Education

[ellenkushner]

("Posted" from the porch steps of the Brooksville Public Library - closed, but blessedly wi-fi'd)

Here in Maine with no instant internet to check for mail and links, I am thrown back on the entertainment of my younger days: reading articles in the paper and magazines. And I realize that this is where I got much of my "liberal arts" education. As a teen, sprawled out on the floor of the family den (no, we weren't a Pride of Lions - the room that wasn't the livingroom, which contained the TV, was called the den) I'd pore over the Arts section of the Sunday NYTimes, which was mostly about theater then, with just a couple of pages devoted to Movies. A critic would explain his opinions in the context of other plays he'd seen, and so I'd learn about them, too. Ditto the Book Review section (which had a lot more fiction reviews); if I hadn't read a book (and mostly I hadn't) I'd read about it.

Fortunately, we brought up with us some of the New Yorker magazines I never have time to read at home (clearly because I'm on the internet all the damn' time. And not reading lengthy articles, either. I hate reading long text of any kind online. Not just hard on the eyes, but the posture's all wrong. Long articles must be read while one is sprawled in a chair sideways, preferably with a piece of fruit in hand - or with elbows propped on a table, paper catching occasional dribbled bits of sandwich. I can sit for a long time with that.

So I've just read Adam Gopnik's piece in the June 9&16 issue on G. K. Chesterton. And now I know not only how he fits in with Shaw (and Borges), but about the "two great tectonic shifts in English writing": 18c - Addison & Steele turned "the stop-and-start Elizabethan-Stuart prose" into "smooth, Latinate, elegantly wrought ironic style" [ohhhh! so that's why they're important! No one ever explained that to me] with "every sentence crafted like a sword and loaded like a cannon," to be replaced after WWI with "a new form of aerodynamic prose" making "what had seeming charming and obviously theatrical twenty years before... sound like puff and noise." Well. That explains a lot.

Gopnik also tackles Chesterton's dire anti-Semitism - also picking up the context of his Victorian Medieval Fantasy in the light of William Morris's - reminds me of how Georgette Heyer's perfect imaginary Regency owed much to her Edwardian childhood - but delivers positively Chestertonian zingers when discussing Ch's famous writing stemming from his conversion to Catholicism: "[N]obody has to argue so strenuously for what he actually believes. Nobody gets up on a soapbox, and shouts about the comfort of his sofa and chairs . . . Chesterton writing about the Church is like someone who ha just made his first trip to the pst office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on a label, and they will sent it...literally anywhere you like...!"

Chesterton is also, clearly, the anti-Interstitialist, saying, "All my life I have loved edges; and the boundary line that brings one thing sharply against another." But he also wrote, ""'My country, right or wrong . . . is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.'"

The whole article is probably online somewhere. If you find it, post the link.

Comments

[handworn.livejournal.com]

If you're ever in Bar Harbor, don't miss the Opera House internet cafe. The owners have refused lucrative offers for the place, but would rather have it be a cool, shady spot full of chairs and tables out front where you can have coffee and pastry and borrow a board game, and full of mismatched Victorian and Edwardian furniture in back, surrounded by computer stations and opera memorabilia.

It's a treasure.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I get The New Yorker, but haven't seen that article yet. I have similar childhood memories to yours, and started reading The New Yorker for the cartoons. Eventually I got to the articles. (I started reading the newspaper for the comic strips, and graduated the same way.)

We used the term "living room" for what you call the den. What you call the living room we called the family room. Everything I know about 1960s television I learned in that family room. But most of what I know about classical music I learned huddled over the stereo in the living room.

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

Adam Gopnik wrote something that has a point? I'll have to look for that article now -- it sounds fascinating and full of actual information. I've been skipping over his byline ever since fighting my way through Paris to the Moon, wherein none of his essays ever seemed to have an actual point; at best they had a conceit, and when they did, it never turned out to be supported by whatever fact or argument he marshalled for it.

But he was obviously a good writer, if not a good essayist. If he's become a good essayist as well, it's cause for rejoicing.

[cija.livejournal.com]

I hate Chesterton--I try not to, because C.S. Lewis can be just as obnoxious in many of the same ways, and I don't hate him--but I do like that he wrote The Disadvantage of Having Two Heads: A Story, which is a pretty good title. (It is dedicated "To--Beryl Blanche Delaforce, from GK Chesterton, Hoping That Should She Ever Be Tempted To Accept the Offer of Two Heads, This Brief Narrative May Suffice To Dissuade Her From So Mistaken a Course.")

Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines: Those Fool Edwardian Patriots

[davidkeck.livejournal.com]

I read that Chesterton article on the train the other day. It made me sad.

I've been a great and guilty fan of Chesterton's "Lepanto" -- the language, the capturing of the magical... but it's like a lot of his work, I suppose. Trapped at the heart of the sumptuous language and heart-shaking rhythms is an unavoidable and inexcusable glob of anti-Islamic thinking. Not that I didn't try to squint around it: perhaps the lines are meant to conjure the archaic mind-set of the old Crusaders, exoticism maybe, an attempt to set the events in the context imagined by the participants... and not something to be taken entirely at face value.

But it's harder to read the thing now....

And I'm not happy with Kipling either.

These Edwardian gentlemen need a good poke in the eye.

~D

PS: http://www.chesterton.org/gkc/poet/lepanto.html if you want a sense of the thing.

Re: Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines: Those Fool Edwardian Patriots

[davidkeck.livejournal.com]

You might wish to replace one of my ...'s with another mark of your choice.

Re: Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines: Those Fool Edwardian Patriots

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

That's why the Gopnik article was so good - he loves Chesterton's writing, too, but he puts him in the context of his times and of his own personal excesses. It wouldn't have worked if it was by someone who didn't love the work. (Um, and you can replace my double-use of words with some better ones of your choice...)

Re: Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines: Those Fool Edwardian Patriots

[davidkeck.livejournal.com]

Oh I agree.

You know how it is. You read something. You enjoy it. (Maybe you find a little profundity or wonder). And then you begin to learn more about the author.

There's a line I've always liked hidden in the middle of an old Crowded House song: "You can tell a man from what he has to say."

Sometimes it's true, but sometimes the two become very tangled.

~D

[oleander9999.livejournal.com]

Hee, hee -- "wrought ironic"!!!