Category: The Arts

The Art of Reading

 

The Library by Elizabeth Shippen Green, from https://thesleeplessreader.com/about/fellow-readers-favorite-paintings-of-women-reading/
The Library by Elizabeth Shippen Green   Image from The Sleepless Reader blog

 

“I sometimes think that good readers are poets as singular, and as awesome, as great authors themselves.”  –Jorge Luis Borges

 

“In short, reading is directed creation.” –Jean-Paul Sartre

As the number of blogs and podcasts about writing multiply with Malthusian abandon, overpopulating our digital feeds, the topic of reading seems much less popular these days. Of course, there are the articles published in the various newspapers and magazines stating that science bears out what every English teacher has always suspected: the act of reading makes us more sympathetic and thus better people. (You can read articles of this kind here and here and here.) But are these articles enough to make us better, more serious, “literary” readers?

Apparently not. And the reason is simple: the creation of better human beings is not the sum-total of what reading offers us. In other words, reading literature is too important an activity to engage in just because it might make us better or more moral people.

That might seem an incendiary statement, but I don’t mean it as one. In fact, I am echoing C.S. Lewis, who wrote in his short book An Experiment in Criticism, published in 1961 and thus one of the last things he wrote, “I have rejected the view that literature is to be valued (a) for telling us truths about life, (b) as an aid to culture. I have also said that, while we read, we must treat the reception of the work we are reading as an end in itself.” But this, he has said earlier, is precisely what most readers simply cannot do.

In this book Lewis theorizes that there are two kinds of readers: the unliterary readers (whom he calls “users“), and the literary readers (whom he calls “receivers.” Users tend to, well, use books to achieve a desired end: entertainment, escapism, gathering information. In fact, it’s not too far-fetched to theorize that the epidemic rise of unreliable news is due to the fact that there are too many users in our society and not enough receivers. According to Lewis, “the most unliterary reader of all sticks to ‘the news.’ He reads daily, with unwearied relish, how, in some place he has never seen, under circumstances which never become quite clear, someone he doesn’t know has married, rescued, robbed, raped, or murdered someone else he doesn’t know.” It’s just possible that these readers and the demand they place on profit-seeking media are skewing the type of reading that is available to us, leaving receiving readers out in the cold and clogging up our news feeds with sensationalist tripe. These users, Lewis might say, would be better off reading mystery, spy, or some other kind of thrilling novels, but their desire for “the news” precludes them from doing so.

Receivers, those who read in a literary way, exert their critical and imaginative faculties to treat the book as an end in itself, not as a link in a chain leading to a desired end. They give themselves fully to the experience of reading. As Lewis says, those of us who want to be receiving readers “must empty our minds and lay ourselves open.” Such readers, few though they may be, can change the way they see things, and in this way, they can help to change the world itself.

Yet the idea that reading makes us better people puts the whole activity of literary reading at risk, co-opting it for some kind of greater, communal good, which is in my view putting the cart before the horse. In other words, reading may be good for human beings, but it certainly won’t be if reading is relegated to the role of making good human beings. This kind of utilitarian advocacy of reading is dangerous. We have already lost so much to utilitarian ideas. In our universities, composition classes have been usurped to create students who can write discipline-specific reports and papers, not essays that allow for exploration and expression. In fact, college itself has become a mere step in the path to obtaining a good job (with the irony that going to college does not necessarily lead to a good job and almost certainly leads to the acquisition of debt). And of course there are those who argue that art must have a political dimension to be relevant. So many intellectual and artistic activities have already been offered up on the altar of utilitarianism. Must we really give up the act of reading, too?

My point is this: only in pursuing these activities in and of themselves–for example, in reading for the sake of reading, in educating oneself for the sake of being an educated person, in painting in order to depict the world, whatever shape it takes–only by doing these things freely, without the thought of some added benefit, can we engage in truly imaginative activities. We should be far beyond the point of saying that reading is good for us, that it makes us better human beings. That’s the kind of thinking that went out of fashion with the death of Jeremy Bentham (whose embalmed body presides over University College London). Instead, we should be asking ourselves this: how do we become better readers? And perhaps more importantly, how do we turn using readers into receiving readers?

Reading is something of a holy act when we do it freely, because it marries the ability to sound out words with the use of our intellect and our imagination, connecting us with the past and propelling us into the future. As Sartre says, “reading is a pact of generosity between author and reader. Each one trusts the other; each one counts on the other, demands of the other as much as he demands of himself.” Reading, as Borges says above, is its own art form. If we acknowledged this, we would be much less tempted to assign it additional value; reading would be enough in and of itself.

Making Art in Troubled Times

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Image from the webpage of the Ashmolean Museum: http://britisharchaeology.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/highlights/alfred-jewel.html 

I will admit it: after the election in November, I succumbed to a sense of defeat. What is the point, I moaned, if autocracy and tyranny are not merely accepted but welcomed by the masses, if the great ideal of a democratic country is systematically dismantled before our eyes? Why bother with anything, much less with the last fifty pages of a novel that no one will ever read?

At the time, I was working through the last part of a story I’d begun a couple of years earlier, and I was ready to give it up, because, well, why would I finish it when the world as I know it is coming to an end? (My feelings arose not only because of the U.S. election results or the ensuing realization that a foreign power had tinkered with our “free elections,” but also because of the global rise of a dangerous populism, coupled with imminent global climate change.)

But a good friend gave me some advice, and I soldiered on and completed the draft. Right now, I am steadily working on it, revision after revision. And I am doing this not because I think my novel can change the world. It certainly won’t; it won’t be read by more than a hundred people, and that’s if I’m lucky.

But this short essay is not about the art of writing without readers; I will deal with that in a future post. For now, all I want to do is to encourage everyone who reads this blog to go on and continue their artistic activities. I say this not as a writer, or even as a reader, but as a scholar. And I have a very simple reason for doing so.

Art is the residue left by human culture. When civilizations disappear, when lives and institutions have crumbled into the dust, what remains is the art they created. Some of this art arises from genius, like the works of Mozart and Shakespeare; some of it comes from normal people, like the rest of us. But we need it all–every last scrap of it, not only the wonderful pieces that make us cry with joy or sadness, but even the average and ungainly works of art, because even bad art is an expression of human experience, and in the end, it is the experience of being human that binds us together on this lonely little planet.

So go ahead with your art. Draw, paint, weave, write, compose or play music. Do not worry that you are fiddling as Rome burns. Rome will, ultimately, burn–history tells us that. But what is left behind are wonderful murals that will take your breath away, mosaics, epic poems, statues and monumental structures. Don’t worry about whether your art will be appreciated; it is the act of making it that is important, not whether or not it is celebrated. Think of that lonely monk who produced Beowulf; he  was probably scared shitless that his Anglo-Saxon culture would be erased by the next Viking invasion, but he fought off this feeling of futility and kept going, thank goodness. Remember his small act of courage, try to emulate it, and above all, keep going.

Do not be afraid of working in the darkness; you may not be able to dispel it, but your work could provide light for others, not only now, but in the future as well.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Revision

Image from http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/dr-strangelove-still-580.jpg
Image from www.newyorker.com

 

Fair warning: this post is not political. It is for all the writers out there who hate revising their work.

Guys, I know the feeling. You labor over something for weeks, months, even years, and when you reach the end, or what you think is the end, it’s so very tempting to stop, put down your pen or push aside your keyboard, and break out the champagne. You love what you’ve written, if only because (1) it’s finished and (2) it meets your expectations, which, let’s be honest, have been systematically lowered throughout the duration of your project. The last thing you want to do is pick over every word and line you’ve sweated over in a pointless effort to tear it apart.

I used to feel that way, too. In fact, I suppose a pretty substantial part of me still does. But today, on the eve of 2017, at the end of a year that so many people are calling a very bad year, if not a catastrophic one, I pause in my own revision work to offer other writers a new way of looking at revision.

I am learning to love this part of writing, because I see it as a perfect marriage between creativity and analysis. Note that I am  using the word “analysis,” not the word “criticism,” because that’s too negative for what I think we do in revision. The job of revision is to help make something better, not to tear it apart. (Tearing it apart should come later, during the critical review, but only in as much as the critic must tear something apart in order to see what it’s made of and how it works. A good critic will always put the work back together again after she does the work of criticism.)

My secret to loving revision, then, is this: Revising a work must involve a willing, enthusiastic attitude. The writer must regard the task of revising with excitement, because it is this part of writing that really shows the essence of craftsmanship, that separates those who write for fun (whether they are published authors or not) from those who write because they are compelled to do so. But how can a writer change their attitude about this pain-in-the-ass time sink? I’ve devised a very simple solution. Instead of hoping that your work contains few mistakes and needs minimal revision, you should assume that it houses many mistakes, some of them not easy to find. Rather than bewailing the need to revise, growing bored and frustrated with finding topical errors, learn to use revision as a sonar device to locate the buried as well as the superficial mistakes. Once found, even deep mistakes are usually fairly easy to fix–much easier to fix than most writers would think. I’ve found that when you let go of the inherent desire not to have to fix something and give yourself over to the idea that fixing it is not only a good thing to do, but an entertaining and satisfying aspect of the nature of the job, revision loses its drudgery. It becomes a pleasant and in some ways delightful stage in the work of creation, and it invites the best use of problem-solving tactics–and creativity–a writer possesses.

There you have it. Stop avoiding revision. (You know you have.) Change your attitude–for real. Love revision and all it offers. Because it’s revision, and not the mere act of writing itself, that makes us real artists. Any third-grader can write. Only a real writer has the ability, and the drive, to revise.

–Offered on this last day of 2016 with a minimum of revision

In Praise of Bad Novels

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I read a lot. Not as much as my husband seems to think, but a respectable amount nonetheless. This year I am keeping track, and since January 1st, I’ve read fifteen books. That’s three books a month, a figure that includes one audio book but does not include the four books I’ve read for reviewing purposes. And among those books, I’ve found two books that I think are actually bad novels. Surprisingly, these two bad novels are by acclaimed authors–authors whose works I have enjoyed, recommended, and highly admired. Hence today’s topic: why reading a bad novel isn’t an utter waste of time.

Many of us have had those moments in which we spend a good chunk of time resolutely plowing through a New Yorker short story only to complain afterwards, muttering something like, “That’s an hour of my life I’ll never get back.” And the same could be said about these two novels. Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and listening to Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana left me frustrated and perplexed until I began to think about bad novels. After several days of thought, I began to see the value of reading books that simply don’t measure up to our standard of writerly quality.

Don’t get me wrong: while in the midst of these two books I kept reading and listening precisely because, knowing the authors’ other works, I expected things to take a turn for the better. When they didn’t, I grumbled and complained, and marveled at the insipidness of the stories being told. I finished Ishiguro’s novel thinking, “That’s strange–it never did get any better. Where is the writer who produced two of the finest novels of the last thirty years?” I finished Eco’s in even worse shape, thinking, “At least I knitted several dishcloths while I spent fifteen hours [!] listening to this thing.”

imgres-2So why would I celebrate bad novels? There are a number of reasons. First, there’s value in reading a body of a writer’s work, just as it’s worthwhile to watch a body of a director’s films. Watching the ebb and flow of good writing within one author’s body of work is instructive: it shows us readers that all writing is experimental, even the writing created by excellent and talented writers. Second, it makes us question our values. What makes a novel bad rather than good? Is it predictability and relying on telling rather than showing, as in When We Were Orphans? Or could it be long-winded musings that interrupt and detract from the real narrative, leaving readers with a shaggy-dog story rather than an enriching experience, as in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana? Would we judge these books as harshly if we didn’t know the authors’ other works, masterpieces in their own right? These questions may not have clear answers, but they are certainly worth considering.

And for those writers out there (and aren’t all of us writers, even those of us who don’t regularly produce manuscripts or succeed in getting our work published?), I’d offer this thought: considering bad novels gives us hope. If Kazuo Ishiguro can miss the bull’s-eye, even after he wrote The Remains of the Day, then we can certainly forgive ourselves for not coming up to snuff. We can continue to labor at our work, trusting that, like Ishiguro, we can still produce some wonderful work, a heart-breaking novel like Never Let Me Go, jaw-dropping in its artistry. Using Eco’s example, we can say to ourselves that our present work may not be quite the thing, but that another, beautiful piece of writing lies within us, struggling to come out.

And most important of all, we can remind ourselves that all stories are significant, and that even the not-so-good ones deserve to be told–and read.

 

Five Fascinating Facts about Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin holding a Charlie Chaplin doll. Source: Wikipedia
Charlie Chaplin holding a Charlie Chaplin doll.
Source: Wikipedia

 

Most of us know Charlie Chaplin as a star of silent movies, the iconic Little Tramp–a clown who made millions laugh during some of the hardest years of the early twentieth century. But he was more than a comic genius. I’d argue that even if he’d never been the most successful film comic to date, he’d still be remembered for the following achievements:

  1. Chaplin composed the tune “Smile,” as the background music for his masterpiece Modern Times (1936). A decade and a half later, John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons added the lyrics and title to the song, producing a major hit for Nat King Cole. It has since been recorded by Tony Bennett, Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Josh Groban, and Robert Downey, Jr., as well as by the Japanese singer Misia.

2. Chaplin was one of the founders, along with  film pioneer D.W. Griffith, Hollywood power couple Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, and lawyer William Gibbs McAdoo (former Treasury Secretary under President Woodrow Wilson, his father-in-law) of United Artists Film Studio. Their goal was to maintain and preserve artistic independence in creating their own film work.

  • Original list of Stockholders of United Artists. Source: Wikipedia

    Original list of Stockholders of United Artists.
    Source: Wikipedia

3. The only earned Academy Award Chaplin ever won, despite his iconic stature in the film industry, was for the score of his film Limelight (1952). Turner and Parsons again added words to the tune, creating the song “Eternally.” Because Chaplin was exiled from the United States when Limelight was produced (see below), the Oscar was not awarded until 1973. The song was recorded by many artists, including Jimmy Young, Petula Clark, Michel Legrand, and Sarah Vaughan. (Yes, that’s a very young Claire Bloom below; she was Chaplin’s co-star in this fascinating film.)

4. When Chaplin sailed to London in September of 1952 for the premiere of Limelight, he was informed that he could not re-enter the United States without submitting to an interview regarding his political and moral behavior. At the height of McCarthyism, this revocation of Chaplin’s re-entry permit was tantamount to political exile. Chaplin, disgusted by what he called the “hate-beleaguered atmosphere” of  the U.S., settled in Switzerland, returning only once to the land that had seen his rise to stardom, in 1972, to receive an honorary Academy Award.

From http://www.floridanewsgrio.com/news/world/15159-1952-charlie-chaplin-banned-from-the-us.html
Source: Florida News Grio

 

5. Chaplin was not only a great comedian, but also a philosopher who worked in the medium of film. The Great Dictator (1940)  a powerful political satire that addressed the growing threat posed by Nazism–was made before the United States had declared war on Germany. (Incidentally, Chaplin worked on the score for the film as well, but the music was credited to Meredith Willson, who would go on to write The Music Man.) These days, in the midst of political unrest, Chaplin’s final speech of the film is frequently cited as an appeal to logic and sympathy in the face of mechanistic and rote obedience to power.

On Literary Crushes

This week’s post is pretty silly, and I apologize for it in advance, but it’s something I’ve been wondering about for a while. As a young teenager, when my contemporaries were salivating over pictures of Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy torn from issues of Tiger Beat, I kept my fantasy love life to myself–and for very good reason. Of course, what’s not to like about either Bobby or David when you’re a fourteen-year-old girl in the 1970s? They held my passing interest: they were good for a few daydreams, certainly. But my real crush during my teenage years was someone I couldn’t tell anyone about: Charles Dickens.

Yes, I know. That’s incredibly weird. And, really, who would  find this guy hot?

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There’s something about that beard that’s distinctly off-putting, right? It looks like a box jellyfish mated with a piece of steel wool and the result crawled onto a man’s chin to die. But take a look at Dickens’s eyes. They seem vulnerable, staring at the camera in an honest and inquisitive gaze. At the same time, there’s something about them that denotes pain and weariness as well. It’s an interesting photograph of a man who peopled an entire world with his creations. In fact, you can see many of those creations in this famous picture that payed homage  to  Dickens’s  imagination:

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Source: Wikipedia, “Robert Buss”

This large painting–a water color entitled “Dickens’s Dream”–was painted by Robert William Buss and left unfinished at the time of the painter’s death. It now hangs in  the Charles Dickens Museum in London. It’s a fascinating portrait of the famous writer, daydreaming with all of his characters swarming around him in his study. This is the Dickens we all think of when we’re reading Bleak House and Dombey and Son.

However, this is not the Dickens I yearned after. My youthful crush was the young Dickens, the brilliant fellow who produced Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist. That young man looked something like this:

 

NPG 5207; Charles Dickens by Samuel Laurence
by Samuel Laurence, chalk, 1838. Picture from https://arabellaproffer.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/old-portraits-of-young-men-part-three/npg-5207-charles-dickens-by-samuel-laurence/

Pretty nice-looking guy, right? Huge eyes, a nicely formed mouth–and that hair! Here’s another nice picture of my teen crush, this one by Dickens’s friend, artist Daniel Maclise:

Charles_Dickens_by_Daniel_Maclise.jpg
Charles Dickens, by Daniel Maclise (died 1870). Source: National Portrait Gallery, London: NPG 1172

For a number of reasons, I fell for this guy–hard enough to make me remember him when I was in graduate school and switch my focus from Comparative Literature (pardonez-moi, Mme Alcover; je suis desolée!) to English Literature, with an emphasis on Victorian novels.

And how do I feel these days about Charles Dickens, now that I’m not young any more? He’s no longer my hero; these days I realize he was by no means perfect, not as a husband, nor as a father, nor even as a novelist. But I love Dickens all the same. It’s true that he’s not the guy I thought he was. But then again, neither were David Cassidy or Bobby Sherman.

I’m wondering if this matter of literary crushes is as uncommon as I think it is, or if there are other people out there who may have had a similar experience. Please send in a comment, if so.

And now, I’ll end by pointing out that the actor and writer Harry Lloyd, who played Viserys Targaryen in the Game of Thrones television series, is actually the great-great-great grandson of Charles Dickens. Take a look below and see if you detect a resemblance to his famous ancestor.

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From imdb.com

Film and Classical Music

One of the things I miss about teaching now that I’m retired is the ability to explore ideas and themes with others. I often compared teaching–at least, teaching at its best–to driving a tour bus. Sometimes you stop the bus and point out some interesting things (and in fact that is pretty much your purpose in life as a teacher), but often people on the bus know some pretty interesting stuff, too, and teaching at its best is when everyone starts sharing their information and their ideas. That part of my life still exists, but in a much smaller form, and I can’t rely on a job to make it happen any longer.

Hence this post. If I were still teaching, I’d be formulating a course on Film and Music, much as there are courses on Film and Literature, or Film and Shakespeare, or Film and Madness. But since I’m not planning on teaching such a course, I thought it would be fun to make a list, the kind you see on Buzzfeed, or even better, on InterestingLiterature (a great site, and not just because I had a guest post on it once) that highlighted some interesting movies that focus on classical music. Fair warning, however: some of these movies are not readily available, and only one of them is well known.

  • We’ll begin with the most famous movie in the list: Amadeus. Now, don’t get me wrong; I loved the movie when it came out in the 1980s, just as everyone else did. But I found it a bit dull and overacted when I watched it again a few months ago. Certainly it is a long movie, but it is visually spectacular. The music is excellent, too. If you haven’t seen this film, it might be good to start here, if only because everyone will expect you to have seen it.
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Image from https://rovingpsyche.wordpress.com/2015/05/13/cinema-review-amadeus/, which provides an excellent review of the film.

 

  • Here’s a little gem that fewer people have seen than Amadeus: It’s called Nannerl, La Soeur de Mozart, or, in English, Mozart’s Sister. I found the portrayal of a very young Mozart and his sister in their family setting both refreshing and appealing. The Mozart in Amadeus can be quite bratty and silly, but in this film, such antics are easier to take, because here Mozart is ten or so years old. Of course, the film centers on Nannerl, Mozart’s older sister, whose musical gifts are acknowledged but circumscribed by her father. The intrigue portrayed in the film is fanciful yet appealing, and the music is, once again,  excellent.
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Image from a revew by Ty Burr which appeared in Boston.com
  • Mention Henry Purcell at a cocktail party, and you’ll receive blank looks. Most Americans don’t know that Henry Purcell was the first really great English composer. The film England, My England provides a view of Purcell’s life in a creative, time-tripping way: focusing on the attempts of a 1960s playwright to create a drama based on Purcell’s life, it spins off into that life itself, returning at times to its trendy 1960s setting. The musical scenes are pleasing, and the portrayal of Purcell (by Michael Ball) is convincing, drawing the viewer into the world of Baroque England.
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Image from Imdb.com

 

  • Emily Watson is one of my favorite actresses, so it makes sense that I would put the film Hilary and Jackie on this list, but I need to warn my readers that this film can be deeply troubling. It deals with Hilary and Jacqueline du Pre, musical prodigies who emerged on the classical music scene  in the 1960s, Hilary as a flautist and Jacqueline as a cellist. Be warned: Jacqueline died at the age of 42, having suffered from multiple sclerosis, which cut short her career when symptoms arose in 1973. The film is grueling at times, and not just because of the onset of the disease. And it is controversial as well, since it presents an unflattering view of Du Pre at times. But it provides a fascinating look at this important 20th-century musician, whose work has been described  as both ground-breaking and definitive.
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Image from Imdb.com

 

  • I’ve saved the most unusual film for the end. In fact, the only way I was able to watch this film was by streaming the entire thing on YouTube. This film may not be for everyone: it follows the early life and career of Carlo Broschi, who took the name “Farinelli” when he appeared on the early 18th-century stage as a castrato singer. But it is an excellent film about a difficult subject. Like the  other films on this list, it is largely fictionalized, but the music is interesting and appealing, and the story itself so unusual as to be intriguing. To recreate the sound of a castrato’s voice, the voices of a female soprano and a male countertenor were digitally merged, resulting in this amazing aural amalgam. It is a unique and gorgeous sound–but you might want to compare it to this rendition of Handel’s aria (“Lascio chi’io panga”) by the male soprano Philippe Jaroussky, which relied on no such digital manipulation. Which is better? Add your comment below to join in the conversation. And please let me know if you know of other movies I should add to this list.
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Image from YouTube

 

 

On Lost Voices

A few days ago, an article appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Carlin Romano that discussed H.J. Jackson’s book Those Who Write for Immortality. Jackson’s book talks about literary fame and how it occurs, and Romano’s article introduces some interesting, and troubling, ideas. For example, what if, as Jackson suggests, we remember Wordsworth and Coleridge not because they are eminently good poets, but because their poetry is easier to anthologize and illustrate than the works of Robert Southey or Leigh Hunt? Many good writers fall by the wayside, Romano seems to argue, simply because they are not convenient to read.

This makes me question my own work as a teacher in years past. One of the things I’m proud of is my attempt to help my students understand Romantic poetry and feel comfortable with it. Of course, I emphasized Wordsworth and Coleridge, because they are so accessible and so easy to identify with, considering their love of simplicity and Nature with a capital “N.” What’s not to like about that, after all? But recently, while reading the letters of Charles Lamb, a literary figure who was once loved for his essays and is now only known for his pseudonym (any crossword addict knows that “Lamb’s alias” is “ELIA”), I discovered a rebuttal of all the nature-worship perpetrated by Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Charles Lamb
Charles Lamb

Of course, any student of Romantic literature will remember lines like “Henceforth I shall know / That Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure; / No plot so narrow, be but Nature there, /…and keep the heart / Awake to Love and beauty!” (“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” by S.T. Coleridge). This is also the poem in which Coleridge addresses Lamb himself (much to Lamb’s chagrin) not once but three times as “My gentle-hearted Charles,” telling him at one point, “thou has pined  / And hungered after Nature, many a year, / In the great City pent, winning thy way / With sad and patient soul…” (28-31). Lovely as those lines are, there was at least one reader who was unimpressed by them. Lamb himself wrote to Coleridge on August 6, 1800, “For God’s sake (I never was more serious) don’t make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses.” Apparently, Coleridge heeded Lamb’s plea, and never again addressed him in a poem.

Five months later, Lamb writes to William Wordsworth an interesting, chatty letter in which he brings up his view of nature, which runs counter to all Romantic ideology, ending in a paean to city life worthy of Dickens or Thackeray some fifty years later: “Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the very women of the Town; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes–London itself a pantomime and a masquerade–all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me.” Lamb’s letter continues to contrast his view of the poetic with Wordsworth’s, ending, “So fading upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature, as they have been confinedly called; so ever fresh, and green, and warm are all the inventions of men, and assemblies of men in this great city.”

Old Covent Garden Market, by Georg Johann Scharf, 1825 (source: Wikipedia)
Old Covent Garden Market, by Georg Johann Scharf, 1825 (source: Wikipedia)

This passage is more than striking; it’s a gobsmacking refutation of the Nature-worship that I have, for many years, erroneously taught was part and parcel of the literary landscape of early 19th century Britain. So here’s a public apology to all my students, with this little piece of cautionary advice: H.J. Jackson may well be right. Rather than teach the old stand-bys, we ought to be engaging in our own recovery projects to introduce more readers to the jewels that we’ve let slip through our fingers.

Postscript to Previous Post

Image from Wikipedia
Image from Wikipedia

Tolkien, the story goes, wrote the first words of The Hobbit in the pages of a student examination blue book. He had been grading examinations as a form of part-time work, and, exhausted by the monotony of the task, he celebrated his discovery of a blank page in the book, untouched by the student’s ink, by writing the words “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

I am far luckier than Tolkien. I received the following essay from a student (who gave me permission to post it here) as a final exam. It is a lovely way to end my final semester at the community college where I teach. Thank you, Cari Griffin, for summing up my attitude towards the study of literature in such a humorous and appropriate way. Indeed, I am a very lucky teacher. After all, a doctor is only as good as his or her companions.

 

 

27 April 2015

“Doctor” Shumway:

For nearly two years, I have been your companion as we have traveled through space and time. Your Tardis is not a blue Police box; it is your classroom, and you are “The Doctor”; a madwoman with a YouTube account. Though there was never a fez involved, exploring foreign lands, examining history, and best of all, discussing literature has allowed for, myself, at least, great understanding of the space-time continuum as it pertains to the literary world.

There can be no question that our travels, having begun in September of 2013, frequently took us to England. I think we can both agree, it is our favorite stop. Whether it has been a visit with the Anglo-Saxons, an exploration of medieval England, several visits with our favorite playwright, William Shakespeare, or an extensive amount of time spent in 19th century Great Britain, each visit afforded us an opportunity to see British history and its inhabitants in a new way. We lacked only our tea while we observed an Abbey, paid a visit to Thornfield Hall, or grasped the devastation of World War I.

We were not always in England. We’ve been to France with a philosopher, to Spain within American, and Germany to witness the beginning of the Romantic Movement. We saw 17th century Turkey through the eyes of an English woman, visited Japan at the turn of the 20th century, and briefly stopped in Imperial Russia. The authors we have covered acted as conductors, providing the means for us to travel. Their voices allowed us to see into their worlds, to spend time in their society, to have a momentary glimpse of a fixed point in time. We have seen revolutions, oppression, and inequality in many of the places we have visited, but always, the voices of those authors who have guided us cried out for equality, rallied for peace, and asked us to question, alongside them, our purpose within our community, our country, and our society, just as they did the same in theirs. Together, on our journey, we have celebrated the individual, applauded the growth of the female author, recognized brilliance, and felt the influence of those long ago voices within our modern society.

It was not just the authors that we met. We examined the world around them. We studied the era in which they lived: we viewed their art, heard their music, and, ultimately, questioned the validity of their place within the literary canon. Perhaps we did not always embrace them as friends, but we did not leave as foes. No. Our relationship with these authors, however brief, brought us a little closer to our fellow man, allowed us see into his or her own world through their eyes, and, to realize they are very much like us, though they lived in a far different world than the one we inhabit now.

As our journey nears its end, you ask, “why?” I interpret this as, “why take the journey? “My answer is quite simply this: we must. For anything less than a madman in a blue box landing in our backyard, we have no other way to reach across time and space, to look at a moment in man’s history, and have an opportunity to see that moment through a different set of eyes. Yes, Doctor Shumway, literature is our Tardis through space and time. We have an obligation to not only understand our place within our own culture, in history, but our fellow man’s place and his culture as well. After all, “We’re all stories, in the end” (The Eleventh Doctor).

On Mondegreens and Willful Misunderstandings

Image from Wikipedia
Image from Wikipedia–Lucy the Australopithecus 

Once in a while, I hear about a new movie that I really want to see. It doesn’t happen often, because I really prefer old movies to new ones; I’m happiest when watching a movie from the 1930s or ’40s, and it takes a bit of gumption for me to sit down to watch a movie in color–a fact that really throws my students for a loop. Action and superhero movies bore me, and I usually end up falling asleep during them, or checking my wristwatch several times throughout the film.

But once in a rare while, I hear about a movie that really sounds interesting. The operative word here is “hear”: what I really do is hear the title, then ignore the movie’s description and single-handedly create a movie that I’d really want to see. The most recent example is the film Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson. Now, a very quick internet search brings you to the official site, but that’s not the movie I envisioned when I heard the title. Somehow, I decided this movie was going to be about the discovery of Lucy, the hominid remains that shook up the world of anthropology in the 1970s. I created an entire plot in my head, which, while shadowy and only partially formed, revolves around archeologists. It’s set in the dry, dusty plains of Africa, where the drama emerged from a slow process of discovery, perhaps involving scholarly rivalry and personal conflicts, and maybe even a love story. This Lucy is, in my warped view, a recipe for a wonderful film, and every time I bump into the real film’s advertisements, I find myself quickly dismissing them, overwhelmed by a sense of ineffable disappointment.

Years ago, I did the same thing with the film Glengarry Glen Ross, which I decided was a film about Americans on a fishing trip to Scotland. It was a little like Deliverance, without the violence; perhaps it would be better to say that my sense of the film was that it was like Brigadoon, minus the magic and the music. Apparently, I couldn’t be further off in my characterization of the film.

I think we need a word to describe this type of willful misunderstanding, where, like Wordsworth in his poem Tintern Abbey, we encounter films which we “half create” (line 106) making unique alternative-reality films that exist only in our own minds. After all, because these alternative films arise from a misunderstanding, they’re not that much different from a mondegreen–a misunderstood song lyric, and there’s a whole slew of websites devoted to them. (You can read about them here and here.) Everyone has a mondegreen story to tell, usually involving a small child. For example, my daughter asked me, when she was five years old, why, in the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” the lamb’s fleas were white as snow, since the fleas on our little Sheltie were definitely black. Was it a different kind of flea? Or were Geordie’s fleas simply dirty?

At any rate, this topic has me thinking about the ways we misunderstand the things we hear about, and, because I deal with the written word so much, the things we read. Don’t worry–I’m not going to launch into a critical essay (though I am tempted to talk about Much Ado about Nothing, a Shakespeare play that focuses on the way we misread people and texts). Instead, I’m going to bring up a memory from my early childhood. My parents, in an apparent effort to provide their three children an introduction to the great books, bought us a volume of stories entitled something like “Great Stories of the World.” In this volume was a short synopsis of myths and legends mixed helter skelter, arranged with no attention to provenance or significance. Thus Beowulf, the first story in the book, was followed by an adventure involving Pecos Bill. I probably never made it past these two stories, which is why, as a graduate student studying Old English, I always felt I was missing something–until I realized that I was waiting for Pecos Bill to come in at the end of  Beowulf and slay the dragon, saving Beowulf and giving him a ride back to his mead-hall on a cyclone.

pecos lassoing cyclone
Image from http://ed101.bu.edu/StudentDoc/Archives/fall05/dfbrand/david%20brand%20ed%20101%20site%204.htm

I’m not sure whether other readers have this experience, but I do remember a fellow graduate student explaining that, like most of us Victorianists, she had seen the movie Oliver! well before she ever read the novel. During the movie, she explained, after Bill Sykes beats Nancy so savagely, she watched, transfixed, and noticed that although Nancy’s body is obscured behind a wall, she could detect her leg moving–and so as a small child, she decided that Nancy was not dead. Wounded, perhaps severely, but not dead. That impression, she explained, held sway each time she re-read the novel, and she had trouble convincing herself that Nancy had indeed been killed by her vicious boyfriend.

So I issue a call to readers–two calls, in fact. Have you ever misunderstood something in a film or a book and preferred your misunderstanding to the reality? And, if so, do you have a suggestion for what to call this situation? I look forward to your responses!