The Gypsy Scholar

Bad Man’s Blunder
The Kingston Trio

A Wicked Good Guy

King Richard III
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:King_Richard_III.jpg

The song is about an inept outlaw for whom, perhaps because of his incompetence, the listener feels a bit of empathy. Most of us are incompetent at something and so we understand the poor outlaw’s problem. Still there is the problem of the deputy that, he tells us frankly in the opening stanza, he killed. The name in storytelling circles for such a character, for the likable bad guy, or the guy with too many flaws to be heroic, is antihero. What lies behind the antihero is a belief that we all have the capacity to be villainous and part of our reaction is a “there but for the grace of God go I” kind of sympathy. We see our own potential in these characters. In the conventional tragedy we encounter a good man or woman with a significant character flaw. This flaw proves to be the character’s undoing. Because in so many other respects this character is so good the reader or viewer sees the consequences that result from this single flaw as undeserved. But no one sees the antihero as undeserving of her or his fate; it is just that that fate falls too close to home.

The painting is of Richard III. As Shakespeare tells his story he is a totally villainous unredeemable character but many throughout history have championed his cause. When I was growing up it was Josephine Tey’s novel The Daughter of Time that made his case. Tey was a writer of detective fiction and her detective, while in the hospital for reasons I have forgotten, becomes intrigued with Richard and the story history has preserved of his legacy. He receives a card with this painting of Richard on it and his curiosity is aroused, also his sense of justice. He does not believe someone with the sensitivity the portrait captures could commit the heinous crimes associated with this “wicked” king. According to history, especially Shakespeare’s history, Richard became king by murdering everyone, including two young children, ahead of him in the line of succession. The Richard of the painting, though probably not the Richard of history, is a bit of an anti-hero in the sense that this portrait provokes a kind of empathy that his actions cannot easily support.

Satan
Gustave Dore
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GustaveDoreParadiseLostSatanProfile.jpg

There was an article in The Guardian last week, “Francesca Simon’s top 10 antiheroes” on the great antiheroes from literature. Number ten on the list is Satan from Milton’s poem Paradise Lost. I am not sure that Milton intended for this character to be seen in this light, but since the Romantic era this view of Satan as the wronged “hero” of the poem has been popular. It is still a popular view espoused by Philip Pullman, the writer of children’s stories who has made a Satan-like character the hero of one of his tales, and Harold Bloom America’s most popular literary critic. Those who see Satan as, well, “Satanic” point out that the Biblical account of this character is as a liar and a seducer consumed with unbounded pride. He has extraordinary gifts combined with ambitions beyond his station. Of course it is the “beyond his station” part that makes him “likable” because most of us have aspired to things that seemed beyond us and have been “put in our place” as a result. Often it is the point of view we bring to what we read that determines how we understand the characters that live in the stories we read. For the atheist and, perhaps, the agnostic Satan is the ultimate hero, for the theist he is the ultimate villain.

Egill Skallagrímsson from Medieval Illustrated Manuscript
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Egil_Skallagrimsson_17c_manuscript.jpg

Egil Skallagrimson is one of my favorite anti-heroes. He is a smart and capable man. He is a ferocious fighter and a great poet. His actions are not always to be emulated but he is audacious and it is his audacity that makes him attractive. His flaws are numerous; he is egotistical, ambitious, and avaricious to name a few. He is slow to let go of a grudge and the “quality of mercy” is not something he was interested in cultivating. One must consider the times in which Egil lived which were very harsh and unforgiving times in which mercy and forgiveness were not often rewarded and were often seen instead as signs of weakness. He belonged to a free and independent people that rather than submit to the authority of a king left Norway and established their own “democratic” nation in Iceland. The Icelandic “Althing” is the world’s oldest standing parliament having met in continuous session since 930 CE and still meets to this day.

The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

The film The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming is about a Russian submarine and its crew that run aground off the New England coast of the United States. The Russians were the villains of the cold war, though there are probably some in Russia who would take a different view. The crewmembers, though, are just ordinary folks who are trying to survive with little interest in international politics. They run aground because the ship’s captain wanted to see what America looked like. When the film was released the cold war was still intense and these hapless sailors were quintessential antiheroes, members of an “evil empire’s” military, who were really not much different from the Americans that viewed the film. What responsibility do everyday folks have for the decisions their government makes. These sailors are not interested in fighting any war, cold or otherwise, they just want to go home, and who of us, in difficult circumstances far from friends and family would not also want to go home?

A Dime Novel Featuring Jesse James
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jesse_James_dime_novel.jpg

The pictures above and below capture another side of the antihero. Some whose behavior was seriously out of line have managed to wrap themselves in the aura of romance. In the “wild west” Jesse James was such a character. He was robber and a killer but one way or another he was greeted warmly by some in the culture. The romance surrounding his exploits inspired pulp fiction like that of the cover illustration above. In this “dime novel” (that according to the cover cost a nickel) Mr. James is not only not an outlaw but he as a protector of the people and a solver of crimes. This Mr. James is “the law” not the outlaw. No doubt his criminal record is the result of some misunderstanding and that at heart he has more in common with Pat Garret than with Billy the Kid. Of course, Billy the Kid established his own aura of romance and is an antihero in his own right.

Coin de table (Corner Table, Rimbaud is second from left)
Henri Fantin-Latour
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Henri_Fantin-Latour_005.jpg

The painting is of a group of French writers. The second writer from the left is Arthur Rimbaud a poet with a “colorful” history. He was an influential and popular poet. He gave up poetry to pursue other interests that culminated in gun running among other things. He is the author as antihero and his life after poetry is part of the “romance” that attaches to this writer. He does not, in this painting, look that radical or counter-culture, in fact no one in the painting looks that revolutionary, with the possible exception of the two bearded gentlemen sitting at the back of the table. He became an inspiration to many twentieth century writers, like some of the Beats in America and folks like Jean Genet in France, who sought to cultivate an aura of anti-heroics. They were antiheroes not because they were engaged in activities that were outside the pale but because they were “labeled outlaws” (culturally not legally) by a culture that was, for them, outside the pale and rather than answer the accusations against them, they embraced those accusations and after a fashion made antiheroes of themselves. Whether the post poetic Rimbaud was an antihero or a true villain would depend on who he was running guns for and who benefited from the business that he transacted.

There is something in human nature that wants to rebel. It is this something that makes the antihero attractive. Whether he is the James Dean character in Rebel without a Cause or Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon in Thelma and Louise. Laws may be broken, maybe laws it would be better not to break, but these characters are seen to be driven to illegality by other “crimes” the culture chooses to ignore, like sexism and intolerance. Often these characters desire to do good but are driven in other directions by a culture that does not believe them to be capable of good. In the book Frankenstein a monster is created. Monstrous things are expected of him because he looks like such a monster. However, he tries to do the good and noble thing, to be compassionate and kind in his dealings with others, but he is always rewarded according to the expectation and not the act. At one point he is shot for saving a young girl from drowning. He changes, he realizes that no one is ever going to give him a chance and he begins to fight back. That too, is part of the story of the antihero. If we do not let people become kind, if for whatever reason we judge them by something superficial, we should not be surprised if they become what we have pre-judged them to be and that it becomes difficult to identify the true heroes and villains.

Promotional photo of Boris Karloff from Frankenstein
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Frankenstein%27s_monster_(Boris_Karloff).jpg

Autumn to May

Taj Mahal

Journeys to Imaginary Landscapes

Gulliver in Brobdingnag

Richard Redgrave

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gulliver.jpg

The reading we do always takes us somewhere. The places that we travel to may be real, they may have been real once, or they may have only ever been real in the imagination of the writer and her or his readers. The song is about an imaginary journey, a journey on a large dog with ears like enormous wings that can fly a person “around the world in half a day.” That is quite a journey. I do not think the song expects to believe this journey ever took place; it is a kind of tall tale that colors our literature. From Sinbad and the Arabian Knights to the journeys of Alice and Mr. Toad story telling has often involved journeys like the one in the song and even if they are not believed they are enjoyed. All reading is a journey and like with most journeys those that make the trip learn something important from it.

Often these journeys are metaphors for other things. The painting above illustrates a scene from Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver has just been discovered by the Brobdingnagians, a race of giants living just off the Oregon or Washington Coast, if Swift’s map is to be believed. On a previous journey Gulliver went to a land of tiny people, the Lilliputians. In Swift’s story size often is a metaphor for the size of one’s mind and the openness of one’s attitudes towards those who are different or behaviors that are unusual. The Emperor of Lilliput is a small minded and petty man. Not all the Lilliputians are small minded, but most of their leaders are and the attitudes of the leaders seem to permeate the society. On the other side of the coin, the Brobdingnagians are not large minded and big hearted because they are oversized, but their king, for the most is, and it is this open mindedness that the king tries, often to encourage in the general population.

There was an article in this weekend’s Boston Globe on metaphorical thinking. The article, “Thinking literally”, suggests that there is a relationship between the metaphors we use and the literal meaning of those metaphors. If we are warm, for example, we are often “warm” in our reception of others, or so the article suggests. If this is true it would stand to reason that giants with large hearts would be big hearted and gracious to those a bit smaller than they are. Perhaps there are limits to how far this literal interpretation of metaphor can be taken, but in the Swift’s story there does seem to be a correlation between behavior and metaphors of scale.

Woodcut from the Nuremberg Chronicle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nuremberg_chronicles_-_Strange_People_-_Umbrella_Foot_(XIIr).jpg

The illustrations above and below depict scenes from two the journeys of two famous explorers, Sir John Mandeville and Marco Polo (though the image below is not from Marco’s time it captures a bit of the architecture that he saw). I do not know if Mandeville went to the places he claims to have visited, but he knew what the people of his day would have expected him to find if he had gone to those places. Mandeville may have gone and chose not to describe what he found but what he was expected to find, folks, for example, with one large leg and a foot that could serve as an umbrella of sorts to keep off the African sun.

Marco Polo on the other hand describes things that he did in fact see and experience and if others had followed in his footsteps they would have seen these things as well. This is one of the benefits of reading of the exploits of others; we have the opportunity to visit places we might not otherwise be able to see. In the case of Mr. Polo’s journey we cannot possibly see what he saw because time has changed these landscapes but by reading his book we can still share in his experience, we can be amazed by the exotic landscapes and the people that shaped that landscape. We can become fifteenth century gentlemen in a strange land. Richard Rodriguez in an interview with Bill Moyers many years ago said that in reading books written by people different from himself he could become those people, or at least see himself in them. He could, he said, become Armenian and African-American by losing himself in the worlds created by Armenian and African American writers. I think there is some truth to this and it is in these experiences that we are able to escape for a time from the limited world of our own experience.

Shwedagon Pagoda

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Shwedagon_pagoda.jpg

There was an article in the New York Times a week or so ago about Alan Furst’s new novel, the Spies of Warsaw. The article, “Love. Death. Intrigue. Warsaw.”, is not a review of the book but an exploration of the Warsaw and Pre-World War II Poland the book describes. The author of the article, Steve Dougherty, compares present day Warsaw with the Warsaw of the novel and explores this ancient city for the remnants of the world depicted in the novel. Like most old cities the past is a veneer that lies on the surface of most things, but in the case of Warsaw much of this veneer is recreated because of the Nazi regimes determination to leave nothing of consequence standing. Though the war was lost, their armies on the verge of final defeat, they would do their best to destroy this city before they were finally forced to capitulate. As a result much of the Warsaw’s cultural history as reflected in its architecture had to be rebuilt.

The Arcadian or Pastoral State, second painting in The Course of Empire

Thomas Cole

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cole_Thomas_The_Course_of_Empire_The_Arcadian_or_Pastoral_State_1836.jpg

Often the literary journeys we take are in quest of the perfect place, it is a quest for a kind of Utopia where all is peaceful and to our liking. This is an impossible journey of course, because few of share a vision of the perfect place that is in exact conformity with the visions of others. Most of us would be the barbarians at the gates of our neighbors Utopia trying to bring it down and into conformity with another Utopic vision. That said, often when we read a description of a Utopic place our imaginations play with the details and these places become for us what their authors intended even if not in the way they intended.

Other journeys are to places we may not in fact want to visit, but enjoy observing from the safety of our imaginations. I remember reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. I did not want to visit this place or any place like it “in the flesh” so to speak, but enjoyed my life what life amongst the dinosaurs might have been like if there had in fact been human ancestors to live among them. When a story captures us we are in its space and if that space includes giants, or dragons, or magicians, or vampires we experience for a bit life in their presence. Perhaps all the literary dangers we encounter are mythic or metaphoric or in some other way archetypal and capture the deep and dark workings of our subconscious and bring us into contact with the deeper layers of our being. There was an article in the New York Times last week, “The Holy Grail of the Unconscious”, on the eminent publication of Carl Jung’s “Red Book” that documents, it is said, his journey into the depths of his own madness. This journey of Jung’s not only led him through his own experience with madness but shaped the direction his practice of psychology took.

The Martian Chronicles

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

This scene from the film version of Ray Bradbury’s novel The Martian Chronicles captures another aspect of our real and imagined journeys. The space travelers think they have arrived home, sort of. Everything they see suggests home, except that it is found on Mars. They are lulled into the world of their past and their yearnings. It is of course a trap that plays upon the spacemen’s desires and longings in order to remove them as a threat to Martian civilization. Perhaps there is a sense that our memories of home are seductive and dangerous. Home may represent safety and warmth and acceptance. But it can also be a place that insulates us from life and from pursuing our own unique destinies. Perhaps another office performed by our literary journeys is to wean us from home, to prepare us to go out on our own and face the world and shape it a bit to our own ambitions and desires.

Shiver Me Timbers
Tom Waits

A tall Ship, A Guiding Star, and a Usable Word Hoard

The Clipper Ship “Flying Cloud” off the Needles, Isle of WightJames E. Buttersworthhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Buttersworth_-_flying_cloud.jpg

Tom Waits is singing about a man who is saying good-bye to friends, family, and loved ones as he prepares to go to sea. The painting also captures some of the ethos of being away at sea on a tall sailing ship. The painting and the song seemed apropos in light of the upcoming holiday “International Talk Like a Pirate Day”, celebrated on September 19th. I suppose this holiday resonates more with folks who think of pirates in terms of Errol Flynn and Captain Blood or Johnny Depp and The Pirates of the Caribbean than those who think in terms of current events in the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz.

But “Talk Like a Pirate Day” also underscores an important dynamic of language, that the way we talk says something about who we are. This view of language is one of the themes of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. Early on the play’s hero, Henry Higgins, says, “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.” Our speech reveals things about us, where we are from, the extent of our education, the kind of work we do. I studied theater in college. It was pointed out by one of my professors that many of the terms for those parts of the theater where lights are hung and sets are kept in readiness and many of the activities performed by stage hands had their origins onboard ships. This was because many of the early stagehands were out of work sailors. There were similarities, or so my professor suggested, between the skills required of an able bodied seaman and a stagehand. I do not know how much truth there is to this, I never spent much time in the professional theater, but it sounds plausible.

There was a recent article in the Times Literary Supplement on the language expert David Crystal, “David Crystal, language geek”, in which Crystal describes some of his adventures in language. In one part of the article he describes working for Randolph Quirk (an interesting name for a language maven) on “The Survey of English Usage.” One day at work he received a phone call from a local shoe store. The marketing folks wanted some new adjectives to use in their advertising. Crystal thought the call was a joke but assembled a collection of words and sent it off. A week later he received a check for services rendered. Perhaps there is a suggestion here of another career path, in addition to teaching, available to the English major.

Book of Kells, Incipit to John
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KellsFol292rIncipJohn.jpg

As the illustrations above and below from medieval books suggest there is also a beauty to language, words, and the pages that contain them aside from what the words reveal about the people that use them. The making of books and the shaping of language can have a physical, a visual beauty that, though suggested by the literal meanings of the words, is separate and apart from the content of the language. The manuscripts are works of art in and of themselves and oftentimes the artistry of the decorations surrounding the words detracts from the words themselves. Some books offer pleasures that have nothing to do with the stories they tell. The textures of the paper and the bindings offer pleasures of their own. The illustrations and photographs that sometimes accompany a book are as satisfying as the book itself. I remember reading James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and thinking that my enjoyment of the book had as much to do with Walker Evans photographs as it did with Agee’s text, which was itself masterful.

Lindisfarne Gospels, Incipit to the Gospel of Matthew
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LindisfarneFol27rIncipitMatt.jpg

The Anglo-Saxons had a love of riddles. There is a riddle that I do with my twelfth grade students, “Riddle #60” from The Exeter Book. The subject of the riddle is “the reed” and the poem mostly focuses on how the reed, once carved into a writing implement, is used to convey “secret messages”, to pass notes, not in class, but in the mead hall. If one remembers that one of the primary entertainments of the mead hall was the singing of songs and the telling of stories set to music, the riddle of the reed completes a kind of “linguistic circle”, in that it provides an avenue for the written word in an environment dominated by the spoken word.

Lingsberg Runestone
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U_240,_Lingsberg.jpg

That the Anglo-Saxons and most of the other Germanic tribes that settled Northern Europe and Scandinavia took enjoyment from the “look” of their letters that is attested to by the many “rune-stones” that decorate the region. The earliest English poem is “The Dream of the Rood.” One of the forms in which this poem survives is as a runic inscription on a stone cross in Scotland. The stone cross consists of figures and patterns carved into the stone bordered by the runic text of the poem. I do not think one needs to be a follower of Tolkien’s hobbits to appreciate the visual beauty of these stones. The runic letters were also believed to have magical properties, a power that transcends their mere appearance, and for this reason their use was eventually forbidden by the religious authorities of the time. There is an irony in this because one of the few poets from the Anglo-Saxon period whose name we know is Cynewulf and the only reason we know his name is because he wove the runic letters of his name into his poems. It is not known for certain who he was, but he appears to have been a priest or a bishop, one of those responsible for the suppression of the runic alphabet.

Star Wars “Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back”
Lucasfilm Ltd.

Hans Solo’s spaceship the Millennium Falcon is a pirate ship from another age, or at least one gets that impression from Hans’ descriptions of the work he did before joining the rebellion. As he talks of his exploits one is left with the sense that piracy was one of his many skills. The romance of a thing and the reality of a thing are often very different. Just as the romance of the cockney in English culture, the culture of Eliza Doolittle and her father, has a romance about it that is appealing to those on the outside looking in, the reality of day to day cockney life is very different. The poor are often depicted in ways that idealize their lives often to make them appear simpler or more genuine or in ways that accentuate the humor of their situation. Sancho Panza, Sam Weller, and Sanford and Son are characters who are endearingly poor. But there is another side to poverty captured in Maxim Gorky’s plays, novels, and memoirs or Upton Sinclair’s “Jungle.” It may be fun to talk like a pirate, but it is probably less fun to be a pirate or to be captured by one.

The language we use to tell our stories often defines reality as it appears to us. Whether our stories create fictional worlds or capture bits and pieces of the world we inhabit, the language we use shapes a world that we expect readers to accept as real, as “believable”. The real world of poverty as perceived by Horatio Alger is a bit different from that same reality as it appeared to Charles Dickens but both authors expected their readers to accept as “true to life” the landscapes they crafted.

Also the language we use often tells others, in some way, who we are. Often we employ a language that tells us who we are, a “character” that we assume as we might assume a secret identity. When words fail us we lose touch with who we are or think we are. It is often not the case that we cannot find the words to say what we mean but rather that we cannot find the words that both say what we mean while preserving the persona we have crafted for the world to see. We may want to talk like a pirate for a day because it is kind of fun, the hard work is in talking every day like the people we imagine ourselves to be.

The Next Big Thing
Vince Gill

At the Moment

Rose Window, Strasbourg Cathedral
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rosace_cathedrale_strasbourg.jpg

I am a schoolteacher. At the beginning of a school year it is important, I think, to consider what the new year has to offer and what ought to change and not change as a result of the summer’s reflection on the previous year. When is new better and when should the “old ways” be preserved. The song suggests that everything is ephemeral; it has its moment in the sun and then becomes passé and yesterday’s news. Vince Gill is speaking specifically of the music industry but this view of things permeates many other areas of our culture.

With the intense focus this view places on the new and the momentary it is difficult to put much of anything into a larger context. This view has also produced a dismissive attitude towards cultural landmarks, whether they are musical, literary, or some other aspect of our cultural identity. This preoccupation with the present also seems to bring with it a resistance to long term planning. Thinking too much about the past or the future makes it difficult to live effectively in the present moment. It is unwise to live too much in the past or the future, but it is difficult to build a meaningful future without some planning and it is difficult to plan well if we cannot fit our planning into an historical context.

The rose window on the other hand was designed to provoke contemplation, to free us from the “tyranny of the moment.” To me the rose window suggests a kaleidoscopic mandala and its beauty is in the way it diffuses light and color. The rose window also suggests the “next big thing” isn’t that big in the context of time and the universe. As a culture there may be a place for us to build a metaphoric rose window in the mind that invites us to contemplate things outside our own scope and experience and to measure our own accomplishments against a larger yardstick.

In this week’s Boston Globe there was an interview with Marianne Taylor on “The definition of cool.” As a term it resists definition, according to Taylor, and there is more to it than what is currently popular, though it seems that it is often a currency of the moment. Perhaps more than anything else “cool” is a kind of charisma that can attach itself to objects, ideas, or people. A large part of cool though seems to come down to attitude, an edgy, confront the status quo sort of attitude, though one must be careful because in some circles confronting the status quo is the status quo. I think, though, the discussion of cool suggests that too often we attach value to surfaces, as attitude is largely a “surface”, that conceals some turbulent currents beneath.

The Illinois
Frank Lloyd Wright
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Illinois.jpg

The sketch is of a building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was planned to be a mile high and eventually had to be put aside as unworkable because at the time there were no elevators that could accommodate the design and folks were unlikely to climb stairs a mile in each direction. In order for the next big thing to become the next big thing, I suppose, the technology necessary for its support must exist. Still, it is an elegant looking building and with current technology might even be workable, though the cultural moment for a design of this kind has probably passed.

Ultimately it is about assessing value. What is worthy of preservation; what is worthy of study? Wright was one of America’s great architects, but not all of his buildings have survived. Some were torn down to make way for other buildings. What does that do to the “legacy” of Wright, where did the buildings that were destroyed stand in relation to the body of his work? There is also in this a suggestion as to the purpose of art, especially arts like architecture that are at least in part functional. What if these buildings of Wright’s that were destroyed no longer satisfied the function for which they were built. As an English teacher it is important to ask which literary texts are worthy of preservation and study and which need to be metaphorically pulled down to make way for other edifices.

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Frank Gehry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GuggenheimBilbao.jpg

A building like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao could probably not be built in Wright’s time. It takes architecture in a different direction and might be the epitome of architectural “cool” for our time. It reminds me of the buildings one often sees in animated cartoons, like the “Toon Town” section of Los Angeles as seen in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But there has also been criticism of Gehry’s style because many of those that work in the buildings he has designed complain about their not being “user friendly” spaces. This is a problem because buildings are not sculpture, though there may be qualities they share in common, and though a well designed building ought to be pleasing to the eye, its ultimate purpose is to serve the people that work in it.

Books are not buildings and we do not live in a book in the way we live in a house, still there is a sense in which readers do occupy a book and in the course of reading it live in the world the book creates. But where a building ought to be designed with the comfort of those it houses in mind, the same is not necessarily true of a book. Good books often make us feel uncomfortable. Often books hold ourselves up to ourselves for scrutiny and that is often not a pleasant experience, but it is, nonetheless, an important thing to do from time to time.

There was an article by Susan Straight in the New York Times this week, “Reading by the Numbers“ about how reading is being assigned and assessed in schools. It concerns a piece of software used by some schools to help encourage students to read. The program assigns point values to books and when students accumulate so many points for the outside reading they have done they are awarded (in some schools, though not in all schools that use the program) a prize.

The article focuses on the point values assigned to various books and tries to understand the “reading” values the program is trying to inculcate and the correlation between the number of points a book is worth and the quality of that book as literature. Some books that are not particularly challenging are worth quite a lot of points while other books that are quite challenging are not worth many points at all. Heart of Darkness, for example, is worth ten points while Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was worth forty-four points. Hamlet was worth seven points while the Gossip Girl series was worth eight points.
Perhaps it is just because I teach English, but something does not seem right here.

Wivenhoe Park, Essex (1816)
John Constable
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_Constable_028.jpg

Of course one must be careful. We all live on the cusp of change as one style of writing (or of doing most any art) is morphing into what comes next. The paintings above and below suggest this potential problem. Constable and Turner were contemporaries, or nearly so, but Constable remained true to a realistic style of painting that was popular when he began to work while Turner’s style was anticipating the Impressionist painters that would come a bit later. Both painters did fine work but one was a bit behind the times and the other a bit ahead of his time. An attitude toward literary texts that is too focused on past greatness is going to miss the work of writers who, like Turner, are producing the “next big thing”, the thing that will make our time memorable to those who will back at it.

Chichester Canal circa 1828
J. M. W. Turner
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chichester_canal_jmw_turner.jpeg

It can be difficult to make judgments about the work that is done in our own time because we are too close to it. C. S. Lewis once observed in a book, The Allegory of Love, about the courtly love poets, “For it must be noticed that such dominance (the dominance of a literary form in any given age) is not necessarily good for the form that enjoys it. When everyone feels it natural to attempt the same kind of writing, that kind is in danger. Its characteristics are formalized. A stereotyped monotony, unnoticed by contemporaries, but cruelly apparent to posterity, begins to pervade it.” Contemporary literary forms that enjoy some popularity, like meta-fiction or stories that rely heavily on stream of consciousness, are probably in danger of falling into this kind of stylistic “monotony.” This may not be obvious to readers today but is likely to be very obvious to readers a few generations from now.

The Shock of the New: “David Hockney on What’s Unphotographable”

This film clip from the television series The Shock of the New suggests another aspect of how we assess an art form. David Hockney talks about how he experimented with photographs and discovered that though both photographs and paintings are visual representations of a subject they were not equally effective in capturing the essence of that subject. Hockney is specifically talking about a painting he did of the Alhambra in Spain. He said he could never capture it adequately in a photograph, but he was pleased with the result of his painting. The image of the painting is not realistic and does not offer a recognizable representation of the Alhambra. If it were put next to a photograph of the building the viewer may not realize that the photograph and the painting were of the same building, nor would someone having seen Hockney’s painting recognize the Alhambra if she or he visited it in Spain.

But it is not the purpose of a work of art to produce “photographic” images of a thing. An historical novel with Abraham Lincoln in it as a character is not as obligated to produce the “real” Lincoln in its pages, as is a biography or a work of history. Novels often tell stories that mix elements of fantasy or the fanciful in an otherwise realistic story. Novelists like Garcia Gabriel Marquez or Robertson Davies tell stories that move through a world that in many ways resemble the world in which we live and move, but at times these worlds are penetrated by a “non-realistic” reality that does not coincide with the world as most people experience it. This artistic license does not detract from the artistry of the books but in fact serve that artistry in much the same way that Hockney’s art serves his painting.

It can be difficult maintaining a balance between the artistic legacy we have inherited and the modern age. It is important to preserve a sense of the past and the historical and cultural streams that have brought us to where we are but it is also important to remain receptive to the work that flows from the influences of this legacy. As rose windows provided an opportunity to contemplate what is holy in the world, the gargoyle provided the opportunity to contemplate those forces that are dedicated to our ruin and the ultimate ruin of those forces. Perhaps in this gargoyle from the National Cathedral in Washington D. C. there is an apt object for contemplation that focuses our meditations on the value of the traditions that have brought us to our moment and the value of our moment’s contribution to those traditions and perhaps that which has value from each stream will cleanse the mundane from both.

Darth Vader grotesque on the tower of the Washington National Cathedral
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Darth_vader_grotesque.jpg

Frim Fram Sauce
Diana Krall

A Taste for the Unusual

Netherlandish Proverbs
Pieter Brueghel the Elder
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bruegel_Proverbs.jpg

I do not know what “frim fram” sauce, “oss-en-fay”, or “sha fafa” are, for all I know they may just be the invention of the lyricist. But I like the song because it suggests to me the importance of being a little bit adventurous with our tastes. It is the only way we find out that “fast food” is not the only source of a tasty meal, in fact it may be the only way we discover how “un-tasty” a fast food meal actually is. We often like what we like because it is familiar. How do we ever become familiar with what is unknown to us if we do not take a bit of a risk with something new, unusual, and exotic.

There is nothing wrong with potatoes, tomatoes, steak or any of the other foods that the persona of the song would like to take a pass on, they are all tasty, but they are also somewhat “clichéd,” somewhat “safe.” Generally when I am looking for something to read there are two things that attract me to a book, the author or the cover. If I know the author and have liked what that author has done in the past, I may give the book a try, if I do not know the author it is generally the cover art that captures my attention. The first is often a safe bet, these books are the potatoes and the tomatoes. The second requires a bit of an adventurous spirit, but not that much, because what usually captures my attention about the cover is its ability to evoke the kind of book with which I am already familiar and comfortable. I think we are often attracted to those things, whether in art, music, or literature that promise to deliver an experience that resembles one we have already had.

The painting is a pleasant scene of an active medieval or renaissance street. It is also somewhat typical of Brueghel’s style and delivers the kind of artistic experience we would expect from a Brueghel painting. But the title tells us there is also something more to the painting than the odd people and the quirky landscape. It contains about a hundred different Flemish proverbs, acted out after a fashion by the “actors” in the scene. For example, in the lower left hand corner there is a woman with a water bucket in one hand and tongs with a hot coal in the other. This suggests a proverb about carrying fire in one hand and water in the other, which is to suggest the person is a bit of a hypocrite. Just ahead of her is a man banging his head against a wall, a proverb with which most are familiar.

I used to give this painting to students at the end of the school year (I knew the painting as “The Blue Cloak” because, I suppose, at the center of the painting is a person wearing a blue cloak) and would give them so many points extra credit for each proverb they could find and explain. I would also give them the list of proverbs the painting illustrates. They only had to find ten and most did pretty well. But the thing about the painting that is a bit quirky is that instead of being a picture that might “paint a thousand words”, it is “words painting a hundred pictures.” Though we often gravitate toward the familiar it is often those things that do something new and unfamiliar that are the most memorable.

There was an article in the Boston Globe recently by Joan Wickersham, “If Jane Austen had a laptop”, that speculated on how Jane Austen might have responded to things like “Twitter,” (it suggests that she would have especially enjoyed using certain “search engines”). The article is a fanciful speculation on a technology driven Ms. Jane but it also suggests that we are products of our culture and were Ms. Austen living with us she too would be a product of our age, just as we are products after a fashion of Ms. Austen’s age, and the ages of other writers whose works have shaped our culture. Once a work of art has touched us, it changes us a bit and the way we look at the world around us. We may not wear Regency clothing, but we have entered and been touched by a Regency way of viewing the world and, while in the world of the book, adopted a bit of that view.

Red Mobile
Alexander Calder
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Calder-redmobile.jpg

The photograph of the Calder mobile and the Matisse paper cuttings suggest another way that art often surprises. Both the mobile and paper cuttings are associated with children and the nursery. Calder and Matisse both pursued “serious” art, one a sculptor the other a painter. They are working with the ingredients of their perspective mediums but they are not working with them in the way we would expect. Part of the reason the art works with the viewer is perhaps because it evokes the nursery and a more innocent and carefree time. There is I think something liberating about a mobile, something that provokes a smile or a chuckle in part because it is not what we expected to find on the menu when we entered the museum.

There was an ad for Pacific Life that used to play at the end of the News Hour on PBS with Jim Lehrer. It was an animation of a whale, the trademark of the insurance company. But the whale would morph from a whale painted in the style of Seurat to a whale in the style of Van Gogh, to a whale in the style of Monet, Picasso, and Calder. It was an imaginative ad, but I wonder how many viewers would recognize how the ad’s creator was playing with artistic trademarks. The ad also suggests that art can sell a product, perhaps in part because the viewer of the ad is not entirely familiar with what is happening, but I think it is even more effective with the viewer that recognizes what the ad maker is doing. In a sense, by playing with artistic styles and expecting the viewer to recognize the styles the advertiser is motivating us to buy the product by flattering our knowledge and sophistication. There is the “story” of the ad’s narration, “buy this product” and the more subliminal story of the ad’s presentation that tells a story of sorts about the history of art, of whales, and insurance, suggesting, perhaps, they have something in common.

The Sorrows of the King
Henri Matisse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Sorrows_of_the_King.jpg

Stories often do this as well. There are many stories written for children that operate exclusively at the child’s level. The adult reader might still enjoy the story, who cannot enjoy The Cat in the Hat, or Goodnight Moon, but the story does not operate at a level that the adult recognizes that the child does not. On the other hand there are other stories associated with children, like Gulliver’s Travels (at least the first two voyages sans a scene or two) and Alice and Wonderland. These books can delight the child but there are other things going on that only an adult would fully appreciate. I remember seeing in a used bookstore a book titled A Boy’s Rabelais. There are aspects of Rabelais that a child might find enjoyable, but there is much about the good friar’s book that may not be entirely suitable for children. It is a book one would not expect to find on the children’s “menu.”

This is, I think, the real reason we incorporate literature in our English classes. The main purpose of the class is to teach fluency with language and ideas and help students to develop a facility with language that will contribute to their future success. But it is also important to help students develop a “sense of adventure” in the choices they make. They know the Phantom Tollbooth or Harry Potter or Vampires living in the great Northwest. These are their “meat and potatoes” so to speak. There are other “foods” that come with more exotic flavors, flavors that may not be initially pleasant (I am told that children do not find sweets tasty at first, they need to acquire the taste) but with time become flavors we cannot live without. We will never outgrow our parochial flavors if someone does not bring to our attention the other flavors that might be experienced and over time enjoyed.

The Sleeping Gypsy
Henri Rousseau
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Henri_Rousseau_010.jpg

The painting of the lion and the sleeping gypsy evokes another kind of magic. The dreamer does not know what is happening in the world while she or he is captured by the dream. The gypsy may be dreaming of pastures and a flock of sheep while the real world is full of lions, or at least, a lion. To what extent are we safe in our sleep; whether it is the real sleeping we do each night or the sleep of a mind that is unaware of what it needs to learn or the consequences of failing to learn. When we dream the world of the dream is real. I know that often when I dream I come to the dream with a complete history that is not my history, I have memories of experiences I have never experienced, at least not in my waking hours, and I remember them vividly. This world seems real and it serves a purpose, dreams are important.

But what of the waking world; what of the world in which we work and earn our bread? The quality of the bread we earn is often shaped by the quality of the education we receive and the confidence that education gives us to explore the unfamiliar. We read great works of literature from the past not because they feed us a familiar food that goes down easily, but because they feed us a food that though more nourishing, is not always palatable with the first bite. We give students that first taste so that they can go on to develop their intellectual palates. In this sense the English class is more of a restaurant or a tasting room serving exotic foods than a “skills factory.”

The world of the children’s story prepares us for the world of the unfamiliar. If nothing else, the stories we read as children were new and different and unfamiliar when we first read and enjoyed them. They also, often, take us to unexpected places. A character opens a door, goes on a trip, meets a strange person and reality takes an unexpected turn. This is often true of the stories adults read as well. When David Balfour went to sea he did not expect to be kidnapped, he did not deserve to be kidnapped. But through the process of being kidnapped he learns some things about himself and human nature. There is a sense that all stories, or at least the good ones, kidnap their readers and take them to unexpected places. But we have to board the ship, even if we would rather make a different journey.

Hitchcock on Film

The film clip is old and shows its age, it is also in Black and White. But I think Hitchcock makes some important points about story telling. Not least among them that a good story will often set us up for a cliché and just when we expect the cliché the story delivers something entirely unexpected. A good story will in some way surprise us. He also does not believe we need to understand everything in the story, in fact, stories often proceed from something that is suggested but never explained. In many of Hitchcock’s films we do not know why people are chasing other people. Why does James Mason want so badly to catch and to kill Carey Grant? Hitchcock called this unknown something a “McGuffin.” When asked to explain the term he tells a story about a scene from an old film. There are two men on a train going to the Scottish Highlands. One of the travelers asks the other what’s that package in the overhead rack. His fellow traveler tells him, “That’s a McGuffin”. They then have this conversation:

“What’s a McGuffin”?

“A McGuffin is a machine for trapping lions in the Highlands of Scotland.”

“But there are no lions in the Highlands of Scotland.”

“Than that’s no McGuffin.”

At the end of the conversation we know no more about what a McGuffin is than we did before the conversation took place. This is also often true about what motivates characters to do the things they do in stories, or at least the stories that Hitchcock tells. But we do not mind; if the characters are interesting and the storyteller does things that surprise us. Why does Iago want so badly to harm Othello? Is disappointment at being passed over for a promotion enough to explain Iago’s behavior? Why is Voltimort such a bad guy? Is his unhappy childhood enough of an explanation? I do not know, but what is more important, I do not need to know to enjoy the story.

I think Wallace Stegner’s novel Angle of Repose has one of the most moving closing lines of any book I have read. The problem with quoting a closing line (and why I won’t do it) is that, unlike a good opening line, it depends for its power on all that has come before. Stegner has introduced us to a man we thought we knew well by the end of the novel and the reader, or at least this reader, expected to part company with a certain kind of man. The last line of the book showed me how the man had unexpectedly changed and that change changed me. This is why it is important to be adventurous in our reading and our living. The familiar does not change us much, we expect it, we know it, it is only the unknown that can show us sides of ourselves we never knew before.