I Blog What I Read

More Industry Than Wit

2012-02-18T08:09:00.002-05:00

...are typical of the Ph.D. theses, regularly turned out, with perhaps more industry than wit, from the American universities. (p.21)

The producer becomes a fearful wild fowl when he takes the theatre as an independent art. The rise of this new and very belligerent art means that its rights are asserted with the noisiness of a Suffragete. (p.120)

E.B. White and the IRS' Rhetorical Secrecy

2012-02-16T19:24:00.001-05:00

From One Man's Meat:

(In reference to a paragraph length sentence on tax exempt items) That sentence...was obviously written by a lawyer in one of his flights of rhetorical secrecy. There isn't any thought or idea that can't be expressed in a fairly simple declarative sentence, or in a series of fairly simple declarative sentences. The contents of Section G of Form 1040, I am perfectly sure, could be stated so that the average person could grasp it without suffering dizzy spells. I could state it plainly myself if I could get some lawyer to disentangle it for me first. I'll make my government a proposition: for a five-dollar bill (and costs) I will state it plainly. (p.107)

How Do You Tuck In A Superhero?

2012-02-08T22:15:00.001-05:00

A quick note to say that I finished reading How Do You Tuck In A Superhero?

I had to read this after the number of times that I heard my wife laughing aloud as she read it. The author also has a blog.

Catching Up

2012-02-04T05:33:00.001-05:00

I have not had time to post from the following recent reads:

The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom
Interviews with Robert Frost
Postmodern Pooh by Frederick Crews
Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini

Sir Alec Guinness and Ovid

2012-01-23T13:20:00.002-05:00

From A Positively Final Appearance:

Before leaving for our eight-day holiday with our friend Marriott White in Baden-Baden...I got very fussy about what to take to read. A little pile was made of Herodotus, Elmore Leonard's thriller Out of Sight, Shakespeare's Henry VIII and Piers Paul Read's new novel, Knights of the Cross. (p.40)

In the past few weeks there have been suggested all sorts of new schemes for quickly getting rid of unwanted babies in the womb. In my head I hear a snatch of office chatter. 'Free for lunch today?' 'Awfully sorry, no. I thought I'd just slip out and have an abortion.' If the human race survives to the third millenium will our age be given a thought? Will we be hailed as the pioneers of cloning or dismissed as a trashy slip-up after the centuries of recognizable values? Most likely the future will be ignorant of the fact that we even existed. (p.49)

A few days ago, rummaging in a drawer of batteries, film spools, etc., I spotted a sixty-minute cassette tape I must have recorded ten years or more ago of various poems or speeches I had wished to learn...The tape included 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', Ulysses' great cynical speech from Troilus, beginning ''Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back', the nineteenth psalm, poems by Robert Graves, R.S. Thomas, Vaughan and Herbert, and the Duke of Burgundy's marvellous evocation of the French countryside in his championship of the peace towards the end of Henry V. (p.84)

Somewhere along the line of the day I managed to buy Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid (and read 'Echo and Narcissus' immediately with intense pleasure while having a haircut; I refrained from looking in the mirror). (p.112)

Why Writers Keep Dictionaries on Their Shelves...

2012-01-18T15:18:00.002-05:00

...to prevent them from writing sentences like this:

The terms used to describe them [negative symptoms of schizophrenia] are derived from the Greek: affective flattening, alogia, and avolition. (p.328, from A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar)

Well, not really. I will give her "alogia."

And the rest?

Affective (Latin) < ad + facio
Flattening (Germanic) < flato- + -en
Avolition (Greek & Latin) < α + volo

The last one is the most interesting. In college we used to make a game of catching these nasty neologisms from two different languages. They are often a sure sign of bad prose. For those unaware, the technical term is σαρδισμός (sardismos), i.e. the kind of word you would find in Sardis, where Greek, Lydian, Persian, and other languages mingled in odd combinations.

The most beautiful sentiment

2012-01-10T19:36:00.001-05:00

From Saint Gianna Molla: Wife, Mother, & Doctor:

Love is the most beautiful sentiment the Lord has put into the soul of men and women. (St. Gianna in a letter to her future husband, quoted in Blessed John Paul II's May 16, 2004 homily at the Mass of Canonization, p.145)

As to the past, let us entrust it to God's Mercy, the future to Divine Providence. Our task is to live holy the present moment. (p.149)

Ignatian Perseverance

2012-01-10T19:18:00.002-05:00

I once knew a Jesuit priest in my days in Rome who remarked once on the strange vacillation today about making decisions in life. In short, half our productive life is over before we settle on a goal that requires that productivity.

The same sentiment can be found in St. Ignatius' autobiography:

There flashed upon his mind the idea of the difficulty that attended the kind of life he had begun, and he felt as if he heard some one whispering to him, "How can you keep up for seventy years of your life these practices which you have begun?" Knowing that this thought was a temptation of the evil one, he expelled it by this answer: "Can you, wretched one, promise me one hour of life?" In this manner he overcame the temptation, and his soul was restored to peace.

Again, I apologize that the Kindle does not allow for page references.

The Classical Wodehouse

2012-01-10T19:09:00.000-05:00

From A Damsel in Distress:

What a girl! He had never in his life before met a woman who could write a letter without a postscript, and this was but the smallest of her unusual gifts.

"I have never heard of Brooklyn." "You've heard of New York?" "Certainly." "New York's one of the outlying suburbs."

The gift of hiding private emotion and keeping up appearances before strangers is not, as many suppose, entirely a product of our modern civilization. Centuries before we were born or thought of there was a widely press-agented boy in Sparta who even went so far as to let a fox gnaw his tender young stomach without permitting the discomfort inseparable from such a proceeding to interfere with either his facial expression or his flow of small talk. Historians have hadned it down that, even in the later stages of the meal, the polite lad continued to be the life and soul of the party...Of all the qualities which belong exclusively to Man and are not shared by the lower animals, this surely is the one which marks him off most sharply from the beasts of the field.

(Of Lord Marshmoreton about to impose himself against his overbearing sister) It was the look which Ajax had in his eyes when he defied the lightning...

The Spartan boy is related by Plutarch (Moralia, Apothegmata Laconica 35). The Ajax is the lesser one of Aeneid 1 fame. These just show the thorough grounding of Wodehouse in the Classics.

*I should add a note on the problems of the Kindle: (1) I cannot refer to page numbers. (2) Bookmarks have a tendency to float from page to page.

Truth and Custom

2011-12-30T12:27:00.000-05:00

From Daughter Zion:

...a custom contrary to truth. Such customs either wither away because their root, the truth, has dried up, or they continue to proliferate contrary to conviction, and thus destroy the correlation between truth and life. They thereby lead to a poisoning of the intellectual-spiritual organism, the results of which are incalculable. (p.11)

The purification of Christianity, the search for its original essence, is carried on today, in the era of historical consciousness, almost entirely by seeking its oldest forms and establishing them as normative. The original is confused with the primitive. (p.38)

The first quote, I believe, makes the case for why we should take thought of those who make Christmas a secular festival.

The Physics (and Myths) of Baseball

2011-12-28T18:27:00.000-05:00

Some of the more useful facts I gathered from The Physics of Baseball:

The inclination of the arc of the swing does not strongly affect the velocity of the struck ball, but it does affect the mean angle at which the ball leaves the bat and, hence, the probability of hitting a very long ball and a home run. The great high-average line-drive hitters...swung the bat such that the barrel crossed the hitting region just in front of home plate, traveling upward on the same line that the average pitch is moving down....Then, if their bat position is correct but their timing is slightly off in their effort to hit the ball over second base, they still connect with the ball squarely...(p.98)

With a lower maximum frequency and the addition of a strong component of lower-frequency sound from the natural bat oscillation, the "crack" becomes more of a "thunk."...A onetime center fielder advised me that "when the ball is hit straight at you...if you hear the bat "crack," run back; if the sound is a "thunk," run in." (p.128)

Generally, the player who drills out his bat stuffs the hole with cork or rubber. But this added material serves more as a detriment than an advantage...that energy will not be effectively transferred to the ball...the extra material will then only slow the bat down a little and slightly reduce the distance a ball can be hit. Such a filler will take another 3 feet off a 400-foot drive. (p.137-8)

The Hidden Classical Background of Pooh

2011-12-28T10:37:00.003-05:00

From The Pooh Perplex:

I shall say nothing of Wart's theory that Pooh is an Orphic deity with seasonal-sacrificial-redemptive crop-growing characteristics–a clever idea, but one that is given a disproportionate weight in Wart's sense of the total meaning of the book. (p.7)

Pooh's nightmare of endless Heffalumps making straight for his honey supply and eating it all requires, I believe, no complicated analysis (and least of all a Freudian one!). It is the very image of proletarian revolution, of the workers arising in a concerted mass to seize the means of production from the jaded bourgeoisie. (p.25)

Piglet has doubted whether Pooh's Ode to him, which at first sight looks as pure and false as Pindar upon whose locker-room eulogies it is patently modeled, really has told the truth...False, you see, but not naïve, and not false in Pindar's sense of toadying to the fixed system of glory, either. (p.33)

Milne's chief spokesman, Eeyore, is a veritable Thersites, a malcontent who would have put Marston to shame. (p.43)

For those unfamiliar with Frederick Crew's work in The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh, the assembled critical essays are in jest.

Doyle's Miles Gloriosus

2011-12-26T10:36:00.001-05:00

From The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard:

He was a good boy, this Duroc, with his head full of the nonsense that they teach at St. Cyr, knowing more about Alexander and Pompey than how to mix a horse's fodder or care for a horse's feet.

...it would have interested me to see something of the customs of the English, which differ very much from those of other nations. Much as I should have wished, however, to have seen them eat their raw meat and sell their wives,...

Truth and the Critical Spirit

2011-12-19T14:04:00.001-05:00

From Etienne Gilson's Héloïse and Abélard:

We have seen the birth of the "Critical Spirit" and all the pedantic fiction with which it encumbers history, fiction which at its best is not even entertaining. For it is characteristic of the "Critical Spirit" to be itself the measure of historical reality. When an event surprises it, the event loses its right to have taken place. When a sentiment goes beyond its grasp, he who expresses that sentiment loses the right to have experienced it. It is to be feared that this story of great souls, reduced to the stature of the scholars who write about it, is sometimes wanting in graphic beauty, but it will inevitably be wanting in truth when that truth consists in personal greatness.

There is nothing quite comparable to the passion of the historians of the Renaissance for its individualism, its independence of mind, its rebellion against the principle of authority, unless perchance it is the docility with which those same historians copy one another in dogmatizing about the Middle Ages of which they know so little.

The best example we can find of historical cliché is the concept of an anti-Christian Renaissance which historians of literature pass on from one to the other as though Lefèvre d'Etaples, Budé, Erasmus, ever pretended to be escaping from any dogma, or as if their adherence to dogmas ever prevented St. Bernard from being eloquent, Dante and Petrarch from writing well, or St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas from thinking.

In conclusion:

What, then, do the facts teach? That Abélard was the first of the moderns? This would be to substitute one piece of foolishness for another. That Héloïse was the first modern woman? On the contrary, as Jean de Meung would say, the world has never since seen her like: Mais je ne crei mie, par m'ame, / Qu'onques puis fust nul tel fame. (By my soul, I do not believe / That another like her ever lived)

I also found this fact interesting:

Either the abbess [i.e. Héloïse] has a good memory, which is most likely, or there was a copy of [Ovid's] The Art of Loving at the Paraclete.

Abaelard and Heloise surprised by Master Fulbert

Jean Vignaud, 1819

A Code of Honor

2011-12-16T15:09:00.000-05:00

From Steinbeck A Russian Journal:

Among Moscow correspondents, particularly in the winter, a code of honor has grown up, rather like the code which developed in the West concerning horses, and it is nearly a matter for lynching to steal a man's book. But Capa never learned and never reformed. Right to the end of his Russian stay he stole books. He also steals women and cigarettes, but this can be more easily forgiven.

Sophists and Freshmen Composition

2011-12-15T06:58:00.000-05:00

From the most recent issue of Classical World ("The Progymnasmata in Imperial Greek Education"):

But Quintilian complains of Latin rhetors, the equivalent of Greek sophists, who wrongly forced the teaching of more difficult progymnasmata onto the grammarians. Those rhetors were like modern English professors who do not want to teach freshman composition. (p.79)

Old but Good News for Budding Classicists

2011-12-14T19:59:00.000-05:00

From The University: An Owner's Manual (1990):

Departments of the classics can usually handle more students very easily. To indicate an intention to major in a subject that is searching for increased undergraduate enrollments may in a particular year boost one's chances for admission, although it is difficult to find out which departments are facing a shortage.

A university college has never consisted of five hundred Mr. Chipses surrounded by a few thousand adoring and adorable undergraduates.

All of us who have reached advanced years can recall teachers whom we vigorously detested in high school or college, only to discover in more mature years the excellence of their instruction. As evidence, I can cite my own and nearly everyone else's high school Latin teacher.

From the same on a more sobering note:

Dim employment prospects and low salaries are bound to affect quality of students now and quality of faculty later. Some will choose the academic life no matter what–individuals who are fatally attracted by the virtues and show little concern for the vices. But in the more ordinary cases, young people make rational and cautious career choices. All of us want to lead decent, well-remunerated lives, and when obvious and interesting alternatives exist, they will be selected without hesitation.

I include a few other quotes about the profession:

There are three professions which are entitled to wear the gown: the judge, the priest, and the scholar. This garment stands for its bearer's maturity of mind, his independence of judgement, and his direct responsibility to his conscience and his god. [quoted from E.K. Kantorowicz]

Personally, I would be thrilled to see a return to the scholar's gown on more occasions than a swelteringly hot day in May. Here is the rather obvious:

An assistant professor does not assist anyone; an associate professor is not anybody's associate. These are merely designations for independent scholars who receive low pay and little secretarial help, while performing the same tasks as full professors.

Elsewhere:

The chances of having courses taught well–with verve and imagination–are greatly diminished when content and structure are imposed by "outsiders" without debate and discussion. Anyone who has attended schools run by our armed forces will have little difficulty in appreciating this point.

Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose: Guinness and Thucydides

2011-12-01T15:52:00.001-05:00

From Alec Guinness' autobiography Blessings in Disguise:

(16 yrs. old) The next thing for me to brush up some poetry in case the Cassons invited me to recite. I knew some Ella Wheeler Wilcox, which I found hysterically funny; also some Keats, Tennyson, Chesterton and a few yards of Shakespeare.

The last time I saw Sybil [Thorndike] to talk to was at a small private lunch party at the Garrick Club. She was an old lady by then, suffering acutely from arthritis but remarkably gallant and cheerful. I asked her if she still managed to learn a few lines of verse each day, which had been her life-long custom. 'Yes,' she said, 'but only a very few. I've given up the Greeks. But the real sadness is my silly old hands, which don't allow me to play Bach any more...'

I would be quite happy to see a return of black for mourning, and to hear no more electric guitars in church. Perhaps we could return to resounding hymns...

As I set off to join the Navy he [Guinness' father-in-law] handed me a pocket edition of Thucydides, saying, 'This will help you keep things in perspective.' Inside the book he had scribbled, 'Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose.' It was a more acceptable gift than the vast unplucked turkey which he dumped, on Christmas Eve, in the kitchen of our tiny cottage. Seizing the duck we were going to have he said, 'That's just what I want; an extra duck,' and made off with it. The turkey wouldn't go in our oven anyway and Merula burst into tears. Not only had I found a wife; I had acquired a family.

Shaw and Greek

2011-11-25T07:52:00.001-05:00

From Shaw's introduction to Major Barbara:

Captain Kidd would have marooned a modern Trust magnate for conduct unworthy of a gentleman of fortune.

And now for a few quotes from the play itself about the profession:

LADY BRITOMART: Oh, Adolphus Cusins will make a very good husband. After all, nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentleman... (p.52)

LOMAX: Well, you must admit that this is a bit thick. LADY BRITOMART: Adolphus: you are a professor of Greek. Can you translate Charles Lomax's remarks into reputable English for us? CUSINS: If I may say so, Lady Brit, I think Charles has rather happily expressed what we all feel. Homer, speaking of Autolycus, uses the same phrase. πυκινὸν δόμον ἐλθεῖν means a bit thick. (p.62-3)

CUSINS: Let me advise you to study Greek, Mr. Undershaft. Greek scholars are privileged men. Few of them know Greek; and none of them know anything else; but their position is unchallengeable. Other languages are the qualifications of waiters and commercial travellers: Greek is to a man of position what the hallmark is to silver. (p.67)

CUSINS: ...the poor professor of Greek, the most artificial and self-suppressed of human creatures,... (p.96)

UNDERSHAFT: ...Can a sane man translate Euripides? (p.99)

STEPHEN: You must not mind Cusins, father. He is a very amiable good fellow; but he is a Greek scholar and naturally a little eccentric.

Adolphus Cusins is, for those yet unacquainted with the play or Shaw's circle of friends, modeled on Regius Professor of Greek Gilbert Murray.

Not that this is the first reason to study Latin...

2011-11-22T19:06:00.001-05:00

From The Office of Assertion: An Art of Rhetoric for the Academic Essay:

...the best writers are always philologists...I would make three other suggestions for improving your diction over time. First, study Latin, a language whose roots constitute a surprisingly large percentage of our own language's words. Second, read widely. (p.80)

I shall let you buy the book to find out the third...

Benedict on the importance of Classics

2011-11-16T14:05:00.001-05:00

From Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977:

Latin, as the foundation of one's whole education, was then still taught with old-fashioned rigor and thoroughness, something I have remained grateful for all my life...In retrospect it seems to me that an education in Greek and Latin antiquity created a mental attitude that resisted sedition by a totalitarian ideology. (p.23)

Goodbye, Mr. Chips

2011-11-15T06:22:00.001-05:00

From Goodbye, Mr. Chips:

We haven't got the confidence we once had, now that we know about those bombs. It is a hard time to try to write fiction. (After the Soviets acquired the bomb, from the preface)

"Colley, you are a splendid example of inherited traditions. I remember your grandfather, he could never grasp the Ablative Absolute. A stupid fellow, your grandfather. ANd your father, too I remember him, he used to sit at that far desk by the wall–he wasn't much better, either. But I do believe–my dear Colley–that you are the biggest fool of the lot!"

Sometimes he took down Vergil or Xenophon and read for a few moments, but he was soon back and again with Doctor Thorndyke or Inspector French. He was not, despite his long years of assiduous teaching, a very profound classical scholar; indeed, he thought of Latin and Greek far more as dead languages from which English gentlemen ought to know a few quotations than as living tongues that had ever been spoken by living people. He liked those short leading articles in the Times that introduced a few tags that he recognized. To be among the dwindling number of people who understood such things was to him a kind of secret and valued freemasonry; it represented, he felt, one of the chief benefits to be derived from a classical education.

And suddenly, in a torrent of thoughts too pressing to be put into words, Chips made answer to himself. These examinations and certificates and so on–what did they matter? And all this efficiency and up-to-dateness–what did that matter, either? Ralston was trying to run Brookfield like a factory–a factory for turning out a snob culture based on money and machines. The old gentlemanly traditions of family and broad acres were changing, as doubtless they were bound to; but instead of widening them to form a genuine inclusive democracy of duke and dustman, Ralston was narrowing them upon the single issue of a fat banking account.

Lighter Christian Essays

2011-11-10T15:30:00.001-05:00

From Idylls and Rambles: Lighter Christian Essays by James V. Schall, S.J.:

His [Hilaire Belloc's] reading now consisted entirely of The Diary of a Nobody, his own works, and the novels of P.G. Wodehouse, which he would read with the satisfied intentness of an old priest poring over his brievary. (p.24)

Sacred music, most proper to churches, should never be applauded, in my view, preferably not even in formal concerts... (p.153)

Women don't have rights. They have, rather, graces, and sacrifices, and tolerances, and patiences, and commitments that make the word "rights" sound ridiculous as a term adequate to cover what it is they confront and accomplish in life. I know very few women whom life has treated "justly". (p.158)

(On Fixed Prayer) Neither eloquence nor a pleasing personality ought to be downplayed. They too are gifts, but what is said or repeated ought not to be things that a talented Christian clergyman or layman simply makes up and "shares"–awful word–with whoever happens to be standing by. The ex tempore, valuable as it can be, in my experience, is almost always more narrow and less freeing than the precise, "rigid", more accurate forms of prayer that embody the simplicity, eloquence, and authority of the ages of the Church. (p.190)

Dorothy Sayers on the Trivium

2011-11-09T21:02:00.000-05:00

From The Lost Tools of Learning:

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.

And:

Is the Trivium, then, a sufficient education for life? Properly taught, I believe that it should be. At the end of the Dialectic, the children will probably seem to be far behind their coevals brought up on old-fashioned "modern" methods, so far as detailed knowledge of specific subjects is concerned. But after the age of 14 they should be able to overhaul the others hand over fist. Indeed, I am not at all sure that a pupil thoroughly proficient in the Trivium would not be fit to proceed immediately to the university at the age of 16 ...

Pausanias and Athens

2011-11-09T19:11:00.001-05:00

Only the Athenians met all their obligations. They stood against the Persians, twice against the Macedonians, and against the Gauls, and, he says, they were also the leaders in the last three crises–which is correct for the battles against Philip and Antipater (I.25.3), but not for the repulsion of the Gauls. The Athenians did fight against them, and they fought bravely, but the Aetolians were the leaders. Nevertheless, as Pausanias sees it, the Athenians were the only Greeks who never failed Greece. (Christian Habicht Pausanias' Gude to Ancient Greece, p.108)

p.s. An interesting quote from the correspondence between Frazer and Housman can be found in an Appendix on the scholarly reception of Pausanias:

"He [Wilamowitz] has always seemed to me a sophist with an infallible instinct for getting hold of a stick by the wrong end. I do not forget how, with the stick (wrong end up, as usual), he belaboured my poor old friend Pausanias and no doubt many a better man." (letter from Sir J.G. Frazer to A.E. Housman, October 1927, quoted in Christian Habicht Pausanias' Gude to Ancient Greece, p.174)