Clive Thompson has an interesting piece at the Times magazine on the importance of blogging and e-mail for a new breed of musicians. Lots there that applies to authors, too; once I have time this summer I am going to make a Myspace page and start getting the hang of it, since I'm going to be a young-adult author & all I think I can't really count on having Light Reading be the main promotional blog! It is deeply non-promotional in any case, that's not going to change, don't worry...
I'm thinking, though, that what I'll need is a proper website of some sort (with a place for all the stuff I'm cutting out of the present draft!) and also a Myspace where I write a kind of weekly update with a notional audience of teenagers (not that I really see the difference between teenagers and grown-ups, pretty much the same thing as far as I'm concerned, but just with a less bookish and more Dynamite No. 1-centered emphasis).
I am excited about the idea of working with teenagers! Younger teenagers than I'm used to, I mean--I suppose technically many a Columbia undergraduate is still a teenager....
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Saturday, May 12, 2007
White jeans and black cowboy boots and Garth Brooks patchwork shirts
Bryan Mochizuki interviews music journalist Will Welch at The Bwog. (Both these guys are former students of mine, I'm proud and also it's a very good interview!)
Friday, May 11, 2007
A sort of consummation
Andrew Motion has a thoughtful piece at the Guardian about Peter Stanford's biography of Cecil Day-Lewis. Sounds like kind of a must-read to me, though I will confess that my minor obsession with Day-Lewis stems primarily from my obsessive reading and re-reading during early adolescence of the strangely (strangewaysley, if I can make an Ed Parkism) compelling detective novels he published under the name Nicholas Blake.
Impossibility does not exist
At the FT, Andrew Clark makes Elizabeth Wilson's book Mstislav Rostropovich: The Legend of Class 19 sound absolutely fascinating:
What went on in Class 19 has long been the stuff of legend, thanks to the informal testimony of alumni - many of them now distinguished soloists. The publication of Elizabeth Wilson’s book is timely, not just for its detailed account of Rostropovich’s teaching methods, but as a reminder of what made him special. Much of it is cast in the form of a memoir - Wilson studied in Class 19 in the 1960s - but it should be required reading for every performer and music teacher, for it adds up to a manual of musical truth. Rostropovich’s most enduring legacy, it suggests, will be the philosophy of life and music he passed on, rather than the more immediate impact of his exuberant personality and performances.
His idea of education, we learn in an ”interlude” penned by Karine Georgian, ”involved seeing and influencing the whole personality [of the student]. He was preparing us for a concert career, and our whole attitude to life and our profession was important to him. When he said I hadn’t shed enough tears to play Brahms, he was also teaching me a deeper truth - that one must know how to absorb everything into oneself, and then filter [the music] through one’s own experience.”
As such, Class 19 was far more than a musical hothouse. Rostropovich was often absent or late. He could be cruel. But as many of the alumni aver, he provided food for thought that lasted a lifetime. What he wanted was, first, to instil the idea that the impossible did not exist, and second, that it was more important to convey a sense of the music’s emotional impulse, through mood, atmosphere and a wide range of tone colour, than to have a flawless technique and beautiful sound.
What went on in Class 19 has long been the stuff of legend, thanks to the informal testimony of alumni - many of them now distinguished soloists. The publication of Elizabeth Wilson’s book is timely, not just for its detailed account of Rostropovich’s teaching methods, but as a reminder of what made him special. Much of it is cast in the form of a memoir - Wilson studied in Class 19 in the 1960s - but it should be required reading for every performer and music teacher, for it adds up to a manual of musical truth. Rostropovich’s most enduring legacy, it suggests, will be the philosophy of life and music he passed on, rather than the more immediate impact of his exuberant personality and performances.
His idea of education, we learn in an ”interlude” penned by Karine Georgian, ”involved seeing and influencing the whole personality [of the student]. He was preparing us for a concert career, and our whole attitude to life and our profession was important to him. When he said I hadn’t shed enough tears to play Brahms, he was also teaching me a deeper truth - that one must know how to absorb everything into oneself, and then filter [the music] through one’s own experience.”
As such, Class 19 was far more than a musical hothouse. Rostropovich was often absent or late. He could be cruel. But as many of the alumni aver, he provided food for thought that lasted a lifetime. What he wanted was, first, to instil the idea that the impossible did not exist, and second, that it was more important to convey a sense of the music’s emotional impulse, through mood, atmosphere and a wide range of tone colour, than to have a flawless technique and beautiful sound.
The world's first computer
At the New Yorker, John Seabrook has a magically good piece about the Antikythera Mechanism. (Also there's a very good piece by Burkhard Bilger on guitar-making, not available online--that guy's such a good writer...)
The Antikythera Mechanism is one of those things that shouldn't even exist, based on our understanding of the ancient world, and yet it does--and it sounds ravishingly beautiful, I have a spartan decorating aesthetic and basically want zero stuff (except that I must buy a bicycle and a wetsuit!) but if I could get a working model of the Antikythera Mechanism it would totally make me break my no-stuff rule. If I had read this article when I was nine years old, I would have basically just lobbied to be allowed to quit school and go to Greece to become an archeologist, which was always one of my obsessions in any case (I remember being obsessed at that age with Linear B). Anyway, there's a slideshow also and here's the website for the wonderfully named Antikythera Mechanism Research Project. But it's the article itself that's so special, it perfectly captures the magic of the machinery...
Science is the "true" thing that gives me the same sense of wonder I associate with novel-reading, it must be said, and "science-fictional" is one of my highest compliments (I've been using it most recently to describe a really mind-bending book of literary criticism on Jane Austen). There are a lot of different things we might mean when we say something's like being in a novel--depends for one thing on the kind of novel (often things happen in my life that make me feel I'm in a satirical novel about academia--one of the reasons I have little urge to read such novels!). But what I'm most likely to mean is that heightened sense of interest and excitement that accompanies our turning the pages of a good novel.
I was thinking the other day, too, about why I like fantasy novels so much, and really it's because of the way that genre lets the writer make the stakes very high in ways that are non-naturalistic but psychologically compelling. We do not have a good vocabulary in the secular world for, oh, writing about someone whose soul is at stake! Fantasy does it better. It's that stakes-being-high feeling, then, that seems to me what's most worth seeking out in life. You can have it in unpleasant situations as well as pleasant--you know, when you're helping someone out in an emergency of one kind or another--but often in quite ordinary ones, like having a funny conversation with someone's small child. I have it very strongly when I'm thinking about training to run in a race or learning to be a better swimmer!
The other place I have it very strongly--this will be easiest for me to explain associatively--is in teaching. It's partly a luxury of the kind of teaching I do, it's not that many actual hours a week in the classroom, but I have a not-so-secret principle that every minute that I'm teaching (and the same thing goes if I'm giving a talk somewhere) I have to be at the very highest level of energy and attention. Frances Burney has a really wonderful passage in a letter about Edmund Burke that I think of often in this context (here's a link with the text):
How I wish my dear Susanna and Fredy[1] could meet this wonderful man when he is easy, happy, and with people he cordially likes. But politics, even then, and on his own side, must always be excluded. His irritability is so terrible upon politics that they are no sooner the topic of discourse than they cast upon his face the expression of a man who is going to defend himself against murderers!
My irritability is certainly not at all terrible upon politics, and I never have the expression of a person about to defend myself against murderers, but I love the passage because of the ways it shows that everything's always at stake for Burke. My enthusiasm is so torrential upon thinking that books and ideas are no sooner the topic of discourse than they cast upon my body a spell of energy more appropriate for a dramatic staged sword-fight in a production of Macbeth! When I find myself giving a talk in a slightly staid and decorous location, I become aware of the inappropriateness of this, but fortunately we are allowed to set our own tone in the classroom. I am never so tired that I cannot work myself up to an insane pitch of enthusiasm within minutes....
The Antikythera Mechanism is one of those things that shouldn't even exist, based on our understanding of the ancient world, and yet it does--and it sounds ravishingly beautiful, I have a spartan decorating aesthetic and basically want zero stuff (except that I must buy a bicycle and a wetsuit!) but if I could get a working model of the Antikythera Mechanism it would totally make me break my no-stuff rule. If I had read this article when I was nine years old, I would have basically just lobbied to be allowed to quit school and go to Greece to become an archeologist, which was always one of my obsessions in any case (I remember being obsessed at that age with Linear B). Anyway, there's a slideshow also and here's the website for the wonderfully named Antikythera Mechanism Research Project. But it's the article itself that's so special, it perfectly captures the magic of the machinery...
Science is the "true" thing that gives me the same sense of wonder I associate with novel-reading, it must be said, and "science-fictional" is one of my highest compliments (I've been using it most recently to describe a really mind-bending book of literary criticism on Jane Austen). There are a lot of different things we might mean when we say something's like being in a novel--depends for one thing on the kind of novel (often things happen in my life that make me feel I'm in a satirical novel about academia--one of the reasons I have little urge to read such novels!). But what I'm most likely to mean is that heightened sense of interest and excitement that accompanies our turning the pages of a good novel.
I was thinking the other day, too, about why I like fantasy novels so much, and really it's because of the way that genre lets the writer make the stakes very high in ways that are non-naturalistic but psychologically compelling. We do not have a good vocabulary in the secular world for, oh, writing about someone whose soul is at stake! Fantasy does it better. It's that stakes-being-high feeling, then, that seems to me what's most worth seeking out in life. You can have it in unpleasant situations as well as pleasant--you know, when you're helping someone out in an emergency of one kind or another--but often in quite ordinary ones, like having a funny conversation with someone's small child. I have it very strongly when I'm thinking about training to run in a race or learning to be a better swimmer!
The other place I have it very strongly--this will be easiest for me to explain associatively--is in teaching. It's partly a luxury of the kind of teaching I do, it's not that many actual hours a week in the classroom, but I have a not-so-secret principle that every minute that I'm teaching (and the same thing goes if I'm giving a talk somewhere) I have to be at the very highest level of energy and attention. Frances Burney has a really wonderful passage in a letter about Edmund Burke that I think of often in this context (here's a link with the text):
How I wish my dear Susanna and Fredy[1] could meet this wonderful man when he is easy, happy, and with people he cordially likes. But politics, even then, and on his own side, must always be excluded. His irritability is so terrible upon politics that they are no sooner the topic of discourse than they cast upon his face the expression of a man who is going to defend himself against murderers!
My irritability is certainly not at all terrible upon politics, and I never have the expression of a person about to defend myself against murderers, but I love the passage because of the ways it shows that everything's always at stake for Burke. My enthusiasm is so torrential upon thinking that books and ideas are no sooner the topic of discourse than they cast upon my body a spell of energy more appropriate for a dramatic staged sword-fight in a production of Macbeth! When I find myself giving a talk in a slightly staid and decorous location, I become aware of the inappropriateness of this, but fortunately we are allowed to set our own tone in the classroom. I am never so tired that I cannot work myself up to an insane pitch of enthusiasm within minutes....
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Novel-reading on the road
A good book really does transport you, interminable plane journeys pass by in a flash--but it's hard to get exactly the right things, and of course really & ideally they are long books in proportion to physical weight (I was sort of kicking myself on the way back for having already read Jilly Cooper's latest, that sort of book's perfect for a plane trip--also the same sort of globalization that some years ago made British convenience stores strangely resemble their American peers now means that the bookstore contents are rather more similar than formerly, or else I have just already ordered everything I really wanted from Amazon UK, so that there are precious few untouched treasures at least in the London chain or airport bookshops).
That said, I had some really good ones, one way and another. Overnight on my way there (my neighbor was annoyed I had the light on, but really I do not see how you sleep on the plane flying overnight east over the Atlantic) I had Megan Whalen Turner's The King of Attolia (so well-written, and so perfectly to my taste!) and then Sherwood Smith's admirably long novel Inda. I think that in general I prefer a more tightly focused single-character mode of fantasy, this was a bit too much in the George R. R. Martin mode to be my perfectly-ideal book, but for the purpose it really was excellent, she's got a really mesmerizing way with the story-telling & it also tided me over the horrible hours in which I had dropped off my bag at the hotel at 9am but couldn't check in till 2pm--that and Starbucks (and my oh my, those Starbuckses have just proliferated since I was last in London! convenient, and yet somehow a bit sad--also perhaps it was just the couple I was in, but I like the way the American phrase "skinny cappucino" which I find annoyingly jargonish & will not say has become there "skinny milk"--"with skinny milk"--pretty funny...)
I raided the Waterstone's round the corner from the hotel for more light reading, most satisfactorily Ian Rankin's The Naming of the Dead (don't know why I missed that when it came out, but of course it's extremely good) and an absolutely wonderful book by Jo Walton, The Prize in the Game. I've had Walton's others in my Amazon cart since reading & loving the excellent Farthing recently, but they kept on phasing in and out of availability (mostly not still in print? but that should be remedied, she is such a good writer...); I seized on this one when I found it, & devoured it with considerable and substantial enjoyment. It's pagan Britainish territory with magic/myth, took me back happily to my childhood love of (what's the short version of the list?) Patricia McKillip and Gillian Bradshaw and Juliet Marillier and Rosemary Sutcliff and a whole host of others whose names aren't particularly coming to mind (what was that one I loved with the centurions also?), and it's remarkably well done: the thing that strikes me especially is the satisfactorily rich and complex characterisation, rare (I think) in fantastical novels of this stripe. It's great! It pained me not to have the others to hand, but I'm going to go and order them from Amazon right now...
And then I had a ludicrously bad crime novel: pretentiously titled, absurdly plotted, Patricia Cornwell redux about fifteen years behind the times. Serves me right for liking the Cornwell-Hayder-Harris style of serial-killer detection thriller so much that I will buy one like this without properly looking in. The thing that really just had me helplessly laughing was when the formerly-forensic-anthropologist-fled-to-become-village-GP-post-death-of-wife-and-daughter goes into the nearest significant town--three years, mind you, after he's moved to the country to escape his family tragedy and it turns out to be the first time he's been to town since he moved to the village! There were so many farfetched points & so little substance to the narrative persona that it really only took about half an hour to read, very annoying.
A second stab at book shopping at the airport yielded two very satisfactory reads that took me exactly and conveniently to JFK. First of all, a quite interesting not-sure-what-to-call-it (fantasy? science fiction?) novel by Steph Swainston called The Year of Our War. It's a flawed book, I think, in certain respects: the plot's awfully meandering for a war novel, there are some inconsistencies of tone, a touch too much whimsy in the dreamworld to which the hero escapes (shades of Jonathan Carroll--I like Carroll very much at times, at his best he's stunning, but Carrollesque does not seem to me a good thing). And yet I really loved it anyway! A very appealingly rendered main character/narrator, for one thing, in the fallen angel vein; but just a really excellent high-caliber imagination and smart writing. Will look forward to her next ones with considerable interest.
And then, quite grippingly, Iain Banks's The Steep Approach to Garbadale. It hasn't been especially well reviewed, but I just loved it, I couldn't put it down (I mean, I was on a plane, so it could have been a lot worse and I would still have enjoyed it, but it really was enthralling); I don't feel that I experience my own life or the lives of others in the shape, as it were, of an Iain Banks novel (this characteristic shape of extended-family-centered retrospection--I mean, I feel like childhood and adolescence are happily behind me, I do not think that any moment of my grown-up life in my thirties would ever be primarily conceived by me as an act of retrospection going back to my teens, which is a preferred structure of his) and yet in every other respect I read Banks's (non-science-fiction) novels and just think "Yep, life is like this for me. Exactly like this." His main characters, male and female, just seem to be people like me--which is not actually a feeling I get as often as you might think, reading as many novels as I do. It makes them remarkably enjoyable.
The trouble with all this novel-reading is that you can't stock up on novels, so to speak--reading novels makes you want to read more novels! But these ones must mostly tide me over, it's a busy month--however I will sneak in a few here and there...
That said, I had some really good ones, one way and another. Overnight on my way there (my neighbor was annoyed I had the light on, but really I do not see how you sleep on the plane flying overnight east over the Atlantic) I had Megan Whalen Turner's The King of Attolia (so well-written, and so perfectly to my taste!) and then Sherwood Smith's admirably long novel Inda. I think that in general I prefer a more tightly focused single-character mode of fantasy, this was a bit too much in the George R. R. Martin mode to be my perfectly-ideal book, but for the purpose it really was excellent, she's got a really mesmerizing way with the story-telling & it also tided me over the horrible hours in which I had dropped off my bag at the hotel at 9am but couldn't check in till 2pm--that and Starbucks (and my oh my, those Starbuckses have just proliferated since I was last in London! convenient, and yet somehow a bit sad--also perhaps it was just the couple I was in, but I like the way the American phrase "skinny cappucino" which I find annoyingly jargonish & will not say has become there "skinny milk"--"with skinny milk"--pretty funny...)
I raided the Waterstone's round the corner from the hotel for more light reading, most satisfactorily Ian Rankin's The Naming of the Dead (don't know why I missed that when it came out, but of course it's extremely good) and an absolutely wonderful book by Jo Walton, The Prize in the Game. I've had Walton's others in my Amazon cart since reading & loving the excellent Farthing recently, but they kept on phasing in and out of availability (mostly not still in print? but that should be remedied, she is such a good writer...); I seized on this one when I found it, & devoured it with considerable and substantial enjoyment. It's pagan Britainish territory with magic/myth, took me back happily to my childhood love of (what's the short version of the list?) Patricia McKillip and Gillian Bradshaw and Juliet Marillier and Rosemary Sutcliff and a whole host of others whose names aren't particularly coming to mind (what was that one I loved with the centurions also?), and it's remarkably well done: the thing that strikes me especially is the satisfactorily rich and complex characterisation, rare (I think) in fantastical novels of this stripe. It's great! It pained me not to have the others to hand, but I'm going to go and order them from Amazon right now...
And then I had a ludicrously bad crime novel: pretentiously titled, absurdly plotted, Patricia Cornwell redux about fifteen years behind the times. Serves me right for liking the Cornwell-Hayder-Harris style of serial-killer detection thriller so much that I will buy one like this without properly looking in. The thing that really just had me helplessly laughing was when the formerly-forensic-anthropologist-fled-to-become-village-GP-post-death-of-wife-and-daughter goes into the nearest significant town--three years, mind you, after he's moved to the country to escape his family tragedy and it turns out to be the first time he's been to town since he moved to the village! There were so many farfetched points & so little substance to the narrative persona that it really only took about half an hour to read, very annoying.
A second stab at book shopping at the airport yielded two very satisfactory reads that took me exactly and conveniently to JFK. First of all, a quite interesting not-sure-what-to-call-it (fantasy? science fiction?) novel by Steph Swainston called The Year of Our War. It's a flawed book, I think, in certain respects: the plot's awfully meandering for a war novel, there are some inconsistencies of tone, a touch too much whimsy in the dreamworld to which the hero escapes (shades of Jonathan Carroll--I like Carroll very much at times, at his best he's stunning, but Carrollesque does not seem to me a good thing). And yet I really loved it anyway! A very appealingly rendered main character/narrator, for one thing, in the fallen angel vein; but just a really excellent high-caliber imagination and smart writing. Will look forward to her next ones with considerable interest.
And then, quite grippingly, Iain Banks's The Steep Approach to Garbadale. It hasn't been especially well reviewed, but I just loved it, I couldn't put it down (I mean, I was on a plane, so it could have been a lot worse and I would still have enjoyed it, but it really was enthralling); I don't feel that I experience my own life or the lives of others in the shape, as it were, of an Iain Banks novel (this characteristic shape of extended-family-centered retrospection--I mean, I feel like childhood and adolescence are happily behind me, I do not think that any moment of my grown-up life in my thirties would ever be primarily conceived by me as an act of retrospection going back to my teens, which is a preferred structure of his) and yet in every other respect I read Banks's (non-science-fiction) novels and just think "Yep, life is like this for me. Exactly like this." His main characters, male and female, just seem to be people like me--which is not actually a feeling I get as often as you might think, reading as many novels as I do. It makes them remarkably enjoyable.
The trouble with all this novel-reading is that you can't stock up on novels, so to speak--reading novels makes you want to read more novels! But these ones must mostly tide me over, it's a busy month--however I will sneak in a few here and there...
One thing that works really well online
is when periodicals link to archive material newly apropos--as here the TLS makes available (as a companion piece to a review of "The Lives of Others," not available online) Anne McElvoy's 2003 review of Anthony Glees's book The Stasi Files:
Halfway through the book I discovered to my considerable surprise that the industrious Dr Glees had unearthed a part of my own Stasi file - relating to my stay as a student at the Humboldt University from 1986 to 1987 - when I had given up what seemed like a pointless search in a labyrinth of changing access laws. Finding oneself reflected through the eyes of secret observers is always disconcerting. To discover that I had, according to the Stasi, "an ethereal quality" is strangely flattering. Not so edifying is the insight that "at the Humboldt University she failed to make much impression", but let's just say it was not for want of trying, so a lot of people I thought might be informing on me obviously did not bother to do so.
Surveillance was often more random and patchy than Glees's account of a relentless machine suggests. I also had contact with many of the other characters in Glees's account -not knowing that they were working for Wolf's foreign intelligence service, but not exactly surprised that they turned out to be. Oswald Schneidratus was no less than one of the elite Offiziere im Besonderen Einsatz (OIBEs), who were intended to carry on the good fight for Communism in the event of a capitalist overthrow of the regime. Schneidratus, an expert on nuclear proliferation, sought me out after 1989 and presented me with a brilliantly lucid account of the justifications, in Bismarckian balance-of-power terms, for maintaining the GDR intact. I remember thinking that the only flaw in his argument was that the State had just collapsed around him.
Halfway through the book I discovered to my considerable surprise that the industrious Dr Glees had unearthed a part of my own Stasi file - relating to my stay as a student at the Humboldt University from 1986 to 1987 - when I had given up what seemed like a pointless search in a labyrinth of changing access laws. Finding oneself reflected through the eyes of secret observers is always disconcerting. To discover that I had, according to the Stasi, "an ethereal quality" is strangely flattering. Not so edifying is the insight that "at the Humboldt University she failed to make much impression", but let's just say it was not for want of trying, so a lot of people I thought might be informing on me obviously did not bother to do so.
Surveillance was often more random and patchy than Glees's account of a relentless machine suggests. I also had contact with many of the other characters in Glees's account -not knowing that they were working for Wolf's foreign intelligence service, but not exactly surprised that they turned out to be. Oswald Schneidratus was no less than one of the elite Offiziere im Besonderen Einsatz (OIBEs), who were intended to carry on the good fight for Communism in the event of a capitalist overthrow of the regime. Schneidratus, an expert on nuclear proliferation, sought me out after 1989 and presented me with a brilliantly lucid account of the justifications, in Bismarckian balance-of-power terms, for maintaining the GDR intact. I remember thinking that the only flaw in his argument was that the State had just collapsed around him.
House-cleaning
literal & metaphorical prefatory to getting (I hope) massive amounts of work done includes blogging the stuff that's sitting around on my desk and in my head...
Thoughts on London:
I had such a pang of missing my grandmother as the plane landed at Heathrow on Wednesday morning! The last time I was in London was for her memorial service (here was a brief excerpt from the "memoirs" I made her write which very much gives the flavor of her personality, and here were a few comical excerpts from various letters she sent me in the last few years of her life) and it really was as though she would be waiting for me in Highgate with tea and toast and clean sheets on the bed upstairs. My hotel room was very much like the bedroom I stayed at in their last house, too; something about the feel of the sheets and the faintly lavenderish smells and the under-the-eaves-ness of it...
The conference was super-enjoyable--really interdisciplinary in the best possible way--this fascinating paper on Tannhauser's dilemma and rational choice hermeneutics stood behind a lot of our discussions, and our host had an altogether delightful paper on this occasion about why Elsa asks Lohengrin the question despite the fact that it assures her a bad outcome--wonderfully appealing stuff! And we also had what must be described as the most heavenly Vietnamese-inflected meal imaginable at Bam-Bou (hmm, did not realize that the building once housed Ezra Pound's Vorticists, I wonder if that is apocryphal?)--though I skipped the other conference dinner due to exhaustion and a fit of the hermits.
I am still reproaching myself for not finding time to swim while I was there--the first place I'd researched in advance had changed hands and no longer had a day-pass arrangement, and by the time I figured out that the Tottenham Court Road Central YMCA was an even better option I kind of didn't have time to fit it in (I will swim there next time I'm in London though, it looked great--fifteen pounds for a day pass including pool and health club, plus some kind of week-long thing in the region of forty-five pounds--not cheap, but worth it). However I did have two very decent runs in Regent's Park. It is amazing how many fewer people run in London than in New York! Though of course this really isn't a "destination" park for runners, too small, you would only go there if you were living in the area & it's not a particularly residential neighborhood I suppose... Fortunately it is so easily findable from where I was staying on Gower Street that even my negative sense of direction couldn't get me lost....
NB Regent's Park as well as being altogether to my taste period-wise--those beautiful houses!--and full of childhood memories of feeding the ducks & eating ice lollies also makes me happy because of the Hundred and One Dalmations connection--you know, the Dearlys live in a little house by Regent's Park because Mr. Dearly is a financial genius and solved the problem of the national debt and earned a life-long exemption from income-tax and a free house to live in--needless to say if you have not read that novel in living memory I highly recommend it--and here's a chance to clear one of the other things that's been taking up space on my desk waiting for me to post, a wonderful passage from a very interesting book we read with the British history reading group a couple months ago, Deborah Cohen's Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions.
Cohen writes well about Ambrose Heal of Heal's Furniture (also right round the corner from where I was staying) and the "modern tendencies" exhibitions he introduced, but here's the charming part, which sent me off to read a biography of Dodie Smith & contemplate her taste for dalmatians:
The best publicity of all, however, was the example provided by one of Heal's own employees. Long before she racked up successes with One Hundred and One Dalmations and I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith was the manager of Heal's toy department, and, as her diary reveals, Ambrose Heal's mistress. The success of her first play, Autumn Crocus, brought Smith a flat to suit her 'very decided ideas' about home decoration. Decorated entirely in black, white, and silver, the flat represented the very latest in stage-set modernism. Its walls were bare of pictures; the few ornaments allowed, black glass flower vases and silver candlesticks, fitted the bichromatic colour scheme. The reporters who visited her in the top-floor flat marvelled at the happy synchronicity between the woman-'a modern phenomenon'-and her dwelling. Hers was a 'flat without a past', a spare assemblage of modernist items purchased to suit the rooms, with no family heirlooms to spoil the effect. Each room (including the bathroom) had a telephone. In place of the ubiquitous Victorian aspidistra, Smith cultivated cacti, plants that 'in their obliging habits are suited to the long absences of their owners which are part of modern life'.
I had intended to offer a few thoughts on novel-reading while traveling, but I think I must put that in a separate post since this one's got so long, and instead give you a page of pictures scanned from Valerie Grove's excellent Dear Dodie: A Life of Dodie Smith (the decor in these ones isn't particularly modernist)...
Thoughts on London:
I had such a pang of missing my grandmother as the plane landed at Heathrow on Wednesday morning! The last time I was in London was for her memorial service (here was a brief excerpt from the "memoirs" I made her write which very much gives the flavor of her personality, and here were a few comical excerpts from various letters she sent me in the last few years of her life) and it really was as though she would be waiting for me in Highgate with tea and toast and clean sheets on the bed upstairs. My hotel room was very much like the bedroom I stayed at in their last house, too; something about the feel of the sheets and the faintly lavenderish smells and the under-the-eaves-ness of it...
The conference was super-enjoyable--really interdisciplinary in the best possible way--this fascinating paper on Tannhauser's dilemma and rational choice hermeneutics stood behind a lot of our discussions, and our host had an altogether delightful paper on this occasion about why Elsa asks Lohengrin the question despite the fact that it assures her a bad outcome--wonderfully appealing stuff! And we also had what must be described as the most heavenly Vietnamese-inflected meal imaginable at Bam-Bou (hmm, did not realize that the building once housed Ezra Pound's Vorticists, I wonder if that is apocryphal?)--though I skipped the other conference dinner due to exhaustion and a fit of the hermits.
I am still reproaching myself for not finding time to swim while I was there--the first place I'd researched in advance had changed hands and no longer had a day-pass arrangement, and by the time I figured out that the Tottenham Court Road Central YMCA was an even better option I kind of didn't have time to fit it in (I will swim there next time I'm in London though, it looked great--fifteen pounds for a day pass including pool and health club, plus some kind of week-long thing in the region of forty-five pounds--not cheap, but worth it). However I did have two very decent runs in Regent's Park. It is amazing how many fewer people run in London than in New York! Though of course this really isn't a "destination" park for runners, too small, you would only go there if you were living in the area & it's not a particularly residential neighborhood I suppose... Fortunately it is so easily findable from where I was staying on Gower Street that even my negative sense of direction couldn't get me lost....
NB Regent's Park as well as being altogether to my taste period-wise--those beautiful houses!--and full of childhood memories of feeding the ducks & eating ice lollies also makes me happy because of the Hundred and One Dalmations connection--you know, the Dearlys live in a little house by Regent's Park because Mr. Dearly is a financial genius and solved the problem of the national debt and earned a life-long exemption from income-tax and a free house to live in--needless to say if you have not read that novel in living memory I highly recommend it--and here's a chance to clear one of the other things that's been taking up space on my desk waiting for me to post, a wonderful passage from a very interesting book we read with the British history reading group a couple months ago, Deborah Cohen's Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions.
Cohen writes well about Ambrose Heal of Heal's Furniture (also right round the corner from where I was staying) and the "modern tendencies" exhibitions he introduced, but here's the charming part, which sent me off to read a biography of Dodie Smith & contemplate her taste for dalmatians:
The best publicity of all, however, was the example provided by one of Heal's own employees. Long before she racked up successes with One Hundred and One Dalmations and I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith was the manager of Heal's toy department, and, as her diary reveals, Ambrose Heal's mistress. The success of her first play, Autumn Crocus, brought Smith a flat to suit her 'very decided ideas' about home decoration. Decorated entirely in black, white, and silver, the flat represented the very latest in stage-set modernism. Its walls were bare of pictures; the few ornaments allowed, black glass flower vases and silver candlesticks, fitted the bichromatic colour scheme. The reporters who visited her in the top-floor flat marvelled at the happy synchronicity between the woman-'a modern phenomenon'-and her dwelling. Hers was a 'flat without a past', a spare assemblage of modernist items purchased to suit the rooms, with no family heirlooms to spoil the effect. Each room (including the bathroom) had a telephone. In place of the ubiquitous Victorian aspidistra, Smith cultivated cacti, plants that 'in their obliging habits are suited to the long absences of their owners which are part of modern life'.
I had intended to offer a few thoughts on novel-reading while traveling, but I think I must put that in a separate post since this one's got so long, and instead give you a page of pictures scanned from Valerie Grove's excellent Dear Dodie: A Life of Dodie Smith (the decor in these ones isn't particularly modernist)...
Miscellaneous thoughts
Because I am a five-year-plan type person and am having a morning of to-do lists that will not otherwise be reflected here...
2007: fall marathon, injury permitting--New York if I get a spot in the lottery, Philadelphia if not. In the meantime, lots of swimming and biking as cross-training & skill-building but no non-run-related racing (unless an irresistible triathlon opportunity pops up--but I still don't even have a bike!). Various half-marathons and shorter races, including the 9 ones I will need to guarantee a spot in the 2008 New York marathon. I have signed up for a 10K next weekend to get a start on that--it's been making me crazy having to wait for my stress fracture to get better, but I think it's finally OK. I will be slower than I was in the fall, which is annoying but unavoidable; I'll aim for a 9:15 pace, but if I can get down closer to 9:00 it will make me happier.
2008: 4-5 sprint and Olympic-distance triathlons (and another marathon in the fall if I can, plus a couple of half-marathons and shorter races as it suits).
2009: half-Ironman!
And after that I will decide if I want to do a full one...
It actually all seems pretty attainable, the thing I like about this endurance training stuff is that it's kind of just a matter of putting in the time and you get the results. It was a great swimming clinic last night--it's Level II, now, and definitely more hard-core, which is what I like--a serious work-out. I was the only woman, and I think also the only person who hasn't done any triathlons yet--a couple of the other guys were training for full-length Ironman races this summer. And the thing was that I did do one less set of the last thing we did, I am just kind of a slower swimmer still than these guys, but I am definitely not in a different universe of swimming from them, it's more a matter of building up endurance & keeping working on skills & stuff but on some things I am perfectly on a par, and on kicking perhaps better. So this is all good, if they can do it I definitely can! I am getting a bike as soon as I've finished grading and done enough novel revision to justify an afternoon off--I'm hoping later next week sometime...
2007: fall marathon, injury permitting--New York if I get a spot in the lottery, Philadelphia if not. In the meantime, lots of swimming and biking as cross-training & skill-building but no non-run-related racing (unless an irresistible triathlon opportunity pops up--but I still don't even have a bike!). Various half-marathons and shorter races, including the 9 ones I will need to guarantee a spot in the 2008 New York marathon. I have signed up for a 10K next weekend to get a start on that--it's been making me crazy having to wait for my stress fracture to get better, but I think it's finally OK. I will be slower than I was in the fall, which is annoying but unavoidable; I'll aim for a 9:15 pace, but if I can get down closer to 9:00 it will make me happier.
2008: 4-5 sprint and Olympic-distance triathlons (and another marathon in the fall if I can, plus a couple of half-marathons and shorter races as it suits).
2009: half-Ironman!
And after that I will decide if I want to do a full one...
It actually all seems pretty attainable, the thing I like about this endurance training stuff is that it's kind of just a matter of putting in the time and you get the results. It was a great swimming clinic last night--it's Level II, now, and definitely more hard-core, which is what I like--a serious work-out. I was the only woman, and I think also the only person who hasn't done any triathlons yet--a couple of the other guys were training for full-length Ironman races this summer. And the thing was that I did do one less set of the last thing we did, I am just kind of a slower swimmer still than these guys, but I am definitely not in a different universe of swimming from them, it's more a matter of building up endurance & keeping working on skills & stuff but on some things I am perfectly on a par, and on kicking perhaps better. So this is all good, if they can do it I definitely can! I am getting a bike as soon as I've finished grading and done enough novel revision to justify an afternoon off--I'm hoping later next week sometime...
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
His nose was as sharpe as a Pen
At the LRB, Michael Dobson on one of the best-known and most beautiful eighteenth-century Shakespearean emendations--and why it's not included in the latest Complete Works... I love this stuff! And it's a great piece, go and take a look...
Monday, May 07, 2007
I have had my Weetabix
Home again, and with a long novel-reading post percolating in my head for later, but for now, check out Sarah Goldstein's excellent Salon interview with Michael Chabon (link via Neil Gaiman) and Sarah Weinman's thought-provoking observations on Chabon and the Yiddish language at her blog Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.
(The London trip was good but tiring; in blog-related news, though, I will just observe that I had a delightful lunch with Maxine at the British Library and while our conversation was altogether quite lovely the single thing she told me that I'm most tickled by--have I got this right, or has my sieve-like memory betrayed me?!?--is that her grandfather was an agriculturalist who bred the strain of wheat used for Weetabix, the breakfast cereal that's recently been on my mind and my menu...)
(The London trip was good but tiring; in blog-related news, though, I will just observe that I had a delightful lunch with Maxine at the British Library and while our conversation was altogether quite lovely the single thing she told me that I'm most tickled by--have I got this right, or has my sieve-like memory betrayed me?!?--is that her grandfather was an agriculturalist who bred the strain of wheat used for Weetabix, the breakfast cereal that's recently been on my mind and my menu...)
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
This is so
Robinson Crusoe!
(It's funny, it almost always happens after I say that I won't be posting for a while that I put up about five more posts before getting on the road ... but nothing much here again till Monday the 8th.)
(It's funny, it almost always happens after I say that I won't be posting for a while that I put up about five more posts before getting on the road ... but nothing much here again till Monday the 8th.)
One more thing before I go
A couple of years ago I wrote a short piece on the occasion of my third-grade teacher's retirement that I ended up posting here because it turned out to be an essay about reading. I've just written another for the teacher I had in fifth and sixth grade; I'm not sure it will be of general interest, some of the references are a bit obscure (and really it is a testament to the progressive education of the late 1970s and early 1980s, eh?!? No wonder I loved school...) but I thought a few of you might be interested.
("Contracts" were the name for one of the major features of the elementary-school curriculum, in which each student would be assigned a suitable number and range of written questions and other tasks--things like making the shield of Medusa out of papier mache--that s/he undertook to complete by a given date, making it a matter of a personal and more-or-less tailored obligation between student and teacher; the Winesapple Apple Corporation was a way of learning about stocks and shares and companies, but also involved apple-picking and bake sales. And here is the website for the school, if you're curious.)
Here goes: in honor of Katy Hineline's retirement.
Part of Mrs. Hineline’s genius in a classroom full of fifth and sixth graders had to do with the way she was such a good teacher for boys and for girls also. Ten and eleven are awful years in which it creepingly begins to dawn on you that it’s going to mean something quite different to be a girl as opposed to a boy, and I am inclined to think that Mrs. Hineline must have been the only person in the world in 1981 or 1982 (with the possible exception of my English grandmother) who did not render me savage and sullen when she drew attention to some aspect of my appearance with a compliment.
The striking fact in retrospect is the ways the influence of Mrs. Hineline worked to make us nicer. The word nice is often belittled, and yet I remember the genuine deep dyed-in-the-wool niceness of girls like Cori Schreiber and Molly Kelly and the way it was allowed to thrive in the best possible way in the culture of the Hineline classroom. Mrs. Hineline made it easy for us to be nice. The girls were nice to the boys and the boys were nice to the girls and (perhaps most amazingly) the girls were nice to each other.
Things I remember with great fondness:
Making paper as part of learning about Marco Polo’s trip to China.
Reading group at that table in the middle of the classroom. (Books I read and loved in that setting included E. L. Konigsberg’s A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver and The Second Mrs. Giaconda, and also—a novel that remains a favorite of mine and that then had me absolutely in its thrall—T. H. White’s The Once and Future King.)
Playing Friar Tuck with a pillow under my monk’s habit and Malvolio with yellow cross-gartered stockings.
The honor of Mrs. Hineline asking me to adapt Twelfth Night for our class play (but also the chagrin of her scaling down the extent of my written assignments for the “contract” we were then working on—I felt I should do more than anybody else, I didn’t see why the other thing should mean I had to do less!).
I remember Mrs. Hineline with what seemed to me even at the time as amused horror rather than actual disbelief asking me one Monday morning what I had done over the weekend and me saying “I read The Agony and the Ectasy” and her saying rather hopefully (Irving Stone’s biographical novel about Michelangelo being roughly eight hundred pages long) “You mean you finished reading The Agony and the Ecstasy?” and me saying blithely and truthfully that I had indeed read the whole book over the weekend (and probably a few others also, though I imagine I had the tact not to mention them). These were also the years of Jane Austen and Robert Graves, I must have read I, Claudius half a dozen times over that couple-year period of being in Mrs. Hineline’s class.
Mrs. Hineline showed me how to fall in love with real history as opposed to the mythological world of ancient Greece, my previous passion; I remember spending many hours compiling notes on historical sources and transforming my material into the year-long diary of a medieval English peasant or a first-hand account of a young nobleman compelled to chronicle the rise and fall of Savonarola. (These were the first things I wrote that really showed me what kinds of novels I wanted to write, and I found myself remembering those narratives when I took a seminar near the end of college from Simon Schama on writing narrative history, a class that together with those early writing experiences helped me understood why the typical fiction-writing class didn’t speak to me and how I could find a different mode of writing that would engage the whole range of my interests.)
I have Mrs. Hineline to thank for my youthful grasp of a technical medieval military vocabulary (trebuchet, crenellation).
I remember (this was not at school) helping to give Mrs. Hineline’s handsome Maine Coon Cat Eggamoggin regular flea baths—an interesting and challenging assignment, more dangerous than anything we did in the classroom....
I remember Mrs. Hineline’s lovely assistant Stan Kenyon showing me how to calculate square roots with pencil and paper (a pointless but enjoyable skill which I no longer retain) and the cheerful daily morning greeting of the task that elicited my most maniacal enthusiasm and energy, MOTB or VOTB (math on the board, vocabulary on the board—since I always got to school before the building was even open, the classroom was a warm haven & vocabulary an absolute delight compared to that penitential winter lurking outside the building till the doors opened at eight).
I remember suffering a crisis of guilt over not being able to fulfill my duties as secretary of the Winesapple Apple Corporation because of an unfortunately scheduled clarinet lesson, only Val Minor stepped in and saved the day!
I remember Mrs. Hineline (a good friend to the Davidson family) having us all to stay at her summer house in Stonington, Maine and being a remarkably good sport about the vast quantities of food we expected to consume at every meal (the thing I remember most vividly from that trip, I must confess, is my effort to memorize “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in its entirety—to this day it is pretty much the only long poem that I could even attempt to say by heart).
I especially remember my imagination being in the grip of the roster of tasks we had to complete as we studied the middle ages in order to receive our “knighthood”—musical tasks and tasks involving embroidery, tasks literary and mathematical. It was not so much the individual things we did as the sense of there being all sorts of ways of approximating the kind of ideal of self-improvement and self-testing undergone by the notional knights of Arthur’s court, and in fact, I’ve thought of the knighthood tasks several times recently, because (this is farfetched, and not what my poor gym teachers would have predicted!) my imagination is now in the grip of a different set of tests—ones related to training for a triathlon or a marathon. I am not sure exactly what it is in human nature that makes us want to try ourselves in this way, but I know that Mrs. Hineline’s real gift as a teacher wasn’t just the love and intelligence she mustered for her subject matter but the way that she made every single one of her students want to work like a demon in order to satisfy her high standards, and the way that her very highest standards were reserved for consideration and thoughtfulness of others rather than any simple notion of academic accomplishment.
("Contracts" were the name for one of the major features of the elementary-school curriculum, in which each student would be assigned a suitable number and range of written questions and other tasks--things like making the shield of Medusa out of papier mache--that s/he undertook to complete by a given date, making it a matter of a personal and more-or-less tailored obligation between student and teacher; the Winesapple Apple Corporation was a way of learning about stocks and shares and companies, but also involved apple-picking and bake sales. And here is the website for the school, if you're curious.)
Here goes: in honor of Katy Hineline's retirement.
Part of Mrs. Hineline’s genius in a classroom full of fifth and sixth graders had to do with the way she was such a good teacher for boys and for girls also. Ten and eleven are awful years in which it creepingly begins to dawn on you that it’s going to mean something quite different to be a girl as opposed to a boy, and I am inclined to think that Mrs. Hineline must have been the only person in the world in 1981 or 1982 (with the possible exception of my English grandmother) who did not render me savage and sullen when she drew attention to some aspect of my appearance with a compliment.
The striking fact in retrospect is the ways the influence of Mrs. Hineline worked to make us nicer. The word nice is often belittled, and yet I remember the genuine deep dyed-in-the-wool niceness of girls like Cori Schreiber and Molly Kelly and the way it was allowed to thrive in the best possible way in the culture of the Hineline classroom. Mrs. Hineline made it easy for us to be nice. The girls were nice to the boys and the boys were nice to the girls and (perhaps most amazingly) the girls were nice to each other.
Things I remember with great fondness:
Making paper as part of learning about Marco Polo’s trip to China.
Reading group at that table in the middle of the classroom. (Books I read and loved in that setting included E. L. Konigsberg’s A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver and The Second Mrs. Giaconda, and also—a novel that remains a favorite of mine and that then had me absolutely in its thrall—T. H. White’s The Once and Future King.)
Playing Friar Tuck with a pillow under my monk’s habit and Malvolio with yellow cross-gartered stockings.
The honor of Mrs. Hineline asking me to adapt Twelfth Night for our class play (but also the chagrin of her scaling down the extent of my written assignments for the “contract” we were then working on—I felt I should do more than anybody else, I didn’t see why the other thing should mean I had to do less!).
I remember Mrs. Hineline with what seemed to me even at the time as amused horror rather than actual disbelief asking me one Monday morning what I had done over the weekend and me saying “I read The Agony and the Ectasy” and her saying rather hopefully (Irving Stone’s biographical novel about Michelangelo being roughly eight hundred pages long) “You mean you finished reading The Agony and the Ecstasy?” and me saying blithely and truthfully that I had indeed read the whole book over the weekend (and probably a few others also, though I imagine I had the tact not to mention them). These were also the years of Jane Austen and Robert Graves, I must have read I, Claudius half a dozen times over that couple-year period of being in Mrs. Hineline’s class.
Mrs. Hineline showed me how to fall in love with real history as opposed to the mythological world of ancient Greece, my previous passion; I remember spending many hours compiling notes on historical sources and transforming my material into the year-long diary of a medieval English peasant or a first-hand account of a young nobleman compelled to chronicle the rise and fall of Savonarola. (These were the first things I wrote that really showed me what kinds of novels I wanted to write, and I found myself remembering those narratives when I took a seminar near the end of college from Simon Schama on writing narrative history, a class that together with those early writing experiences helped me understood why the typical fiction-writing class didn’t speak to me and how I could find a different mode of writing that would engage the whole range of my interests.)
I have Mrs. Hineline to thank for my youthful grasp of a technical medieval military vocabulary (trebuchet, crenellation).
I remember (this was not at school) helping to give Mrs. Hineline’s handsome Maine Coon Cat Eggamoggin regular flea baths—an interesting and challenging assignment, more dangerous than anything we did in the classroom....
I remember Mrs. Hineline’s lovely assistant Stan Kenyon showing me how to calculate square roots with pencil and paper (a pointless but enjoyable skill which I no longer retain) and the cheerful daily morning greeting of the task that elicited my most maniacal enthusiasm and energy, MOTB or VOTB (math on the board, vocabulary on the board—since I always got to school before the building was even open, the classroom was a warm haven & vocabulary an absolute delight compared to that penitential winter lurking outside the building till the doors opened at eight).
I remember suffering a crisis of guilt over not being able to fulfill my duties as secretary of the Winesapple Apple Corporation because of an unfortunately scheduled clarinet lesson, only Val Minor stepped in and saved the day!
I remember Mrs. Hineline (a good friend to the Davidson family) having us all to stay at her summer house in Stonington, Maine and being a remarkably good sport about the vast quantities of food we expected to consume at every meal (the thing I remember most vividly from that trip, I must confess, is my effort to memorize “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in its entirety—to this day it is pretty much the only long poem that I could even attempt to say by heart).
I especially remember my imagination being in the grip of the roster of tasks we had to complete as we studied the middle ages in order to receive our “knighthood”—musical tasks and tasks involving embroidery, tasks literary and mathematical. It was not so much the individual things we did as the sense of there being all sorts of ways of approximating the kind of ideal of self-improvement and self-testing undergone by the notional knights of Arthur’s court, and in fact, I’ve thought of the knighthood tasks several times recently, because (this is farfetched, and not what my poor gym teachers would have predicted!) my imagination is now in the grip of a different set of tests—ones related to training for a triathlon or a marathon. I am not sure exactly what it is in human nature that makes us want to try ourselves in this way, but I know that Mrs. Hineline’s real gift as a teacher wasn’t just the love and intelligence she mustered for her subject matter but the way that she made every single one of her students want to work like a demon in order to satisfy her high standards, and the way that her very highest standards were reserved for consideration and thoughtfulness of others rather than any simple notion of academic accomplishment.
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