Does seeing Mansfield on Colbert and subsequently talking about it with someone who took one of his classes count as reading his book? I'm pretty sure it's the closest I'll come to it.
You know what, there are at least two allusions in the Housman that I take to be to the Georgics, but now that I think about it I wonder if Virgil didn't take those lines himself from Greek works? After all it's supposed to be fragments of a Greek tragedy.
jazz, from such persons and groups as . . . XTC!
This must be wrong.
I sort of expected Mansfield to have a weird squeaky voice, because Nathan Tarcov does, and all those guys are the same, right?
Doesn't Alcmaeon figure directly into The Theogony, and didn't Virgil take from Hesiod for the Georgics anyway?
Guys, guys, stop it! People are starting to stare!
I love you all so much, even when I don't entirely understand what you're talking about.
Has anyone read the book?
Has anyone seen a single positive comment, anywhere, about Mansfield or the book? Even a tentative suggestion that it might in some sense be worth reading?
Hmm, I should have read on to the end of Wills' review. Here's the review by Christina Hoff Sommers, from (naturally) the Weekly Standard. It's positive, all right, in a way that should settle the question of whether the book is worth reading.
(It occurs to me that the answer to Ben's question may be "Garry Wills.")
And so, were you ever to do this all-noise show, what would be on the playlist, then? (Asks the lurker shamelessly looking for new musical references, & simultaneously too lazy to think up pseudonym.)
I'm not sure I actually could do an all-noise show, so I don't know how much help I can be. Uh, old standby Merzbow; early Flying Luttenbachers; the Martin Tetreault/Otomo Yoshihide duos; probably a fair amount of stuff on Ambiances Magnetiques could work; some of Nels Cline's collaborations… Maybe some AMM? Wolf Eyes? Hair Police? I dunno, really.
The Weekly Standard review - or "preview" as the case may be - has some quite critical sections, the enthusiastic praise at the beginning and the end notwithstanding.
I love Garry Wills in his modes of ire and irony. I wish he had done more to explain that much of what Mansfield is calling "manliness" isn't what used to be called that.
Speaking of manly, Ted Barlow has hung it up, and (because it's all about oneself) apparently considers Unfogged among the ninety percent of everything.
What I have found a little astonishing is the tendency of reviewers of this book to make little or no attempt to outline what Mansfiled in fact thinks, but to move immdiately into counter-argument. Of course, the book may be a mess; I haven't read it. From what I have read of Mansfield, I think it's entirely possible that a book by him might combine hyperbolic, undersupported statements with thoughtful/acute observations. Closing of the American Mind had this quality, I think, and it drove a certain type of reviewer crazy.
14: I was all ready to be hurt, thinking that he'd said something mean about us. Bitching because we didn't get a name check, on the other hand, would be silly. And I'll miss him at Crooked Timber.
14, 16: That fucker . Good riddance.
I read an excerpt of that book that was published in the New Criterion I was once susceptible to certain aspects of neo-conservatism (being something of a real conservative myself) i.e, some of their criticisms of modern approaches to literature. I was very anti-theory for a while andmostly agreed with Allan Bloom--though never completely.
That Mansfield article was the death knell in their credibility as far as I was concerned.
(To be fair, some of their mainly favorable reviews ofnon-politival books or musical performances are not entirely wrong. Their published poems are often good. Donald Hall is a good poet. And I'm glad that they have poetry prizes for young poets. They are biased in favor of traditional forms, but I don't think that that's entirely bad. Blank verse is fine, but it's good to have people who can wtill write sestinas or lyric forms. I'm a bit biased, though, since a guy I knew in collegewon ne of those prizes.)
My House in college had Junior dinners at the Master's house where we got to invite professors to come to dinner. I had always wanted to meet Mansfield, so I put his name down. He was a real disappointment as a right-winger. I was an impressionable young fogey, but then I found out that he had made a reputation for himself as a Plato scholar, and he didn't even know Greek!
No squealy voice.
I found out that he had made a reputation for himself as a Plato scholar, and he didn't even know Greek!
WTF? Can I have a job as a professor of cosmology - I don't understand a word (equation?) of string theory.
1.) OFE--It was just that he always goes on about declining standards in education and how students aren't as good or as well-educated as they used to be. He was known as Harvey C- Mansfield. Grade inflation probably was a problem, but he seemed to believe in grad deflation as a politocal statement.
If you're going to talk about decliing educational standards, you ought to match teh previous generation's attainment, and that includes learning Greek.
2. The New Criteion article seemed to hold up Teddy Roosevelt as the pinnacle of manhood, when, really, he always struck me as something of a man-child. Mansfield talked mainly about his exploits in the wilderness, but I can't help thinking that Mansfield would approve of Teddy's penchant for starting unnecessary wars under false pretenses.
mostly agreed with Allan Bloom
Bloom always struck me as the dotty old man sitting on his porch bitching about how much better things were back in his day, then screaming at the kids to get the hell off of his lawn.
BG, I agree. If you want to be taken seriously as a Plato scholar, you should know Greek.
that Mansfield would approve of Teddy's penchant for starting unnecessary wars under false pretenses
Well, he says he approves of things that increase the level of risk in society, doesn't he? Unlike, David Frum, who wants to increase that level in order to increase the value of traditional family arrangement or something like that, Mansfield wants to do it so that men can show off by killing each other and so that women will admit to being weak and let men take care of them.
Very briefly:
1) I haven't read the book, but one thing I do know is that Mansfield does not think Manliness is an simple good. Rather, he considers it a natural trait, one that is overwhelmingly (though by no means exclusively) characteristic of men, which has positive and negative aspects in about equal measure. Indeed, recklessness, overconfidence, etc. are all things which Mansfield considers typical "manly" flaws. In this sense, Teddy R is a very good example of the virtues and the vices of confidence in the face of risk.
2) Mansfield main beat is Machiavelli, not Plato (I don't believe he's ever published on Plato, actually). He does read and speak Italian.
OneFatEnglishman--I reread your comment and thought how stupid I was for submitting my second comment without reading it more carefully.
My follow-up was not wholly without merit. He was a hypocrite.
apo--That is exactly what Allan Bloom was.. I was a fogey at 18. By 25 I was much younger at heart and had outgrown those attitudes.
I still kind of envy some of the Victorians abd Edwardians for their educational systems. I wish that someone had started me on languages much earlier. I's have liked to have started Latin and Greek at 8. I think that my mastery ofbothwould have been much better if I had.
Would you say Donald Hall is a neo-con? I wouldn't have thought so. Does he review for the New Criterion or just publish poems there? Anyway, he's so old now--too old to be a neo-anything.
I heard Mansfield interviewed on WNYC. He was absolutely hopeless, I'm afraid: stuttering and fumbling in response to callers, needing to be rescued out of his own argumentative holes by the host, wandering around aimlessly in examples and reverting suddenly to his oversimplified thesis. It was really painful to listen to, and I remember thinking that somebody in his family or department should have dissuaded him from writing the book.
Donald Hall has published pieces other than poems at The New Criterion, though how many I couldn't say. I know he did a short appreciation of Larkin there years ago. I wouldn't consider him a neo-con in political terms, but then many of magazine's writers, past and present, aren't actually neo-cons. I agree that their poetry section is very good; I'll also say that Karen Wilkin is a first-rate art critic, though I disagree with her on some issues. She's also a pretty formidable art historian.
I'll say a good word for Mansfield: I like his translation of Machiavelli's Florentine Histories. And yet, while I have no trouble believing his conception of manliness is more complicated than it might seem from reviews, I still wouldn't want to read his book, let alone be seen with it. Nor would I refrain from laughing at someone I saw reading it.
Nathan Tarcov does has a squeaky voice. I had forgotten that, but it's true.
baa-You're right that his main beat is Machiavelli. He is not principally a Plato scholar, but he has published on Plato. I don't remember what. That's why I asked him about Greek.
And it is true that he did not think of manliness as an unmitigated good. It is strange that he finds it only completely objectionable when it shows up in women.
Furthermore, if he had a question about the meaning of a word like thumos,he could have called up Greg Nagy.
baa-You're right that his main beat is Machiavelli. He is not principally a Plato scholar, but he has published on Plato. I don't remember what. That's why I asked him about Greek.
And it is true that he did not think of manliness as an unmitigated good. It is strange that he finds it only completely objectionable when it shows up in women.
Furthermore, if he had a question about the meaning of a word like thumos,he could have called up Greg Nagy.
baa, I'm curious about your reaction to this, from the Wills review:
We are served up second-class insights from second-class literature, from The Old Man and the Sea, King Solomon's Mines, The Jungle Book, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, An Ideal Husband, and A Man in Full.
No, I don't think that Donald Hall is a neo-con. I may have expressed it badly, but that was not my main point. Their serious reviews are sometimes worth reading. Mark Steyn never is. I once read something by James Bowman that wasn't bad.
(
I actually liked the movie critic for National Review. He was also interested in fashion, though he refused to wear denim--even in the country) I think his name was JOhn Powers, but I'm not sure.
Before teh Iraq war I never thought of neoconservatism in purely political terms. I saw it as peoplewho thought of themselves as liberals but who felt mugged by the New Left. I've never read Strauss, and what I knew of it was confined largely to the domestic sphere. Thy were all very fond of Pat Moynihan's article on thedeclien of the Negor family, and they railed against attacks on the canon. There was a NOtes and Comments segment once criticizing Georgetown's English department, when it stopped requiring Englih majors to read Chaucer. I don't know much about the original publisher who was also a pianist, but Hilton Kramer always seemed to me to be primarily concerned with art, not politics.
They did publish a piece by Davd Frum in appreciation of Russel Kirk which was somewhat out of character with the rest of the magazine. It was, however, one fo Frum's least objectionable pieces. (It's sill available on their website, but I won't link.)
18 - deep in a parenthesis -
Blank verse is fine, but it's good to have people who can still write sestinas or lyric forms.
I'm pretty sure you mean "free verse". Blank verse follows a metrical rule -- not the most rigid one, but not easy to follow well (or indeed, to describe).
>only completely objectionable when it shows up in women
I don't think that's Mansfield's position, or at least, not as I understand it. And I really, really doubt that Mansfield is confused on the meaning of thymos in a way that requires Gary Wills' correction. Again, this may be a bad book. I haven't read it, and likely won't. The reviews from Wills and from Kirn were pretty pitiful specimens, however. And in general I have seen a desire to confound and contradict Mansfield outpace the desire to understand him. Maybe that's not worth the effort, of course (although it is a book reviewer's job).
you'll be happy to know that i have started teaching "girl x" the greek alphabet. she will turn five in a few months. I've been hyping how once she gets a little bit older, she can learn greek and latin too, just like mommie!! I mean, I don't imagine she'll be a 21st century JS Mill in this respect, but she could sure know Latin and Greek by the time she's, I don't know, 13 or whatever. and do you know what? all those fusty Victorian school books aimed at teaching latin to bored 8 year olds are...perfect in this respect! (and they smell sooo good. old book smell.) bring on the queens, the poets, the sailors, and the various 1st conjugation verbs they...shit I was going to say know and love but are there any 1st conjugation verbs for know? shit...um...arbitror? that's deponent, so 1/2 pt. love anyway. mmmm, amo, amas, amat. I made up a song to the case endings in latin, based on richard's thus spake zarathustra. all of my students have found it really helpful. I mean, I think they think I'm insane, but it is a handy mnemonic. also, b-wo, which allusions in the Housman? cuz I could, like, check for you, and shit.
I have already decided to buy and then review my own copy of ramesh ponnuru's "party of death: how democrats smother little babies with pillows until their tender limbs fall slack against the chambray cotton of their doomed cots". I wanted to email ponnuru to request a review copy, but although most of the cornerites have visible email addresses, ponnuru's is a non-link. maybe I'll ask K-lo. but as long as I'm reviewing the crazy shit, maybe I'll rock some manliness as well. I'm all about some manliness.
And I really, really doubt that Mansfield is confused on the meaning of thymos in a way that requires Gary Wills' correction.
You seem to be suggesting that Mansfield is more of an authority on this than Wills. But we have firsthand testimony that Mansfield doesn't know Greek, and Wills received a Ph.D. in classics from Yale.
based on richard's thus spake zarathustra
You know him personally?
are there any 1st conjugation verbs for know?
Um... coniugare? I was once on the radio reading from Winnie ille Pu. You're doing that kid a big favour!
I think so. she's also taking mandarin so it's not like I'm being a total prick about it.
Yeah Matt, but Wills is a goofus. When he played the vanity game at Slate said his greatest regret was not knowing Hebrew to read the prophets in the original, which is the ne plus ultra of insufferable, more intellectual than thou comments. And he attacks Kipling. The man must be stopped.
Back when we were discussing the HOE worst books evar list, no one, including me, thought to mention the bizarre scores assigned to the books. For instance: The Feminine Mystique + The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money+Silent Spring+Second Sex+Descent of Man=The Communist Manifesto.
I also discovered, looking at the list of judges, that I should stop believing anything the author of the treatise I was reading on piercing the corporate veil says.
Don't mock me alameida. I was thinking not so much of JS Mill as of John Maynard Keynes.
VM--I may be thinking of free verse, but I think that I meant blank verse. Did T.S. Eliot write blank verse? I love T.S. Eliot, but I also like lyric forms which rhyme.
I thought blank verse was pretty much unrhymed iambic pentameter, as in the unrhymed verse parts of Shakespeare's plays.
Also, more seriously, I know for a fact that Mansfield does not think thymos is a synonym for manliness.
Some people I'd address with their full names, even if were dear friends. Like Jan K?titel Krumpholz.
Some people I'd address with their full names
I recently learned that Billy Dee Williams' full name is William December Williams Jr.
BG, you're right. (So's Matt.) I thought you were contrasting "blank verse" with "traditional forms", not with rhyme.
Eliot did (often enough) write blank verse, but also rhyming quatrains, and metrically looser lines (e.g. in Four Quartets).
also, b-wo, which allusions in the Housman? cuz I could, like, check for you, and shit.
Having checked the part to which I thought one of the allusions was, I'm no longer sure that I'm right at all, so.
Iambic five-beat lines are labeled blank
Verse (with sometimes a foot or two reversed,
Or one more syllable--"feminine ending").
Blank verse can be extremely flexible:
It ticks and tocks the time with even feet
(Or sometimes, cleverly, can end limping).
[...]
Free verse is never totally "free":
It can occur in many forms,
All of them having in common one principle--
Nothing is necessarily counted or measured
(Remember biblical verse--see above).
Nice. (But hey, where's our Friday game? Tia? Teofilo?)
Hey, and could blank verse exist in a non-iambic pentameter meter? Would it still be called "blank verse" if it were unrhymed lines of dactylic hexameter with the occasional trochee and spondee thrown in for variety?
52: I would just call that "dactylic hexameter".
But it's "verse", right? A-and it's "blank", right?
Two things. One: it's just not what the term means. Two: it would sufficiently difficult to write a sustained poem in, say, dactylic hexameter that I don't think you'd want people to overlook that pattern. And, actually, Three: dude, dactylic hexameter for more than about six lines would probably annoy the bejeezus out of me.
If you wrote trochaic verse that had four feet in every line and didn't rhyme or follow patterns, like "The Song of Hiawatha," well, it wouldn't be blank, would it?
You might think too much enjambment would destroy the sound completely, and you might well have a point there. I forget, I must confess it, if "The Song of Hiawatha" had enjambment, or it shunned it.
If you wrote trochaic verse that had four feet in every line and didn't rhyme or follow patterns, like "The Song of Hiawatha," well, it wouldn't be blank, would it?
I don't understand—by this logic, why would you say that iambic verse with five feet to the line and no rhymes would be blank?
The only english poem written primarily in dactyls I can think of is Byron's "Stanzas Written on the Road Between Florence and Pisa", and it's not incredibly annoying or anything.
MK,
Would it still be called "blank verse" if it were unrhymed lines of dactylic hexameter with the occasional trochee and spondee thrown in for variety?
I don't think anybody describes Clough's 'Amours de Voyage' as blank verse, do they? Just as an imitation of classical hexameter. OTOH, as you say, it's blank and it's verse, so why not?
Should there be line breaks in 58? I am looking at it trying to figure out where they go.
w-lfs-n doesn't get the joke. He's mocked without a shred of mercy.
Each line has trochaic feet and there are only four per line. So that should tell you where the lines break.
Writing in trochaic verse can be incredibly annoying. So I'll stop as of this comment.
You might think too much enjambment
Would destroy the sound completely,
And you might well have a point there, [ONE MORE FOOT].
I forget, I must confess it,
if "The Song of Hiawatha"
had enjambment, or it shunned it, [ONE MORE FOOT].
I'm not sure what this meter is. Is it the scheme of "Gunga Din"?
62 was not intended to be as rude as it sounded. The constraints of meter made me use word I might not have if not for the way that I was writing.
64 was false, it looks like.
65: Eh? There are eight syllables per line, and it's the meter of "The Song of Hiawatha."
Ah OK. I don't really know "Hiawatha" well enough to think of it unprompted, or apparently with heavy prompting either.
(Also I apparently don't know "Gunga Din" very well either.)
The only english poem written primarily in dactyls I can think of is Byron's "Stanzas Written on the Road Between Florence and Pisa", and it's not incredibly annoying or anything.
This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks…
Also, how cool is it that alameida's teaching Older Daughter Latin? Answer: way cool. It could only be cooler if she let Husband X speak English, while she only spoke Latin, so that both Older and Younger Daughter would speak Latin "natively".
Shouldn't Husband X be speaking Classical Greek to them instead?
Longfellow in general fails to count as "not massively annoying." In my HS creative writing class someone read the "into each life a little rain must fall" poem, which really goes on for an incredibly long time.
OneFat, that's just the example I was thinking of. A good poem (though I tend to skip the lyric heads and jump straight to the beginning of each letter).
However, I don't think "blank" is used alone to mean "unrhymed" or what have you -- "blank verse" is a fixed phrase. Even to say "the verse was blank" seems off.
Matt, scanning your example, I hear a mix of disyllables and trisyllables. For some beautiful and nearly regular trochees, try Campion.
My belief is that Husband X doesn't know Classical Greek, which is something of a hurdle in the path leading to attainment of that most glorious goal. However, you're right that Husband X should be speaking Classical Greek. In this late, lessened age, knowledge of the classics is sadly lost to many.
Vance, you're probably right about the example; 66 is especially crap. You have to strain a bit to get it to fit the trochaic pattern, though that may also be true in Longfellow. I notice Campion was too smart to use lines of exactly the same length.
My mom has pointed out that "The Explosion is roughly Hiawathic.
SE Asia already has too may Latinists. That seems to be the only place theycan get jobs.
Longfellow counts as massively annoying.
Hollander gives, as illustration of dactylic octometer, Browning's "A Toccata of Galuppi's" and Tennyson's "Locksley Hall." I find the excerpt from Browning tending towards the annoyingly affected. The Tennyson is fine.
Here's the bit from the Browning:
As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop:
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?
Bleah-dee, gag me, make it stop.
"The Explosion is roughly Hiawathic.
I am guessing it might be consciously so, based on the word "pipe-smoke" in the fifth line -- corresponding to "pipe-stone" in the first stanza of "Hiawatha".
speaking of american poets and massive annoyance,
{{{Spoiler--if you read this, it will wreck Emily Dickenson for you for a long time, if not forever}}}
did you know that most, if not all of Dickenson can be sung to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas"? Try it:
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.
or:
BELSHAZZAR had a letter,—
He never had but one;
Belshazzar’s correspondent
Concluded and begun
In that immortal copy
The conscience of us all
Can read without its glasses
On revelation’s wall.
I bet the number of songs to the tune of which Dickinson's poems can be sung is quite large indeed.
I quite like "A Toccata of Galuppi's," though it's not near as kick-ass as Soliloqui of the Spanish Cloister. But I have never been able to read Browning's long unrhymed poems.
Few so annoying, however. Once this was pointed out to me I couldn't forget it. Maybe the thing to do is find another song.
also, yes, Dickinson
the embarrasment.
I bet the number of ways in which Dickinson's poems can be ruined is quite large indeed.
MCMC: My son says that the "Gilligan's Island theme" and the "Mr Ed theme" also work.
That Dickinson/Yellow Rose thing works beautifully with the old Coke song ("I'd like to buy the world a Coke/To keep it company") and "Because I could not stop for death. . ."
It's the real thing. Death IS!
I have been told that Swinburne wrote some really excessive poems in odd meters, but I can't find any.
Well, check out the Choriambics and Hendecasyllabics and Sapphics here. He had incredible facility (and something better too, though hardly ever unmixed with camp). Better than Longfellow, I think (though L was not always annoying).
Thanks! at least I can use one to chase out another.
Swinburne wrote a poem in hendecasyllabics, called "Hendecasyllabics." Here's a bit:
Till I heard as it were a noise of waters
Moving tremulous under feet of angels
Multitudinous, out of all the heavens...
That works pretty well, I'd say, though I'm not crazy about "multitudinous," ever.
This is Swinburne's deliberate self-parody, an amphigouri (look it up):
....Surely no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses
Sweetens the stress of suspiring suspicion that sobs in the semblance and sound of a sigh;
Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical moods and triangular tenses--
"Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day when we die....
I understand Gordon Getty, the heir to the fortune after vast wrangling, has spent his life writing lieder for Dickenson's poems. Another tune indeed!
94--Is that the son whom Elder Getty did not bother ransoming from the mafia? ("So you cut off his ear. Like I care.")
92--That's pretty funny, in a "Thank God that's a self-parody" kind of way.
No, not the same as the earless one, so that ready-made explanation is not available.
You're right. Paul Getty III later in life overdosed on prescription pills and is now paralyzed and blind, which doesn't rule out music-composition but does make it more difficult. The general profile of Getty-spawn looks, from Wikipedia, to be pretty fucked up; Gordon's obsession with setting Dickinson poetry comes off very well in comparison.
You can listen to samples of his compositions here. What is "White Election" a reference to?
Aha: Mine-- by the Right of the White Election!
The Derek Bailey/Pat Metheny album was not a duet -- Gregg Bendian and Paul Wertico played percussion on it (one sat out one track) -- but Bailey recorded an album of duets with Noël Akchoté, Close to the Kitchen, which I have not heard.
He's also on an album with Antoine Berthiaume which is half AB/Fred Frith duets and half AB/Derek Bailey duets. So I guess I should have known better than to make that claim.
But hey, where's our Friday game? Tia? Teofilo?
I'm here. I e-mailed Tia, but she hasn't yet put up a post.
Provided only that Tia's well, I approve of this turn of events.
Besides, I have such an awesome person for Botticelli that no one should be able to play before I get to lead.
We're delaying mine until next week. Make of this what you will.
Make of this what you will.
This? Why, I can make a hat or a brooch or a pterodactyl
When you do lead in Botticelli, w-lfs-n, I'm going to ask you a first order question in nine parts.
I didn't ask a question in nine parts, I asked nine questions in one go.
I really like Ted Barlow. But it's never been the same between us since he posted this.
I'm certainly not saying anyone has to like Pavement, but "I hear a bunch of guys who forgot to write any songs" is just crazy talk.
Also on that thread is my favorite evar Adam Kotsko comment, just because it's so true, every word.
I love love love Pavement, but I always think of the Beavis and Butthead episode where they watch the video for "Rattled by the Rush."
"It's like these guys aren't even trying. Okay, we're going to take it again from the top and this time TRY!"
re: 35 and Alameida's attempts to teach Latin to older daughter X.
There is a series of books here in the UK, and some audio stuff I believe, aimed at teaching Latin to young kids.
http://www.cambridge.org/us/education/latin/minimus.asp
http://www.minimus-etc.co.uk/
It's quite successful.
decem urnae pendent ex muro,
decem urnae pendent ex muro,
si forte urna cadit ad terram,
iam pendent novem urnae ex muro