The Johnson Tercentennial at Harvard.

I didn’t attend this one, but there’s a wonderful article on it in the Harvard Gazette:

Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary of the English Language” was first published in 1755 as his attempt to both rein in and celebrate the galloping vigor of English. For 150 years, it was considered the pre-eminent compilation of its kind.

But Johnson — born 300 years ago this coming Sept. 18 — was more than its author. He was England’s most famous man of letters, rising from humble origins as the son of a provincial bookseller to become an accomplished poet, literary critic, playwright, essayist, and (not least) conversationalist.

Johnson — in all his fullness, contradiction, erudition, and energy — was remembered, reviewed, and revered late last month (Aug. 27-29) in a Harvard literary celebration.

The three-day event, “Johnson at 300: A Houghton Library Symposium,” drew more than a hundred Johnsonians from all over the world….

The symposium was the largest scholarly celebration of Johnson this year in the United States, said organizer Thomas Horrocks, Houghton’s associate librarian for collections. He called the author “this good and great man.”

Accompanying the article is this wonderful picture of Greg Clingham, professor and director of the university press at Bucknell, and a scholar whose work I have been admiring since I was a graduate student whose dissertation was barely a blip in his brain:

An eighth type of ambiguity…

…but not mentioned in the book:

In 1971, ten years after first reading Seven Types, I met Empson in London. He’d recently retired from his chair at the University of Sheffield and was living with his wife, Hetta, at Studio House, Hampstead Hill Gardens – in a set-up described by Robert Lowell as a ‘household [that] had a weird, sordid nobility that made other Englishmen seem like a veneer’. Empson’s idea of making lunch was to place an assortment of unpunctured cans of Chinese vegetables on the gas cooker, where they tended to explode. Ancient rashers of fried bacon served as bookmarks in his disintegrating copy of Marvell’s Collected Poems. He stirred his tea with the sole remaining earpiece of his glasses. After an alarming lunch, he and I would set off in my car to raid the Wallace Collection, the Sir John Soane Museum, or some unsuspecting country house in Buckinghamshire or Hertfordshire, where he had found out that a family portrait of an ancestor, distantly connected with Marvell, hung on the walls. Doorstepping a secluded mansion, deep in its landscaped park, at the end of a long and gated drive, Empson displayed an imperious persistence, refused to take no for an answer, and forced his way inside past nonplussed butlers and feebly protesting dowagers. I delighted in the disquiet that he gave such people. During the time I knew him, his silver moustache varied in cut from Fu Manchu to Colonel Blimp; he was, always, legendarily scruffy, but his commanding, high-pitched voice announced his lapsed membership of the landowning classes, and the dowager and butler were clearly uncertain as to whether they were confronting Lord Emsworth in his cups, or an unusually determined Kleeneze brush salesman.

The scene went something like this:

Empson: “I can’t quite make out this stanza of ‘Appleton House.’ It’s wonderfully opaque.”

Friend: “Ah, yes, the ideology of these lines shows a fascinating shift in English diction, as Marvell struggles to register the myriad of social changes that had occurred with the return of Charles within the tradition and conventions of the country-house poem.”

Empson: “No, just a smudge of grease. Maybe it’s best not to put that type in the book.”

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

From “Dreams of Better Schools,” a review of two new books on American education in The New York Review of Books comes this gem on continuities in public education policy over the last nine years:

So it is all the more remarkable that it was under George W. Bush, a president full of platitudes about the virtue of local autonomy and the folly of “big government,” that Washington entered the field of public education more aggressively than ever before. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, supported by many liberal Democrats, notably the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy, required that states institute standards defining what students must learn grade by grade, test student achievement school by school and district by district, and improve—or, in the absence of improvement, eliminate—schools that fail to meet the standards.

In general, the Obama administration remains committed to such mandates. As part of the “stimulus package,” it has announced plans for dispensing some $4 billion on a competitive basis to states that adopt what Secretary of Education Arne Duncan calls “common, internationally benchmarked K–12 standards.” The new initiative is called “Race to the Top,” and one of its provisions encourages the growth of charter schools that are exempt from many of the regulations governing the hiring, firing, and promotion of teachers, and whose charters are subject to revocation depending on performance as measured chiefly by test results.

So the new boss is not that different from the old boss, educationally-speaking. Tenure is under attack everywhere, by everyone. Republicans like doublespeak. Shocking claims, I know.

But here’s the part that really gets me riled up:

Rose, by contrast, observes a gifted teacher reading a story called A House for Hermit Crab with her first-grade students. She has furnished the classroom (probably at her own expense) with a glass case containing live crabs, and has the students watch their behavior in different environments—cold water, warm water, dry surfaces—and then write about what they have seen. The exercise helps them learn how “to observe closely and record what they see, to form hypotheses, to report publicly on their thinking, to gain the feeling of being knowledgeable.” And it is also an introduction to the pleasure of writing as an act of communication. For Rose, a good teacher can turn almost any material to good use.

To which this professor of English literature replies: would it kill you to use literature to teach literature–instead of using it as a mere gateway to science or social studies?

A lot of people rightly note that some college-professors cop-out of their responsibilities as teachers by blaming primary and secondary schoolteachers. Of course this happens. But on the other hand, it’s easy to take that stance too far. As a teacher who wants to teach his students as they come to him, it seems useful to think critically about the kinds of training they’ve had before they walk through my door. You do this not to sling blame, but to try to understand what they’ve taught your students so that you can build on it.

Sadly, when it comes to teaching literature and reading, the answer is too often “not much”:

Although stories and poems play a prominent role in the education of children, literature itself is rarely the subject of teaching–at least not in North America. Young children reading Charlotte’s Web might be asked to develop their language skills by inserting vocabulary words into webs made of twine and hung in the classroom, or to expand their creativity by exploring what it feels like to try looking radiant, or to build their knowledge by developing an interest in the habits of spiders. But in American and Canadian classrooms, they’re seldom asked, as they are more often in Britain, Australia, and elsewhere, to consider a text as a text–to explore the ways in which is provides the pleasures of literature we outlined in the previous chapter.

Even when texts aren’t being used at the basis for vocabulary or science lessons, study of them tends to focus on nonliterary concerns. Standard guides…define literature as vicarious experience that offers children insight into the feelings of others, as a transmitter of cultural heritage, and as a resource for the development of cognitive and linguistic skills. These guides say much about the usefulness of literature in teaching these subjects and skills but surprisingly little about literature itself, or about the means by which ardent readers respond to it, think about it, and take pleasure in it. In fact, the educational uses of these guides recommended in these guides distort the experience of reading in a way that might actually prevent children from enjoying it. Ardent adult readers of literature and children who happily read it on their own don’t often do so as a means of investigating spiders or of conscientiously setting out to learn how to be more tolerant or more imaginative….People who like reading literature read it, primarily, because they enjoy the experience of reading it. They like doing it in and for itself.
–Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer, The Pleasures of Children’s Literature, 3rd ed. (2002)

Of course, anyone who teaches in a university English department knows what comes next, regarding composition outcomes. I am not even going there.

Because Shandyism is art-form.

A blog documenting artistic interpretations of Tristram Shandy’s infamous black page. Some of them are quite brilliant, and some quite misguided. A fitting tribute.

I am not going to be Henry VIII for Halloween.

But after last night’s terrific talk by Suzannah Lipscomb, I kinda wish I was. She came here to our little corner of the middle of nowhere to speak on why Henry VIII became a suspicious tyrant after 1536, when before that time he was known as kind, friendly, even somewhat benevolent as a ruler. Or, in other pictures, how Henry went from this rather unthreatening young man:

To this display of Renaissance machismo:

I gather that her talk was a precis of her book, that the year 1536 saw a number of events which, taken together, thoroughly changed Henry’s outlook. Her thesis was quite convincing (says the professor of literature). Even better, though, was the wonderful balance between gritty, detailed scholarship and engaging presentation. I talked with my students afterward and heard a lot of raving about how interesting the lecture was. That’s high praise, from students at a Friday night lecture! It’s also something to keep in mind, as a teacher.

Attendance was wonderful, a mix of students, faculty, and townspeople, upwards of 200 I would guess. If I was being mean-spirited, I’d say there isn’t much to do in a small college town–but I’d rather say that this is what makes a small college town great, that a Friday night lecture turns out to be just the kind of thing that people want to do. We went out for dinner afterward and had a very pleasant evening.

And now, for Halloween. I’m thinking of going as Slash. It’s a stretch, I know.

On restaurant English.

It is apparently not the same language spoken by the rest of us.

I was at at chain restaurant the other day–OK, OK, don’t make fun, I live in a small town that is decidedly uncool when it comes to eateries–and I came across the following drinks menu:

We offer an array of special beers that are brewed in small batches by masters of the craft. These selections are unique and often hard to find, so the choices are a little different at every [insert name of restaurant].

And then there followed a list of “unique and often hard to find” beers “brewed in small batches by masters of the craft.” Rare, unknown brews like Sam Adams, Blue Moon, Stella Artois, Sierra Nevada, Heineken, and Yuengling.

Bet you’ve never seen any of those beers before, have you? Come from the ends of the earth, they do.

There’s an old saying…

…that sums up my reaction to this: “you get what you pay for.”

College drinking.

An interesting study: apparently, American students drink on average less than students in many other countries.

Of course, statistics don’t really tell the story, but only give averages. Still, I’d like to see what kinds of analysis or narratives would grow out of these numbers. Based solely on my experience dealing with students, I come to the startling conclusion that there are some students who take things seriously and some who don’t. Things haven’t changed that much since I was a student–except that the music has gotten worse, of course. And they’ve flattened out those hills that we had to climb both ways to get to school.

It’s fall…

…and I just won an iPod nano.

I didn’t know what an iPod nano was until about ten minutes ago. I had a vague idea that, like other mp3 players, it played music. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t even know what the raffle prize was when I threw in my ticket last week at the Octoberfest lunch-fundraiser for Foreign Languages. But I picked up my prize this afternoon and am now trying to figure out what it does. Apparently, a lot of different things: I’m most excited about the pedometer and the voice recording function, but it also takes and plays back video and does a lot of other nifty stuff.

Someone’s been peeking into my classroom.

From University Diaries:

Not only some discussion is crucial; clear signals about what the professor considers important to know are crucial. The things we go to the trouble of writing on the board with our very own fingers are the important things, not the twelve bullet points some book has provided for your slide. Physically writing on the board is also letting the students watch the professor’s brain operate right there in front of them. PowerPoint of course makes professors just as passive as it makes students. Everyone reads off of a nice neat packaged page. Writing on the board is messy, human, dynamic — thought in motion. Active.

Just today, I was illustrating Spenser on the chalkboard. There are good pedagogical reasons to use classical art for the same purposes, but I find it a lot more fun to scribble a picture of a dragon as big as a mountain and a teeny-tiny shining knight on a horse then to try to find a Raphael of that image. I took four years of art in high school, but I’m not much of a draftsman–in fact, I’ve never been able to draw a horse than didn’t look like a pig with a longish nose. I bet it serves the purposes of visual learning about as well as a Raphael, though, while providing a whole lot more in the way of laughs.

But every year–even every class period–my drawings get just a little bit better. One of these years, I should do them up right and publish them in the blog, for the amusement of my former students.