mcdspot

Good list of 100 books that should be in any man’s library. And have been read.

Letters of Note is one of my favorite new websites, although I cannot view it at work because I wouldn’t get anything done. Simply put, it’s a collection of rare, important, or otherwise culturally relevant letters, with transcriptions. For starters, check out this letter from Kurt Vonnegut to his family, written from a repatriation camp after he was rescued from the nazis in 1945.

The Royal Society has published a number of important manuscripts online in .pdf format, including a certain document entitled A Letter of Mr. Isaac Newton, Professor of the Mathematicks in the University of Cambridge; Containing His New Theory about Light and Colors: Sent by the Author to the Publisher from Cambridge, Febr. 6. 1671/72; In Order to be Communicated to the R. Society

“Colours are not Qualifications of light, derived from Refractions, or Reflections of natural Boadies (as ’tis generally believed) but Original and connate properties, which in divers Rays are divers.”

I love the internet.

William Chace, former university president and English professor, has written a very interesting essay on the decline of the English Department at American colleges. I’m inclined to agree with him, especially when he makes this point:

What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.

For me, the most important reason for the decline is the politicization of literary discussion and over-emphasis on literary criticism. Rather than teach graduate students how to effectively communicate their own love of books to students, they are pigeonholed into critical perspectives and told to stay there. And the older the critical theory you adopt, the less chance you will have of getting a tenured position. Should it really be all about getting a job? (yes). Or should we focus on understanding how reading seriously can inform and deepen our understanding of the world? As Chace puts it:

Studying English taught us how to write and think better, and to make articulate many of the inchoate impulses and confusions of our post-adolescent minds. We began to see, as we had not before, how such books could shape and refine our thinking. We began to understand why generations of people coming before us had kept them in libraries and bookstores and in classes such as ours. There was, we got to know, a tradition, a historical culture, that had been assembled around these books. Shakespeare had indeed made a difference—to people before us, now to us, and forever to the language of English-speaking people.

Finding pleasure in such reading, and indeed in majoring in English, was a declaration at the time that education was not at all about getting a job or securing one’s future. In comparison with the pre-professional ambitions that dominate the lives of American undergraduates today, the psychological condition of students of the time was defined by self-reflection, innocence, and a casual irresponsibility about what was coming next.

Yes

yes

yes.

However, there are a multitude of opinions on this issue, many of which are discussed well in this Metafilter thread. It ain’t as simple as I wish it all was.

Hortensio:
Sir, you say well, and well you do conceive,
And since you do profess to be a suitor,
You must, as we do, gratify this gentleman,
To whom we all rest generally beholding.

Tranio:
Sir, I shall not be slack; in sign whereof,
Please ye we may contrive this afternoon,
And quaff carouses to our mistress’ health,
And do as adversaries do in law,
Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends.

The Taming Of The Shrew Act 1, scene 2, 269–277

Letters of Note is a particularly fascinating site, with scans of actual letters from history. Here’s a particularly compelling one from Einstein.

Yes, that’s Hemingway. via Gunslinger and Kottke.

Few realize how gruesome a lot of fairy tales actually were.

Erin sent the latest results of the 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which are great as always. The winner:

“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”

David McKenzie
Federal Way, WA

The elements of telling a good story, by Ira Glass, host of “This American Life.”

This ten-part biography of Walt Whitman looks wonderful. And it’s free.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the
stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg
of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

via Kottke.org

Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
There was an old father of Dylan
Who was seriously, mortally illin’
“I want,” Dylan said
“You to bitch till you’re dead.
“I’ll be cheesed if you kick it while chillin’.”

If Shakespeare were alive today he’d be an Alabama politician, given our legislators’ natural eloquence and complete abstention from violence.

You speak unskilfully: or, if your knowledge be more, it is much darkened in your malice.

More Shakespearean insults here. Stolen liberally from Eartha.

Wordsworth for the YouTube generation.

The New York Times article is here. Rolling Stone had a great interview here. But for me, I’m going to pull out my old dogeared copy of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and raise a glass to one of my favorite literary rebels. Although some of his works were just plain weird, I’ll never forget the delicious weirdness of Billy Pilgrim’s shattered life in Slaughterhouse Five, a book which spoke to me at a young age when I was wrestling with my own ideas of fate and free will and just who in the hell am I? I always enjoyed Vonnegut’s ability to pull these deep themes out of such hilariously bizarre settings. I also loved that I knew I was reading a book that had been banned from the Montgomery Academy high school library.

So goodbye Mr. Vonnegut. I hope you and Kilgore Trout and a couple of Tralfamadorians are relaxing somewhere in the fourth dimension, sipping tea and watching the fires.

so it goes.

(p.s.: great interview with Kurt here.)

Cormac McCarthy’s amazing novel “The Road” is among the five finalists for the 2007 National Book Critics’ Circle Award. The nominees are:

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf)
• Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic)
• Dave Eggers, What is the What (McSweeney’s)
• Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land (Knopf)
• Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Knopf)

You can view a list of past winners here.

Reading Shakespeare has a dramatic effect on the human brain.

I really dig Isaac Asimov.

from Douglas Adams: The Private Life of Genghis Khan.