Washington Irving
New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc.
1802-1803 (1983)
Ideas and Quotes for Discussion
"...the lady was seen, with the most bewitching languor, reclining on the arm of an extremely attentive beau, who, with a long cane...was carefully employed in removing every stone, stick or straw that might impede the progress of his tottering companion, whose high-heel'd shoes just brought the point of her toes to the ground."
"What husband is there but will look back with regret, to the happy days of female subjection."
"...the audience, who, I assure you, furnish no inconsiderable part of the entertainment [at the play]."
"I had got in the neighborhood of a very obliging personage, who had seen the play before, and was kindly anticipating every scene, and informing those about him what was to take place...."
"The even strive to be inattentive...propose a game or two of cards in the theater during the performance....."
"As to the dull souls who go for the sake of the play, why, if their attention is interrupted by the conversation of their neighbors, they must bear it with patience--it is a custom authorized by fashion. Persons who go for the purpose of chatting with their friends are not be deprived of their amusement."
Critics:"...the most 'presumptuous,' 'arrogant,' 'malevolent,' 'illiberal,' 'ungentleman-like,' 'malignant,' 'raucous,' 'villainous,' 'ungrateful,' 'crippled,' 'invidious,' 'detracting,' 'fabricating,' 'personal,' 'dogmatical,' 'illegitimate,' 'tyrannical,' 'distorting,' spindleshanked moppets, designing villains and upstart ignorants."
"Nothing is more intolerable to an old person than innovation...."
"...for this I can give no other excuse, than that it is the privilege of old folks to be tiresome...."
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
The Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle (01).
Washington Irving
New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc.
1802-1803 (1983)
Why read it? The years are 1802 and 1803 in America. The commentator is Jonathan Oldstyle, an older man, a conservative, someone who does not like innovation on old habits.
He sends letters to the editor, commenting on the fashions of the young, on the foppishness of young men, on the habits of playgoers, most of which modern readers will recognize in the movieplexes of today--except for cell phones, of course--and on the contemporary methods of dueling when pistols replaced swords, and other modes of dueling are not quite like what Abraham Lincoln used, cow flop, but are also designed to assure that no one is seriously hurt. It's all in good fun.
But since your reviewer is an old man--74 years old--he is sympathetic to the older point of view toward contemporary society and its youth and the manners of those who engage in social functions. If I were still teaching, I would set my young scholars to imitating the style of Mr. Oldstyle in studying today's fashions, youth and social gatherings.
New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc.
1802-1803 (1983)
Why read it? The years are 1802 and 1803 in America. The commentator is Jonathan Oldstyle, an older man, a conservative, someone who does not like innovation on old habits.
He sends letters to the editor, commenting on the fashions of the young, on the foppishness of young men, on the habits of playgoers, most of which modern readers will recognize in the movieplexes of today--except for cell phones, of course--and on the contemporary methods of dueling when pistols replaced swords, and other modes of dueling are not quite like what Abraham Lincoln used, cow flop, but are also designed to assure that no one is seriously hurt. It's all in good fun.
But since your reviewer is an old man--74 years old--he is sympathetic to the older point of view toward contemporary society and its youth and the manners of those who engage in social functions. If I were still teaching, I would set my young scholars to imitating the style of Mr. Oldstyle in studying today's fashions, youth and social gatherings.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793. (2)
JH Powell
New York: time Incorporated
1949 (1965)
Ideas and Quotes for Discussion
"And two Negroes [Absalom Jones and Richard Allen], former slaves...the first to show that fear could be conquered by the spirit of Christian love."
"No conduct, however heroic, could expiate the original sin of a dark skin."
"A poor Negro named Sampson went from house to house caring for the sick and taking no reward. When he himself fell a victim of the fever, none of those he had helped would aid his family."
"That he [Dr. Rush] was wrong [in administering purging and bleeding],tragically, disastrously, frightfully wrong, everyone was not to realize for more than a century, nor shall we ever know how many lives his errors cost, but the courage he imparted to others was as healing as his purging and bleeding were undoubtedly destructive...."
"For Dr. rush stood forth unafraid in a community dominated by fear. There was only one doctor who would enter a fetid chamber, scorn all protections, sit on the edge of a vomit-soiled bed, smile cheerfully to the frightened patient, say blandly, 'You have nothing but a yellow fever.' "
"In doorways and alleys, in yards and courts, in open streets people lay dying," turned out of their houses by their families.
"Those who were in health one day were buried the next."
Symptoms: "...lassitude, glazed eyes, chills, fevers, headaches, nausea, retching, nosebleeds; yellow tinge in the eyeballs, puking, straining in the stomach; black vomit, hiccoughs, depression, comatose delirium, stupor, purplish discoloration of the whole body, death. Insanity was often the last stage of its horror."
"But from September 15 on, panic would meet its match in the leadership of three men--in Dr. Rush's serene confidence, in Stephen Girard's organizing genius, in Matthew Clarkson's cool and resolute determination. These were the leaders who refused to fear fear."
"There are heroisms unrecorded, great moments of beauty and courage that have left no trace, unknowable human experiences that could teach wisdom and understanding.... But history is always full of gaps."
New York: time Incorporated
1949 (1965)
Ideas and Quotes for Discussion
"And two Negroes [Absalom Jones and Richard Allen], former slaves...the first to show that fear could be conquered by the spirit of Christian love."
"No conduct, however heroic, could expiate the original sin of a dark skin."
"A poor Negro named Sampson went from house to house caring for the sick and taking no reward. When he himself fell a victim of the fever, none of those he had helped would aid his family."
"That he [Dr. Rush] was wrong [in administering purging and bleeding],tragically, disastrously, frightfully wrong, everyone was not to realize for more than a century, nor shall we ever know how many lives his errors cost, but the courage he imparted to others was as healing as his purging and bleeding were undoubtedly destructive...."
"For Dr. rush stood forth unafraid in a community dominated by fear. There was only one doctor who would enter a fetid chamber, scorn all protections, sit on the edge of a vomit-soiled bed, smile cheerfully to the frightened patient, say blandly, 'You have nothing but a yellow fever.' "
"In doorways and alleys, in yards and courts, in open streets people lay dying," turned out of their houses by their families.
"Those who were in health one day were buried the next."
Symptoms: "...lassitude, glazed eyes, chills, fevers, headaches, nausea, retching, nosebleeds; yellow tinge in the eyeballs, puking, straining in the stomach; black vomit, hiccoughs, depression, comatose delirium, stupor, purplish discoloration of the whole body, death. Insanity was often the last stage of its horror."
"But from September 15 on, panic would meet its match in the leadership of three men--in Dr. Rush's serene confidence, in Stephen Girard's organizing genius, in Matthew Clarkson's cool and resolute determination. These were the leaders who refused to fear fear."
"There are heroisms unrecorded, great moments of beauty and courage that have left no trace, unknowable human experiences that could teach wisdom and understanding.... But history is always full of gaps."
Monday, July 28, 2008
Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793. (1)
J.H. Powell
New York: Time Incorporated
1949 (1965)
Why read it? The anatomy of a crisis. How this particular crisis--the yellow-fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793--was dealt with. Ultimately, it was not resolved by human effort, but by nature's change of seasons, the frost that killed the real culprit, the mosquito. But to some degree the crisis was dealt with by people.
The first need was firm leadership, in this case, the mayor of Philadelphia, Matthew Clarkson, who did not desert his duties or the city. Second was the need for organization--to identify the many complicated problems within the crisis and then to set out to deal with them in an organized and efficient manner, from picking up and burying the dead to managing a hospital, Bush Hill, away from the city. The need to deal with the many excuses or obstacles to getting things done. Ultimately, the greatest need was to give hope and confidence to both victims and survivors. How to deal with fear and panic. (Another example of the power of organization and firmness in making decisions can be found in John Hersey's Hiroshima about the aftermath of the atomic bomb in Japan.)
Help came from both well-known people and ordinary citizens who did not desert the city, including black people. Matthew Clarkson, the mayor, did everything he could to help organize its remaining citizens and Stephen Girard, the future philanthropist, organized and managed the hospital at Bush Hill. Absalom Jones and Richard Allen were two of the many blacks who helped their white brethren. Also helpful was financial assistance from people, including those from outside the city, rural areas in Pennsylvania, and from other states, New Jersey and New York, in paying for needed services, like transporting and burying the dead. But these areas also refused to admit Philadelphians who, they thought, would infect their own inhabitants. The resistance to admitting Philadelphians, at times, bordered on persecutions.
What about the professionals in the field? Like doctors today, the doctors in this epidemic were able to agree on the description of the disease, but were bitterly antagonistic toward each others' theories about causes and suggested cures. The essential disagreement was whether the epidemic came from bodies (infectiousness) or from an external source, like the poisonous city fumes. Today, we know that the cause was from the bite of an infected female mosquito and that the infection cannot be spread from one person to another. The disease was not infectious.
In 1793, the theories of how to stop the epidemic were sometimes extraordinary: camphor, vinegar, wearing tarred ropes, shooting off guns to clear the air in and out of houses and burning bonfires in the streets and on street corners to clear the air. Common sense--like washing the streets and picking up the garbage--didn't help reduce the epidemic, but, from a sanitary point of view, improved the environment. When the federal government returned to the city at the end of the yellow fever epidemic, its members found clean streets.
In short, the professionals did not know and could not agree on the cause of the problem which they were trying to treat. The complex heroism of Benjamin Rush is an example. His extravagant purging and blood-letting were wrong and probably killed many more than he was able to cure, but his confidence, his assurance, his calmness, and his conviction that his methods were right gave confidence to his patients and to the rest of the surviving citizens who worshiped him. However, his bitter disagreements with his fellow professional physicians over his purge and bleed strategy, which he was absolutely sure was the best way for treating the illness, expended his valuable energy on anger and vituperation at the expense of his patients and of learning about the disease through cooperation with everyone trying to combat it.
What can we learn about dealing with crisis from reading this book about a crisis in Philadelphia in 1793? The leadership and decision-making must be firm, action must be organized and the goal must be to give survivors hope. Every effort must be made to resist panic. Professionals need to work together, rather than to antagonize each other by clinging to and arguing about unproven theories.
New York: Time Incorporated
1949 (1965)
Why read it? The anatomy of a crisis. How this particular crisis--the yellow-fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793--was dealt with. Ultimately, it was not resolved by human effort, but by nature's change of seasons, the frost that killed the real culprit, the mosquito. But to some degree the crisis was dealt with by people.
The first need was firm leadership, in this case, the mayor of Philadelphia, Matthew Clarkson, who did not desert his duties or the city. Second was the need for organization--to identify the many complicated problems within the crisis and then to set out to deal with them in an organized and efficient manner, from picking up and burying the dead to managing a hospital, Bush Hill, away from the city. The need to deal with the many excuses or obstacles to getting things done. Ultimately, the greatest need was to give hope and confidence to both victims and survivors. How to deal with fear and panic. (Another example of the power of organization and firmness in making decisions can be found in John Hersey's Hiroshima about the aftermath of the atomic bomb in Japan.)
Help came from both well-known people and ordinary citizens who did not desert the city, including black people. Matthew Clarkson, the mayor, did everything he could to help organize its remaining citizens and Stephen Girard, the future philanthropist, organized and managed the hospital at Bush Hill. Absalom Jones and Richard Allen were two of the many blacks who helped their white brethren. Also helpful was financial assistance from people, including those from outside the city, rural areas in Pennsylvania, and from other states, New Jersey and New York, in paying for needed services, like transporting and burying the dead. But these areas also refused to admit Philadelphians who, they thought, would infect their own inhabitants. The resistance to admitting Philadelphians, at times, bordered on persecutions.
What about the professionals in the field? Like doctors today, the doctors in this epidemic were able to agree on the description of the disease, but were bitterly antagonistic toward each others' theories about causes and suggested cures. The essential disagreement was whether the epidemic came from bodies (infectiousness) or from an external source, like the poisonous city fumes. Today, we know that the cause was from the bite of an infected female mosquito and that the infection cannot be spread from one person to another. The disease was not infectious.
In 1793, the theories of how to stop the epidemic were sometimes extraordinary: camphor, vinegar, wearing tarred ropes, shooting off guns to clear the air in and out of houses and burning bonfires in the streets and on street corners to clear the air. Common sense--like washing the streets and picking up the garbage--didn't help reduce the epidemic, but, from a sanitary point of view, improved the environment. When the federal government returned to the city at the end of the yellow fever epidemic, its members found clean streets.
In short, the professionals did not know and could not agree on the cause of the problem which they were trying to treat. The complex heroism of Benjamin Rush is an example. His extravagant purging and blood-letting were wrong and probably killed many more than he was able to cure, but his confidence, his assurance, his calmness, and his conviction that his methods were right gave confidence to his patients and to the rest of the surviving citizens who worshiped him. However, his bitter disagreements with his fellow professional physicians over his purge and bleed strategy, which he was absolutely sure was the best way for treating the illness, expended his valuable energy on anger and vituperation at the expense of his patients and of learning about the disease through cooperation with everyone trying to combat it.
What can we learn about dealing with crisis from reading this book about a crisis in Philadelphia in 1793? The leadership and decision-making must be firm, action must be organized and the goal must be to give survivors hope. Every effort must be made to resist panic. Professionals need to work together, rather than to antagonize each other by clinging to and arguing about unproven theories.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Travels with Charley. John Steinbeck (2)
New York: The Viking Press
1962
Ideas and Quotes for Discussion:
“When you decide you want to get away from Here, you first have to find a reason.”
“…a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
“Next, I was told that a stranger’s purpose in moving about the country might cause inquiry or even suspicion. For this reason I racked a shotgun, two rifles, and couple of fishing rods in my truck, for it is my experience that if a man is going hunting or fishing his purpose is understood and even applauded.”
“A dog…is a bond between strangers. Many conversations en route began with ‘What degree [“kind?”] of dog is that?’ ”
“I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation—a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here…not toward something but away from something.”
“I also knew from thirty years of my profession that I cannot write hot on an event. It has to ferment. I must do what a friend calls ‘mull it over’ for a time before it goes down.”
“American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash—all of them—surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.”
“The dairy man had a Ph.D. in mathematics…. He liked what he was doing and he didn’t want to be somewhere else—one of the very few contented people I met in my whole journey.”
“It seems to me that coffee smells even better when the frost is in.”
“I soon discovered that if a wayfaring stranger wants to eavesdrop on a local population the places for him to slip in and hold his peace are bars and churches. But some New England towns don’t have bars and church is only on Sunday. A good alternative is the roadside restaurant where men gather for breakfast before going to work or going hunting.”
“I have found many readers more interested in what I (a writer) wear than in what I think, more avid to know how I do it than in what I do. In regarding my work, some readers profess greater feelings for what it makes than for what it says.”
“It might have been caused by the season with a quality of light, or the autumn clarity. Everything stood out separate from everything else, a rock, a rounded lump of sea-polished driftwood on a beach, a roof line. Each pine tree was itself and separate even if it was part of a forest…. The people have the same quality…. Surely I never met such ardent individuals.”
“A farmer in upper New York State painted the word cow in big black letters on both sides of his white bossy, but the hunters shot it anyway.”
“In establishing contact with strange people, Charley [my French poodle] is my ambassador…. A child can do the same thing, but a dog is better.”
Four lady mooses. Pressed the lever on the cattle caller and they all turned and came at me with romance in their eyes. “Four romances, each weighing well over a thousand pounds! And much as I favor love in all its aspects, I trod my accelerator and got the hell out of there fast.”
“I feel that there are too many realities. What I set down here is true until someone else passes that way and rearranges the world in his own style.”
“Those great roads are wonderful for moving goods but not for inspection of a countryside. You are bound to the wheel and your eyes to the car ahead and to the rear-view mirror for the car behind and the side-mirror for the car or truck about to pass, and at the same time you must read all the signs for fear you may miss instructions or orders.”
“There’s one thing you can say about cars, there’s nearly always something wrong with them that got to be fixed.”
“It seems to me that regional speech is in the process of disappearing, not gone but going. Forty years of radio and twenty years of television must have this impact. Communications must destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process.”
“I who love words and the endless possibility of words am saddened by this inevitability. For with local accent will disappear local tempo. The idioms, the figures of speech that make language rich and full of the poetry of place and time must go. And in their place will be a national speech, wrapped and packaged, standard and tasteless. Localness is not gone but it is going.”
“You know when show people come into what they call the sticks, they have a contempt for the yokels. It took me a little time, but when I learned that there aren’t any yokels I began to get on fine. I learned respect for my audience. They feel that and they work with me, and not against me. Once you respect them, they can understand anything you can tell them.”
“…a profession older than writing [acting] and one that will probably survive when the written word has disappeared. And all the sterile wonders of movies and television and radio will fail to wipe it out—a living man in communication with a living audience.”
The one-thousand mile retreat of the Nez Perces before the U.S. Army. Charles Erskine Scott Wood: “If they hadn’t had their families with them we could never have caught them…. And if we had been evenly matched in men and weapons, we couldn’t have beaten them. They were men…real men.”
“Again it might have been the American tendency in travel. One goes, not so much to see, but to tell afterward.”
“And that ancient law went into effect which says that when you need towns [on a trip] they are very far apart.”
“To me dawn and dusk are quiet times, and here in the Redwoods nearly the whole of daylight is a quiet time.”
“Sometimes the view of change is distorted by a change in oneself.”
“Civil war is supposed to be the bitterest of wars, and surely family politics are the most vehement and venomous.”
“My return caused only confusion and uneasiness. Although they could not say it, my old friends wanted me gone so that I could take my proper place in the pattern of remembrance—and I wanted to go for the same reason.”
“And the desert, the dry and sun-lashed desert, is a good school in which to observe the cleverness and the infinite variety of techniques of survival under pitiless opposition. Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.”
Black man avoids helping a drunken woman who has fallen flat on her face on an icy New York City sidewalk. He was afraid that she would yell rape if he helped her. “I’ve been practicing to be a Negro a long time.”
“I want to be very clear about one thing. I have not intended to present, nor do I think I have presented, any kind of cross-section so that a reader can say, ‘He thinks he has presented a true picture of the South.’ I don’t. I’ve only told what a few people said to me and what I saw. I don’t know whether they were typical or whether any conclusion can be drawn. But I do know it is a troubled place….”
“My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned. I know exactly where and when it was over. Near Abingdon, in the dog-leg of Virginia, at four o’clock of a windy afternoon, without warning or good-by or kiss my foot, my journey went away and left me stranded far from home. I tried to call it back, to catch it up—a foolish and hopeless matter, because it was definitely and permanently over and finished.”
1962
Ideas and Quotes for Discussion:
“When you decide you want to get away from Here, you first have to find a reason.”
“…a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
“Next, I was told that a stranger’s purpose in moving about the country might cause inquiry or even suspicion. For this reason I racked a shotgun, two rifles, and couple of fishing rods in my truck, for it is my experience that if a man is going hunting or fishing his purpose is understood and even applauded.”
“A dog…is a bond between strangers. Many conversations en route began with ‘What degree [“kind?”] of dog is that?’ ”
“I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation—a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here…not toward something but away from something.”
“I also knew from thirty years of my profession that I cannot write hot on an event. It has to ferment. I must do what a friend calls ‘mull it over’ for a time before it goes down.”
“American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash—all of them—surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.”
“The dairy man had a Ph.D. in mathematics…. He liked what he was doing and he didn’t want to be somewhere else—one of the very few contented people I met in my whole journey.”
“It seems to me that coffee smells even better when the frost is in.”
“I soon discovered that if a wayfaring stranger wants to eavesdrop on a local population the places for him to slip in and hold his peace are bars and churches. But some New England towns don’t have bars and church is only on Sunday. A good alternative is the roadside restaurant where men gather for breakfast before going to work or going hunting.”
“I have found many readers more interested in what I (a writer) wear than in what I think, more avid to know how I do it than in what I do. In regarding my work, some readers profess greater feelings for what it makes than for what it says.”
“It might have been caused by the season with a quality of light, or the autumn clarity. Everything stood out separate from everything else, a rock, a rounded lump of sea-polished driftwood on a beach, a roof line. Each pine tree was itself and separate even if it was part of a forest…. The people have the same quality…. Surely I never met such ardent individuals.”
“A farmer in upper New York State painted the word cow in big black letters on both sides of his white bossy, but the hunters shot it anyway.”
“In establishing contact with strange people, Charley [my French poodle] is my ambassador…. A child can do the same thing, but a dog is better.”
Four lady mooses. Pressed the lever on the cattle caller and they all turned and came at me with romance in their eyes. “Four romances, each weighing well over a thousand pounds! And much as I favor love in all its aspects, I trod my accelerator and got the hell out of there fast.”
“I feel that there are too many realities. What I set down here is true until someone else passes that way and rearranges the world in his own style.”
“Those great roads are wonderful for moving goods but not for inspection of a countryside. You are bound to the wheel and your eyes to the car ahead and to the rear-view mirror for the car behind and the side-mirror for the car or truck about to pass, and at the same time you must read all the signs for fear you may miss instructions or orders.”
“There’s one thing you can say about cars, there’s nearly always something wrong with them that got to be fixed.”
“It seems to me that regional speech is in the process of disappearing, not gone but going. Forty years of radio and twenty years of television must have this impact. Communications must destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process.”
“I who love words and the endless possibility of words am saddened by this inevitability. For with local accent will disappear local tempo. The idioms, the figures of speech that make language rich and full of the poetry of place and time must go. And in their place will be a national speech, wrapped and packaged, standard and tasteless. Localness is not gone but it is going.”
“You know when show people come into what they call the sticks, they have a contempt for the yokels. It took me a little time, but when I learned that there aren’t any yokels I began to get on fine. I learned respect for my audience. They feel that and they work with me, and not against me. Once you respect them, they can understand anything you can tell them.”
“…a profession older than writing [acting] and one that will probably survive when the written word has disappeared. And all the sterile wonders of movies and television and radio will fail to wipe it out—a living man in communication with a living audience.”
The one-thousand mile retreat of the Nez Perces before the U.S. Army. Charles Erskine Scott Wood: “If they hadn’t had their families with them we could never have caught them…. And if we had been evenly matched in men and weapons, we couldn’t have beaten them. They were men…real men.”
“Again it might have been the American tendency in travel. One goes, not so much to see, but to tell afterward.”
“And that ancient law went into effect which says that when you need towns [on a trip] they are very far apart.”
“To me dawn and dusk are quiet times, and here in the Redwoods nearly the whole of daylight is a quiet time.”
“Sometimes the view of change is distorted by a change in oneself.”
“Civil war is supposed to be the bitterest of wars, and surely family politics are the most vehement and venomous.”
“My return caused only confusion and uneasiness. Although they could not say it, my old friends wanted me gone so that I could take my proper place in the pattern of remembrance—and I wanted to go for the same reason.”
“And the desert, the dry and sun-lashed desert, is a good school in which to observe the cleverness and the infinite variety of techniques of survival under pitiless opposition. Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.”
Black man avoids helping a drunken woman who has fallen flat on her face on an icy New York City sidewalk. He was afraid that she would yell rape if he helped her. “I’ve been practicing to be a Negro a long time.”
“I want to be very clear about one thing. I have not intended to present, nor do I think I have presented, any kind of cross-section so that a reader can say, ‘He thinks he has presented a true picture of the South.’ I don’t. I’ve only told what a few people said to me and what I saw. I don’t know whether they were typical or whether any conclusion can be drawn. But I do know it is a troubled place….”
“My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned. I know exactly where and when it was over. Near Abingdon, in the dog-leg of Virginia, at four o’clock of a windy afternoon, without warning or good-by or kiss my foot, my journey went away and left me stranded far from home. I tried to call it back, to catch it up—a foolish and hopeless matter, because it was definitely and permanently over and finished.”
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Travels with Charley. John Steinbeck. (1)
New York: The Viking Press
1962
Why read it? I found out when I read the novel East of Eden, that John Steinbeck likes to philosophize and he does it well. He does it by the sentence. Brief. Concise. To the point. That makes Travels with Charley, a travelogue, I guess, the perfect vehicle for Steinbeck who can cross America and comment on what he finds, the people, the speech, the unforgettable characters and scenes. I thought of some other “travelogues” as I was reading it: Lolita (a novel by Nabokov) and On the Road (Kerouac). Both of those books conveyed impressions of Americans and American culture at a particular time.
For three-fourths of the book, I enjoyed the narrative of Steinbeck’s experience, his impressions and reflections. But it ends with the South—and then the book turns nasty. It’s the South I discovered when I made a trip across the country at the same time as Steinbeck, in 1960, the South that hates blacks with a vehemence and rage that stunned me and stunned Steinbeck, too. His reports of the use of the N-word, like Mark Twain’s in Huckleberry Finn, mean that I could not read the book as a teacher with middle-schoolers who would be the natural readers for it. It would be censored because that word encapsulates the feelings by some (?) people of the South.
Steinbeck’s narrative is as much about the nature of travel as it is about what he has rediscovered from his journey across America. His impressions of driving the super highways. Maine. Montana. The Mohave Desert. The people he met. But he knew when his trip was over. He knew the trip was finished at the very place and time it was finished before it was officially finished. I think his experience with travel is symbolic of careers and even living. We know when we are finished.
Steinbeck offers a few ideas that are thought-provoking. Otherwise, the narrative isn’t deep. But it is entertaining—until he reaches the South. He says he is not drawing conclusions about the nature of the people in the South. But it is hard not to. A very disturbing finish to an otherwise idyllic trip across America.
1962
Why read it? I found out when I read the novel East of Eden, that John Steinbeck likes to philosophize and he does it well. He does it by the sentence. Brief. Concise. To the point. That makes Travels with Charley, a travelogue, I guess, the perfect vehicle for Steinbeck who can cross America and comment on what he finds, the people, the speech, the unforgettable characters and scenes. I thought of some other “travelogues” as I was reading it: Lolita (a novel by Nabokov) and On the Road (Kerouac). Both of those books conveyed impressions of Americans and American culture at a particular time.
For three-fourths of the book, I enjoyed the narrative of Steinbeck’s experience, his impressions and reflections. But it ends with the South—and then the book turns nasty. It’s the South I discovered when I made a trip across the country at the same time as Steinbeck, in 1960, the South that hates blacks with a vehemence and rage that stunned me and stunned Steinbeck, too. His reports of the use of the N-word, like Mark Twain’s in Huckleberry Finn, mean that I could not read the book as a teacher with middle-schoolers who would be the natural readers for it. It would be censored because that word encapsulates the feelings by some (?) people of the South.
Steinbeck’s narrative is as much about the nature of travel as it is about what he has rediscovered from his journey across America. His impressions of driving the super highways. Maine. Montana. The Mohave Desert. The people he met. But he knew when his trip was over. He knew the trip was finished at the very place and time it was finished before it was officially finished. I think his experience with travel is symbolic of careers and even living. We know when we are finished.
Steinbeck offers a few ideas that are thought-provoking. Otherwise, the narrative isn’t deep. But it is entertaining—until he reaches the South. He says he is not drawing conclusions about the nature of the people in the South. But it is hard not to. A very disturbing finish to an otherwise idyllic trip across America.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Memento Mori. Muriel Spark (2)
New York: Time Incorporated
1958 (1964)
Ideas and Quotes to Discuss
"I've quite decided to be cremated when my time comes. Cleanest way. Dead bodies under the ground only contaminate our water supplies."
"There is a time for loyalty and a time when loyalty comes to an end."
"If you look for one thing...you frequently find another."
"He [Godfrey] was all the more disturbed by Charmian's increasing composure. It was not that he wished his wife any harm, but his spirits always seemed to wither in proportion as hers bloomed."
Godfrey: "...having made the mistake of regarding Charmian's every success as his failure."
"The ward lay till morning, still and soundless, breathing like one body instead of eleven."
"I would be glad to be let die in peace. But the doctors would be horrified to hear me say it. They are so proud of their new drugs and new methods of treatment--there is always something new. I sometimes fear, at the present rate of discovery, I shall never die."
"As we get older these affairs of the bladder and kidneys do become so important to us."
"If the book does nothing else, it demonstrates how hard it is to approach tranquility at the end of a long life marked by the deceits, subterfuges and willful departures from ordinary decency that plague all men at all times."
1958 (1964)
Ideas and Quotes to Discuss
"I've quite decided to be cremated when my time comes. Cleanest way. Dead bodies under the ground only contaminate our water supplies."
"There is a time for loyalty and a time when loyalty comes to an end."
"If you look for one thing...you frequently find another."
"He [Godfrey] was all the more disturbed by Charmian's increasing composure. It was not that he wished his wife any harm, but his spirits always seemed to wither in proportion as hers bloomed."
Godfrey: "...having made the mistake of regarding Charmian's every success as his failure."
"The ward lay till morning, still and soundless, breathing like one body instead of eleven."
"I would be glad to be let die in peace. But the doctors would be horrified to hear me say it. They are so proud of their new drugs and new methods of treatment--there is always something new. I sometimes fear, at the present rate of discovery, I shall never die."
"As we get older these affairs of the bladder and kidneys do become so important to us."
"If the book does nothing else, it demonstrates how hard it is to approach tranquility at the end of a long life marked by the deceits, subterfuges and willful departures from ordinary decency that plague all men at all times."
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