More on music

The incomparable R.T. responds to our post "Banishing silence":

Whoa! Whoa! Atonal music... and Miles Hoffman's essay in the Wilson Quarterly.

I have to disagree with the conclusions of his essay, if not some of his ideas about music, i.e., "Our fundamental quest...is the quest for meaning, the quest to make sense of our time on earth, to make sense of time itself." And later, "...the very 'movement' of music, its rhythmic movement through time, carries inevitable associations with life, with positive forces and feelings. Life is movement and movement is life, and joyous music can literally get us moving again when we've been stunned or stilled by sadness."

He should have explored this last idea further, and he would have found more hope in the modernist movement.

I am not a musician, and I can't speak about music in a scholarly way. But with a background in classical ballet, and having choreographically explored many different styles of music for use in the performance and to either enhance, underlie or promote the work of dance over the years, I have found atonal music (the 12-tone structure) and its offspring (Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage, Charles Ives as composers with whom I happen to be most familiar) to present a rich storehouse of material for expression and going beyond what we hear.

Yes, going beyond what we hear.

Mr. Hoffman admits it himself. Music contains "the harmonic center of gravity" in a melodic key, consonant chords and intervals are "firmly rooted in the laws of acoustical physics," and he uses food as a metaphor for describing chords, notes and tones. He says, "Silence is at once a metaphor for loneliness, and the thing itself: It's a loneliness of the senses. Music overcomes silence, replaces us. It provides us with a companion by occupying our senses--and through our senses, our minds, our thoughts. It has, quite literally, a presence. We know that sound and touch are the only sensual stimuli that literally move us, that make parts of us: Sound waves make the tiny hairs in our inner ears vibrate, and, if sound waves are strong enough, they can make our whole bodies vibrate. We might even say, therefore, that sound is a form of touch, and that in its own way music is able to reach out and put an arm around us." (Italics mine.)

Notice he says, "[S]ound is a form of touch." Yet later in his essay, he relegates the appreciation and emotional enjoyment of music to one sense only, our hearing. Our ability to hear, and then intellectually and emotionally understand, thereby empathizing with the piece of music.

Well, which is it?

It's both, but I maintain that what atonality in music does is stretch the limits of this idea, sound as a form of touch, rather than sound as simply what the ear hears.

What does this mean?

In my understanding, the primal expressive instincts of being human, first expressed themselves through dance and music---rhythm being a core of this _expression, with tones that "vibrate in the memory" (Shelley.) Long before language, a very long time before writing. There is debate over which came first, the body moving as a means to express and communicate something, or sounds from our voice boxes used for the same, but for the purposes of what I am to say, which came first isn't important.

What has happened to a lot of us, and what we have been trained to do through our Western tradition and our culture, is that we have relegated music to simply an exercise in listening, and then intellectually verbalizing (for _expression) what we hear. This is what has evolved through our musical tradition.

We go to concerts and sit for two hours. We sit in the car and listen to radio or CD's. We put on music in our homes and often, sit and listen, or occupy ourselves with some other task while we listen. Sometimes we comment on what we are hearing, sometimes we don't. We make comparisons of one piece of music based on what we have heard and *easily* understood.

What few of us do, and what atonality causes in us that we so resist, is to react physically to music. To let our other senses play, to let our bodies react in a purely visceral way to what is being presented.

Oddly enough, the basic 4/4 anapestic beat of rock music helps more people do this, just move, but that's because there is little else to do. The intellectual/sound quality of the music is so basic, so simplistic, that our bodies take over because our minds are otherwise unoccupied. (Okay--I know somebody will scream out, "Dark Side of the Moon," here or, "The White Album," and I already allow for exceptions.) But I think you get my point.

What many of the twentieth century modernists do is to force us to go beyond intellectualizing about what we hear, to force our hearing to blend with those physical vibrations that are happening, to tap into something deeper from within our very center that we can't articulate. We can only express by moving. Or by creating something else in a physical or visceral way.

Put on Schoenberg's "White Mass, Black Mass." Stand up. Don't "think" anything. Just let the music occupy the space around you. Refrain from judgment and intellectualizing. Let your body, your visceral, physical senses, react to the music you hear. Try Charles Ives or John Cage. Let the loudness make you cringe, or your back release, your buttocks tighten, or your lungs expand. Let it affect your breathing, to the point where it is so shallow your heart slows, then let it push you to walk or run or move your arms through the air around you.

(Well, the image of a room full of music critics doing this is making me smile.)

It is difficult to do this in a concert hall. In those renowned halls of splendid acoustics, we are forced to sit and use only our heads. But I maintain that the work of the modernists, those that have succeeded, move us in ways that at once take us back to our most primal instincts and at the same time move us forward into new realms of creativity and by association, expansion of our powers of thinking and understanding. New thought patterns inspired by the internal and external reactions we have to the physics of this kind of music.

Verbalizing this, before one has experienced it fully, is essentially impossible. Yet the conundrum is in how to encourage this among those who are intent on searching for the perfect words to describe the music they hear instantly. Perhaps those with such a vast musical vocabulary, yet who are open to other ways of experiencing a piece of music, have already found ways to describe the experience.

This isn't to say that tonal music, the perfect C chord range with its logical assonances and dissonances, can't move us physically. It does. But because it meets our intellectual and emotional expectations, because it resides comfortably in that range that pleases our ear and it is what we are used to, we have no need to allow ourselves the primacy of the physical that atonal music forces us to respond to. The tension it does introduce is within a structure that allows us to deconstruct (or simply accept) in a way that pleases us because we know it. There is nothing wrong with this. But it is one process on the continuum. What we have forgotten or discounted, are the kinesthetic reactions occurring in our bodies. We can sublimate them unconsciously (if that is what we are doing) or consciously (forcing ourselves to remain seated, to think, to respond with our heads or even our emotions.) Occasionally an involuntary reaction literally rears its head; those goosebumps in reaction to the perfect blend of harmony or the way our heart races at the heavy percussion in the exciting climax, but for the most part, we don't have to respond physically because we have unlearned this response through our focus on responding in only one way.

Atonal music won't let us do this. It throws us, mentally and physically. It catches us off guard. Sometimes it assaults, sometimes it fades, sometimes it evokes chaos, sometimes just simply random patterns, and one can't make sense of all that in a way that is orderly and common. But because we insist, mind over matter, we find that atonal music disrupts our psyche, boils our blood, and creates dissonance in the soul in a way music that is more intellectually patterned and harmonious to the brain does not. But this intellectual dissonance allows no choice but to give up (as I believe Mr. Hoffman does,) or to fall back (or spring forward) on the physical and visceral and sensual response that is inspired and brought forth through this music.

The works of the modernists challenge us to throw off convention; just as do the modern and post-modern playwrights and sculptors and poets and dancers, but more than that, they have made an exciting bridge between our primal human response, and the intellectual one we have so painstakingly developed. They go beyond Mr. Hoffman's notion that what is most important is that the arrangements "contain information" but are exactly in line with his following idea that "to be meaningful, they have to be perceivable" because what a good modernist composer does is allow us to perceive the gut of the music through our guts, the musical center through our own physical centers, rather than as Mr. Hoffman seems to want, a logical source of information that can be translated verbally or experience emotionally.

And most definitely, I think both the tonal and atonal are important, lying on whatever musical continuum can be plotted out, but not necessarily a continuum that lies in a direct line but more circular. And neither should one be ignored or the other forgotten. The modernist composers are forcing us to respond from the full realm of what it means to be human. And to quote Mr. Hoffman once more, "[T]he quest to makes sense of time itself."

Well, this is perhaps only one way to explore 12 tone music. Someone with a musical pedagogy will obviously have additional perceptions and insights. Unfortunately, Mr. Hoffman cut it off at the knees by applying the head and heart, and forgoing the body. Fortunately, modern composers aren't so constrained, and in their quest for meaning, continue to provide us with additional understanding--even in it lies so deep within that, in the infancy of our human minds, we can only respond to it more akin to our primitive ancestors.

But if we are responding at all, I'd say they have led us at least a half step closer.

Last night...

Master M-mv brought home three ribbons -- one first- and two third-place -- and these lovely roses.

It seems that Mr. M-mv remembered that in between the hugs good-bye and the chorus of "Good luck!" and refrain of "Keep cool, you two!" I had shouted, "And don't forget: We need bananas!" And as they had nearly cleared the driveway, "And gas!"

He pumped gas while Master M-mv ducked into the store for the world's most perfect food.

My son saves seventy-five percent of every paycheck. At $7.50 per hour, this does not leave him much pocket change. Yet he decided his mother might like some flowers.

You don't have to tell me. I know we must be doing something right.

After hugging my now 6'7" man-boy and thanking him in an uncharacteristically warm and fuzzy voice, I said, "I'm going to blog about this tomorrow, Boy-boy."

"That's great, Mom. Hey, wait! You haven't put 'Boy-boy' on the blog, have you? Oh, my god! Dad! Mom put 'Boy-boy' on the blog! Aaargh! What do you mean 'on the board, too'? Aaargh!"

A few minutes later.

"I'm just messing with you, Mom. I knew about the whole 'Boy-boy' thing. G'night, Mom."

G'night, dear, dear boy... almost man. And thank you for the red roses on my library table.

Three blogs

Have you visited these blogs lately?

The Rage Diaries
Her links and remarks make readers think.

Magnificent Octopus
M.O.'s posts about literature are not unlike the incomparable R.T.'s posts here: conversational tone, terrific content.

Quiet Life
The woman who tends this gentle spirit garden is the "real deal." A lot of bloggers try to achieve this sort of simplicity and sincerity but fail. Miserably.

Art

Science

Banishing silence

From "Music without Magic" (The Wilson Quarterly):

Music is both a balm for loneliness and a powerful, renewable source of meaning—meaning in time and meaning for time. The first thing music does is banish silence. Silence is at once a metaphor for loneliness and the thing itself: It’s a loneliness of the senses. Music overcomes silence, replaces it. It provides us with a companion by occupying our senses—and, through our senses, our minds, our thoughts. It has, quite literally, a presence. We know that sound and touch are the only sensual stimuli that literally move us, that make parts of us move: Sound waves make the tiny hairs in our inner ears vibrate, and, if sound waves are strong enough, they can make our whole bodies vibrate. We might even say, therefore, that sound is a form of touch, and that in its own way music is able to reach out and put an arm around us.

Miles Hoffman explores the "point" of twelve-tone music, which, two weeks ago, was a topic about which I knew less than nothing. But my work and my pursuit of a rich interior life converged last week when, among the many research topics assigned to me, "Berg, Alban" appeared on my list.

Although Alban Berg (1885-1935) played piano and composed many songs in his youth, his formal music education did not begin until, at the age of nineteen, he met composer Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg befriended, taught, and greatly influenced the young Austrian, who was, as Harvey Sachs explains, part of old Vienna, "the Vienna of daring, cosmopolitan creative minds: Sigmund Freud and his disciples, the writers Arthur Schnitzler and Karl Kraus, the painters Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, the architect Adolf Loos and the composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg."

The trio of composers Schoenberg, Berg, and Berg's fellow music student Anton Webern represents what is known as the Second Viennese School. The hallmarks of their style were atonality and a twelve-tone method of composition; that is, a style in which a piece's melodies and harmonies are all drawn from a particular arrangement of twelve semitones or half-steps on the modern scale.

In the Wilson Quarterly piece, Hoffman writes:

Now, it’s true that we often add salt and hot spices to our food to enhance its flavor and heighten contrasts, and it’s important to remember that some people like their food much hotter and spicier than others. I should emphasize here— and I can’t emphasize strongly enough—that there are many contemporary composers, along with a host of not-so-contemporary composers, who have in varying degrees made use of 12-tone techniques and atonal procedures to write richly expressive and, indeed, powerfully moving and beautiful works. The extraordinary Alban Berg, an early Schönberg disciple, comes immediately to mind, as do some of the names on my earlier list of primarily tonal—but occasionally atonal!—20th-century composers.

Ayup. Musicians and music critics do seem to have one voice when it comes to Berg: While Schoenberg's atonality and twelve-tone method of composition occur in many of Berg's later works, they do not obscure Berg's extraordinary contribution.

According to Willem Pijper:

Alban Berg was a great musician, and he was, before all else, a great musical dramatist. He was not primarily a composer of absolute music. If he had not become a Schönbergian, would he not have left work of greater significance in the form of orchestral and chamber music? One is sometimes tempted to think so. The musical doctrine of Schönberg, however, leads by direct ways to areas that are not by any means melodious. Schönberg himself, and Anton Webern, demonstrate this fact with unquestionable clarity in their compositions. One tone, one chord, a single movement, three, four notes in melodic succession, are in their musical apperception the substratum of such unutterable and intense musical emotion that it becomes practically impossible in these sound-areas to make music freely and completely in the manner of Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, or Palestrina. The musical interpreter Berg has been able to save his musicianship by becoming a musical dramatist; that is to say, by putting his inventive powers to the service of an idea in itself outside music. When the exacting and coercive (and there fore helpful), libretto failed him, when he wished to write a concerto or other piece of absolute music then he (even he!) began to grope and to hesitate.

Later in the piece, he notes, "The musical interpreter Berg has been able to save his musicianship by becoming a musical dramatist; that is to say, by putting his inventive powers to the service of an idea in itself outside music."

Berg's masterpiece is widely considered to be the opera Wozzeck, "a powerful music psychodrama that, as Douglas Jarman suggests, 'depicted mental instability in such a way that the audience shared this instability, rather than simply observing its outward effects.' In present-day clinical language, Wozzeck suffers persecutory paranoia with traces of schizophrenia. No other opera had ever attempted anything like this before, and perhaps, none has since," according to John Rea, who reorchestrated the work for a 1995 Nouvel Ensemble Moderne production.

Interested? Drawn from articles published in the Arizona Daily Star in 1991 and 1992, The Timid Soul's Guide to Classical Music "certainly isn't a comprehensive examination of all the most important and popular composers in Europe and the United States during the past 500 years," notes author James Reel. "But it's a start." Check out his chapters on both Schoenberg and Berg. Timid Soul is a gentle guide, blending biography with music theory and appreciation.
____________________________

Read. Think. Write. Learn. No matter how many miles you run, how many crunches you squeeze in between chores, how much you can press at the gym, sooner or later, your body will yield to time. It will sag and wrinkle and fold in upon itself, ceasing to deliver reliably.

Your mind, on the other hand? Well, a rich interior life may be the one reliable comfort of old age. Start decorating, autodidacts. Paint the mind's rooms in colors bright. Hang pictures worth memorizing. Stock it with books to revisit. Pipe in music for the many ages. Oh, yes, start decorating it with something other than People and internet quizzes because twenty-five years from now, it won't matter what eighties song you were according to a poorly written, multiple choice inanity that passed ten minutes one morning.

Ten minutes you won't be able to reclaim. Ever.

It. Just. Won't. Matter.

And ten minutes here, ten minutes there, an hour surfing, two hours parked in front of reruns or reality television... and then it's all over.

Life's short, folks. Fill it with more things that do matter.

As always...

Many thanks to those who purchase books, music, software, and other products through our Amazon.com links.

G'night, fellow autodidacts. Mr. and Mrs. M-mv are off to read in bed together.

Look up!

Three Planets Bunch Up in Twilight

A fan letter

From D., who signs herself "a somewhat disorganized autodidactic fashionista-wannabe and Coke drinker":

I never imagined that I'd be writing to thank you for anything. Sure, I enjoy the un-blog (who doesn't?), and I regularly read your posts on another forum. Yet we are so very different.

Or are we?

I admit it: I've bristled a time or two at the suggestion that a spic-and-span house, incessant reading, and parenting seem effortless in your neck of the woods. Mountain Dew? Never! Overalls? Okay, maybe. *grin*

Then came last Saturday. The Saturday on which arrived my very own copy of Children's Guide to Knowledge. And while I would never infringe upon your wide swath of personal space, I absolutely wanted to hug you that day.

I didn't know that yours was the book--THE book--that I remembered so fondly from my own childhood. I didn't recall a yellow cover at all, but as I slowly thumbed through it, so many of the illustrations leapt out at me. Bucephalus! The trees! Ah, this sweet volume was a treasure from so long ago, and thanks to you, I can now share it with my little readers.

"Mom, are you about to cry over that book?"

"I'm so happy to have it again," I replied.

Thank you for a fine un-blog and for being (to thine own self) true. Your words are always a pleasure to read, and despite your propensity toward perfection and chartreuse soft drinks, I think you're the bee's knees. *grin* May your french roast be hot, your M&Ms plentiful, and your weekend long.

It was, they were, and, it was. Thank you, D.

To the man who sent me this link

You're the one I want to read in bed with. Tonight. Tomorrow night. Every night until there is only night.

Literary Maine: A reader's pilgrimage

The recommended daily allowance

The Guardian asks the same question anyone who reads De Beauvoir's journals today must ask: But was she happy?

From "'Our relationship was the greatest achievement of my life'":

De Beauvoir had declared that whatever her many books and literary prizes, whatever her role in the women's movement or as an intellectual ambassador championing causes such as Algerian independence, her greatest achievement in life was her relationship with Sartre - philosopher, playwright, philanderer, born 100 years ago this month.

There is something mysterious in De Beauvoir's insistence. Given Sartre's other liaisons, and that this was the height of the women's movement, it seems to fly in the face of common sense. Yet the Simone who had flouted convention in the 20s by entering into an open liaison with an ugly, charismatic young unknown was not about to conform to expectations.

Whether we agree with her own startling assessment or not, it's clear that De Beauvoir was neither lying nor, as some misogynist commentators have argued, simply writing herself into a life more important than her own.

Yeah, but was she happy?

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter is actually (cliche alert!) one of my favorite books, and not because it is the easiest of Beauvoir's multi-volume journals. Memoirs, which chronicles the philosopher's beginnings, is the sort of book one presses on (literate) young women in high school and college when they talk about their struggles to understand their place in the world. Yes, of course. I read it when I was young, but I reread it in my thirties and concluded that it wasn't just a young girl's foolishness.

Yet a few days later, finding myself alone in the apartment, I was overcome by a strange uneasiness; I stood planted in the middle of the hall, feeling as utterly lost as if I had been transported to another planet! No family, no friends, no ties, no hope. My heart had died and the world was empty; could such an emptiness ever be filled? I was afraid. And then time started to flow again.

The edition linked above is the one I own, but Memoirs will apparently be re-released this year.

Read. Think. Learn. Lounge by the pool, sure. Play in the sand, absolutely. But remember to challenge yourself to do more with your gray matter than read the latest chick lit.

"Make a little birdhouse in your soul."

They Might Be Giants... again. At 6:35 a.m. Loudly. We are generally the only family grinnin' and boppin' our way to and from swim practice.

Oh, we could be solemn and grim-faced like so many of the other parents dropping their swimmers off at that ungodly hour.

But life is short.

Better to fill it with laughter and loud silly music than with early morning grunts and nods, no?

Hey! Look up tonight!

Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch
Who watches over you
Make a little birdhouse in your soul
Not to put too fine a point on it
Say I'm the only bee in your bonnet
Make a little birdhouse in your soul

Added later:

R.T. wrote this morning, "In our upside-down, black is white, through-the-looking-glass-like society today, seems for every rule, there's an equal and opposite rule advocated by someone, somewhere. (Well, maybe not so equal. But definitely opposite.) Thought you'd be curious (or incredulous) about a new book written in reaction to Eats, Shoots & Leaves."

From "Lover of English slang takes on Truss and tradition" (The Independent, June 18, 2005):

In a counter-argument to Truss's book, which sets out to preserve the traditional conventions of grammar, Kate Burridge, professor of linguistics at Monash University in Australia, even calls for the apostrophe to be dropped. "When I suggested on radio that the possessive apostrophe should be dropped from the language because people get it wrong so often, you would have thought that a public flogging would not have been a severe enough punishment," she said. "I received hate mail, and letters from the apostrophe support group, though not all of them used the apostrophe correctly."

In her book Weeds in the Garden of Words: Further Observations on the Tangled History of the English Language, published this week, she calls for dictionaries to acknowledge new words and usages of grammar and punctuationto stay relevant. She said: "Today's weeds - non-grammatical expressions and pronunciations - are often rewarding garden species if left to grow. The words Samuel Johnson described as low usage and cant, such as novel, bamboozle and capture, are now totally conventional."

"Good morning. How are you? I'm Dr. Worm."

I'm interested in things
I'm not a real doctor
But I am a real worm

They Might Be Giants... because if it were all Shakespeare, Latin, and Bach here, we wouldn't be Family M-mv.

The weekend in images

Reading


Mr. M-mv: Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II (Robert Kurson)


Mrs. M-mv: It's All Right Now: A Novel (Charles Chadwick)


Master M-mv: The Stand -- Expanded Edition -- For the First Time Complete and Uncut (Stephen King)


Miss M-mv(i): Black Beauty (Anna Sewell -- again)


Miss M-mv(ii): Molly's Puppy Tale (American Girls Short Stories; Valerie Tripp)


Listening


Dial-A-Song: 20 Years of They Might Be Giants


Watching


Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events


Monty Python and the Holy Grail


Playing




Cooking



Happy weekending to M-mv's reading, thinking, and learning audience.


And now a word from our sponsor



Many thanks to those who purchase books, music, software, and other products through our Amazon.com links. We appreciate your business and your loyalty.

Bloomsday

From "The Fading World of Leopold Bloom":

[Today] is the 100th anniversary of the day in 1904 on which Dublin's best-known fictional Jew (and cuckold), 38-year-old Leopold Bloom, wandered the city as a modern-day Odysseus and, after numerous adventures located more in his mind than on the street, circumnavigated his way home. It also commemorates the first day that James Joyce, Bloom's creator, "walked out" with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle. On Bloomsday, as it has been known for more than 50 years, Joyce diehards will have a chance to celebrate his great novel "Ulysses" in costume, recital and booze. They can retrace Bloom's footsteps to Davy Byrnes's "moral pub" or indulge in Bloom trivia by buying cakes of lemon soap, as Bloom did for his secret epistolary lover, Martha.

My tour through Ulysses was led by a deft literary guide, a full professor who preferred his students to his study, a rare, rare breed, indeed. He took us by the hand (and some us by the nose) as we sometimes walked, often plodded, occasionally skipped through his favorite book in all the world. And those who could afford the annual pilgrimmage to Dublin, he happily ushered through the streets and narrows that his beloved Bloom paced.

As I have done each June 16 since taking Marty N.'s seminar on James Joyce, today I pulled down my tattered copy of the tome and reread a paragraph here, a margin note there, assorted slips of paper quoting Marty, and Chapter 18 in its entirety. Our discussion of "the 'Yes' chapter," all those years ago, was prefaced by a screening of Irish actress Fionnuala Flanagan's performance of Molly Bloom's monologue. The stunned silence that followed the film's end was recalled to me today when I read this bit in the Times Literary Supplement:

This is particularly true of Molly Bloom’s closing soliloquy, which may end on a “Yes” but is tragic in its implications. Here is a wakeful woman, beside her sleeping husband, left with nobody to talk to but herself. After an afternoon assignation with her lover, she feels compelled to m-st-rb-te repeatedly in the bed, because her visitor took all the pleasure for himself. The blank pieces of paper which she posts to herself seem like emblems of her lonely condition, just as her “yes” seems a desperate tactic to convince herself that life is better than it is. When the Irish actress Fionnuala Flanagan performed the monologue in this way on an American campus in the 1980s, some elderly professors handed back their membership cards to the Joyce Association in disgust at her alleged blasphemy against a sacred text.

Not Marty. Like us, he was staggered by Flanagan's interpretation. Oh, what a discussion followed.

Yes, it's Bloomsday again. The thirteenth that I've marked. I grow old.*

You know, reading Joyce, heck, reading any of the "heavier" books, requires a time-space that few of us willingly make. Oh, the children, we chide. Ah, work, we moan. Oh, dear, the chores, the errands, the lawn, the home-improvement projects. We toss the books aside in dismay because they are no easier now than they were when well meaning English teachers and professors pressed them on us in our teens and early twenties.

Bulletin! They were never meant to be "easy."

Happy Bloomsday.

___________________

* From "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot:

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

Do you want me "to bring it all home"? Okay. Modernists Eliot and James (and Ezra Pound) influenced, nay, arguably shaped twentieth-century literature. In a 1922 review, Eliot described Joyce's Ulysses as "the most important expression which the present age has found." It's no small coincindence that Eliot identified the "mythical method" in Joyce's work: "The Waste Land" was meant to be read as a mythic quest, too.

Hence, it is not remarkable that a discussion of Joyce might remind me that "I grow old... I grow old..." and that growing old in that meter might call to mind Eliot.

The reading life is rife with leaps and connections, links and consolations.

And lest someone think me a literary snob, I offer this from Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye:

"'I grow old... I grow old... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.' What does that mean, Mr. Marlowe?"

"Not a bloody thing. It just sounds good."

He smiled. "That is from the 'Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.' Here's another one. 'In the room women come and go/Talking of Michael Angelo.' Does that suggest anything to you, sir?"

Yeah -- it suggests to me that the guy didn't know very much about women."

"My sentiments exactly, sir. Nonetheless I admire T. S. Eliot very much."

"Did you say, 'nonetheless'?"

Also from The Long Goodbye:

I'm a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I'm a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I've been in jail more than once and I don't do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I'm a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, and to plenty of people in any business or no business at all these days, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.

The company of books is unimaginably rich.

(This entry originally ran 6.16.2004.)

Berries on the vine

Apparently, these will soon ripen. Rumor has it that they nicely complement fresh vanilla yogurt. We'll let you know.

It is a beautiful morning -- in the traditional sense: cool, clear, buttery-sunny -- here at the little house in the tiny woods on the prairie. No matter what the weather, may it be a beautiful morning wherever you are, too.

His brain, her brain

From a May 2005 article of the same title (Scientific American):

Several intriguing behavioral studies add to the evidence that some sex differences in the brain arise before a baby draws its first breath. Through the years, many researchers have demonstrated that when selecting toys, young boys and girls part ways. Boys tend to gravitate toward balls or toy cars, whereas girls more typically reach for a doll. But no one could really say whether those preferences are dictated by culture or by innate brain biology.

Read the whole piece. Interesting stuff.

Earlier this year, we talked a bit about this topic.

Another addition to the Chevalier Noir for the Mind list?

39. Insect Lore

The recommended daily allowance

From The Inn at the Edge of the World (Alice Thomas Ellis):

[A]nd the rest of them who, being human, were all accustomed to lying with a greater or lesser degree of skill, wondered, not why he did it, but why he did it so badly.

The little things

The little things -- the four-leaf clovers and the crooked hearts in the summer sand.

They accrue like the interest on your someday-maybe savings account in the neighborhood bank. Slowly, steadily.

The litte things -- the early-morning exclamations over new visitors to the feeder and the later-evening chorus of "I love you!"

They grow in your heart, swell like those funny, flat sponges you won at the Fourth of July fair once-upon-a-time ago.

Oh, the little things.

They crowd out worry and doubt. And fear. And they leave only the full feeling of loving and being loved.

The little things.

The empty swing

gently swaying in the late afternoon sun yesterday filled me with an ineffable sadness. We're saying, "Good-bye," from the moment they arrive, but I could have lived without this foreshadow in the long shadows of day's end.

From the (e)mailbag

R.T. writes:

A few comments about some recent entries over at M-MV:

Lembas -- Did you mean for us to actually eat this stuff? I take it, no.

[Um, we're not. To be honest, I persuaded my students to make chocolate chip cookies instead.]

Nursing and urination -- in one sentence? Has Neil Steinberg lost all common sense? Has the man been living in a YMCA all these years that the sight of a woman's teat reminds him he has forgotten to flush? I can't offer anything else to this dim-witted observation.

[How's this for "dim-witted"? A couple of folks have ascribed Steinberg's opinion to me, simply because of the quoted passage. The remark that followed that passage indicated that I knew my favorite local columnist had headed into, shall we say, misguided territory.

Anyway...

He tackled the touchy subject again in Friday's column under "More news from the breast beat," in which he quoted both (his words) "outrage" and "sensible replies." He concludes:

My reality is: If I am sitting at a bar, I would of course ask the lady next to me if she minds if I smoke a cigar, just as I would expect her to say something to me as she flopped out her breast to nurse. This does not suggest that smoking tobacco is the same as nourishing infants with "liquid gold," as one mother described it. But rather that it is good to be considerate of other's feelings when engaging in actions that might bother them, however wrongly. How can you argue against that?]

However, he redeemed himself a little with mall burn. Sweet. I am going to add that to my list of couldn't-say-it-better-any-other-way expressions. Right next to McMansion.

And finally, the grammar curmudgeons from underground: I am right behind them whistling and cheering on the usage thing. You know, like when, sometimes, uh, kids and them, you know, use the word real too many times and take, uh, forever to make their point? Well, I think that's awful! Annoying! Boring! Really!

But punctuation. Well now, that's a horse of a different color. I just can't punctuate my way out of a paper bag. So I will consciously avoid these pasty-faced, glasses-on-the-ends-of-their-noses, haven't-showered-in-a-month and only come up from the den in the corner of their Aunt Rhoda's basement when they have to get their latest brown paper wrapped copy of *ahem* (throat-clearing all around) The Harvard Review, Garden State boys when they do see the light of day.

Until then, barbarian that I am, I will continue to mess up it's and its and its in favor of speedy transmission on this marvelous internet sea.

And laugh alot (nay, a lot) at my own expense.

And theirs.

As always, good to hear from you, R.T. M-mv readers love hearing from you, too.

I'm betting Chevalier Noir, Mountain Dew, and M&Ms are not on the list.

Haven't we been saying this all along?

From "11 steps to a better brain" (New Scientist):

It doesn't matter how brainy you are or how much education you've had - you can still improve and expand your mind. Boosting your mental faculties doesn't have to mean studying hard or becoming a reclusive book worm. There are lots of tricks, techniques and habits, as well as changes to your lifestyle, diet and behaviour that can help you flex your grey matter and get the best out of your brain cells.

For grammar geeks and other guardians of the language

The following material was culled from two June 2004 posts.

From The Underground Grammarian:

Do not boo and stamp your feet when some barbarian [misuses the language]; it will bring reprisal, for barbarians are vindictive. Simply mutter, just loud enough to be heard, 'Clickety-click-click.' This requires no lip movement and suggests a wind-up toy. With a female barbarian, an equally good response is 'Ding-dong,' familiar to all television-addicted barbarians and suggesting some more appropriate career in cosmetics.

An incomplete list of errors to avoid:

Explanation not explaination

Voila! not Wallah!

Used to (and only if you must) not use to

Vengeance not vengance

A lot not alot

Advice is the noun; advise is the verb.

Loan is the noun; lend is the verb.

Too many exclamation marks. How many is too many? More than one tacked to the end of sentence? Too many. More than one exclamation per thousand-words? Too many. And, yes, I've erred here, too. I'll heed my own advice, ne'er fear!

Heh, heh, heh.

Care to place a wager on how many folks will write in about that last exclamation mark? "You just broke your own rule!" Ah, well. It's a public blog. No telling who will click in, right? Unfortunately, as The Underground Grammarian maintains, "Barbarians are vindictive."

Ayup.

And here's another site for grammar geeks and other guardians of the language.

From "The Grammar Curmudgeon":

Nothing makes a confirmed curmudgeon crankier than misuse of the English language, especially if that curmudgeon has devoted his adult life to studying and teaching English – and even more so if he has spent countless hours editing bad prose. This site is an outlet for an old guy who is tired of hearing teenagers punctuate every sentence with a half dozen likes, baffled by the apparent inability of many presumably literate adults to distinguish between it’s and its, and a little tired of explaining to college freshmen why “Mary and me went to the movies” is wrong. I hope that, in the course of venting, I can also contribute some useful information – and perhaps even add a little fire and wit to that dull-as-proverbial-dust subject, grammar.

Here is the link to "Curmudgeon's Corner," the Curmudgeon's blog.

Let us be the first to remark on this coincidence: "The Grammar Curmudgeon" (Rich Turner) hails from the same home state as "The Underground Grammarian" (Richard Mitchell).

The Garden State yielded a crop of grammarians.

Heh, heh, heh.

_______________________

M-mv on grammar, language, and writing:

"Rules are important, no question about it." (5.16.2004)

Your writing fool (4.24.2004)

The recommended daily allowance (4.13.2004)

"Scared silly by the Underground Grammarian" (3.23.2004)

Heh, heh, heh. "Ding-dong!" (3.22.2004)

Two things (3.8.2004)

Ayup. (2.1.2004)

Not for grammar geeks only (12.15.2003)

The recommended daily allowance (12.15.2003)

Hab SoSlI' Quch! (12.13.2003)

The Underground Grammarian (12.3.2003)

The recommended daily allowance (11.15.2003)

We appreciate your business and your loyalty.

Many thanks to those who purchase books, music, software, and other products through our Amazon.com links.

Heh, heh, heh.

From Neil Steinberg's column today:

This all could have been avoided had the mom on the airplane simply asked, "Mind if I nurse this hungry little beggar?" Walters would have squeezed out a grandmotherly smile and nobody would have felt uncomfortable. But these La Leche League types are fanatics -- they really are obsessed -- and they think that just because they're in a pew at church or their child is 9 years old that they're a victim if somebody coughs into their fist at seeing them give teat. Yes, nursing is natural, but so is urination, and I don't feel oppressed because society encourages me to take my business out of sight. It's a big world, but we all have to live in it together, and a little politeness goes a long way.

Think our favorite local columnist is going to generate some email today, or what?

From later in the piece (different subject):

To be fair, Old Orchard does have the benefit of being outdoors -- you don't get that suffocating, get-me-outta-here feeling that can come over you after too long in an enclosed mall, a condition I call "mall burn." Still, you can't look at the packs of disaffected teens drifting through it on a Friday night, for want of anything better to do, and not wonder what our country has come to.

Ayup.

Reminds me of a mall story and a recommendation.

"I'm not hungry. Leastways, not for lembas bread."

Frodo: Sam...
Sam: All right. We don't have that much left. You go ahead and eat that, Mr. Frodo. I've rationed it. There should be enough left.
Frodo: For what?
Sam: The journey home.
From Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

The population of our not-the-suburbs town is approximately 21,500. Admission to the county historical musuem was recently free to said town's residents. Seven visitors passed through the doors of the museum on that free day; five of them were town residents -- the five members of Family M-mv.

There must have been a big sale at Wal*Mart.

Or else a big game on the tube.

How else to explain the absence of all of the other approximately 21,495 residents? It's not as if they had yard work. Ask us, we know: The cacaphony of lawn movers and weed whackers had reached ear-splitting levels by 10:30 a.m. the day before free day.

Anyway...

We spent more than two hours prowling through the museum halls, enjoying the sound of our happy voices echoing back to us. Why whisper when no one can hear you, anyway, right?

The docents seemed to appreciate talking with folks who were more than willing to listen attentively and question earnestly.

It was a good day.

Of all of the pictures we took that day, I fancy the one above most. Doesn't this Civil War hardtack remind you of lembas?

Now, M-mv is not a recipe exchange, but perhaps you and your resident historians and/or LOTR fans would like to make some hardtack/lembas today.

Hardtack/lembas

2 cups of flour
1/2 to 3/4 cup of water
1 tablespoon of Crisco or vegetable fat
6 pinches of salt

Mix the ingredients into a stiff batter. Knead several times. Spread the dough to a thickness of 1/2-inch on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake for thirty minutes at 400 degrees. Remove from oven. Cut into three-inch squares and punch four holes per row into the dough. Turn the dough over and bake for thirty more minutes. Turn the over off and leave the oven door closed. Leave the hardtack (Lembas) in the oven until cool.

Let's go fly kite!

Let's go fly a kite
Up to the highest height
Let's go fly a kite
And send it soaring
Up through the atmosphere
Up where the air is clear
Oh, let's go fly a kite!

When you treat life like a to-do list, there's never any wind when you reach "Fly a kite."

Simplicity

Big old tree with sturdy branches.

Rope woven at the Trail of History program last fall.

Small log from out front.

Board from the basement.

Two young girls who still hold hands when they cross the street.

Sweet, simple fun.

The recommended daily allowance

Sylvester and the Magic Pebble (William Steig) -- a Family M-mv favorite.

When they had eventually calmed down a bit, and had gotten home, Mr. Duncan put the magic pebble in an iron safe. Some day they might wish to use it, but really, for now, what more could they wish for? They had all they wanted.

Steig won the Caldecott Medal for this book in 1970. It was the first of his many (and well-deserved) Newbery and Caldecott honors.

Here's a bit o' advice.

Think your own durned thoughts, okay?

Sheesh.

Imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery.

They lied.

Imitation is simply the lack of original thought.

And it's irksome beyond measure.

Enough said.

The social lives of autodidacts

"So, can you spell everything you say?"

Long pause while I focus on nothing in the middle distance above the speaker's left ear.

"Ayup."

Now we have pink!

To infinity and beyond!

From "Probes to moon, Mars called priority" (CNN, today):

"That is why this is important," he said. "It's about where human beings go and what they do when they get there and what that means to the future of the human race."

From the incomparable R.T.

Your situation isn't dire, of course, but I was really impressed with the perspective taken in a book titled, The Alchemy of Illness, by Kat Duff, back when I was experiencing thyroid problems. A friend who has MS recommended it. You may find it interesting, although the writer talks more of chronic illness, rather than injury.

In a nutshell, we are a culture of people poorly adapted to illness or physical setback. We do not know how to be sick. We only know how to "fight" it -- with meds, with attitude, with therapy, with continually striving at all costs, even sometimes to our detriment. We do not allow ourselves just to be sick. And from that, derive the powerful and unique learning inherent in our new circumstance.

Allowing ourselves to be sick doesn't mean "giving up," it means accepting, for whatever period of time that entails, and with that acceptance finding a new way of looking at ourselves, our relationships, our world. We can really grow from this, and if nothing else, we can simply just "be" -- restful, contemplative, serene -- all those things that I, for one, don't come to very easily in my day to day living.

I think the very old, at least those who are somewhat successful at being old, have figured this out. By force, obviously, because for them, there is no silver lining to the cloud of getting progressively older and less able. Us "youngsters" look a the elderly and ask, "Have you just given up?" But in reality, I think many have found a way of being that works for the circumstances in which they find themselves. We should respectfully ask for their wisdom, and try to gain more understanding from it. Instead, our culture mostly ignores or puzzles over their behavior. Ignoring their ill health or their seeming retreat toward death means denying the eventuality of our own.

R.T.'s note recalled to me Laura Hillenbrand's essay, "A Sudden Illness," which is collected in The Best American Essays 2004.

We remember you.

This is our first complete year at the little house in the tiny woods on the prairie. Each spring morning, we awaken to the gentle prodding of the ghost of the original owner. "Come! Come! See what grows in my gardens!" Her vision of spring renewal has been unfolding in gentle waves since the galanthus first poked their heads through the winter-tough soil on a warm day in early March.

So, sometimes still rubbing sleep from our eyes, we tour the yards, wondering what new surprises await us.

I don't know what else this woman did in her life or if any children, family, or friends are still living and remember her.

We do, though.

We who never knew her.

We remember her.

Every morning. Cups of coffee in hand.

We remember you, patient gardener.

"I'm Hans Christian Andersen!"

From "Great Dane" (Harold Bloom's April 20, 2005, piece at the WSJ):

Many Americans still read Andersen's tales, whether as children or to their children, but tend to confound him with the amiable dreamer played by Danny Kaye in a not very adequate film biography. The actual [Hans Christian] Andersen composed an extraordinary range of stories, as much addressed to older readers as to children.

"Not very adequate"? Well, we like it. Anyway.

Later:

I myself see no distinction between children's literature and good or great writing for extremely intelligent children of all ages. J.K. Rowling and Stephen King are equally bad writers, appropriate titans of our new Dark Age of the Screens: computer, motion pictures, TV. One goes on urging children of all ages to read and reread Andersen and Dickens, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, rather than Ms. Rowling and Mr. King. Sometimes when I say that in public I am asked: Is it not better to read Ms. Rowling and Mr. King, and then go on to Andersen, Dickens, Carroll and Lear? The answer is pragmatic: Our time here is limited. You necessarily read and reread at the expense of other books. [Emphasis added.]

Heh, heh, heh.

Found this related article at Arts & Letters late last night.


The recommended daily allowance

The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories (Anchor Folktale Library)



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