself from the bondage of unreason, and the traditional prejudices which, when I first began to think, constituted the whole of my intellectual fabric. I have nothing beyond trivial personalities to tell in the way of incident. If there is anything of interest in my story, it is as a story of mental development."

Pattison, the Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, devoted his life to scholarship. His major work was a biography of the late sixteenth-century classical scholar Isaac Casaubon, and it is as the putative model for another Casaubon—Mr. Edward Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch—that Pattison is remembered today. Although the identification of Pattison with Eliot's Casaubon is disputed, Pattison was indisputably the model for Professor Forth, the dull, irritable "Professor of Etruscan" in Rhoda Broughton's Belinda. The unflattering likeness was so widely acknowledged that Pattison himself, on a visit to Broughton's home in Oxford, had himself announced as "Professor Forth."

The novel begins in Dresden in the spring. Belinda Churchill and her spirited, dog-loving younger sister Sarah are on holiday with their grandmother. While Sarah avidly collects beaux as if they were Dresden figurines, Belinda falls for the young English student David Rivers. Unfortunately, Belinda's shyness and insecurity make her appear cold, and Rivers fails to press his suit. The couple is parted, and Belinda, believing she has lost her true love forever, resigns herself to a loveless marriage with Professor Forth, who proceeds to suck every ounce of joy from her life.

Then Rivers reappears, still ardent and unattached. These days, Belinda would feel little hesitation about writing off her mistake and leaving the Professor. But in late Victorian England, she finds herself in a bind. Although Broughton's novel is a shocking depiction of the soul-crushing tyranny of a bad Victorian marriage, it's difficult to warm to Belinda. Her beautiful cold exterior masks a rather foolish and rather shallow interior that easily fills up with bitterness and self-pity. Even her relationship with Rivers fails to generate enough of a spark to thaw Belinda. Her reserve freezes her out of her own life.

Belinda's husband is a monster—but so, in some way, is each of the characters: the flirtatious Sarah, the self-absorbed Mrs. Churchill, the tactless Miss Watson. Broughton creates a world in which the seeds of sympathy fall upon barren ground.

Professor Forth's major contribution to scholarship is an edition of the fragments of Menander. He is Professor of Etruscan, a language that exists only in a few scattered fragments and loan words. With the professor, Belinda is only able to find fragments of happiness, and Broughton seems to imply that such is life.

After she had posted a copy of her wedding announcement to Rivers, Belinda sits down to read to her husband. Curiously, the passage she reads to him is from Darwin: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case. No doubt many organs exist of which we do not know the transitional grades."

There is growth and change and survival. There is something that connects the apparent fragments of life, but poor Belinda cannot find it. She falteringly reads the passage to her husband, he asks her to repeat it ("pray repeat that last paragraph; I am unable to follow you; you are making nonsense of it!'), and she faints.

Dino Kale and Chicken Pizza

2009-09-25T07:51:00.000-07:00

Dino kale is in season and available at Just Food Co-op. It travels about fifteen miles from Gardens of Eagan to the produce section of Just Food. I picked up a bunch of dino kale yesterday and fashioned it into a pizza topping, along with grilled chicken and fresh cherry tomatoes from a friend's garden. Most of the ingredients—except for the olive oil, salt and pepper, and mozzarella—could be found in season now from local sources. Barbara Kingsolver, whose Animal, Vegetable, Miracle I'm in the midst of reading, would approve.

Dino Kale and Chicken Pizza

1 grilled chicken breast, cubed
half a bunch of dino kale, chopped
olive oil
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
salt and pepper
cherry tomatoes, halved
grated mozzarella
pizza dough

Preheat oven to 425°. Heat 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil in a sauté pan. Add minced garlic and cook, stirring often, until lightly golden. Add chopped dino kale and sauté over moderate heat until limp, 5-10 minutes. Stir in chicken during the last minute or two of cooking. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Roll out pizza dough, brush lightly with olive oil, and top with cooked dino kale and chicken, tomatoes, and mozzarella. Cook in preheated oven. Makes one large pizza.

Reading Journal: Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America

2009-09-23T05:31:00.000-07:00

Edmund Burke

The British politician and writer Edmund Burke (1729-1797) is often claimed as the father of modern conservatism, and in the pages of Burke's great speech on Conciliation with America (1774), conservatism sounds eminently reasonable. In tone and intellect, there is a vast difference between Burke and the living, fire-breathing conservatives of Fox News, whose object is to inflame rather than to persuade. One wonders what Burke, for whom conservatism was a matter of civility and the preservation of polite civilization, would have made of Glenn Beck, for whom it's a matter of fear- and hate-mongering.

It's true that Burke had an Irishman's hot temper. "Burke's faults," says Hammond Lamont, the editor of a nineteenth-century school text of the speech, "were clearly those of an ardent temperament." Edward Gibbon called Burke "the most eloquent and rational madman I have ever known." Most television conservatives these days strike me more as simple madmen, without the eloquence or reason. In nineteenth century American high schools and universities, Burke's speech was studied as a model of good writing and argumentation. It still remains compelling and inspiring.

The two most frequently cited characteristics of Burke's conservatism are his appeal to experience over theory, and his preference for slow and incremental change over sudden innovation. The two are closely connected, since for Burke tradition is the accumulation of human experience and wisdom, and should not be lightly abandoned for an untested theory. "The question now...is," he tells Parliament, "whether you will choose to abide by a profitable experience or a mischievous theory; whether you choose to build on imagination or fact; whether you prefer enjoyment or hope..." His whole understanding of the function of government is summed up in a passage near the end of the speech:

All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniencies; we give and take; we remit some rights that we may enjoy others; we choose rather to be happy citizens than subtle disputants.

In 1774, the question before Parliament was how to deal with the American colonies, who were refusing to submit to taxation without representation and were in open defiance of Parliament. Burke, who would later be a passionate opponent of the French Revolution, stands squarely on the side of the colonists. Why did he support one set of revolutionaries and execrate the other? As David Womersley (the editor of my Penguin edition of Gibbon) explains: "In France it is the revolutionaries themselves who are the peddlers of political, financial, legal, and moral innovation. In America, political and legal innovation had come from Great Britain and had been resisted by the colonists." In Burke's view, the system of taxation proposed by Parliament for the colonies was an untried theory, an "innovation," something that went against the traditions of the British Constitution. The American Revolution was, in Womersley's words, "that paradoxical thing, a conservative revolution." It was about restoring the traditional rights and liberties of British subjects, and resisting the innovative and arbitrary exercise of Parliamentary power.

Burke's analysis of the American character—the American love of liberty, reinforced by democratic assemblies and dissenting religion—is masterful. His peroration argues that the best method of securing a revenue from the colonies is not by a mass of legislation, but by cultivating their "interest in the British Constitution"—by stirring their patriotic sense of inclusion in the civil rights and privileges of British citizens.

My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges and equal protection. These are the ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep their idea of their civil rights associated with your government,—they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance.

This idea resonates down through the great speeches of American statesmen like Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln. One hears the echo of it in Lincoln's invocation of the "bonds of affection" in the First Inaugural Address.*

In his Memoirs, Edward Gibbon wrote: "As soon as I understood the principles, I relinquished for ever the pursuit of the mathematics; nor can I lament that I desisted, before my mind was hardened by the habit of rigid demonstration, so destructive of the finer feelings of moral evidence, which must, however, determine the actions and opinions of our lives." Burke expresses a similar sentiment: "Man acts from adequate motives relative to his interest, and not on metaphysical speculations. Aristotle, the great master of reasoning, cautions us, and with great weight and propriety, against this species of delusive geometrical accuracy in moral arguments, as the most fallacious of all sophistry." Again, at the root of modern conservatism, in the eighteenth century, is a rejection of abstract reasoning in favor of practical experience and moral sensitivity.

One finds this oversimplified in remarks like those of conservative commentator David Gelernter, who writes about "a conventional liberal or a conventional academic who would rather think than act. (Pure thought is no good—is top-heavy and likely to capsize—without the ballast of everyday, practical experience.)" These same conservatives find something suspect about Sonia Sotomayor drawing upon her own experience to animate her jurisprudence. Central to Burke's conservatism is a respect for tradition tempered by what he called "a moral imagination," which the conservative Russell Kirk defines as "that power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and momentary events." In other words, it includes "empathy."

At the center of Burkean conservatism is something that, these days, I associate much more with "liberals": the ability to enter the experience of someone different from oneself, and be morally and intellectually enlarged by that experience.

*As a classicist, my favorite passage in the speech is when Burke says: "It is the spirit of the English Constitution, which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the empire, even down to the minutest member." Here he is quoting Dryden's translation of a passage in Vergil's Aeneid:

...One common soul
Inspires and feeds and animates the whole.
This active mind infus'd through all the space
Unites and mingles with the mighty mass (982-985).

In the original Latin:

Spiritus intus alit; totamque infusa per artus,
Mens agitat molem; et magno se corpore miscet (6.726-727).

The Latin is quoted by Daniel Webster in his Bunker Hill oration (1825) to characterize the spirit that animated the Americans in the Battle of of Bunker Hill. John Dickinson quotes it in 1776 when he argues, in Burkean fashion, that "the wellfare of the people...perpetually animates the [English] constitution, and regulates all its movements."

Frontenac State Park

2009-09-20T12:03:00.001-07:00

September woods

The steep walk down from the bluff

In Yan Teopa Rock

Lake Pepin, from above In Yan Teopa Rock

Frontenac State Park is located on the bluffs above the western shore of Lake Pepin, about 10 miles south of Red Wing and 5 miles north of Lake City, Minnesota. From the top of the bluff, there are impressive views over Lake Pepin. A rather steep path leads down the bluff and runs parallel to the lake shore, eventually arriving at In Yan Teopa ("rock with opening" in the Dakota language), a natural limestone arch. On this Sunday morning in September, we saw numerous warblers in the woods, beginning their fall migration.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

2009-09-18T13:38:00.000-07:00

Middlemarch is back on the shelf, and my next big read is Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon's monumental work originally appeared in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, and is available in various modern editions, including the hefty three-volume Penguin edition elegantly introduced and edited by David Womersley. Pictured above is the 1114-page first volume.

There are some interesting affinities between George Eliot, the philosophic novelist, and Gibbon, the philosophic historian. Both probe into the dark recesses of human motivation; both approach their subjects with an equal measure of irony and sympathy. David Womersley, in his introduction, writes: "[T]he belief in unintended consequences naturally led the philosophic historian to form surprisingly nuanced judgements prompted by unexpectedly broad sympathies... Individuals and institutions, which he could only condemn as in themselves criminal or perverse, at moments contributed positively to human society, while, in obedience to the same principle, those he admired or loved may, despite their best endeavours, have exerted a harmful influence" (xxiii).

Thus Gibbon praises and admires the good emperor Marcus Aurelius, but shows us that, through his indulgence as a father, Marcus bequeathed to Rome the troubled reign of his unstable son Commodus. On the other hand, he dates the beginning of the end of Rome to the reign of the murderous and self-interested Septimius Severus, who temporarily restored a measure of peace and justice to the empire.

Of Marcus Aurelius, Gibbon writes: "The mildness of Marcus, which the rigid discipline of the Stoics was unable to eradicate, formed, at the same time, the most amiable, and the only defective, part of his character" (108). This is typical of Gibbon's style, contrasting, in the same sentence, a positive and negative assessment of a person's character or actions. "The most amiable, but only defective, part of his character." There's a kind of dizzying, dazzling even-handedness about Gibbon as he performs his stylistic juggling act, making judgments while seeming to keep judgment suspended in the air.

Morning Glories

2009-09-17T15:43:00.001-07:00

On the corner of Fifth and Winona Streets in Northfield

Let Them Eat Shrimp

2009-09-15T06:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon was the annual "garden party" at the college president's house to celebrate the first day of classes at Carleton. In the past (at least since we arrived at Carleton in 1990), the party has been known for the heaping trays of jumbo shrimp served to the faculty and staff. But this year there was no shrimp. According to an article in Time magazine, the shrimp was eliminated as a cost-cutting measure: "Carleton College will save $3,800 by skipping shrimp and wine at annual faculty parties."

Although Time presents a gratifying picture of elite cake-eating college professors having to go without their shrimp and wine during a severe economic downturn, there seems to be another side to the story. The garden party followed the opening convocation, at which the address was given by Gary Nabhan, a leader of the local foods movement and author of books such as Coming Home to Eat (2001) and Where Our Food Comes From (2008). And Carleton's new food service provider, Bon Apétit, is committed to using locally-sourced foods and to promoting sustainability, and is aware that jumbo shrimp (along with most commercially-available seafood) is neither local to Minnesota nor, for the most part, harvested in a sustainable manner.

Joe Wilson in Historical Perspective

2009-09-11T05:42:00.000-07:00

A contemporary political cartoon of Preston Brooks beating Charles Sumner on the Senate floor.

May 3, 1910. Senate candidate Frederick Hale (R-ME) horsewhips newspaper editor Charles Thornton Libby for allegedly slandering Hale's mother in the rural Six Town Times. Hale is later elected to fill a Senate seat once held by his father, and has a long career in the United States Senate.

September 4, 1813. Future President Andrew Jackson, horsewhip in hand, approaches future Senator Thomas Hart Benton (D-MO) in a Nashville hotel and shouts, "You damned rascal! I'm going to punish you!" As Jackson attacks Benton, Benton's brother Jesse Benton shoots Jackson point blank in the back. Jackson is carried from the scene, and as he's being treated, the blood from his wound soaks through two mattresses. Years later, when Jackson is President, Tom Benton becomes his most loyal ally in the Senate.

In 1851, when Charles Sumner (R-MA) joins the Senate, Benton tells him he has joined the Senate too late. "All the great issues and all the great men are gone," Benton says. "There's nothing left but snarling over slavery..."

July 11, 1804. Former Vice President Aaron Burr fatally shoots former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in a duel. After the duel, Burr flees to South Carolina (the future home state of both Preston Brooks and Joe Wilson). In 1807, Burr conceives a treasonous plan to raise a private army and go to war against Mexico, and attempts to enlist the support of Andrew Jackson. Jackson's nephew Stockley Hays joins Burr's abortive expedition, and is later on hand to thrust a sword at Jesse Benton after Benton shoots Jackson in the back. (A metal button on Benton's coat deflects the blade and saves his life.)

Preston Brooks

May 22, 1856. After a speech in which Senator Charles Sumner ridicules Senator Andrew Butler (D-SC),* Butler's kinsman Rep. Preston Brooks (R-SC) attacks Sumner on the floor of the Senate with a gold-tipped walking cane. (Brooks has to walk with a cane because he was shot in the hip in a duel with future Texas Senator Louis Wigfall.) Brooks beats Sumner until Sumner is blinded with his own blood and falls unconscious. Sumner spends three years recovering before he can return to the Senate. Brooks becomes a hero in his home state of South Carolina, and receives dozens of new canes as gifts from constituents. He apologizes to the Senate, explaining that he meant no disrespect to the Senate, and that if he had meant to kill Sumner, he would have used a different weapon.

*In his speech, Sumner said of Butler: "Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight. I mean the harlot, Slavery."

February 27, 1859. Rep. Daniel Sickles (D-NY) murders U.S. attorney Philip Barton Key, son of Francis Scott Key, in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, after discovering his wife Teresa in an affair with Key. In his murder trial, Sickles is acquitted, using the first successful plea of temporary insanity in history. Sickles later serves controversially as a Union general in the Civil War.

February 5, 1860. Lawrence Keitt (D-SC), who had drawn his pistol to prevent other lawmakers from intervening to help Senator Sumner, starts a brawl on the House floor. The brawl ends when Rep. John Potter (R-WI) pulls the toupée from the head of Rep. William Barksdale (D-MS). Potter holds up the toupée and exclaims: "Look, boys! I've scalped him!" The House dissolves in laughter and the brawl ends.

Middlemarch Revisited: Rosamond and Dorothea

2009-09-10T05:36:00.000-07:00

Shallow, self-centered Rosamond fantasizes that Will Ladislaw is hopelessly in love with her. When Dorothea finds them together, in what appears to be an attitude of some intimacy, Rosamond thinks the situation is entirely to her advantage, never imagining that Will is in fact devoted to Dorothea. Eliot writes:

Shallow natures dream of an easy sway over the emotions of others, trusting implicitly in their own petty magic to turn the deepest streams, and confident, by pretty gestures and remarks, of making the thing that is not as though it were. She knew that Will had received a severe blow, but she had been little used to imagining other people's states of mind except as material cut into shape by her own wishes... (834).

"Making the thing that is not as though it were." It sounds, for one thing, like a definition of what a novelist does. It also sounds like Dorothea herself, who, as Celia says, sees only what isn't there. But Dorothea's imagination has been shaped by sympathy, and by knowledge gained through her own suffering. When Dorothea reflects on the scene she's witnessed between Will and Rosamond, Eliot writes: "It was not in Dorothea's nature...to sit in the narrow cell of her calamity, in the besotted misery of a consciousness that only sees another's lot as an accident of its own" (845). How different from Rosamond, who imagines "other people's states of mind...as material cut into shape by her own wishes." As Dorothea reflects, she asks herself: "Was she alone in the scene? Was it her event only?"

"She forced herself to think of it as bound up with another woman's life."

Dorothea has gained "emotional intelligence." As Eliot says: "[A]ll this vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power: it asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance" (846).

Feminists have always objected to Dorothea because, after asserting her maturity and power as a woman, she settles for becoming a wife and mother. In Sexual Politics (1970), for example, Kate Millett writes: "[Eliot] stuck with the Ruskinian service ethic and the pervasive Victorian fantasy of the good woman who goes down into Samaria and rescues the fallen man—nurse, guide, mother, adjunct of the race. Dorothea's predicament in Middlemarch is an eloquent plea that a fine mind be allowed an occupation; but it goes no further than petition. She marries Will Ladislaw and can expect no more of life than the discovery of a good companion whom she can serve as secretary" (139).

Eliot herself anticipated this criticism. "Many who knew her," she writes, "thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother. But no one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought rather to have done..." (894). Eliot, though she was able to choose a different life, was keenly aware of the limitations placed on women in Victorian society. And she was ambivalent about the alternatives. Her letters, for example, reveal a brilliant and independent-minded woman who signs herself "Mrs. M.E. Lewes" and who has strong maternal feelings. Although she moved as an intellectual equal in a world dominated by men, Eliot seemed to find value in the traditional sphere of women, in what she saw as women's greater sympathy, care and sense of justice. Perhaps, she seems to say, feminism shouldn't only be about women gaining an equal footing with men in the traditional spheres of male activity. Perhaps it should also be about valuing what women have always done, such as raising children and making a home.

Eliot wants to see a sympathetic partnership between men and women, based on shared knowledge and values, rather than the independence and rampant individualism that men have traditionally pursued. In her perceptive biography of Eliot, Jenny Uglow writes:

The message for the lives of women seems to be that although change must come (preferably gradually rather than suddenly), it must not be at the expense of traditional female values. Although it is wrong for women to be excluded from access to common culture and common stores of power, they should demand them for the sake of partnership with men and for the good of society, not just for their own separate fulfillment... The vital thing is not to launch women into a masculine sphere, but to "feminise" men, because the feminine strengths have for so long been trampled underfoot and undervalued.

As a former stay-at-home father, who spent years working within the traditionally feminine sphere of domesticity, I sympathize with Eliot. I'm reminded of a passage in Rosemary Radford Ruether's ecofeminist book Gaia & God that had a profound influence on my thinking as, like Dorothea, I abandoned a life of pure scholarship for a life of domesticity:

The "liberation of women" cannot be seen simply as the incorporation of women into alienated male styles of life, although with far fewer benefits, for this simply adds women to the patterns of alienated life created by and for men... Rather, what is necessary is a double transformation of both women and men in their relation to each other and to "nature." Women certainly need to gain some of the individuality that has been traditionally purchased by men at their expense. But this individuation should not be based on exploitative domination (of other women or subjugated men), but needs to remain in sustaining relation to primary communities of life. The ways of being a person for others and of being a person for oneself need to come together as reciprocal, rather than being split between female and male styles of life (265).

With this, I think George Eliot would have agreed enthusiastically.

In Dead from the Waist Down: Scholars and Scholarship in Literature and the Popular Imagination (2003), A.D. Nuttall writes of Middlemarch: "The slow accumulation of asphyxiating, counter-heroic ordinariness in nineteenth-century middle-class life has produced, very naturally, a nineteenth-century three-decker novel ending in marriage and a baby." But for me, Middlemarch celebrates that "counter-heroic ordinariness" as much as it finds it suffocating. When I read about Dorothea, early in the novel, wanting to arrive at "the core of things" through Casaubon's scholarship, I recall its distant echo in Barbara Pym's No Fond Return of Love (1961). Early in that novel, Dulcie Mainwaring, an academic indexer, is attending an academic conference and finds herself at church on Sunday morning with a congregation full of fellow academics:

The lay reader gave a short address. He tried to show how all work can be done to the Glory of God, even making an index, correcting a proof, or compiling an accurate bibliography. His small congregation heard him say, almost with disappointment, that those who do such work have perhaps less opportunity of actually doing evil than those who write novels and plays or work for films or television.

But there is more satisfaction is scrubbing a floor or digging a garden, Dulcie thought. One seems nearer to the heart of things doing menial tasks than in making the most perfect index. Again her thoughts wandered to her home and all that needed to be done there, and she began to wonder why she had come to the conference when she had so many better ways of occupying her time (emphasis added).

Although Dulcie is not concerned with building improved peasant cottages, as Dorothea was, she is concerned with practical, day-to-day domestic arrangements. These simple domestic tasks are what give her a grounding in reality. Dorothea, in another life, is one of Pym's "excellent women" whose lives are simple but whose influence is, as Eliot says, "incalculably diffusive."

It is not far to travel from the end of Middlemarch to the middlebrow and middle-class pleasures of Barbara Pym, or Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, with their frank celebration of ordinary middle-class life and the role ordinary people have in sustaining the world.

"For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

Middlemarch Revisited: Judgement

2009-09-09T05:10:00.000-07:00

We have known from the beginning that Dr. Lydgate and Rosamond are essentially incompatible. He's a serious, ambitious doctor whose goal in life is the advancement of science. Rosamond is a pampered doll whose goal in life is the advancement of her social position. To maintain her in the style she expects, Lydgate falls into debt, and is nearly ruined. I expect that most of us find our sympathies on the side of Dr. Lydgate, but he bears his share of the responsibility for the marital difficulties he and Rosamond face. Like most of the men in Middlemarch, Lydgate has an autocratic streak that contributes to Rosamond's exasperating immaturity.

When a pregnant Rosamond wants to go out riding again with Lydgate's fashionable cousin, Lydgate tells her: "surely I am the person to judge for you. I think it is enough that I say you are not to go again" (629, emphasis added). His caution seems reasonable—and, as it turns out, warranted—but his tone is disturbingly paternalistic. It has, as Eliot remarks later, "a touch of despotic firmness." When Lydgate's medical practice has begun to fail, Rosamond suggests that he "should be more careful not to offend people." Lydgate snaps: "What I am to do in my practice, Rosy, it is for me to judge. It is enough for you to know that our income is likely to be a very narrow one..." (700, emphasis added).

Later, one one of several occasions when Rosamond does something significant behind Lydgate's back, he asks her: "Will this be enough to convince you of the harm you may do by secret meddling? Have you sense enough to recognize now your incompetence to judge and act for me—to interfere with your ignorance in affairs which it belongs to me to decide on?" (716, emphasis added).

Rosamond has been spoiled, yes, and her education has been superficial, but Lydgate persists in treating her as a kind of household ornament rather than a full partner in marriage. Conversation becomes nearly impossible between them: "His indisposition to tell her anything in which he was sure beforehand she would not be interested was growing into an unreflecting habit, and she was in ignorance of everything..." (812). Both of them act behind the other's back, and fail to confide in each other. Their initial incompatibility deepens into a nearly impassable gulf.

The contrast with Dorothea is interesting. At the beginning of the novel, she impulsively marries Casaubon. Instead of being initiated into the mysteries of scholarship, she gains an education in sympathy. Near the end of the novel, Dorothea wants to rush to the aid of Dr. Lydgate, who has fallen under a cloud of scandal. Her male advisors warn her against it. Her brother-in-law, Sir James, says: "Surely, a woman is bound to be cautious and listen to those who know the world better than she does" (791). Her sister Celia tells her: "I think it is a mercy now after all that you have got James to think for you." She adds: "And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better... Well, I mean about babies and those things" (792).

But Dorothea is right. She has matured in sympathy in a way that pampered Rosamond hasn't, in a way that even Celia doesn't understand. The novel is full of harmful talk that spreads as malicious gossip and potentially helpful talk that remains suppressed through polite caution. Dorothea has the courage and the sympathy to speak honestly, soul to soul, with another suffering human.

Scenes from Labor Day Weekend in Chicago

2009-09-06T13:48:00.000-07:00

My avatar (Emperor Hadrian) at the Art Institute of Chicago

Cloud Gate in Millennium Park

Waterlilies in Lincoln Park Conservatory

The Chicago skyline from the roof of the building where we stayed

Moonrise over Lake Michigan from the roof of the building where we stayed

A little boy running around the fountain in front of Navy Pier

Nicole Mitchell and the Black Earth Strings at the 31st Annual Chicago Jazz Festival