The Bechdel Test

Don't ask me why but the Wichita bureau thinks I need to know about the Bechdel test.  I quote Wiki

The Bechdel test (/ˈbɛkdəl/ bek-dəl) asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. Many contemporary works fail this test of gender bias. 

The test is named after the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel. In 1985, she had a character in her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For voice the idea, which she attributed to a friend, Liz Wallace. The test was originally conceived for evaluating films, but has since been applied to other media. It is also known as theBechdel/Wallace test,^[1] the Bechdel rule,^[2] Bechdel's law,^[3] or the Mo Movie Measure.^[4]

Well he's right, and it's new to me, but I want to plug it into a larger matrix about women-talking-about-men-talking-about women and suchlike.  Example: so far as I recall, in Jane Austen, we never see a man outside the company of women.  For all the evidence, they may not even exist except when they show up to cause trouble or solve life's problems among the ladies.   Side note: FWIW, I like Sex and the City, too, even though on the Bechdel standard, that show seems to be a crashing failure.

But re Jane Austen--this is not a complaint.  I'm a huge Jane Austen fan and I suspect one reason she is so good is that she is careful not to write about what she doesn't know.  But it does move you on to the larger question: can men tell the truth about women? Can women tell the truth about men?  Or can they at best (as in Bechdel/Wallace) do no better than to tell the truth about what women think they know about men.

Can any male author tell the truth about women?  Well now I wouldn't know, would I? I'm tempted to say "Henry James," but the nearest I can come to evaluating him is to consider what women think of Henry James--and I suppose his rep in that quarter is pretty high.  I was about to say "James Joyce, channeling Molly Bloom"--but is Molly's voice that of a woman, or just a man trying to ventriloquize a woman?

Of course it cuts both ways.  Virginia Woolf doesn't have much to say about men but most of what she does say is laughable.   So also the Brontes (does anybody see either Heathcliff or Rochester as anything other than a girlish fantasy?).  Among serious novelists, perhaps the most interesting would be George Eliot: she does write a lot about men and a lot of it strikes me as shrewd and/or savagely funny. But here too, you have to wonder: are you getting a man's story, or merely the work of an (uncommonly insightful) woman on the outside looking in?

Update:  Oh, now I get it.  Sweden. Sure, should have seen that coming. Will they also movies on whether or not anything the ladies say about the men is true?

Beckett? No, But...

This almost sounds like Beckett, except perhaps too florid:

No, I have not the strength to bear this any longer. God, the things they are doing to me! They poor cold water upon my head! They do not heed me, nor see me, nor listen to me. What have I done to them? Why do they torture me? What do they want of poor me? What can I give them? I have Washington. My strength is gone, I cannot endure all this torture. My head is aflame, and everything spins before my eyes. Save me, someone! Take me away! Give me three steeds, steeds as fast as the whirling wind! Seat yourself, driver, ring out, little harness bell, wing your way up, steeds, and rush me out of this world. On and on, so that nothing be seen of it, nothing. Yonder the sky wheels its clouds, a tiny star glitters afar, a forest sweeps by with its dark trees, and the moon comes in its wake; a silvergay mist swims below; a musical string twangs in the mist; there is the sea on one hand, there is Italy on the other; and now Russian peasant huts can be discerned. Is that my hope looming blue in the distance? Is that my mother sitting there at her window? Mother dear, save your poor son! Shed a tear upon his aching head. See, how they torture him. Press the poor orphan to your heart. There is no place for him in the whole wide world! He is a hunted creature. Mother dear, take pity on your sick little child. . . . And by the way, gentlemen, do you know that the Bey of Algiers has a round lump growing right under his nose?

Gogol, Diary of a Madman; the frontispiece to Vladimir Nabokov's extraordinary study of Gogol, published by New Directions Books (1944).

Perspective

 Here's Isaiah Berlin as we like to remember him:

It is difficult enough to develop an adequate consciousness of what we are and what we are at, and how we have arrived where we have done, without also being led on to make clear to ourselves what such consciousness and self-consciousness must have been like for persons in situations different form our own; yet no less is expected of the true historian. ... [I]maginative projection of ourselves  into the past, the attempt to capture concepts and categories not altogether like ours by means of concepts and categories that cannot but be our own, is a task that we can never be sure that we are even beginning to achieve, yet are not permitted to abjure.  We seek to apply scientific tests to our conclusions, but this will take us but a lttle way.  Without a capacity for sympathy and imagination beyond any required by a physicist, there is no vision of either past or present, neither of others nor of ourselves; but without this, normal--as well as historical--thinking cannot function at all.

--"The Concept of Scientific History," I History and Theory 1 (1961) at 26-7.  So my old notes from perhaps 37 years ago.  I don't have that book any more (I think maybe I read it in the library at the London School of Economics).  But I do see tht the same essay is bound up in a paperback appropriately enough titled Concepts and Categories, published in 1980.

I'm remembering Piaget (yes?--I can't find the reference) testing kids on the developing political consciousness by inquiring whether they could recognize "the same" mountain when photographed from different angles, i.e., from different points of view.  And those (can't find a good cite) who talk about the development of perspective in Renaissance art as part and parcel of a growing political maturity (but they still burned Savonarola at the stake).

I copied out the  Berlin quote about 30 years ago. I bet it was about the same time that I copied out two passages from Arnold Hauser's Social History of Art.  First:

When Ibsen was once asked why he gave the heroine of his Doll's House such a foreign-sounding name, he answered that she was named after her grandmother who was Italian.   Her real name was Eleonora, but she had been pampered as a child and called Nora.  to the objection that all this played no part in the play itself, he replied in amazement: 'But facts are still facts.'

--Id., 52.  And:

There is an extraordinary number of anecdotes about Balzac's relationship to his characters, similar to the one about Ibsen. The best known is the incident with Jules Sandeaux who, while telling him about his sister's illness, was interrupted by Balzac saying: 'That's all very well, but let's get back to reality: to whom are we going to marry Eugenie Grandet?

 Id., 53.   This is perhaps the attitude that the Shakespearean critic L.C. Knight mocked (and substantially undermined) with his essay ""How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?"--a question which, bye the  bye, the author made no attempt to answer.

Yes, and I Read the Stuff, Don't I?

This morning's e-mail from the London Review of Books offers three teasers from the forthcoming issue:

• The Strange Career of Robert Oppenheimer


• Nancy Astor


• Larkin v. Amis

I mean c'mon now. Is it possible to think of any topics more overdone and squeezed dry. [Why, yes it is--how about something nice about the Bloomsbury Group, or Henry James?--ed.]

Old Man Yells at Kids To Get Them the Hell Out of His Yard

And who could do it better than Joseph Epstein?

When asked what he thought about the cultural wars, Irving Kristol is said to have replied, “They’re over,” adding, “We lost.” If Kristol was correct, one of the decisive battles in that war may have been over the liberal arts in education, which we also lost. ... 

For many years, the liberal arts were my second religion. I worshipped their content, I believed in their significance, I fought for them against the philistines of our age as Samson fought against the Philistines of his—though in my case, I kept my hair and brought down no pillars. 

As currently practiced, however, it is becoming more and more difficult to defend the liberal arts. Their content has been drastically changed, their significance is in doubt, and defending them in the condition in which they linger on scarcely seems worth the struggle. ... At the University of Chicago I read many books, none of them trivial, for the school in those years did not allow the work of second- or third-rate writers into its curriculum. Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Jack Kerouac, Adrienne Rich, or their equivalents of that day, did not come close to making the cut. No textbooks were used. You didn’t read “Karl Marx postulated .  .  .”; you read Karl-bloody-Marx. The working assumption was that one’s time in college is limited, and mustn’t be spent on anything other than the first-rate, or on learning acquired (as with textbooks) at a second remove. 

Nor did Chicago offer any “soft” majors or “lite” courses. I remember, in my final year, looking for such a course to fill out a crowded schedule, and choosing one called History of Greek Philosophy. How difficult, I thought, could this be? Learn a few concepts of the pre-Socratics (Thales believed this, Heraclitus that), acquire a few dates, and that would be that. On the first day of class, the teacher, a trim little man named Warner Arms Wick, announced that there was no substantial history of Greek philosophy, so we shall instead be spending the quarter reading Aristotle and Plato exclusively. ... 

Had I not gone to the University of Chicago, I have often wondered, what might my life be like? I suspect I would be wealthier. But reading the books I did, and have continued to throughout my life, has made it all but impossible to concentrate on moneymaking in the way that is required to acquire significant wealth. Without the experience of the University of Chicago, perhaps I would have been less critical of the world’s institutions and the people who run them; I might even have been among those who do run them. I might, who knows, have been happier, if only because less introspective—nobody said the examined life is a lot of laughs—without the changes wrought in me by my years at the University of Chicago. Yet I would not trade in those three strange years for anything.

Go read it all here.  On that nature and practice of reading (and much else), Epstein would surely find shared sympathy with Patrick Kurp.

The Imagined Life

I wrote the other day about the difference between Shakespeare as presented and Shakespeare as imagined.  Here's a particularly forceful expression of the point:

How many a woman who sees or reads As You Like It either believes in secret that she does resemble Rosalind or wishes that she did! And how many a man projects on its heroine the image of the woman he loves best, or, if not, the memory of some lost first love who still embodies the purest instincts of his youth, and hears her voice instead of the words on the printed page! Which is why the imaginative man will always prefer to read the play rather than to have some obliterating actress come between the text and his heart. ... In her own way, and on a lower level, Rosalind contributes her mite to our understanding of why Dante chose the Rose as a symbol of the ultimate paradise.

--Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare I 292-3 (1951)

Goddard may be offering nothing more than a special case of a more general point.  Consider: 

Chaque homme porte en lui un monde composé de tout ce qu’il a vu et aimé, et où il rentre sans cesse, alors même qu’il parcourt et semble habiter un monde étranger.

Every man carries within him a world which is composed of all that he has seen and loved, and to which he constantly returns,even when he is travelling through, and seems to be living in, some different world.

From Chateaubriand, Voyages en Italie, entry dated December 11th. It's from his entry for his outing to Tivoli outside Rome.  In the 21st century, Tivoli is still a tourist spot, though you have to change busses to get there so you wind up with mostly Italians. I ran across the observation in the first chapter of Claude Lévi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques.  I see in my battered paperback that I underlined it (I think in 1979).  I tend to think Chateaubriand is right, although I suspect I have believed it moreso since I read it than I did before.

Lévi-Strauss quotes Chateaubriand in a long meditation,  puzzling over the construction of his own vision of the world. Here's a taste:

Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield up their treasures untarnished. A proliferating and overexcited civilization has broken the silence of the seas once and for all. The perfumes of the tropics and the pristine freshness of human beings have been corrupted by a busyness with dubious implications, which mortifies our desires and dooms us to acquire only contaminated memories.

As I write, I'm remembering what might be the flip side:  a passage from (Walker Percy?) where he says we can never see the Grand Canyon neat because on our first trip we will have already seen a post card of the Grand Canyon and will be measuring our reality against the post card.  And there's this:

I once knew a man from Khartoum
Who kept a live sheep in his room.

"It reminds me," he said,
"Of a lover long dead,

But I never can quite recall whom."

Saddest poem in the English language. 

Stendhal and the Civil Code

Following up on that last post, I'm remembering that Stendhal once told Balzac that he warmed up for novelizing by reading the French Civil Code.  Cute, but I think it has to be a joke: Stendhal is, after all, a compulsive trickster with a taste for the obscure and the faux pedantic: if this (if in little else) a bit like Joyce.  


The odd thing is--literary scholars appear to take him at face value and to consider the deeper meaning of the comparison.  One thinks that perhaps they need to lighten up.


Afterthought: I seem to have thought this thought before.

Things Susan Sontag did not Approve of

What demon impels me to read stuff about Susan Sontag?

Here are a few of the things Sontag did not approve of: writer's colonies, the countryside ... Hawaii, carrying a purse, squeamishness, baby talk, women with menstrual complaints, feminists who complained about being underrepresented in the arts, wives, couples, other people's depression, other people's parenting, tears, American education, and American culture in general.

--Cathleen Schine, "A Different Susan," New York Review of Books, July 14, 2011.

[Though what is "different" remains undisclosed.] 

Wain and Macaulay on the Scribbler's Life

Following up on my last (18th Century lit) post, I'm reflecting on that stuff about Samuel Johnson's unobtrusive generosity.  I think I drew that insight from John Wain's biography of Johnson, together with his even more elegant little autobiography of Johnson--a selection of Johnson;'s own writings on himself, which Wain published via Everyman in 1976,  Together the Wain books are a marvelous exemplar of an indispensable genre: the "shock of recognition" book where one write responds to another writer.  The best comparison I can think of is Peter Levi's fine little biography Shakespeare.  You  might think that no one could add anything to the Johnson story after Boswell, just as you might think that no one could add anything to the Shakespeare story after a torrent of predecessors.  In each case, you'd be wrong: Wain, like Levi, achieves a connection with his subject quite beyond the reach of any ordinary scribbler.

I find only one reference to Smart in the index of the Wain biography but it is a story worth repeating.  Per Wain, one "Gardner" a "bookseller"

 signed up two authors, Rolt and Christopher Smart, to produce a monthly miscellany.  This was to cost sixpence and they were to have a third of thre profits between them.  It sounded good until one gets to the small print; neither man was to write anything else during the period of the contract, and it was to last ninety-nine years.  Small wonder tht the lurid miseries of this period provided Macaulay with the material for one of the liveliest pages in his Essays.

[All that is squalid and miserable might now be summed up in the word Poet. ...  Even the poorest pitied him; and they well might pity him.  For if their condition was equally abject, their aspirings were not equally high, nor their sense of insult equally acute.  To lodge in a garret up four pairs of stairs, to dine in a cellar among footmen out of a place, to translate ten hours a day for the wages of a ditcher, to be hunted by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary and pestilence to another, from Grub Street to St George's Fields, and from St George's Fields to the alleys behind St Martin's church, to sleep on a bulk in June, and amidst the ashes of a glasshouse in December, to die in an hospital and to be buried in a parish vault, was the fate of more than one writer who, if he had lived thirty years earlier, would have been admitted to the sittings of the Kitcat or the Scriblerus Club, would have sat in Parliament, and would have been entrusted with embassies to the High Allies; who, if he had lived in our time, would have found encouragement scarcely less munificent in Albermarle Street or in Paternoster Row.

Tough life.  Give that man a MacArthur Grant.   

Larry Commends me to Kit Smart (and his Cat, Jeoffry)

Well, fancy that.   Larry writes:

I remember that you're fond of Kit Smart, and thought you'd like this from G.Keillor's blog: link.

He's absolutely right.  I was a fan of Christopher (Kit, Kitty) Smart, author of the inimitable Jubilate Agno, including (amid all its religious intensity), the greatest poem about cats ever written. I guess you would say I remain a fan of Smart's work, although I haven't given him a lot of thought for much of these past 54 years.   Still, the memory is vivid: it was the winter of 56-57 and my life was more or less falling apart.  I won't trouble with the details except to say my troubles were pretty much entirely of my own doing--and to rub salt in the wounds, I pretty much recognized that bitter fact.

One thing that kept me going was that in the same winter, I discovered 18th-Century English letters.  Well: "discovered" is too strong a word: I was introduced to the 18^th Century by Basil Pillard, teaching English at Antioch College.  Our class met, I think, just once a week.  Between times, we kept journals.  In class and out, we encountered Boswell (the London Journal); Fielding (Joseph Andrews); Richardson (Pamela); and of course, the great man himself--Samuel Johnson, through Boswell's Life.

Everything about this new vista was a revelation for me.  I thought I knew a bit about culture--I certainly had pretensions along that line.  But for me "culture" meant the great moderns (Joyce, Woolf, that sort of thing) or the Victorians, whom in truth I did not really fancy (still don't, really).  Nothing prepared me for the grit, the intensity, the bitter realism and the raw energy of the 18th Century.  I was dazzled and I must say also animated: here was stuff you could actually engage with,  not just in pretense.

I dropped out of college  before the end of that winter so I don't really know what exactly I missed--more Johnson I think, perhaps Tobias Smollett, whom I then thought of as an "English novelist," not foreseeing that he would be recast in our time as a "Scottish novelist."  But Pillard, among his many other gifts, provided the one thing that I suspect a good humanities teacher always hopes for: he jump-started the engine. He gave me a taste for the 18^th Century that has never left me. [Via the journal, he gave me something else as well: I can remember perching on the edge of the ratty couch in my ratty student apartment, pounding out journal entries and telling myself—hey, I am th... th... I must be thinking. An almost entirely unfamiliar experience for me at the time, I say with all earnestness].

Smart came to me sideways through Johnson. I did enjoy Smart in his own right: I've never thought of myself as a particularly religious person (nor a cat-lover either, come to that), but then as now I was arrested by the focus and clarity and individuality of Smart's own engagement. Still, as much as by Smart himself, I was taken by Johnson's response to Smart. Johnson is known for truculence and such a reputation is not entirely undeserved. But less obviously, he was a man of abundant compassion, particularly for those who didn't show much knack for helping themselves. “Less obviously,” has at least a double meaning here: one of the most attractive aspects of Johnson's charitable attitude is that he never made a big deal of it. Sometimes the most elevated of stylists, he could easily dismiss his own kindness and tolerance with a one-liner. As ever, Boswell captures the moment:

Concerning this unfortunate poet, Christopher Smart, who was confined in a mad-house, he had, at another time, the following conversation with Dr. Burney. — BURNEY. "How does poor Smart do, Sir; is he likely to recover?" JOHNSON. "It seems as if his mind had ceased to struggle with the disease; for he grows fat upon it." BURNEY. "Perhaps, Sir, that may be from want of exercise." JOHNSON. "No, Sir; he has partly as much exercise as he used to have, for he digs in the garden. Indeed, before his confinement, he used for exercise to walk to the alehouse; but he was carried back again. I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else. Another charge was, that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it."

"I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else”--I'm not at all sure I know why but I still find that one of the most touching insights in the English language. The whole experience can come back to me in a moment. I'd thank Pillard if I could but he died years ago. I am profoundly grateful to Larry, and I respond by commending this selection of smart as offered by PoemHunter.Com. For a largish expert from “I Will Consider My Cat, Jeoffry,” go here.   

What is it with the French?

Something I just noticed in reading about Flaubert: he seems to share a great kinship with Proust in that both were the cosseted hothouse offspring of highly respectable physicians.  Gide and Sartre too--not the children of physicians but from the same kind of solidly respectable upper middle class (with a sauce of academic achievement).  I tried to fit Stendhal and Balzac onto this same Procrustean bed, without success though I do note this curiosity about Stendhal and Flaubert: they seem to share a closely similar hostility to the conventional middle class.  Yet Flaubert, though he admired Balzac, had no use for Stendhal (he seems not to have understood him).

Am I right in my recollection that French kids stay home longer, leave home later, than any others in Europe?

Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa!

Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit.

--James Joyce, Ulysses Chapter 14, "The Oxen of the Sun."

Happy Bloomsday.

Tim Park on the Globalization of Literature

Mark Thoma posted this on his blog for economists but it is too good to be left to them:

Not all writers share the same sense of whom they are writing for. Many may not even think they are directing their work at any audience in particular. All the same, there are clearly periods of history when, across the board, authors’ perceptions of who their readers are change, something that inevitably leads to a change in the kind of text they produce. The most obvious example is the period that stretches from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century when writers all over Europe abandoned Latin for the vernacular. Instead of introducing their work, as before, into an international arena presided over by a largely clerical elite, they “descended” to local and national languages to address themselves to an emerging middle class.

In the history books this shift to the vernacular tends to be presented as a democratic inspiration that allowed a wealth of local vitality into the written text and brought new confidence to the rapidly consolidating national languages. That said, it was probably driven as much by ambition and economic interest as by idealism. There came a point when it no longer made sense to write in Latin because the arbiters of taste were now a national rather than international grouping. Today we are at the beginning of a revolution of even greater import that is taking us in a quite different direction.

As a result of rapidly accelerating globalization we are moving toward a world market for literature. There is a growing sense that for an author to be considered “great,” he or she must be an international rather than a national phenomenon. This change is not perhaps as immediately evident in the US as it is in Europe, thanks to the size and power of the US market and the fact that English is generally perceived as the language of globalization, so that many more translations go toward it than away from it. However, more and more European, African, Asian and South American authors see themselves as having “failed” if they do not reach an international audience.

In recent months authors in Germany, France and Italy—all countries with large and well-established national readerships—have expressed to me their disappointment at not having found an English language publisher for their works; interestingly, they complain that this failure reflects back on their prestige in their home country: if people don’t want you elsewhere you can’t be that good. Certainly, in Italy where I live, an author is only thought to have arrived when he is published in New York. To appreciate how much things have changed one only need reflect how little it would have dented the reputations of Zola or Verga had they not achieved immediate publication in London.

This development has been hugely accelerated by electronic text transmission. Today, no sooner is a novel or even an opening chapter complete, than it can be submitted to scores of publishers all over the world. It is not unusual for foreign rights to be sold before the work has a local publisher. An astute agent can then orchestrate the simultaneous launch of a work in many different countries using promotional strategies that we normally associate with multinational corporations. Thus a reader picking up a copy of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, or the latest Harry Potter, or indeed a work by Umberto Eco, or Haruki Murakami, or Ian McEwan, does so in the knowledge that this same work is being read now, all over the world. Buying the book, a reader becomes part of an international community. This perception adds to the book’s attraction.

The proliferation of international literary prizes has guaranteed that the phenomenon is not restricted to the more popular sector of the market. Despite its questionable selection procedures and often bizarre choices, the Nobel is seen as more important than any national prize. The Impac in Ireland, Mondello in Italy, International Literature Award in Germany are rapidly growing in prestige. Thus the arbiters of taste are no longer one’s own compatriots—they are less easily knowable, not a group the author himself is part of.

What are the consequences for literature? From the moment an author perceives his ultimate audience as international rather than national, the nature of his writing is bound to change. In particular one notes a tendency to remove obstacles to international comprehension. Writing in the 1960’s, intensely engaged with his own culture and its complex politics, Hugo Claus apparently did not care that his novels would require a special effort on the reader’s and above all the translator’s part if they were to be understood outside his native Belgium. In sharp contrast, contemporary authors like the Norwegian Per Petterson, the Dutch Gerhard Baaker, or the Italian Alessandro Baricco, offer us works that require no such knowledge or effort, nor offer the rewards that such effort will bring.

More importantly the language is kept simple. Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of the importance of avoiding word play and allusion to make things easy for the translator. Scandinavian writers I know tell me they avoid character names that would be difficult for an English reader.

If culture-specific clutter and linguistic virtuosity have become impediments, other strategies are seen positively: the deployment of highly visible tropes immediately recognizable as “literary” and “imaginative,” analogous to the wearisome lingua franca of special effects in contemporary cinema, and the foregrounding of a political sensibility that places the author among those “working for world peace.” So the overstated fantasy devices of a Rushdie or a Pamuk always go hand in hand with a certain liberal position since, as Borges once remarked, most people have so little aesthetic sense they rely on other criteria to judge the works they read.

What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives. In the global literary market there will be no place for any Barbara Pyms and Natalia Ginzburgs. Shakespeare would have eased off the puns. A new Jane Austen can forget the Nobel.

That's Tim Park in the blog of the New York Review of Books. A commentator complains that not that-all much gets published in English anyway, but I think this misses the point. If only one in a hundred Italian novels makes it to Manhattan, that's all the more reason why the one will enjoy a special kind of prestige.

Sitzfleisch and the Novel

My new fave grumpy old man has a delightful rant up about the crimes and follies of the AP English exam. I admit I can't claim actually to have read either Rutherford's London or Follett's Pillars of the Earth, so I cannot responsibly pretend to confirm that they are in fact tedious potboilers. I admit that I've actually enjoyed a bit of Follett here and there though it never occurred to me to class it as high art. And while I haven't actually read Rutherford, the people who lug around copies of Rutherford often strike me as tedious potboilers themselves.

So I suspect that he is onto something. But as I sugget in his comment section, I think he may be overlooking an important instrumental necessity here: the purpose of the AP English exam is to feed the maw of the great beast--perhaps in particular, to get them ready for law school (those med school bound are doing AP biology, I hope). And as I must have said before: brilliance, or acuity, or insight, are not at the top of the list of qualities that you want to cultivate in a prospective law student--or even a prospective lawyer. Far more important is sitzfleisch--the capacity to prop up that $140 casebook under the gooseneck lamp and pull out your yellow marker and undertake hours and hours of parsing For training in sitzfleisch, I suspect that Rutherford and Follett would stand fairly high on the list.

Added note: I do think he is a bit hard on Child's Christmas in Wales, though. Another instance of a perfectly good artifact spoiled by an English teacher.

How Not To Get Turned Off From the Classics

In the Sunday's NYT Book Review, Joe Queenan offers some good-natured insights on compulsory summer reading lists (link). You'd almost call it wry, except that Joe Queenan is never wry; its a Queenanesque rant on the evils of such an imposition, together with a grudging acknowledgment that this kind of mandate probably leads the young to Better Things.

As it happens, in adulthood I have read quite a few of the Victorian doorstop novels, and I think I know why. The reason is that I didn't read much of anything when I was young. I've never read To Kill a Mockingbird or Catcher in the Rye, but I'm really too old to have met them in high school anyway. Thing is, I never read Story of a Bad Boy (link) or Penrod and Sam (link) either, despite my mother's suave efforts at inducement. When Mr. Boland in the 11th Grade assigned Tale of Two Cities, I simply didn't bother. I don't know quite how I got round it, but I was a pretty good con artist in those days (I even made a bit of money ghosting book reviews for others, sometimes of books I hadn't read myself). In any event, I never accrued the warm puddle of animosity that keeps so many people off the big books until well into adulthood, perhaps forever.

What happened instead was there came a time when guilt and curiosity began to catch up with me, together with an uneasy intution that I was really, really ignorant. So I started throwing my head against the cultural brick wall. It's been nearly 50 years now and as I say, I've been able to chalk up a good deal of material. And never once have I had to say: gee, this is more interesting than I ever suspected in high school.

There are gaps. Still haven't read Our Mutual Friend, hope to get to it in the next year or so. Probably will have to knock off The Ambassadors, at least to curry favor with Mrs. Buce. Assuming I have the time, I suppose I will get to Proust's Captive, though it doesn't appeal to me. I've pretty much given up on Finnegans Wake. I suspect I never will get to Clarissa.

Oh, and for whatever it is worth, I never have finished Tale of Two Cities.