I’m still reading Lounsbery’s Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917
This chapter considers first Goncharov’s An Ordinary Story and then works by Belinsky in order to analyze what provinciality and the provinces signify for these writers, both of whom are concerned with how Russia might work to develop a coherent (literary) culture. Both pay close attention to the processes by which one goes from being provincial to being not provincial, an attention reflecting their shared belief that readers and other consumers of culture need to be trained. [She cites Balzac in Lost Illusions, where Lucien Chardon repudiates his “provincial ideas of life.”] The same holds true for Goncharov and Belinsky: to a great degree they, too, believe that becoming nonprovincial and thus modern depends on having access to a sufficient quantity of cultural artifacts and ideas.
Scale allows for comparing and choosing: “In the provinces there is no question of choice or comparison,” Balzac writes, whereas in Paris, “one learns, one compares.” With changes in scale (the “new proportions” to which Balzac refers) come changes in judgment, a fact reflected in an old Parisian’s sage advice to a newcomer—“I do beg of you, wait, and compare!” The result is a new level of discernment: Lost Illusions devotes long passages to the myriad subtle distinctions that life in the capital will require Lucien to master. The account of Lucien’s introduction to fashionable society, for instance, is structured entirely around his realization that he must learn to discriminate; words like “compare,” “different,” “distinctions,” and “subtle perception” recur over and over. This is what interests Goncharov and Belinsky—the incremental process by which provincials can lose their provinciality, and the circumstances under which such a transformation becomes possible.
Then I was reading Meghan Daum’s essay (originally in the New Yorker of October 18, 1999) about how she racked up massive debt as a provincial from New Jersey trying to achieve the cultural life of Manhattan as shown in Woody Allen movies when I hit the following passage, which perfectly exemplifies the process Lounsbery describes:
Though there were lots of different kinds of kids at Vassar, I immediately found the ones who had grown up in Manhattan, and I learned most of what I felt I needed to know by socializing with them. In this way, my education was primarily about becoming fully versed in a certain set of references that, individually, have very little to do with either a canon of knowledge as defined by academia or preparation for the job market. My education had mostly to do with speaking the language of the culturally sophisticated, with having a mastery over a number of points of cultural trivia ranging from the techniques of Caravaggio to the discography of The Velvet Underground. This meant being privy to the kind of information that is only learned from hours spent hanging out with friends in dorm rooms and is therefore unavailable to those buried in the library trying to keep their scholarships or working at Stereo World trying to pay the bills. It is to have heard rumors that Domino’s Pizza has ties to the pro-life movement, that Bob Dylan’s mother invented White-Out and that Jamie Lee Curtis is a hermaphrodite. It is to never wear nude panty hose, never smoke menthol cigarettes, never refer to female friends as “girlfriends,” and never listen to Billy Joel in earnest. It is to know at least two people featured in the New York Times wedding pages on any given Sunday and to think nothing of putting $80 towards a bridal shower dinner at a chic restaurant for one of these people. It is to know that anyone who uses the word “chic” is anything but. It is to know arugula from iceberg lettuce, Calder from Klimt, Truffaut from Cassevetes. It is to be secure in one’s ability to grasp these comparisons and weigh one against the other within a fraction of a second, to know, as my Jewish Manhattanite friends put it, “from stuff”—to know from real estate, from contemporary fiction, from clothing designers and editors of glossy magazines and Shakespearean tragedies and skirt lengths.
Knowing from stuff is what it’s all about, and as a former provincial who spent years trying to absorb all the cultural knowledge I didn’t get growing up, I sympathize. Then, reading Boris Fishman’s wonderful novel A Replacement Life, I found this (an old Jewish Soviet emigré is speaking): “The capital likes to laugh at the provinces. Makes it feel like the capital.” And just now, watching the Words Without Borders symposium Young Russophone Writers (broadcast on YouTube; you can read a description here), I heard Olga Breininger talking about how Russia is only now catching up with feminism and other notions that have been common currency in the West for years. Once you start noticing it, it’s everywhere.
I guess I’ll take this opportunity to do a little nitpicking, as is my wont: Lounsbery refers to Turgenev’s “Hamlet of Shchigrov,” translating the title of one of the Sportsman’s Sketches, Гамлет Щигровского уезда [The Hamlet of the Shchigry district]. The adjective щигровский [shchigrovskii] means ‘of or pertaining to the town of Shchigry [Щигры]’; there is no such place as “Shchigrov.”
I suspect that the parallels are rather superficial. Learning to imitate the upper crust by observing and hobnobbing isn’t exactly what the Russian literary giants were trying to instill. Of course Moscow and NYC can be both described as nosy, snobby and purposefully unfriendly to the uninitiated. But the parallels between Moscow and Paris were imagined to run along a slightly different line, worldly, non-parochial, concentrating and monopolizing the high art of the thought. The two lines aren’t totally mutually exclusive, but, sort of, different.
Of course they’re different; everything is different if it’s not identical. The point of comparisons is to point out interesting similarities.
Here’s another example, from the Log post On the origin of the term “hanzi”:
Hey! I score 25% at least on this list. (It would be even more if it weren’t for the pantyhose.)
Can I be a sophisticate too?
Ms. Daum apparently grew up in a quite affluent Northern New Jersey suburb. No doubt one might as a teenager there feel sophisticated compared to ones imaginings of Manhattan (barely 15 miles away as the crow flies but conceptually a larger distance than that), but one had much readier access to all of those cultural-trivia signifiers than folks growing up in more ordinary Provincial America.
I’m intrigued by the never-smoking-menthols point. Sez the internet: “Young adults who smoke menthol cigarettes are more likely to be female, black or Hispanic, or identify as LGBT compared to non-menthol smokers.” In my own youth (I’m about five years older than Ms. Baum) they were stereotypically a black thing although I guess maybe white girls might be more prone to them than white boys and we didn’t have a large enough sample size of Hispanic or overtly-LGBT smokers to base stereotypes on. So it’s rather intriguing that the straight-white-male option was, in the millieu to which she refers, also the sophisticated and progressive Manhattanite option. (My own recollection of college years is that since one smoked non-menthol cigarettes by default if you wanted to seem cooler than that you had to either smoke unfiltered cigarettes or foreign cigarettes.)
I’ve been vaguely working on something about 5 provincial Minnesota authors who made it to the Ivy League at rough 10 year intervals 1870- 1920. Thorstein Veblen didn’t like what he saw and said so eloquently. Sinclair Lewis obligingly pilloried his provincial home town. F Scott Fitzgerald has very mixed feelings but tried desperately to fit in.
The other two are unknown and more interesting. Charles Flandrau wrote a wonderful book called “Harvard Episodes” which was a very revealing series of vignettes demystifying Harvard very revealingly and amusingly. He later observed that he had learned to understand the Boston world, but that his Boston friends would never learn to understand his Minnesota world. In later life lived in St Paul near young Fitzgerald but bypassed the East Coast on the way to Mexico, Paris, the Balaerics, and Normandy.
He only wrote about 6 books and most were good, albeit “minor”.
In my college Camels were the established cigarette. 4 years out of college I was selling cigarettes on skid row and Camels ranked #2, behind Pall Mall and ahead of Lucky Strike. Each of these 3 sold more than all other brands combined. Old Golds never sold and I think the boss smoked them so as not to waste them.
Maybe that’s one reason why there have been so many great writers from the US South. They were not worried about looking provincial.
The fifth MN writer was a friend of Sinclair Lewis’s father, from Sauk Centre, who wrote “The Other Side of Main Street” and argued rather convincingly that Sauk Centre wasn’t as bad as all that. He published his book in 1943 after retiring from a career at Columbia University at a time when Columbia was the American center for education reform, and the ideas he taught in Columbia has originated in small schools in the Midwest.
The South also has the remnants of a gentlemanly, non-utilitarian, quasi-aristocratic tradition.
In my college Camels were the established cigarette.
But he can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke
The same cigarettes as me.
1. I smoked Camels predominantly but not exclusively during my cigarette-smoking years (1982-89), in no small part due to their glamorization by the hippie-magic-realist novelist Tom Robbins in _Still Life With Woodpecker_,* which is one of those books I have carefully avoided rereading in later life because I suspect I would find it much less impressive than I did as a teenager and don’t want to destroy happy memories. However, I did have an Old Golds phase, more or less coinciding with the fall semester of my sophomore year in college, when I was enamored of a young lady who was enamored of Old Golds. I believe I am somewhat younger than John Emerson, so by then maybe Old Golds were so completely out of fashion they were ripe for a young-hipster comeback?
2. I hadn’t noticed first read the reference to the rumor about Bob Dylan’s mother, which is extremely hilarious if you know the underlying true story it’s a confused distortion of.
*To be fair, Camels would have appealed to me anyway as the most obvious-in-context alternative to Marlboros, and I wouldn’t have smoked Marlboros because of a weird contrarian aversion to market-leading brands almost regardless of product category. Avis before Hertz, Jim Beam before Jack Daniels, Miller High Life before Bud. That was for some reason my attitude (which is a different one than being so contrarian that you want to patronize an actually obscure brand that isn’t a mass-market player at all).
“Picture of the factory on the package”.
William Burroughs: “Just like a cop to smoke Old Golds.”
The point of comparisons is to point out interesting similarities.
OK, how about this then: the great Russian minds surely didn’t miss a chance to condemn the provinicials’ fixation on what to wear, what to say, and maybe even what to smoke to fit in as regrettable provincialism 😉 ?
But this may merely mean that the great Russian minds *already knew* what was cool and uncool and didn’t have to think about it, and could even be deliberately uncool in this way or that just for fun, once their coolness.
I’m thinking mostly about my own experience as provincial in a cool college, but also of the way novelists establish their characters’ identities right off with mannerisms and dress.
Above all, Charles Bovary’s hopeless hat, which doomed him forever in the early pages of the book.
“talking about how Russia is only now catching up with feminism and other notions that have been common currency in the West for years.”
And in Cambodia they are still speaking Khmer:(
It is to know arugula from iceberg lettuce
I found it quite an important skill, personally, to know arugula from iceberg lettuce, because I find arugula to be almost inedibly pungent (I’ve been told that it is a close relative of mustard, and I’m not sure if that’s true but it sure tastes the part), while iceberg lettuce is as approximately tasteless as all the other kinds of lettuce.
My mother smokes menthol cigarettes, usually Vogue. I do not smoke any and do not currently intend to start doing so anytime soon.
how Russia is only now catching up with feminism and other notions that have been common currency in the West for years
Is it actually catching up? I thought we’ve been backsliding for years (under the ever-stronger influence of the church). But admittedly I’m not a woman and consequently have little reason to know about the current state of feminism in particular.
I suppose if by “the West” she meant “the US” it’s possible that we’ve been backsliding but the US had been backsliding faster, so technically we’re catching up…
never refer to female friends as “girlfriends”
My childhood best friend happened to be a girl; our relationship was probably best described as “BFF”, except I’m pretty sure BFF implies same gender.
I suspect she was also well among the closest I had to a girlfriend proper, but if so I never got a chance to actually find out, as her entire family quite suddenly moved to the USA in 2003, when I was 11 and she was 12.
Is it actually catching up?
I don’t think she meant “catching up” in the sense ‘reaching the same level’ but rather ‘becoming acquainted with,’ so that “feminism” isn’t some weird catchall term of abuse implying man-hating lesbians (as it was in the US decades ago) but actually carries the meaning of ‘equal rights for women,’ even if one dislikes that idea.
Misguided attempts to cure provincialism are no better than attempts to “cure homosexualism”.
Can’t dismiss them as ignorant 19th century bullshit yet, because unfortunately it still very much happens.
But I believe in social progress.
One day, people will learn better and New York, Paris and Moscow will be hosting Provincial Prides where provincials and their metropolitan supporters would proudly wear clothes out of style since 2020s…
In the US ca. 1880 or so, Boston was still the center and looked down on crass, commercial, ethnically impure NYC, which was on the point of becoming the center. The two agreed, however, that the South and Midwest were provincial. Mark Twain successfully played to that feeling while also showing some of the appealing side of those parts of the country. (Twain married a Bostonian and raised two Bostonian daughters who loved him dearly except for his cursing and vulgarity).
Boston, however, was terribly provincial by cosmopolitan standards, and when the US joined the world of literary modernism it was in Chicago, which was even more vulgar than NYC. For a time people like Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters, thought of as regional
writers today, were published alongside sophisticates like Pound, Eliot, and Yeats on The Little Review and Poetry (Chicago). The high point for me came when Yeats met Vachel Lindsay and spoke well of his poetry.
One day, people will learn better and New York, Paris and Moscow will be hosting Provincial Prides where provincials and their metropolitan supporters would proudly wear clothes out of style since 2020s…
This reminds me of a vigorous correspondence in the Times some years ago, occasioned by the fact that someone-or-other in public life had incautiously referred to Birmingham as “England’s second city.”
This provoked the wrath of Mancunians (quite rightly); however, the correspondence was definitively concluded by a Mancunian who wrote to say that he was delighted to hear that Birmingham was now England’s second city, though he had always supposed hitherto that that honour had belonged to London.
The high point for me came when Yeats met Vachel Lindsay and spoke well of his poetry.
Not surprised: Vachel Lindsay is pretty good.
Congo (for example), though one of those poems that it is now (quite rightly) only possible to praise while performing powerful apotropaic gestures throughout, is, qua poem, superb. (Kipling’s The Female of the Species is another such.)
Lindsay originally lived in Chicago only fairly briefly en route from his boyhood downstate in Springfield, Ill. to seeking his fortune in New York, although I think he was somewhat of a vagabond in his later life. I was recently reading (because recommended by someone re the recurrent rise and fall of populist themes in our national politics) the poem he wrote many decades after the fact about the 1896 election, with his perspective (he was 16 at the time) of Bryan’s campaign as an ultimately doomed crusade of the young and vigorous “provincial,” if you must, America against the cunning and wickedness of the “dour East,”
The denouement:
Election night at midnight:
Boy Bryan’s defeat.
Defeat of western silver.
Defeat of the wheat.
Victory of letterfiles
And plutocrats in miles
With dollar signs upon their coats,
Diamond watchchains on their vests and spats on their feet.
Victory of custodians, Plymouth Rock,
And all that inbred landlord stock.
Victory of the neat.
Defeat of the aspen groves of Colorado valleys,
The blue bells of the Rockies,
And blue bonnets of old Texas, by the Pittsburg alleys.
Defeat of alfalfa and the Mariposa lily.
Defeat of the Pacific and the long Mississippi.
Defeat of the young by the old and the silly.
Defeat of tornadoes by the poison vats supreme.
Defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream.
Defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream.
*remembers 1968*
We read Sandburg, Masters, and Lindsay in HS. In a summer school seminar I went to after my junior year, the established critic R P Blackmur was horrified to learn that.
Modernism-wise, The first publication of (parts of) Ulysses was in NYC by a publisher who otherwise published mostly pornography. Unfortunately he had failed to inform Joyce that he was going to do so, thus bringing the wrath of the global literati down on himself.
http://web.uvic.ca/~mvp1922/samuel-roth-and-the-pirated-ulysses/
@de
Manchester’s claim does not appear to be based on population. Leeds is about 50% larger, Liverpool about 10% smaller, Bristol 20% smaller, Sheffield about 10% larger. Since Birmingham has about twice the population of Manchester, Leeds would be in the middle and more deserving on that basis of being “third city” than Manchester. The other ones here could battle it out for 4th city????.
Re Sandburg in high school, I may have mentioned this before but once upon a time maybe twenty years ago I was talking to a writer who is a decade older than me (meaning he’s just around age 65 now). I said, apropos of I don’t remember what, that I thought I had been in the last cohort of American high school students who were taught to think of Kurt Vonnegut as a novelist of the first rank (his reputation having seemed to have faded by the time we were having this conversation). He replied by saying that he had been in the last cohort of American high school students who were taught to think of Sandburg as a poet of the first rank.
Interestingly enough from an eternal recurrence perspective, I just learned that 110 years ago Vachel Lindsay was so mad at the United States Senate for failing to overturn the announced result of what Lindsay considered to have been a fraudulent and stolen election that he wrote a very angry poem that might fairly be construed as inciting violence against the Senators who had sustained the allegedly rigged outcome. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/General_William_Booth_enters_into_Heaven,_and_other_poems/To_the_United_States_Senate
Spoiler: there was a second round of Senate proceedings the following year about the same disputed election in which the outcome changed, i.e. a majority of Senators came to the view that the election in question had been tainted by corruption and should be voided. https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/electing-appointing-senators/contested-senate-elections/095William_Lorimer.htm
I am pretty sure Greater Manchester has more people than West Midlands Metro Area (aka Greater Birmingham).
Comparison of just city of Manchester and city of Birmingham is meaningless.
I mean, City of London has population of just 9,401, you know.
Manchester’s claim does not appear to be based on population.
Naturally not. That sort of metric is for Brummies and Londoners.
Depressingly, WP has an entire page on this second-city issue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_city_of_the_United_Kingdom
*remembers 1968*
É PROIBIDO PROIBIR (from 5:40)
the context in portuguse.
The text of the speech.
Caetano Veloso against the crowd 15 September 1968. Russians must find the line”proibido proibir” especially fun. (Later they elected Gilbero Gil minister of culture and I even think he sang some songs about marijuana in that capacity)
P.S. Google translate of “the context” link above.
Wonderfully it “translated” the phrase as “É prohibited para prohibiz” to English, and «Éhibited para prohibiz» to Russian. Quotemarks are especially cute:/
P.P.S. Lyrics: the studio version of the song precedes 5:40.
a poem apparently quoted in lyrics.
P.P.P.S In Russia it was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Red_Square_demonstration. I knew some of them (mostly their children and grandchildren though). I have not met Gorbanevskaya, though and regret this. They say she Totally loved guests when living in Paris:/
I think Joan Baez has a song about her. That’s the problem with her. Such a cute defender of working class… who know that in USSR she will defend human rights TOO?!
When Los Angeles overtook Chicago in population back in the 1980’s to become the second-most-populous city in the U.S., I don’t think there was much clamor on the part of Los Angelenos to claim “Second City” status because why concede that you’re not first on whatever the best methodology might be? “Second City” still resonates somewhat ironically around Chicago, as witness this fairly recent retrospective on an old-timey New-York-centric putdown: https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/books/ct-prj-chicago-the-second-city-20160503-story.html.
I imagine a certain aura of Secondness will continue to remain in Chicago even if it falls down to 4th place on the population metric (which may happen in the next decade or so as Houston continues to grow).
When Los Angeles overtook Chicago in population back in the 1980’s to become the second-most-populous city in the U.S., I don’t think there was much clamor on the part of Los Angelenos to claim “Second City” status because why concede that you’re not first on whatever the best methodology might be?
The position of Los Angeles in American culture is fascinating; while it resents the presumed superiority of NYC (cue Woody Allen and Randy Newman), it has no interest in the kind of ranked competition implied by “Second City” — it’s the capital of sunshine and movies, and that’s how people think of it. Nobody goes to LA because they think it’s a better version of NYC; they go for the sun, surf, and lifestyle (or, of course, to get discovered at a soda fountain). It’s sort of like the position of Moscow under the Russian Empire (though of course with utterly different values): “Who cares if we’re not the capital? We’re the center of true Russianness and real values, and we sneer at the Europeanized fops on the Nevsky Prospect.”
this second-city issue
That’s a different thing. The second city of the United Kingdom is obviously Edinburgh (perhaps Dublin had a slightly better claim back when it was still part of the UK; I suppose technically Belfast would have inherited that claim, though calling Belfast the second city of the UK sounds ridiculous).
The question of which is the second city of England, however, is more interesting, as neither Dublin nor Edinburgh is an option. Though I personally would probably have guessed York rather than Manchester.
York
Certainly if you go back a bit …
I gather that the two archbishoprics in England were supposed to be in York and London, but an unfortunate pagan revival meant that the London idea had to be abandoned in favour of Canterbury.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A6berht_of_Essex#Conversion_and_succession
I believe I mentioned Eve Babitz above (“Eve’s Hollywood”). She’s a strong and persuasive advocate for LA and especially hates Nathanael West.
On a smaller scale, San Jose in the Bay Area overtook San Francisco in terms of population and perhaps economic output in the early days of the tech boom. I think San Jose resented that people still thought of it as the obscure hick little sister of the snobbish San Francisco, but it remained that way. San Francisco had its own inferiority complex, but that’s another story.
Knut Hamsun lived in Chicago a winter in his twenties in the 1880’ies. Some sources say that he worked as a street car conductor, others that he was a road worker and dreamed of becoming a streetcar conductor.
Since Chicago and Carl Sandburg were mentioned above, I’ll put on record that my father claimed that as a bookstore clerk in Chicago in 1918 or 1919 he was given a list of book thieves to look out for. One of the suspects to watch was Carl Sandburg.
Hamsun was in the US for a considerable period and wrote a rather dismissive book about American culture (though he admired Mark Twain). He did farm labor, lectured a little, and worked as a secretary for a Norwegian Unitarian pastor in N. Minnesota. He hated being called a Swede, which was the generic term for Scandinavians. (Oddly, Henry Johnson above was a Swede who was wrongly called a Norskie). Hamsun was a bit foppish and thought Minnesotans were philistines.
and dreamed of becoming a streetcar conductor
Perhaps that was the equivalent of me wanting to be a spaceman when I was little
I had been in the last cohort of American high school students who were taught to think of Kurt Vonnegut as a novelist of the first rank
Funny, I am a year or two younger than you and I would have thought I was in the first cohort of American high school students who were taught to think of Vonnegut as a serious novelist one could be assigned in school, and not just an entertaining counterculture writer. But I grew up in New Hampshire, which is of course provincial. Still, my sense is that Vonnegut remains assigned reading in many American high schools, often Cat’s Cradle and certainly Slaughterhouse Five. And even read for fun. Kurt will likely survive into the next generation. I am fairly certain my Gen Z children will never voluntarily read Norman Mailer, Updike or Cheever.
Me, Vonnegut annoys me because he states obvious truths, and acts as if there is something novel and revolutionary about him stating them. That’s good enough to sell it to kids who haven’t been exposed enough to “War is Bad”, but once you get past that, there’s not much else to carry the writing.
Slaughterhouse-Five inevitably appeals to those lost souls given the unenviable task of deciding which Significant Works of Literature children should be made to read, on account of its obvious association with the Important Issues of Our Time.
But Cat’s Cradle is better. In fact, in its own way, it’s pretty much perfect.
(I should own up to having Bokononist sympathies, which may cloud my judgment. About everything.)
No child should be made to read it. (Of course.) In fact, I doubt whether one can really appreciate it without being at least a bit raddled first.
Mailer, Updike, Styron, Bellow, and several others convinced me around 1964 that the novelist biz was not for me. I liked Ralph Ellison and found Roth rather amusing, but didn’t aspire in those directions either.
@Vanya, I feel like I should offer to give ten bucks to the superintendent of any American public school district where the kids in 2021 are encouraged to read _Mother Night_. But OTOH my oldest child attracted favorable attention from grown-up authority figures in our town high school just for going to the library and voluntarily checking out books to read that hadn’t been specifically assigned for a class, even though I thought the stuff she was reading was rather boringly middlebrow (e.g. P.D. James and Carl Hiaasen). Apparently that’s all you need to do to exceed expectations nowadays, and my own ridiculous long-ago seventeen-year-old posturings (e.g. trying to exegete Ezra Pound to my suburban classmates in AP English) are now outside the scope of what is necessary to stick out.
Kurt will likely survive into the next generation. I am fairly certain my Gen Z children will never voluntarily read Norman Mailer, Updike or Cheever. (Vanya)
Toward the end of his long life (1892-1982), in I think Donald Hall’s Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, Archibald MacLeish spoke bitterly about what it’s like for a poet to outlive his poetry. In general, a good demo for a thesis about the mutability of literary reputation might be made of Barrett Wendell’s A Literary History of America, which in 1900 went on and on and on about the extreme wonderfulness of Wendell’s cousin Oliver Wendell Holmes while devoting just this one misspelled sentence to one of Holmes’s older contemporaries:
“Hermann Melville, with his books about the South Seas, which Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have declared the best ever written, and with his novels of maritime adventure, began a career of literary promise, which never came to fruition.”
(And does anybody remember that it was Barrett Wendell who invented freshman comp? No!)
@Jonathan Morse: It think it’s doubly amusing that the Oliver Wendell Holmes in question is nowadays probably best known simply for being the father of the other Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court justice.
See Our American Poets.
rather boringly middlebrow (e.g. P.D. James and Carl Hiaasen)
Carl Hiaasen’s works are much better in the original French* …
*I’ve only ever read them in the French translations, which seem all to be by Yves Sarda, who evidently loves the books and does them proud. I tried one in English, and it just wasn’t the same. It lacked that Je ne sais quoi …
David E: The daughter I was referencing was the one who took Latin, although I guess I could commend Hiaasen’s work to her younger sister who instead opted for French. But maybe there’s a Latin translation of Hiaasen out there? I don’t think she’s necessarily aware of Latin translations of any recentish Anglophone authors other than Milne and Rowling.
Funny, but I’ve read them in Portuguese translation.
“Sorte Sua” is very funny.
the one who took Latin
Eh, Latin, French, it’s all the same at the end of the day. You just need to marinate it a bit.
re: vonnegut, exegesis, etc:
i haven’t listened to any of it, but an acquaintance of mine who i generally trust (and have learned a lot about contemporary african literature from) has been doing a comprehensive vonnegut podcast: https://gradschoolvonnegut.libsyn.com/
i grew up on Rootabaga Stories, myself – extracurricularly, but i was raised by highly literary wolves – and had Stephen Vincent Benét* forced on me in elementary school**, who exemplifies a whole other kind of provincial-made-good-ism.
* only while checking about the accent on his name just now did i learn that he (a) gave the yale younger poets prize to both muriel rukeyser and margaret walker (and, of all people, joy davidman – though long before her entanglement with either christianity or c.s. lewis), and (b) wrote a short story that was both (i) based on the (abduction and) rape of the sabine women and (ii) the source for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
** Western Star, of all things.
And rozele, Stephen Vincent Benét’s brother and collaborator William Rose Benét was the third husband of the utterly beautiful and even more utterly well dressed poet Elinor Wylie, who haughtily wrote
Avoid the reeking herd,
Shun the polluted flock,
Live like that stoic bird,
The eagle of the rock.
There’s your monition, you provincials. Harvey Pekar drew a strip about it.
Oh dear, I was a terribly unliterary child. I read Biggles from age 12, and after that…. nothing really.
Harvey Pekar drew a strip about it.
One of the high points of my literary life in NYC was meeting Harvey Pekar. He was grumpy, as advertised.
Of course not. They’re girl friends. 🙂
(There’s even a forgettable book with that title.)
Me too, kind of, because menthol cigarettes have been illegal here for decades. By hiding that the smoke is smoke, they end up more addictive than without the menthol.
What is the true story?
“Abduction” is what rape means here: the Sabine women are possessions robbed from the Sabine men, then married, and raped in the modern sense only afterwards, after the story is over.
Euphemism treadmill.
In German it’s called Der Raub der Sabinerinnen, with the word for “robbery”.
As I understand, most American women call their female friends “girlfriends” – it’s quite the normative usage.
Except for sophisticated women* in New York who would refer to other women as “girlfriends” only in a romantic sense.
* And men. I remember an American explaining to my classmate that she can’t call another classmate of ours a girlfriend unless they both happen to be lesbians. It was very rude thing to say, I thought at the time. He was from New York, of course, used to work at the Wall Street.
“By hiding that the smoke is smoke, they end up more addictive than without the menthol.”
Is not this definition an euphemism for “some people like them”?
Practically, I rarely meet people who like them and they are women (often, women older than LH). They do not smoke much.
What is the true story?
Mike Nesmith’s mother (he of the Monkees) invented Liquid Paper, an alternative to Wite-Out [sic]
I have tried methnol cigarettes, calling my girl friend a girlfriend (oops, I did it again… but which one?) and listening to Billy Joel in earnest (whatever ‘listening in earnest’ means). I have not tried nude panty hose.
—
About “girlfriend”, one observation is that it is in the list of articles every Wikipedia must have.
But in Russian it is just “my girl” (or my young lady, or lass or how do you translate девушка). Poor editors of Russian Wikipedia created an article gyorlfrend (I see no point in adapting it to my English, thus interlinear: “[an] established-itself in several languages anglicism, [a] definition of social status of beloved-one, that is woman….”) and redirected boyfrend to that article. Meanwhile, as I see, English Wikipedia defines it as a female friend.
Understandably, “a girlfriend” is not what you say often, so “my girl” does the job. The closest thing to a literal translation, and a more romantic one would be “someone’s girl”.
“I want to be someone’s” as a female freind of mine once said.
To amplify for the young (especially the non-US young like David M.): after the tremendous success of the Beatles’ 1964 movie A Hard Day’s Night, an American imitation sprang up the next year in the form of a TV sitcom called The Monkees. This was conceived as an exercise in the Richard Lester directorial style with music only as an incidental detail, but the four cute young stars turned out to be popular as musicians too.
The operative word was “cute.” Wholesome and safe and derivative were their brand. On the other hand, Bob Dylan . . .
Discuss for comparison: the swaggering hedge fund billionaire Daniel S. Loeb, whose style contributed much to the culture of the Trump era, is a nephew of the inventor of the Barbie doll.
The Monkees turned out to be an excellent group, defying all expectations; “Last Train to Clarksville,” “I’m a Believer,” “Daydream Believer,” and other of their hits will outlive a lot of the touted songs of the era. I learn from the astoundingly thorough Wikipedia article:
the swaggering hedge fund billionaire Daniel S. Loeb, whose style contributed much to the culture of the Trump era, is a nephew of the inventor of the Barbie doll.
Barbie herself should not be tainted by association. She has greater depth than is commonly appreciated.
In 2003, when Saudi Arabia outlawed the sale of Barbie dolls, the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice announced that the “Jewish Barbie” is the symbol of decadence to the perverted West.
https://www.thejc.com/culture/features/barbie-s-jewish-roots-barbie-doll-ruth-handler-mattel-1.461881
https://www.heyalma.com/why-did-nobody-tell-me-that-barbie-is-jewish/
@David Marjanović: Correction fluid was invented by Bette Graham—whose son Michael Nesmith was part of the (pseudo)-band, The Monkees—in her kitchen.
I saw a Jewish cat in a dream. Why not Barbie…
As for Saudi Arabia, they were protecting fragile psyche of Saudi men.
Her eyes were green.
Harvey Pekar drew a strip about it
You mean, wrote about it? I don’t think he drew anything in his comic books. He was strictly a librettist.
hat really only learned about the Sex Pistols’ version of Stepping Stone by reading about it on wikipedia in Anno Domini MMXXI? Surely that was something that Every Schoolboy Knows, innit?
Meanwhile, that sort of cigarette that was under discussion was referenced by the Other Leading Brand, viz. the Clash (in “Stay Free”), in a nostalgic context that suggests that the symbolic-or-demographic baggage was not the same c. 1978 in the UK as it might have been in the US:
You always made me laugh
Got me in bad fights
Play me pool all night …
Smokin’ menthols
hat really only learned about the Sex Pistols’ version of Stepping Stone by reading about it on wikipedia in Anno Domini MMXXI?
I’m sure I knew about it forty years ago, but that’s a long time.
@drasvi: Caetano and Gil put on their “é proibido prohibir” act under a military dictatorship, which had introduced censorship of the arts. It’s easy to draw parallels both to Soviet Russia and to post-Soviet Russia as of today.
To avoid censorship, some Brazilian musicians resorted to Aesopian language – Chico Buarque’s Apesar de você could be superficially mistaken for a spurned lover’s diatribe. I used to think of this as a uniquely Soviet trick until I got more familiar with the history of what’s called Música popular brasileira (not the same as Brazilian pop).
As the Russian regime is increasingly resembling a Latin American dictatorship these days, Apesar de você and Vai passar sound as if they had been written with Russia in mind. (The Russian Maslenitsa tradition is minor compared with the great carnivals of Rio or Venice but the Russian theatrical revival in the past decade has been most remarkable.)
@Jonathan Morse: Wiley’s poem begins with a commonplace but ends more idiosyncratically: if you can’t live like an eagle, live like a mole (she has a weakness for velvet):
Live like the velvet mole:
Go burrow underground.
And there hold intercourse
With roots of trees and stones,
With rivers at their source,
And disembodied bones.
I hear Wordsworth (“With rocks, and stones, and trees”) and Yeats (“That converse bone to bone”) in the last stanza.
Wylie, not Wiley. My bad.
The Monkees’ version is the one that was best known to my generational cohort coming along a decade later, but the first recording of Stepping Stone was by the insufficiently remembered Paul Revere and the Raiders, and here’s some grainy black-and-white footage of them doing a comical lip-synch of it for some tv show circa 1966. (PR & the R’s also had a following among subsequent generations of punk-rockers, as witness e.g. the Circle Jerks’ version of Just Like Me.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smErXnu1leM
Circle Jerk is a really gross name for a band.
On provincialism, there are still British people who like to make fun of “colonials”. They think it’s a funny putdown.
“Colonials” retaliate by calling Englishmen “Poms”. One of our number here from New Zealand takes great umbrage at this word, finding it “racist”. I suspect, however, (just suspect, mind you) that it was originally created to cut newcomers from England down to size. It isn’t necessarily pejorative — in the form “Pommy” it can even be affectionate — but delivered in the right tone of voice with the right expletives it is definitely a putdown.
China is a great place for snobbery. People from Beijing look down on 外地人 wàidì-rén ‘people from outside’, while Shanghainese look down on everyone else in the country as country bumpkins.
I may have mentioned a female friend of mine from Beijing who was most upset when her Hong Kong boyfriend’s mother told her that ‘country girls’ from the Mainland (including Beijing) were much better wife material than the sophisticated, materialistic girls of Hong Kong. A nice clash of superiority complexes.
A while ago I was reading “A Research on Functional Grammar of Chinese” by Bojiang Zhang and Mei Fang and it had this phrase – supposedly by such “country girl”:
Wǒ shìgè nóngcūn gūniáng, cóngxiǎo shēnghuó zài shāngōu lǐ, yǒuxiē wèishēng xíguàn kěnéng gēn nǐmen chéng lǐ rén bù dà yīyàng. Yǒu shíhòu kěnéng liǎ yuè sā yuè yě bù xǐ yī huí zǎo, yīfú ma, bànnián yī huàn, nǐmen xián bù xián?
Thank you, Bathrobe.
that Jamie Lee Curtis is a hermaphrodite
Nonononono, Ms. Daum. That is the ignorant version of the rumor. The sophisticated version is that Ms. Curtis is a pseudohermaphrodite: that is, she has androgen insensitivity syndrome, in which the cells of an XY fetus ignore the androgens normally pumped out by the testicles, and therefore develop as female, the default developmental sex of mammals. Since Ms. Curtis refuses to comment, the matter remains a rumor.
Except for sophisticated women* in New York who would refer to other women as “girlfriends” only in a romantic sense.
Gale would beg to differ, or rather insist on differing.
And men. I remember an American explaining to my classmate that she can’t call another classmate of ours a girlfriend unless they both happen to be lesbians. It was very rude thing to say, I thought at the time.
Quite right.
He was from New York, of course, used to work at the Wall Street.
As a construction laborer, perhaps. To be sure, I know some very polite laborers, including at least one outright feminist.
I should own up to having Bokononist sympathies, which may cloud my judgment. About everything.
I firmly believe that we are all Bokononists, but some of us don’t know it (yet). I had to explain Bokononist vocabulary to Gale he other day because I had said that we were a duprass, but after that she agreed.
Theodore Sturgeon on Cat’s Cradle: “This is an annoying book and you must read it. And you better take it lightly, because if you don’t you’ll go off weeping and shoot yourself”.
No child should be made to read it. (Of course.)
Or anything else. Not even Homer.
In fact, I doubt whether one can really appreciate it without being at least a bit raddled first.
In what sense: colored red, interwoven, heavily beaten, or confused?
One of the high points of my literary life in NYC was meeting Harvey Pekar.
I was warned off meeting authors by Le Guin. Much later, I met Le Guin very briefly at the end of a talk she had given. I was so flustered that I couldn’t remember to ask her if her line “the tadde was a miner” in The Dispossessed was an allusion to “Which Side Are You On?” And now it’s too late, dammit.
She has greater depth than is commonly appreciated.
And rather less breadth; if she were full-size, there would be no room for her internal thoracic organs.
“Colonials” retaliate by calling Englishmen “Poms”.
pom < pommy < pomegranate < jimmygrant < immigrant, as it turns out.
As a construction laborer, perhaps.
“I worked at the Merrill Lynch. They entrusted me with two billion dollars!”
“Wow, what did you do with so much money?”
“Er… well… I counted them…”
That’s backwards, because if she were androgen-insensitive, she’d look a lot more feminine. Everyone produces some amount of androgens; only androgen-insensitive people look as if they didn’t produce any.
@dm
I am not sure what features (as opposed to haircut, makeup, clothing preferences, etc.) you select as “more feminine”.
You could say JLC has
1. Square jaw
2. Angular (i.e. not round) face
3. Thin lips
4. unusually direct and “herausfordernd” eye contact
I am not even sure that 4 needs one to have “masculine” eyes and surrounding musculature, it could be independent of that.
Maybe you mean androgynous body features, but this is outside my scope (I would need quantitative measurements or full body images to form an opinion).
Are you saying that CAIS (or also some PAIS) fit more within some “feminine” envelope excluding (JLC levels of) 1-4?
pom < pommy < pomegranate < jimmygrant < immigrant
wow!