Girl Detective

In Hamlet, Polonius is the father of Laertes and Ophelia. Before Laertes departs Denmark for France, Polonius sends him off thus:

…There, my blessing with thee.
And these few precepts in thy memory
Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion’d thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar;
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledg’d courage. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear’t that th’opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell, my blessing season this in thee.

Several well-known phrases contained therein are deployed in common usage without irony. Many critics, though, regard Polonius as a clown, or figure of ridicule; this makes his advice likely trite and not meant by Shakespeare to be taken seriously.

Though later scenes in the book portray Polonius as foolish, the longer note on this passage in the edition I’m reading, with commentary by Harold Jenkins (NB: not the man better known as Conway Twitty), says it is a mistake to read the above passage as a joke:

Such conventional precepts are entirely appropriate to Polonius as a man of experience. It is a mistake to suppose they are meant to make him seem ridiculous. Their purpose, far more important than any individual characterization, is to present him in his role of father….by impressing upon us here the relation between father and son the play is preparing for the emergence of Laertes later as the avenger who will claim Hamlet as his victim.

So, is Polonius a good father, a pompous fool, or perhaps a little of both? Methinks ’tis the latter.

I’m reading Hamlet again. When I read it in high school, I dismissed Hamlet as an annoying procrastinator. I used my paper to prove my AP English teacher wasn’t reading my work, just giving me A’s, identifying Claudius with a term that contains the letters m and f. That was me, then: “an understanding simple and unschool’d.”

The next time I read Hamlet I was in graduate school, about ten years ago. My English friend Thalia lent me her copy, with her A-level notes. It was a discouraging contrast with my senior-year experience. I loved the play. It was a feast of words–so _this_ was the source of so many famous quotes, many of which I’d thought were from the Bible.

Two nights together had these gentlemen,
Marcelllus and Barnardo, on their watch
In the dead waste and middle of the might
Been thus encounter’d: a figure like your father
Armed at point exactly, cap-a-pie,
Appears before them, and with solemn march
Goes slow and stately by them; thrice he walk’d
By their oppress’d and fear-surprised eyes
Within his truncheon’s length, whilst they, distill’d
Almost to jelly with the act of fear,
Stand dumb and speak not to him. This to me
In dreadful secrecy impart they did,
And I with them the third night kept the watch,
Where, as they had deliver’d, both in time,
Form of the thing, each word made true and good,
The apparition comes. I knew your father;
These hands are not more like. –Horatio, from Hamlet I, ii, 196-206

Footnote from the 1997 Arden Shakespeare edition:

Horatio’s speech ‘a perfect model of dramatic narration and dramatic style, the purest poetry and yet the most natural language’ (Coleridge)

I decided on a slow reading: not just the text of the play, but the xxvii-page preface and 159-page introduction first, since I’ve read the play before. I read the spread of two pages, then their footnotes. At the end of each scene, I read the longer end notes for it. The preface and introduction took me the better part of two days to read. The academic jargon was so thick I only noticed my edition skipped from page 14 to 47 when I paged back for a definition of “foul papers.” I’d had to read that page transition several times to make sense it didn’t possess; it looks as if it were never bound in, not as if it fell out. The editor, Harold Jenkins, is entertainingly satisfied with himself, cutting down interpretations of other scholars with words as poisonous as Laertes’s rapier.

The Arden Shakespeare series has undergone several changes of publisher. They have a new edition of Hamlet, but I’m sticking with the one I read before, even if my copy is missing a segment. As the introduction makes clear, the lineage of the text is murky. Most copies of Hamlet rely on the second quarto, though some adhere to that of the first folio. Editors have a mighty task to decide which copy, if any, is the most authoritative for any given passage.

Asked later: What edition is your favorite/least favorite? Do you have a preference?

At the Literary Review, Philip Davis argues that reading Shakespeare changes our brains in the moment, not by discussing it after the fact. (Link from Arts & Letters Daily)

Shakespeare is stretching us, making us more alive, at a level of neural excitement never fully exorcised by later conceptualisation; he is opening up the possibility of further peaks, new potential pathways or developments.

He offers early studies of brain activity to back up his theory. I’ll be interested to see if these experiments are sound and stand up to scrutiny. I’d also be interested to learn if there’s a difference in the brain’s response to reading Shakespeare versus hearing/seeing Shakespeare performed, as it was intended.

At the Guardian, Alice Wignall uses the opening of the “Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging” film to muse about “the power of teenage literary passions.” (Link from Bookslut)

The truth is that you never love books the way you do as a young reader. My generation consumed with fanatical zeal the works of Judy Blume and Paula Danziger and the far less wholesome American series, Sweet Valley High. And contemporary teenagers are just as likely to be found with their heads stuck in a book.

I am one of about two people in the universe who didn’t like the Angus book, but I can see why so many do, because it reminded me strongly of two books that I LOVE, Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones’ Diary.

I don’t think I do love books I read now, as an adult, as ardently or so well as I did those when I was young. That’s why reading Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Dodie Smith’s I Captured the Castle and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for the first time as an adult was bittersweet; I wished I’d been re-reading them since girlhood.

I read Blume and Danziger (The Solid Gold Kid was a favorite), but missed the Sweet Valley High phenomenon by a few years. I was reading Anne of Green Gables, Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden and the Hardy Boys right up till I started sneaking more salacious fare, like Blume’s Forever and Wifey, Judith Krantz’s Scruples, Princess Daisy and Mistral’s Daughter, Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave, Lace by Shirley Conran, Judith McNaught and Kathleen E. Woodiwiss’s bodice rippers, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, and those truly dreadful V.C. Andrews books. Of these, I might have one Pern book still on my shelf. All the rest have been duly and rightfully purged. And yet, I didn’t just love them, I LOVED! them, and I feel affection for them for that, if nothing else.

Wignall’s essay suggests that boys aren’t nearly as impressed by what they read as are girls. I question this, though. Tolkien, Harry Potter? Superman, Batman, X-Men, et al? Where would these be without their fervent boy-reader followings?

How about you–do you love certain books with the same fervor as when you were young?

From the LA Times review of Mark Bauerlein’s Dumbest Generation:

The problem is that instead of using the Web to learn about the wide world, young people instead mostly use it to gossip about each other and follow pop culture, relentlessly keeping up with the ever-shifting lingua franca of being cool in school. The two most popular websites by far among students are Facebook and MySpace…

This ceaseless pipeline of peer-to-peer activity is worrisome, he argues, not only because it crowds out the more serious stuff but also because it strengthens what he calls the “pull of immaturity.” Instead of connecting them with parents, teachers and other adult figures, “[t]he web . . . encourages more horizontal modeling, more raillery and mimicry of people the same age.”

From “The Burden of the Humanities” by Wilfred M. McClay at The Wilson Quarterly:

Lamentations about the sad state of the humanities in modern America have a familiar, indeed almost ritualistic, quality about them. The humanities are among those unquestionably nice endeavors, like animal shelters and ­tree-­planting projects, about which nice people invariably say nice things. But there gets to be something vaguely annoying about all this cloying uplift. One longs for the moral clarity of a swift kick in the ­rear.

Both articles were linked from Arts & Letters Daily, and both reflect on questions I wrote about in an earlier post on education and classics. Bauerlein’s book implies that people read too little. McClay’s piece suggests there’s peril in reading too much.

There can hardly be a simple answer, but I find the proliferation of articles on these questions interesting. There’s a clear dissatisfaction with the current state of education. Is it just this generation’s “woe is us” lament, or if there is actually a qualitative difference?

I feel as if I’m caught in a reading zeitgeist, with many online articles touching on similar themes.

At The American Scholar, William Deresiewicz details what he sees as “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education“:

[I]t makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you …[and] inculcates a false sense of self-worth.

An education from an elite US university, like Yale, will reinforce the class system, and prepare students for the security of an upper-class job, not introspection and independent thought.

In “The New Learning That Failed” at The Criterion (link from Arts & Letters Daily), Victor David Hanson argues that modern universities have lost two important lessons from a classic, Western education: the value of self-criticism and introspection, and theories of exploitation based in the real world. The result, according to Hanson, is pedagogy focused on what to think, not how to think.

Hanson also notes the loss of three things that used to distinguish between what once was studied in a traditional liberal arts education, and pop culture:

an appreciation that a few seminal works of art and literature had weathered fad and cant and, by general agreement, due to their aesthetics or insight, or both, spoke universally to the human condition.

[an] old assumption that professors, through long training, were necessary to guide students through such classic texts [like] Dante’s Inferno

an appreciation of a manner of formal thought and beauty that separated some high art and literature from more popular and accessible counterparts.

Historian David McCullough echoed this idea of established classics in a recent commencement speech, “The Love of Learning” (link from Mental Multivitamin):

Read for pleasure, to be sure… But take seriously–read closely–books that have stood the test of time. Study a masterpiece, take it apart, study its architecture, its vocabulary, its intent. Underline, make notes in the margins, and after a few years, go back and read it again.

At The Times, Rod Liddle writes about books that don’t survive their age (link from Bookslut):

[T]hey seem to be books that fitted in far too comfortably with the sensibilities of a certain chattering-class elite when they were published. Remove a work of fiction from the milieu in which it was written and you remove some of its purpose and point, of course; however, with Hesse, Powell and Fowles, as with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you seem to lose all the purpose and point. Everything simply evaporates.

Liddle’s, though a rant, is similar in subject to Jonathan Yardley at the Washington Post on Cannery Row and other Steinbeck works (link from Arts & Letters Daily):

Not many books of our youth survive unscathed into what passes for our maturity, and many other books await that maturity before we are ready to appreciate and understand them.

For more on Steinbeck’s books as classics, see “The Rescuing of Steinbeck” at The New York Review of Books. (link from Arts & Letters Daily)

All of the preceding articles provide an interesting context for Entertainment Weekly’s lists of new classics–the top 100 since 1983 in books, movies, tv, music, and more. In the blogosphere, at least, EW’s lists seems to have quickly eclipsed the AFI’s 10 top 10, released the same week. As with any list, there’s a great deal of righteous protest: This should have been higher, that lower, this one’s missing, I can’t believe that one is on there.

EW qualifies their lists up front. They’re not only based on quality, but on influence. They include recent works, because that’s what EW does–it’s a weekly magazine for entertainment, focusing on what’s new.

A few things struck me about the lists, and the commentary on it. First, I think there’s great value in a waiting period to see if a work endures. Second, lists are only ever a starting point for discussion. Nearly every list that’s published acknowledges this, but that gets lost in the ensuing outrage. Third, I think there was a great deal of justice done in the lists for works that were critically acclaimed but not blockbusters, or for things like comics that still aren’t considered by many to be real books. Finally, my own numbers told an interesting story: 37 books, 87 movies, 67 television shows, and 46 albums. I don’t agree with all of EW’s choices, and I think they put too much emphasis on recent works, but it affirmed why I am a fan of the magazine–I like much of what the writers like, so EW is a good index of things I might like.

Minnesota is home to many famous writers, many of whom aren’t even on that list, like Kate DiCamillo, Faith Sullivan, and Alison McGhee. Minnesota is also home to many great comics writers and illustrators, as this article at MinnPost notes.

I figure it’s the tough winter that makes a happy home for artists.

My to-read list has suddenly gone kablooey. I have several recommendations from people I trust, plus Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck to read for my book group. Those poor, neglected books on my shelf. They’re never going to get read.

World Made by Hand by James Kunstler and The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer, recommended at Mental Multivitamin

Dispatches by Michael Herr, recommended by Carolyn and Kate because of my recent spate of Vietnam books. Carolyn also recommended A Rumor of War by Phil Caputo.

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary Pearson, recommended by Dawn at Avenging Sybil

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson, recommended by my bluegrass-babe, public-health friend RG

Grand Central Winter by Lee Stringer, recommended by my friend lxbean

Oscar and Lucinda recommended by SFP at Pages Turned

The Road by Cormac McCarthy, recommended by VT

The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde, recommended by Steph

Confessions of a Slacker Mom, recommended by Natasha of Maw Books, and Lazy Cow of Only Books All the Time

And these are just the recent recommendations. Sheesh!

One element of the Three Bears story always bothered me–why were the bowls of porridge three different temperatures? Last week, during my umpteenth reading of some version, a few possibilities occurred to me.

Mother Bear’s porridge could be cold because she served herself first, and sat down to eat last. I find this the likeliest explanation, having experienced this scenario many times. Additionally, she could have been on a diet, and given herself a small portion compared to that of Papa Bear, whose large size would demand a large portion, which would take longer to cool. Perhaps the bears were very poor, and Mama Bear was sacrificing her own portion to feed her child and husband. In both the latter examples, Baby Bear would probably get the medium amount of porridge, which would then be cooler than Papa’s, and warmer than Mama’s.

I do wonder how my reading changes when this type of musing takes up part of my brain. Do the boys notice the difference between Mom being fully present reading a story, and Mom struggling to suss out the subtexts while still reading aloud?

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation.

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, a book about organizing without organizations, gave a speech recently (16-min. video here, via Making Light; transcript here) in which he argued that the information age is akin to the industrial age, and what society has been spending its cognitive surplus on over the past decades is not gin, but sitcoms.

Shirky’s a good speaker; I recommend taking/making time to watch the video. He says that projects like Wikipedia are a societal shift away from consuming alone, toward consuming, producing and sharing content. He implies there is a limited future for passively received media. I see the self-destructing music industry as a good example. I also think that the more cognitive surplus there is, the greater the tendency for information to be free, meaning both available and at no cost.

I’m probably preaching to the converted and singing to the choir here, since many of you are bloggers and commenters who produce and share. But Shirky’s ideas have lingered since I watched the video, and I’m interested to see how many examples of movement beyond consumption to production and sharing I’ll notice in the coming days.

“Miss Austen Regrets” was probably my favorite new film of the recent PBS series, The Complete Jane Austen. It’s just now showing in England, and Austenblog has a good roundup of the reviews, which seem more negative than the ones stateside.

It also has a link to the Jane Austen Society of North America’s details on the men in the film, which I found illuminating.

Rachel Donadio’s recent back page essay in the NYT book section on literary deal breakers got a lot of comments, and a lot of linkage.

Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed – or misguided – literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility.

Like most bookish bloggers, I could rattle off books or authors that make me cringe. It’s too easy, though, and really, too potentially offensive. As soon as I say I hate x, someone else would say they loved it, or at least didn’t hate it.

More fun, I think, are literary dealMAKERs. My friend LXN worked in a bookstore, and when my soon-to-be friend Thalia asked if they had any Diana Wynne Jones, they bonded about Dogsbody, and Thalia got invited to a potluck at LXN’s. At that party, Thalia and I both saw the list of books for LXN’s book group, and asked to join. On my first date with now-husband G. Grod, he saw Watchmen and Sandman graphic novels on my shelf, and knew we were off to a promising start.

So the question I put to you is, what have been literary dealmakers for you, in friendship or in love?

W H Smith is a British book retailer best known for news stands on major city streets, train stations and airports, like an English version of New York’s Hudson News. From 1992 to 2002, the W H Smith Thumping Good Read Award was chosen by a panel of WHS card-carrying customers, and given to books considered more “accessible” than those nominated for the W H Smith Literary Award.

Thumping Good Read has entered the vernacular, especially in the blogosphere, for books that are fun to read. Diane Setterfield’s Thirteenth Tale and Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White were recent TGRs for me. Astute reader Gretchen commented on a previous post that

when a book describes itself as “dreamy,” or “elegiac,” or mentions the prose at all, it’s usually not a thumping good read.

Can a book be both a Thumping Good Read and Literary? I’m re-reading Jane Eyre, and I think a good case can be made for that work. Additionally, the 2006 W H Smith Literary Award went to Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince; Entertainment Weekly chose the last Harry Potter as it’s book of 2007. I think it’s possible, but infrequent. I think it’s also what most book groups hope for–a book that entertains and enlightens.

Robert Fulford, at the National Post (link from Arts and Letters Daily) skips the whole religion is bad/good dichotomy in defense of art. Loving great art does not make you good, neither does creating it, he notes. So, he asks,

What, then, does it guarantee? Those who give it their time and love are offered the chance to live more expansive, more enjoyable and deeper lives. They can learn to care intimately about music, painting and books that have lasted for centuries or millennia. They can reach around the globe for the music, the images and the stories they want to make their own.

Fulford’s is a short piece, and he’s probably singing to the choir. Yet it’s a good reminder to give a piece of art more than a few seconds of your time. Really look at it, don’t just take a picture or videotape it to consider it later. Read a book, then read another book related to it; come at things from a different angle. Do the same with a film. Listen to music and don’t do anything else. Put aside multi-tasking for the moment. As the author of Mental Multivitamin continually exhorts us, “Read, Think, Learn.”

I’m often asked why I’ve relocated, and STAYED, in Minneapolis.

It’s a reader’s city. And so is neighbor, St. Paul. (Link from Galley Cat)

Of late, I rarely have time to read the long articles that my favored blogs link to. Today, though, I took the time and was glad of it. Three disparate articles wove together in provocative ways.

From Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant (link from Mental Multivitamin), a critique of Sherry Shepherd’s statement that “Jesus came first” on The View:

Sherri Shepherd of The View has uttered, in all seriousness, that “Jesus came first.” Shepherd seems to believe that, in the great collective whole of human existence, there was no religion before Christianity….

when presented with the facts by her peers, Shepherd is incapable of even confessing that her co-hosts may be right.

Philip Pullman, interviewed at More Intelligent Life (link from Arts and Letters Daily), is the author of the “His Dark Materials” series, which I wrote about here, here, and here. The first book, titled The Golden Compass in the USA and Northern Lights elsewhere, has been adapted into a film. Both his film and the books are being criticized and boycotted by religious groups:

Pullman says that people who are tempted to take offence should first see the film or read the books. “They’ll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence. It’s very hard to disagree with those. But people will”….

Pullman clearly enjoys an argument; Bernard Shaw, after all, is one of his favourite authors. He draws the line at discussing issues with fundamentalists. “You can’t communicate with people who know they’ve got all the answers.”

Also in the interview, Pullman places the focus on story, not writing:

I’m fundamentally a storyteller, not a literary person, if I can make that distinction. If I wrote a story that had enough vigour and life to pass into common currency and be recounted by people who had no idea that I was the author, nothing would give me greater pleasure.

In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech (link from Pages Turned), Doris Lessing also venerates storytelling, and its creative, shifting nature, so unlike the rigid, uninformed arguments of Shepherd and Pullman’s denouncers.

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

Anthony Lane gushes over Leica cameras at the New Yorker, while Scott Beale from Laughing Squid anoints the Fuji Finepix F50SE as his favorite digital point-and-shoot model, ahead of the Leica-lensed Panasonic Lumix. (Links from Arts and Letters Daily and Boing Boing, respectively)

in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

The Guardian reprints an excerpt of an interview with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who is so sad and garrulous he could be a character in one of his own books. (Link from Bookslut)

Is it me, or does this designer resemble Fitzgerald and his wild hair?

(thanks to Pages Turned)

What are you reading right now? About to start Phillip Pullman’s Golden Compass

Do you have any idea what you’ll read when you’re done with that? The Long Goodbye

What magazines do you have in your bathroom right now? Entertainment Weekly and The Atlantic

What’s the worst thing you were ever forced to read? Paper by a racist student in a writing class I taught.

What’s the one book you always recommend to just about everyone? Lately? Eat, Pray, Love.

Admit it, the librarians at your library know you on a first name basis, don’t they? They know my kids by first name, since they often hear me calling after them. They know my last name, since that’s what my holds are under.

Is there a book you absolutely love, but for some reason, people never think it sounds interesting, or maybe they read it and don’t like it at all? Gilead. Neither of my book groups liked it.

Do you read books while you eat? While you bathe? While you watch movies or TV? While you listen to music? While you’re on the computer? While you’re having sex? While you’re driving? While I’m eating, if I’m eating alone, which is rare.

When you were little, did other children tease you about your reading habits? Yes, I sat against a wall at recess with my book, and always finished my schoolwork quickly so I could pull out my book.

What’s the last thing you stayed up half the night reading because it was so good you couldn’t put it down? HP and the Deathly Hallows. For me, half the night was after 11pm.

Heh-heh. Quel surprise, I’m a literature nerd. But what I want to know is, what’s a social nerd?

(Thanks to Haddayr for the link.)

Speaking of overly critical, it should NOT have a hyphen. No hyphens after -ly. Again, heh-heh.