Morning Read
¶ Today’s Decameron story (III, ix), about Gillette de Narbonne and Bertrand de Roussillon, is an original — although not the original, which is in Sanskrit — of the plot of My Geisha, the bittersweet Shirley MacLaine comedy of 1962, with Yves Montand….¶ O wearying Book Five of the Aeneid! Today’s reading: the boxing match between Dares and Entellus, which would be bad enough; but then Aeneas interrupts the fight, apparently because Entellus, enraged by having fallen into his own missed “roundhouse right,” pummels Dares too gruesomely. An odd reason to break off a boxing match! I am only now old enough to tolerate the tedium of these stretches….¶ “Shells” and “Room” from A Dream of Mind: for me, very nearly impenetrable. Of all the Williams that I have read, these dream poems are the only ones not to engage me at all. Nice turn of phrase, though: “A dubious plasma”….¶ Clive James on Sir Lewis Namier (like Conrad, a Pole):
The war having been decided by the New World’s gargantuan production efforts, the United States should logically have become the centre of the Western mind as well as of its muscle. Men such as Namier ensured that the Old World would still have a say. With their help, it was English English, and not American English, that continued to be the appropriate medium for the summation and analysis of complex historical experience.
Still quite true; we have learned to speak better English in America….¶ Wonderful letter from Decca, written from Yale, where she was teaching a course in journalism, in the spring of 1976.
Am loving the students. The first few days were pure torture as I had to choose 18 students (max size of class) out of 200 applicants, goodness it was difficult. They’d all had to write on a card why they wanted to take the course. Mostly I rather followed instructions of higher-ups (deans etc) & chose illustrious-sounding people with Rhodes Scholarships. But one boy aged 17 wrote on his card “I believe I have the qualifications for a journalist as I am tall enough to look over walls & thin enough to hide behind trees,” so I could see I would worship him, & let him in. A girl wrote “There comes a time in every person’s life when he or she must burst into some new form of action.” She’s an athlete, so I let her in mainly because I long to see her burst into some new form of action.
Evidently, however, Decca’s policy of letting in the illustrious was not a complete success. (Do see Decca, two letters of January 1976 to her husband. Wonder who the snotty newspaper heir might have been!)….¶ Chapter XXII of Le rouge et le noir too long for one sitting. Without Mme de Rênal on hand, the novel is tough going….¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Mary Jo Foley, of All About Microsoft. Why am I reading this business book? To know the territory? Arguable but dubious plasma. More to the point: why did McNally Robinson stack it among all the legitimate general-interest nonfiction titles at the front of the shop?