Books-and-words gallimaufry

Updatery 

I have updated the Glimmerglass page, cutting and adding and tweaking, and wouldn't mind a bit any comments to improve it. Launch events will start later in the month. Right now I'm working on the final stages of a manuscript...

The Uses of Tolkien

I've noticed a growing number of slight mentions of of Tolkien in the context of current events. Victor Davis Hansen has just dug into that vein of comparison. Here Hansen analyzes the state of the world, launching off from The Lord of the Rings.

"10 books"

I'm loving all these facebook lists of books that affected people and stuck with them. Every now and then I bump into one of mine--so far I've seen A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Thaliad, Ingledove, and Catherwood on lists. Catherwood is out ahead of the rest. Considering that people can dive back more than a thousand years through English language books alone, I am tickled.

 "10 books" from that lovely poet and man, Dave Favier

The King of Elfland's Daughter, Lord Dunsany
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt
Marx's 1844 manuscripts
A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Marly Youmans
All the Strange Hours, Loren Eisley
Leaves of Grass, Whitman
William Blake's lyric poetry
Juan Luna's Revolver, Luisa A. Igloria*
William Butler Yeats' lyric poetry
The Walls Do Not Fall, H.D.
History of the Civil War, Shelby Foote
Vanity Fair, Wm Thackeray
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Debt: the first 5,000 years, David Graeber

*Note: Luisa and I will be reading together this month! See here. I'll also be reading from Glimmerglass with Philip Lee Williams, Lev Grossman, Kelly Link (and Raymond-Atkins-if-we-work-it-out...)

Bill Knight commented, "I had Marly Youmans on my list as well, but it was "The Thaliad", not "A Death", which I have not read." So that's the first I've seen for Thaliad.

Free speech (h/t @prufrocknews)

Wordsmiths rely on free speech. Academics ought to know what it means. But in our time, is it any surprise that the chancellor of Berkeley gets it wrong? Administrators have a weird challenge; they tend to be tugged toward a Babel of obfuscation, sophistry, word-inflation, falsehood, and jargon. It's evidently hard to resist. Go here for an interesting takedown and analysis of the chancellor's letter to the university. Here's a sample:

First, observe the hidden premise Chancellor Dirks is presenting — that free speech must have "meaning." This implies that speech that does not have "meaning" — as defined, one presumes, by Chancellor Dirks or a committee of people like him — then it is not "free speech," and perhaps is not entitled to protection. Dirks is smuggling a vague and easily malleable precondition to free speech. There is no such precondition. Our rights are not limited by some free-floating test of merit or meaning.

It gets tougher from there...

12 Readings in Advent: Victor Davis Hanson

Last night was battling snowstorms to and from Mohawk, where N, now 13, won two wrestling matches, 4-3 and 8-0. When we came out of the gym, huge flakes of snow were falling and the world had changed. Our eldest, Ben, was fetched home from the Albany airport after the meet, and now I must abandon him (snoozing happily) and head out to Annandale-on-Hudson to fetch home the middle child, who I do hope woke up in time for her French exam. So I do not really have time for thoughtfulness about a book but must putter off into the snowy, snowing wilderness between here and there. It’s a gorgeous snow coming down—just wish it would go away and come back at a more convenient time.

Since I won’t be around till later, I’ll cheat and offer a quote for the day and recommend a book that was popular in our family. Not long ago my husband read A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (Random House, 2005) by Victor Davis Hanson, and enlivened life for a while by reading passages and dropping weird tidbits (as, the Spartans hated trade and merchants and used long iron bars for money—no pocket change!) He enjoyed the book very much, its clarity about a war that lasted so long and its wealth of surprising information, the work of a retired professor of classics and scholar of military history. Later he passed it on to our eldest son. It's on my To Read list. I thought of the book this morning because in noodling about the web (while I was helping our youngest grasp convection, absolute zero, specific heat, and other fascinating subjects), Mike came across an article by Hanson defending the liberal arts, and later he read it to me over tea and corn muffins baked in the shape of teddy bears. I throw in the teddy bears as an antidote to Spartans. Of course, they were baked in cast iron molds, so perhaps they are already little Spartans.

Here is a little scrap of Hanson’s thought, saved from breakfast with the bears:

The more instantaneous our technology, the more we are losing the ability to communicate with it. Twitter and text-messaging result in an economy of expression, not in clarity or beauty. Millions are becoming premodern -- communicating in electronic grunts that substitute for the ability to express themselves effectively and with dignity. Indeed, by inventing new abbreviations and linguistic shortcuts, we are losing a shared written language altogether, much like the fragmentation of Latin as the Roman Empire imploded into tribal provinces. No wonder the public is drawn to stories like "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Chronicles of Narnia" in which characters speak beautifully and believe in age-old values that transcend themselves.

Life is not just acquisition and consumption. Engaging English prose uplifts the spirit in a way Twittering cannot. The latest anti-Christ video shown at the National Portrait Gallery by the Smithsonian will fade when the Delphic Charioteer or Michelangelo's David does not. Appreciation of the history of great art and music fortifies the soul, and recognizes beauty that does not fade with the passing fad.

America has lots of problems. A population immersed in and informed by literature, history, art and music is not one of them.