Morning Read
Today, I bid an inconclusive farewell to Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle. I also contemplate reading the rest of Blogging Heroes in one go, and being done with the blasted thing.
As for the Decameron, I find myself wondering how this book might be taught. Reading a story a day seems just right, and I expect that it was only the very odd medieval reader who went through it any faster. Most people, like the companions in the Decameron itself, heard the stories, at least until the printing presses got going. Here’s what I’d do if I were teaching the book: I’d have students read it over the summer! Starting in tenth grade.
Now, there’s a thought. Anyone who was exposed to Boccaccio in high school, raise your hand. I didn’t think so. The one classic that would appeal to adolescent audiences, scrupulously kept from them. What waters of Lethe do teachers drink, anyway?
¶ The Fifth Day of the Decameron is stuffed with what seem like bits and pieces of famous comedies and opere buffe. In V, v, a girl who goes almost unnamed is wooed by rival suitors, each of whom has suborned a servant in her guardian’s household. In what feels like a very funny scene from Goldoni or Cimarosa, the guardian goes out for dinner, leaving the butler and the maid each impatiently waiting for the other to go to bed, so that the respective lover may be admitted to the house. But the exquisitely-worked nonsense of rococo theatre lies centuries away. For Boccaccio, comic resolution lies in the fact that the girl happens to be all but a blood relative of one of the suitors, which clears the way for the other to marry her. Connoisseurs of melodrama will appreciate the cross-shaped birthmark just above the girl’s left ear, but noses will be wrinkled at the rather unsentimental recognition scene.
On hearing this the girl, having taken account of his age and the fact that his words rang true, was prompted by some mysterious impulse to relax in his arms and tenderly mingle her tears with his.
“Some mysterious impulse”? The man’s her father! In more romantic hands, there would be nothing mysterious about it.
¶ Just when I was wondering, what with King Latinus all set to welcome the Trojans, where Virgil was going to find the material for six more books of the Aeneid, good old Juno makes one of her fell appearances, stamping her foot like a Five Towns matron.
               “Why, Mars had the force
to destroy the giant Lapith race! And Father Jove
in person gave old Calydon up to Diana’s rage,
and for what foul crimes did Calydon and the Lapiths
merit so much pain? Oh but I, powerful Juno,
wife of Jove, wretched Juno, I endured it all,
Left nothing undared, I stooped to any tactic,
still he defeats me — Aeneas!
In short, watch out for Alecto.
¶ Adieu to District and Circle — with a mental note to pay attention whenever the Tollund Man is mentioned. Heaney’s second poem on the subject, “Tollund Man in Springtime” — longer than the first; a sequence of six sonnets — resisted all attempts at comprehension. The power of the verse remains clear, however, as does its preoccupation with muck:
Cattle out in rain, their knowledgeable
Solid standing and readiness to wait,
These I learned from. My study was the wet,
My head as washy as a head of kale,
Shedding water like the flanks and tail
Of every dumb beast sunk above the cloot
In trampled gaps, bringing their heavyweight
Silence to bear on nosed-at sludge and puddle.
My suburban childhood and urban adulthood fairly doom me to ignorance of “as washy as a head of kale.”
¶ In Le rouge et le noir, Julien meets the Marquis de La Mole and is sent off to buy some new clothes. He disappoints, however, by spelling cela with two ‘l’s. Translator Roger Gard falls into the trap, and has the marquis tell his neighbor at dinner that Julien “writes ‘that’ with two t’s.”
¶ Clive James on Jean-Paul Sartre! Sulphurous!
Radiating contempt for its bourgeois liberal conformity, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) looms in the corner of this book like a genius with the evil eye. For the book’s author, Sartre is a devil’s advocate to be despised more than the devil, because the advocate was smarter.
The basic idea is that Sartre’s philosophy was necessarily “flapdoodle” because it was obliged to cloak Sartre’s duplicity.
But [Sartre] never made a beginning on the question of how the writers and intellectuals who continued with their careers during the Occupation could do so only at the cost — precisely calculated by the Propaganda Abteilung — of tacitly conniving at Nazi policies, all of which radiated from one central policy, which was the extermination of the Jews. No moral issue was ever more inescapably real; even the cost of ignoring it was directly measurable in lost lives; there could be no philosophical discussion of any subject on which that subject did not intrude. If Sartre wanted to avoid examining his own behaviour — and clearly he did — he would need to develop a manner of writing philosophy in which he could sound as if he was talking about everything while saying nothing.
My favorite phrase comes a bit earlier.
Finally it took a pair of scientists, writing in French but with a thorough background in American scepticism [Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont], to produce the book that blew the whistle on Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard and the other artistes in the flouncing kick-line of the post-modern intellectual cabaret.
Fun, what?
¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion. And what do I find at Micro Persuasion? That Wiley & Sons, publisher of Blogging Heroes, has a new book coming out, with a matching dust jacket: Online Marketing Heroes. Pass! Today’s Point to Review:
With competition among news bloggers being so strong, and bloggers finding every available subject, the best option for new bloggers is to find a niche.
And make like an urn.