Swagger

A lovely interview with Dorothea Lasky at P&W (via Robert Polito):

I use that word “performance” a lot when discussing teaching, and I really believe that what the teacher is doing is a performance. You are saying that this set of behaviors has some meaning. That’s what you’re doing is a spell as well, and that’s definitely what you’re doing in a poem. A poem asserts: I’ve made this line, and this is going to have some effect on you. Just the act of believing does make it have an effect. For example, in a class, if I am going to get ten oranges and ask students to write a poem, just the fact that a teacher has decreed that as important—it does become important. You have a classroom of students who have not only thought deeply about oranges, you also have a classroom’s worth of poems about oranges. Or if we say that we’re going to read John Donne, then that becomes really important. A whole group of people will see his work in a new way—it wouldn’t have happened otherwise, if the people had simply read him on their own. It may seem arbitrary and specific to the particular teacher, and it is, in a holy way. Every teacher brings their style into the classroom in ways that both crucial and critical and this why we still need real-life teachers, not machines, to teach our students.

Ombromanie!

The only reason I got a mini-subscription to BAM this spring was that I desperately wanted to see Derek Jacobi in Lear, and you had to buy tickets to four different shows in order to qualify for the special early advance-purchase set-up that would ensure I got the tickets to the one show I really desperately wanted; I picked the others more or less at random, without much investigation, and the thing that sold me on The Nightingale and Other Short Fables was just the basic attractions of Stravinsky and Hans Christian Andersen plus the mention, in the brief description on the website, of a twelve-thousand-gallon on-stage water-tank. (I am a sucker for aquatic spectacle!)

When I read the Times review, though, I knew that it really was going to be something special, and in fact I would have to say it is one of the most absurdly lovely things I have ever experienced. The loveliness of the voice of the Nightingale (it is the most beautiful music, absolutely otherworldly and perfectly performed in this case too) plus the extraordinary fluttery nightingale puppet, the massive skeleton that rises out of and really directly from the emperor's bed, dozens of other details - everything about it was utterly delightful!

My absolute favorite bit of all was the "Berceuses du chat" in the first half - they are doing the most extraordinary things with shadow puppetry! All I can say that if I were a young person with even the most moderate professional interest in this sort of thing, I would buy a plane ticket and show up on the doorstep of Philippe Beau and just stay there until he promised to teach me everything he knew....

They do it with mirrors

From Arnaud Maillet, The Claude Glass: Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art:

This lack of knowledge [of the Claude mirror] is sometimes compounded by prohibitions that prevent these objects from being exhibited. For example, the Musee National des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Paris possesses a mirror of about 28 centimeters in diameter, with a slight outward curvature and a black backing, designed to be suspended from hooks. Its last owner, a Parisian sculptor, had hung it in his dining room. A complicated series of events came about: The artist got rid of this magic mirror by donating it to the museum in the early 1980s. A magnetizer who had come to examine it inserted some bits of paper inscribed with signs (for example, Solomon's seal) between the backing and the glass and recommended that it be kept in charcoal, which is reputed to absorb evil forces. This mirror is therefore not exhibited, since someone who knows how to cast spells would be able to use it, even through a glass case. In accordance with these magical recommendations, it is stored in a large case designed for black magic. The guards are afraid of it, and anyone who looks inside feels a great unease. Despite its ethnographic value, and for the reasons just mentioned, this mirror cannot be lent out, since it has no inventory number: thus it "doesn't exist"!

"Like nothing else in Tennessee"

I went to a very moving memorial service earlier this afternoon for a long-ago former professor of mine, Barbara Johnson.

She was an extraordinary teacher as well as a remarkable scholar and writer - as I thought about the seminar I took with her in the spring of 1992, I realized she perfectly exemplified the thing described in that essay of Wayne Booth's I recently quoted on college teaching. She downplayed her own very considerable personal and intellectual charisma in an attractive show of self-abnegation; the readerly virtues she taught were modest but also very powerful.

I dug out the syllabus this weekend from an old box of files in my office, and was struck by how strongly I was affected by many of these readings - this was the first time I encountered Saussure's anagrams and the prose poems of Francis Ponge by way of Derrida's Signeponge - I remained in intellectual thrall for some years after to the truly wonderful essay by Roman Jakobson titled "Two Types of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances".

I especially like the paradoxical combination of eclecticism and focus displayed in the cluster of texts grouped under the heading of "The Aesthetic Object: Part I": Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn", Wallace Stevens' "Anecdote of the Jar", Carolyn Forche's "The Colonel" and Heidegger's essay "The Thing".

People sometimes laugh at me when I say this - academics and non-academics alike! - but really the reason I am an academic rather than primarily a novelist or someone making some other kind of art (music, theater) is that the kind of thinking done by the very best people in the academy is truly magical to me. There's nothing else like it, and Barbara Johnson had that quality in spades, in her classes just as much as in her writing. To this we all aspire...

A moment I remember very vividly from that class: Barbara Johnson, mentioning as an aside that Poe originally thought that the raven of the famous poem should be a parrot, suddenly tilting her head to the side and squawking Nevermore! Nevermore!

Here is Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters' reminiscence of Barbara Johnson, and here are the funeral home's guestbook and the Crimson obituary.

Last but not least, the syllabus for "Approaches to the Lyric," spring 1992 (click on each image to enlarge the page):

The wobble

Jellies were once the pinnacle of sophistication.

(As a child, I made jellies in the shape of rabbits as an edible school project for our medieval feast - but though we had, at home, both a very good though now no longer fully functional large orange plastic jelly mold [it was benevolently tested last Xmas as part of small-child-oriented holiday preparations, but the jelly that emerged was not zoologically recognizable] and also smaller metal rabbit molds that perhaps worked better as cake tins, I believe that I used cookie cutters to solve the problem of how to scale up and make enough rabbits for everybody in the class to have their own.)

And here is the jellymongers website. Victorian breakfast looks to be a thing of considerable deliciousness (do I spy decorative anchovies?). Also, for the discerning, bespoke jelly moulds (pictured above). I wouldn't mind having one of these for a party.

I always have a trickle of advance reading copies coming into my apartment, many of which seem to have been sent to me on no rationally comprehensible grounds, but late last week I got one which I seized upon with delight: Lev Grossman's forthcoming novel The Magicians.

It is perhaps too dark to be the perfect escapist reading, but I thought it was very good indeed. For comic relief, I will also observe that I recently bought another book about magic partly because the Amazon reviewers' back-and-forth made me laugh...