Recently Published (by Me)…

…on the Books and Culture website, a review of two books on D-Day. (I mean to say, if I don’t use my own website for relentless self-promotion, won’t that be an indication that I just never understood what the internet was actually for?)

I am not a World War II historian, or even a buff or amateur aficionado. So the essay isn’t really about D-Day, or the books under review, but explaining to interested lay readers the divides in military history that condition what they get to read. If you’re looking for a thumbs up or thumbs down on Craig L. Symonds’s Neptune, well, I would give it “thumbs up!”. But that was not my primary goal. Books and Culture is not Consumer Reports–The Books Edition. 

Does that sound snobbish? Well, if it does, than snobbery has been defined downward. My model here is H.L. Mencken–admittedly a terrible snob, in his way–whose legislative (and, I think, modest and self-effacing) pronouncements on criticism I should probably post on the tack board above my desk:

The motive of the critic who is really worth reading—the only critic of whom, indeed, it may be said truthfully that it is at all possible to read him, save as an act of mental discipline—is something quite different. That motive is not the motive of the pedagogue, but the motive of the artist. It is no more and no less than the simple desire to function freely and beautifully, to give outward and objective form to ideas that bubble inwardly and have a fascinating lure in them, to get rid of them dramatically and make an articulate noise in the world.

I had then, and I have now, very little interest in many of Mr. Dreiser’s main ideas; when we meet, in fact, we usually quarrel about them. And I am wholly devoid of public spirit, and haven’t the least lust to improve American literature; if it ever came to what I regard as perfection my job would be gone. What, then, was my motive in writing about Mr. Dreiser so copiously? My motive, well known to Mr. Dreiser himself and to every one else who knew me as intimately as he did, was simply and solely to sort out and give coherence to the ideas of Mr. Mencken, and to put them into suave and ingratiating terms, and to discharge them with a flourish, and maybe with a phrase of pretty song, into the dense fog that blanketed the Republic.

The critic’s choice of criticism rather than of what is called creative writing is chiefly a matter of temperament —perhaps, more accurately of hormones— with accidents of education and environment to help. The feelings that happen to be dominant in him at the moment the scribbling frenzy seizes him are feelings inspired, not directly by life itself, but by books, pictures, music, sculpture, architecture, religion, philosophy—in brief, by some other man’s feelings about life. They are thus, in a sense, secondhand, and it is no wonder that creative artists so easily fall into the theory that they are also second-rate. Perhaps they usually are.

Superprofessors have a lot to learn.

More or Less Bunk

I wanted to follow up my call for a superprofessor educational campaign with a post about something besides academic politics that the average superprofessor [Is that a contradiction in terms?] might not understand either, namely the pedagogical details of commercial MOOCs as currently constructed.

If there’s anything that you’ve been able to read on this site that you might not find elsewhere in the MOOC backlash blogosphere, that would probably be the details of what it’s like to take a MOOC and, to a lesser extent (because I will never teach one) what it’s like to be a superprofessor. Michael Feldstein makes an important distinction which anybody who wants to be a superprofessor will eventually have to face:

The distinction between a “course” and “courseware” is a blurry one, but basically, if you take the particular instructor out of the course, what you have left is the courseware. If the…

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“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe Is Published-This Day 1852

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A book that helped to change history- Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was published on this day in 1852. The anti-slave novel helped to lay the groundwork for the Civil War. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was the best selling novel of the 19th century and the second best selling book behind The Bible. In the first year after it was published it sold over 300,000 copies and this was in 1852 not today. It sold over 1 million in Great Britain. Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe during the Civil War and remarked “So, this is the little lady that started the war.’

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ALZ observes: I think this has to be one of the most bizarre “just so” stories told in a historic house museum. Most of them are attempts to square the circle, to give some sort of “practical” or “common-sense” explanation for some sort of human behavior that, like a lot of human behavior, defies common-sense. But this is so counter-intuitive that it baffles me, just a little bit. Does that mean I don’t think that someone has spun this story to a group of rapt visitors? No. I can easily believe that they did.

March 10 1813: Presidential Letter

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On March 10 1813, President Madison, in Washington, writes to former President Thomas Jefferson, in Monticello.

Dear Sir,—I have received your two favors of the 8 and 21 nit. The conduct and character of the late Commander at Niagara, as portrayed in the narrative enclosed in the first, had been before sufficiently brought to our knowledge. Some of his disqualifications for such a trust were indeed understood when he was appointed Inspector General. Gen1 Dearborn seems not to have been apprised of some of the sides of his character, though he has an apology for what’he did in the paucity of General officers provided for the army at that time, and the difficulty of making a satisfactory selection. The narrative is returned, as you desire. It gives me pleasure to receive a confirmation of the unchanged dispositions of those whose sympathies with R S- could not fail to be most…

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Cures for Depression: Confront the Pain of Being Human

This concludes the series on Samuel Johnson and depression. This quote does not come from Boswell, or even my Zotero “note cards” of Johnsoniana, but from Jack Lynch’s great The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page. Originally it was recorded in the “Anecdotes of the Revd. Percival Stockdale”, which was then collected and included in Johnsonian Miscellanies, edited by G.B. Hill.

I called on Dr. Johnson one morning, when Mrs. Williams, the blind lady, was conversing with him. She was telling him where she had dined the day before. “There were several gentlemen there,” said she, “and when some of them came to the tea-table, I found that there had been a good deal of hard drinking.” She closed this observation with a common and trite moral reflection; which, indeed, is very ill-founded, and does great injustice to animals — “I wonder what pleasure men can take in making beasts of themselves.” “I wonder, Madam,” replied the Doctor, “that you have not penetration to see the strong inducement to this excess; for he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

Teaching in a straitjacket.

Teaching in a straitjacket..

via Teaching in a straitjacket..

“A Bowl of that liquor called Bishop…”

A liquor called Bishop? What could that be?

Perhaps that quote from Boswell’s Life of Johnson stirs another literary memory:

“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob!”

But Bishop is old enough that Samuel Johnson himself defines it in his Dictionary as “a cant word for a mixture of wine, oranges, and sugar.”

Not just any wine, though, but port.

Johnson harangued upon the qualities of different liquors; and spoke with great contempt of claret, as so weak, that “a man would be drowned by it before it made him drunk.” He was persuaded to drink one glass of it, that he might judge, not from recollection, which might be dim, but from immediate sensation. He shook his head, and said, “Poor stuff! No, Sir, claret is the liquor for boys; port, for men; but he who aspires to be a hero (smiling) must drink brandy.

A truly excellent recipe by Eric Felten is provided here.  Traditionally, Bishop was flavored by a clove-studded roasted orange; Felten recommends the later Oxford tradition of instead using roasted lemons. And that is not the only possible variation, though I would refuse to drink a Smoking Cardinal, made with champagne. I prefer to drink my champagne chilled, thank you very much; I don’t really see how any flavors can be coaxed out of champagne by heating it.

Whatever the citrus, this is a classic hot punch recipe, not just for Christmas but for any bleak, grey, rainy day. In England this of course could mean a day in any month of the year. But on the eastern seaboard of North America, it seems to me that the perfect antidote to March is a bowl of Bishop.

However, when taking that medicine, remember Johnson’s dictum that “Melancholy, indeed, should be diverted by every means but drinking.”

Cures for Depression: Maintain Intergenerational Friendships

One night when [Topham] Beauclerk and [Bennet] Langton had supped at a tavern in London, and sat till about three in the morning, it came into their heads to go and knock up Johnson, and see if they could prevail on him to join them in a ramble. They rapped violently at the door of his chambers in the Temple, till at last he appeared in his shirt

Topham Beauclark: “having, in some particulars, a resemblance to Charles the Second”

, with his little black wig on the top of his head, instead of a nightcap, and a poker in his hand, imagining, probably, that some ruffians were coming to attack him. When he discovered who they were, and was told their errand, he smiled, and with great good humour agreed to their proposal: ‘What, is it you, you dogs! I’ll have a frisk with you.’ He was soon drest, and they sallied forth together into Covent-Garden, where the greengrocers and fruiterers were beginning to arrange their hampers, just come in from the country. Johnson made some attempts to help them; but the honest gardeners stared so at his figure and manner, and odd interference, that he soon saw his services were not relished. They then repaired to one of the neighbouring taverns, and made a bowl of that liquor called Bishop, which Johnson had always liked; while in joyous contempt of sleep, from which he had been roused, he repeated the festive lines,

‘Short, O short then be thy reign,
And give us to the world again!’

They did not stay long, but walked down to the Thames, took a boat, and rowed to Billingsgate. Beauclerk and Johnson were so well pleased with their amusement, that they resolved to persevere in dissipation for the rest of the day: but Langton deserted them, being engaged to breakfast with some young Ladies. Johnson scolded him for ‘leaving his social friends, to go and sit with a set of wretched UN-IDEA’D girls.’ Garrick being told of this ramble, said to him smartly, ‘I heard of your frolick t’other night. You’ll be in the Chronicle.’ Upon which Johnson afterwards observed, ‘HE durst not do such a thing. His WIFE would not LET him!’

Boswell: Life

Winston Churchill Gives His “Iron Curtain” Speech- This Day 1946

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On this day in 1946 former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill  gave his famous “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. Churchill would condemn the Soviet Union’s policies in  Eastern Europe. He would say “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” The term ‘iron curtain” would immediately catch on and be used throughout the Cold War.

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