A 400-year-old collection of John Donne’s poetry has been discovered in an English country house: “A previously unrecorded handwritten manuscript of John Donne’s poetry has been found in a box at an English country house in Suffolk. Dating back 400 years, the bound collection was kept for at least the last two centuries at Melford Hall in Suffolk.”
William Logan reviews the poetry of Frederick Seidel, Ursula K. Le Guin, Max Ritvo, and others: “It’s a given that, when a writer is eminent enough, someone somewhere will publish virtually anything that falls off his desk—high-school English papers, complaints to the irs, or, well, poems. If Jimmy Carter was allowed to publish his poems, and Jimmy Stewart his, and Tupac and James Franco and Viggo Mortensen and Leonard Nimoy and Charlie Sheen and Suzanne Somers theirs, there’s no good reason Le Guin shouldn’t have added hers.”
A history of the Pyrenees: “Nothing by way of history or imagination is alien to his account of this 270-mile chain of mountains. We follow Henry Swinburne on a hot day in 1776 to the 9,439ft summit of the Pic du Midi de Bigorre, where no local person would venture. ‘Dreary’ was his verdict, but also ‘savage’.”
The decline of the history major: “History has seen the steepest decline in majors of all disciplines since the 2008 recession, according to a new analysis published in the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History.”
Joseph Bottum writes in defense of the “great men” approach to history and against a mindlessly progressive one.
The return of Jeeves: “‘As a large part of the planet slipped from Britain’s grasp one man silently maintained the country’s reputation.’ Coming across that sentence a dozen years ago in an otherwise persuasive volume of social history, I raised an eyebrow. One man? The masculine specimen the author had in mind was Ian Fleming’s suave, sophisticated bullet-dodger and lady-killer, ‘Bond, James Bond.’ That’s as may be, I thought. Entirely plausible. But what of Wooster, Bertie Wooster — that blithe, hapless and unfailingly preux English gent dreamed up by P.G. Wodehouse in 1915? With the help of his brainy, discerning valet, Jeeves, Bertie had been dodging (sartorial) disasters and rogue (matrimonial) engagements for decades before Bond ordered his first martini. Was he not, in his breezy, feckless way (or ‘vapid and shiftless’ way, as his fearsome Aunt Agatha would have it), an equally effective bulwark of his nation? Just imagine the boost to British prestige, not to mention morale, if the sang-froid of Bond and the sunniness of Bertie could be blended in one person! This thought might be enough to prompt Jeeves to observe ‘Rem acu tetigisti,’… prompting Bertie to ask Jeeves what that means. (‘Put my finger on the nub?’ ‘Exactly, Sir.’) It also, evidently, has prompted Ben Schott, the author of the Jeevesian compendium of British cultural trivia known as Schott’s Original Miscellany, to attempt this patriotic hybridization himself, recrafting Wooster as his fleet of ex-fiancées only dreamed of doing, by injecting him with spine — or, at least, by assigning him a mission of greater import than swiping a silver cow creamer. In Jeeves and the King of Clubs, a fizzy new homage to Wodehouse, Schott infuses Bertie with extra bounce, transforming him from sheer pleasure seeker to shrewd (sort of) secret agent — no wardrobe change necessary.”
Essay of the Day:
The American Heritage Dictionary has dissolved its usage panel. David Skinner, who was a member of the panel, remembers it in the latest issue of the magazine:
“The history of debate over good English is mostly written in the pages of grammars, textbooks, professional style guides, and that whole genre of single-author monographs that can be lumped under the banner of How You Really Ought to Speak and Write Your Own Native Language. Yet, apparently, this is not enough. Every once in a while, some well-meaning soul has to come forward with the bright idea that what the English language really needs is an academy along the lines of the Académie française, an official body of so-called immortals who expound rules and maintain an official dictionary for the French language.
“Fed, apparently, by the same impulse that leads to blue-ribbon commissions, innocuous motions in favor of the metric system, and arguments for a two-person presidency, these proposals for an academy of English embody an otherwise sane observation, which is that certain people know a lot more about usage than others. But none of these proposals, from Jonathan Swift’s in the 18th century to Jean Stafford’s call in 1973 for ‘a new kind of censorship’ to fight unwelcome euphemisms and jargon, has succeeded in establishing a body of any authority or landed any punches stronger than a glancing blow on the language itself.
“The usage panel of American Heritage Dictionary, though modest in scope, may be the closest anyone has come to establishing such an academy. Its purpose was to discover and present an enlightened consensus on ‘how the language is used today,’ as editor Morris put it, ‘especially with regard to dubious or controversial locutions.’ Although Parton himself understood the commercial advantages of recruiting intellectual all-stars to his roster, it was Morris who came up with the idea, according to American Heritage correspondence with the usage panel.
“From its first ballot in 1964, the usage panel survived through February of this year, when Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the dictionary’s sole publisher since the second edition, announced that it was ending the usage panel, citing the ‘continuing decline in consumer demand for print dictionaries.’ This news caused hardly a yawn, even in lexicography circles, yet it marks the end of a striking episode in the history of American English when the idea of organizing a distinguished group of expert users to provide guidance on disputed usages was put to the test.
“If you imagine that the point of an academy is to uphold classroom rules, especially those trampled by the young and the careless, the original American Heritage panel would have been to your liking. Its biases were writ large with the inclusion of Jacques Barzun, Sheridan Baker, Dwight Macdonald, and several other critics of Webster’s Third. A handful of others came armed with usage guides of their own. Theodore Bernstein of the New York Times, also a critic of Webster’s Third, was the author of a few popular books on usage. Roy Copperud, the words columnist for Editor & Publisher, had written his own dictionary of usage.
“The usage panel was more august than representative. It included several Pulitzer Prize winners (Walter Lippmann, Katherine Anne Porter, Virgil Thomson), one Nobel Prize winner (Glenn T. Seaborg), a gaggle of poets (John Ciardi, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Allen Tate), and the usual overstock of former association presidents and suspiciously prominent journalists.
“The group was very male and very old and, of course, very white. Of 105 members, only 11 were women. The scholar Patrick Kilburn investigated the ages of the original panelists and discovered that 28 had been born in the 19th century. Only 6 of the 105 were under 50 years old. ‘What,’ Kilburn asked, ‘could such a huddle of arthritic ancients tell about the language of 1970?’
“It was a good question: The usage panel was so old that just a couple years after the dictionary was published, more than 10 percent of the panelists had died and needed to be replaced.
“But the panel was never marketed as an up-to-the-minute weather report on the state of American English. Instead it was described as a body of ‘professional speakers and writers who have demonstrated their sensitiveness to the language and their power to wield it effectively and beautifully.’ A good bit of gray hair and the occasional walking stick were perfectly consistent with the desired image of a fairly large body of experts all of whom qualified as Persons of Consequence.”
Photo: Abandoned village in the Pyrenees
Poem: Richard Tillinghast, “Overnight”
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