I don’t like to eat kidneys for breakfast. I don’t like the way James Joyce makes it hard to read what he’s written. I don’t feel much empathy with Leo Bloom; he’s just not a character in whom I can take much interest.
Call me a Philistine, but I do not celebrate Bloomsday.
However, I am disappointed that the North American Barbara Pym Society is not holding a conference this year.
Needing a good novel to occupy my attention, I happened across Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children. It has turned out to be a good book for me to read right now. Trollope is gentle with his characters:– he makes you see their deepest motivations; and he shows you when they lie to themselves or misjudge the people around them; but he is gentle with them, and you feel that you want to know them. In his autobiography, Trollope writes that his characters lived for him, or that he lived with them, and that he liked them. He had enough affection for them that he sometimes couldn’t kill them off even when the plot demanded it, and the same characters appear in novel after novel because (he says) he liked them that much.
I don’t read Trollope for his prose style; his prose is adequate but sometimes the seams show. Nor do I read Trollope for his plots, for his plots can be a little too creaky. But I do find myself caring for his characters. I still get upset when I think about the ending of The Small House at Allington, because I cared about the characters.
Too many novelists (especially recently) do not treat their characters well:– they treat their characters as disposable entertainment modules, or as commodities, or as inferior beings, or as superstructure upon which to hang a plot, a concept, or a philosophy. Too often this is the way the world treats real human beings:– as disposable, or as commodities, or as inferior beings, or as superstructure on which to hang political power. I suspect the real reason I wanted to read Trollope right now is because of the ongoing presidential election campaign, in which the candidates seem to treat the United States populace as mere pawns, things to be polled, bought, and moved about on a political chessboard; this political campaign is not being gentle with anyone.
I try not to write about politics here, but I am always willing to write about efforts to resist the anti-intellectualism that is dominant in the United States today. Columnist Ben Macintyre, writing for the London Times, has uncovered poetry which was written by Barack Obama “for a college magazine at the age of 19.” Macintyre’s assessment of the poems? — “Surprisingly good.” Apparently even Harold Bloom, the critic who is the self-proclaimed guardian of the “Western canon,” likes Obama’s poetry. Hillary Clinton, while not a poet herself, at least has no less than Maya Angelou to write poetry in her defense. Link to Timesarticle.
For the record, Macintyre reprints one of the 19-year-old Obama’s poems:
Pop
Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken
In, sprinkled with ashes,
Pop switches channels, takes another
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks
What to do with me, a green young man
Who fails to consider the
Flim and flam of the world, since
Things have been easy for me.
No it’s not Maya Angelou, but yes, Obama’s poem is “surprisingly good” — and, given the current anti-intellectualism of the political scene, I find it utterly surprising that a U.S. politician even cares about poetry. We can only hope that this will start a trend of U. S. politicians aspiring to be smart and well-educated, instead of aspiring to be badly-educated corporate hacks.
Carol and I went across the street at about eleven o’clock to see who was left at the Moby-Dick marathon.
The Readers, those who would be reading during their assigned time, sat on one side of the room, where the Watch Officers could keep an eye on them. They all wore numbers on their left shoulders, big numbers on stick-on labels. They paid close attention to what was going on, and they followed along in their own copy of Moby-Dick, or shuffled through papers with the reading schedule. Attentive and ever so slightly restless, it looked as though either caffeine or adrenalin was pumping through their bloodstreams.
The Spectators sat in the chairs on their side of the room, or on the stairs leading up to the balcony, or they sprawled out on the balcony itself, or they wandered back and forth to the back room where the bathrooms and coffee were. There were two groups of Spectators. There were a few people like Carol and me who would stay until they got tired and then go home. And then there were the people who obviously planned to stay all night. The all-nighters were predominantly young and slightly giddy; but the older all-nighters had more of an appearance of grim resolution.
We stayed and listened for a while. The rhythms of Moby-Dick, when read aloud, are expansive and calming; I sat cross-legged and felt meditative; although not all that meditative, because I craning my head back and forth so I could watch people come and go. At last Carol touched my arm and said we should go. We went across the street and went to bed.
At around two in the morning, I was awakened by loud voices outside our apartment building. There are a lot of bars in the neighborhood so we get more than our share of drunks walking by our house. But these voices kept on and on; and besides, it wasn’t a Friday or Saturday when we usually get the loud drunks. I went to the front windows and looked out. Three guys stood just under one of the windows, all bundled up against the bitter cold, and one of them appeared to be sipping out of a large can; but they didn’t sound drunk, merely high-spirited.
I opened the window a crack. “People trying to sleep up here guys.”
“Oh, sorry, sorry,” said the one with the can, and they scampered off towards the Whaling Museum. The only thing I can figure is that they were at the Moby-Dick Marathon and decided they needed to take a break outdoors; but it seems odd that they would come across the street and stand under our windows.
Every year, the New Bedford Whaling Museum hosts a Moby-Dick marathon, where Herman Melville’s entire novel is read aloud. I went over on my lunch hour, and this is what I saw and heard….
(You’ll hear the voices of Scott Lang, mayor of New Bedford, and Barney Frank, our representative to Congress, among others.)
2:56
Note: video host blip.tv is defunct, so this video no longer exists.
This Sunday, I’ll be preaching one of the sermons that Ralph Waldo Emerson preached while he was in New Bedford during 1833-34. In those years, Emerson’s cousin Orville Dewey was the minister at the Unitarian church in New Bedford; but Dewey’s health had been damaged by overwork, and Emerson came to preach here while Dewey took a sabbatical to regain his health.
I knew the Concord Free Public Library had the complete four volume set of Emerson’s sermons (ed. Albert J. Frank et al., Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1989), so I drove up there this morning. I went down into the Special Collections rooms in the basement, and Leslie Wilson, the extremely knowledgeable curator and librarian of the Special Collections, got the four volumes for me.
Emerson kept a careful record of which sermons he preached in which church. Many of the sermons he preached in New Bedford appear to be among his favorites, for he preached them over and over again, sometimes as many as fourteen times. Mostly he did not write new sermons while he was here, but merely dug out sermons written originally for his church in Boston, or some other Unitarian church. But it appears that he did write sermon no. 169 (on the text Psalms 139.14) specifically for the New Bedford church; at least, this was the very first place he preached the sermon, on September 7, 1834. I decided this would be the sermon I’ll preach this Sunday.
Leslie Wilson, whom I have known for years and years, was curious what I was working on. I told her how I was going to preach one of Emerson’s sermons.
“You’ll have to cut it down,” she said.
“I know, no one wants to listen to a sermon that long these days,” I replied.
“And let’s face it, you’re not Emerson…,” she said thoughtfully.
“No, I most certainly am not!” I said emphatically.
“He was known for being an absolutely wonderful speaker,” she said. “He could say almost anything, and keep his audiences enthralled.” We both knew the old story of someone’s uneducated maid who went to hear one of Emerson’s lectures on Transcendentalism or some such obscure topic. Her employers were surprised that she would go to hear a lecture on such an esoteric subject. Ah, said the maid, but when Mr. Emerson says it I can understand it.
Emerson’s sermon no. 169 is so well written that it will stand up to even my delivery of it. Right now, I’m going through the two manuscript versions of the sermon — the earlier version which must be the one he delivered at New Bedford, and the later version that he delivered at Unitarian churches in Plymouth, Waltham, Boston, East Lexington, Concord, and at the Harvard College Chapel. It’s fascinating to see how he changed the sermon, mostly for the better, although at times the earlier version is more vigorous. But in both versions, you can sense a great writer coming into his full powers.
What must it have been to sit in the pews of the old wood-frame Unitarian church on the corner of William and Purchase Streets, and listen to Ralph Waldo Emerson preach on September 7, 1834, less than two years before he would publish his book Nature? The New Bedford church had wanted him as their minister — Orville Dewey having announced that his health would not allow his return — but Emerson got out of the offer by saying that he could not in good conscience preside at the communion table, nor offer a prayer unless he was truly moved to do so. Instead, in October, 1834, he moved to Concord and began writing in earnest.
I’m about two-thirds of the way through Thurber: A Biography by Burton Bernstein. I had known that James Thurber was one of the finest American humorists of the 20th C., but I did not realize that he was very good at word games. Once, Peter De Vries and Berton Roueche challenged Thurber to come up with single words that contain all five vowels — “sequoia” was the example they gave him. Thurber: A Biography quotes from two of Thurber’s letters to De Vries and Roueche, in which he gives them twelve other such words. He extended the game to come up with five-vowel names of real people, such as Benjamin Clough.
I read too fast, and had already read Thurber’s twelve five-vowel words before I realized that it would have been far more fun to try to find them myself. Now I’m trying to think if there are any more beyond those twelve. I don’t want to spoil your fun, so I’ll just leave this question hanging:– how many five-vowel words can you come up with? — and how many five-vowel names (of real people)?
The five novels in the Canopus in Argos: Archives series, by Doris Lessing, are among my favorite science fiction books. Their stories and images continue to haunt my imagination. The fourth book in the series, The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight, tells the story of how to face the collapse of a planet’s entire ecosystem. The first book in the series, Shikasta, contains one of the more interesting sustained meditations on racism that I have ever read, and as I thread my way through anti-racist theology, I find Lessing’s words coming up through memory. And the second book in the series, The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five has no real relevance to current events (not that I can remember, at least), but the image of contact between the three different, and increasingly transcendent, zones of existence still fuels my imagination.
Two bits of trivia about Lessing: The Associated Press reported that Doris Lessing was less than enthusiastic about winning the prize at first, which makes me like her better….
Doris Lessing pulled up in a black cab where a media horde was waiting Thursday in front of her leafy north London home. Reporters opened the door and told her she had won the Nobel Prize for literature, to which she responded: “Oh Christ … I couldn’t care less.”
And the last bit of trivia: Lessing was the Guest of Honor (GoH) at the 1987 World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). (Via.) Whaddya bet she wins an honorary Hugo award for lifetime achievement at the 2008 Worldcon….
In a Harvard Crimson article from 19 September 2007 titled “Coop discourages note-taking in bookstore”, reporter Gabriel Daly writes that students are getting thrown out of the Coop for noting down prices and ISBN numbers of books in the store:
Coop President Jerry P. Murphy ’73 said that while there is no Coop policy against individual students copying down book information, “we discourage people who are taking down a lot of notes.â€
The apparent new policy could be a response to efforts by Crimsonreading.org—an online database that allows students to find the books they need for each course at discounted prices from several online booksellers—from writing down the ISBN identification numbers for books at the Coop and then using that information for their Web site.
Murphy said the Coop considers that information the Coop’s intellectual property.
Umm, no an ISBN number is not the Coop’s intellectual property. What a flagrant example of misusing intellectual property law to intimidate people.
But wait, the Harvard Crimson reports that the Coop has gotten even more hostile.
The Coop has not been the same since they asked the Borg, er, Barnes and Noble to manage the store. I spend hundreds of dollars a year on books, but you can be sure I’ll pass by the Coop and walk a few blocks down the street to Harvard Bookstore, the last remaining independent leftist bookstore in Harvard Square.