Leighton, 'Study'

For the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature, according to a new study by the National Endowment for the Arts. Reading on the Rise documents a definitive increase in rates and numbers of American adults who read literature, with the biggest increases among young adults, ages 18-24. This new growth reverses two decades of downward trends cited previously in NEA reports such as Reading at Risk and To Read or Not To Read.

“At a time of immense cultural pessimism, the NEA is pleased to announce some important good news. Literary reading has risen in the U.S. for the first time in a quarter century,” said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. “This dramatic turnaround shows that the many programs now focused on reading, including our own Big Read, are working. Cultural decline is not inevitable.”

Maybe not. But any statistician will tell you to wait for the next survey, and maybe the one after that: it may be a dead cat bounce. Still, it’s way better than more decline. Pity about poetry and drama – still sinking.

The full report can be downloaded here, and in the same place you can find a six page summary of the Reading at Risk report which started the heartburn.

ABC News today:

The virus is widely being called swine flu although it has components of classic avian, human and swine flu viruses and has not actually been seen in pigs.

Anyone want to suggest a better name? Pigs-have-wings?

Elsewhere in the university, it’s notorious that the bones of Marx and Freud, are kept over in the English Department. (It won’t be long before the remains of Foucault and Derrida join them.) What for some of us is still astonishing, even after all these years, is the situation summarised by Professor Mark Edmundson in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education. (Hat tip, as so often, to Arts and Letters Daily.)

? the student who has heard the teacher unfold a Marxist reading of a work probably doesn’t get to study Marx per se. He never gets to have a potential moment of revelation reading The Manifesto or The Grundrisse. Marx too disappears from the scene, becoming part of a technological apparatus for processing other works. No one asks: “Is what Marx is saying true?” “Is Foucault onto something?” “Is what Derrida believes actually the case?”

Overstatement, maybe, but close. There’s a good reason, of course. To discuss at university level whether what Marx says is true involves actually reading Marx and his principal commentators. No time for that, so the student accepts the lecturer’s summary – as often as not itself based on secondary sources – and then they all set to work ‘applying’ the ideas, as Edmundson says, like paint.

Its intellectual squalor is not the worse aspect of such a practice. As Edmundson says, it removes from students the possibility of discovering the text for themselves and making their own kind of sense of it. Such responses to the text are said to be ‘insufficiently theorised’. Now there’s language as magic.

The situation: Laura, the heroine and narrator, has married Edward, whom she has only just met, against the wishes of his father. The newly-weds escape by stealing Edward?s father?s coach.

The Postilions had at first received orders only to take the London road; as soon as we had sufficiently reflected However, we ordered them to Drive to M—-. the seat of Edward’s most particular friend, which was but a few miles distant. At M—-. we arrived in a few hours; and on sending in our names were immediately admitted to Sophia, the Wife of Edward’s freind. After having been deprived during the course of 3 weeks of a real freind . . . imagine my transports at beholding one, most truly worthy of the Name.
Sophia was rather above the middle size; most elegantly formed. A soft languor spread over her lovely features, but increased their Beauty–. It was the Charectarestic of her Mind–. She was all sensibility and Feeling. We flew into each others arms and after having exchanged vows of mutual Freindship for the rest of our Lives, instantly unfolded to each other the most inward secrets of our Hearts–.

We were interrupted in the delightfull Employment by the entrance of Augustus, (Edward’s friend) who was just returned from a solitary ramble. Never did I see such an affecting Scene as was the meeting of Edward and Augustus. “My Life! my Soul!”(exclaimed the former) “My adorable angel!”(replied the latter) as they flew into each other’s arms. It was too pathetic for the feelings of Sophia and myself–We fainted alternately on a sofa.

From: Jane Austen, Love and Freindship (1787-1790). The spelling is Jane Austen?s. She began L&F at the age of 12.

A sonnet by the Scots poet Mark Alexander Boyd, reprinted by Pound who called it the most beautiful sonnet in the language. Text is from The Oxford Book of English Verse (1919 – is it still in?). There is a fan site for Boyd with pictures of the blind boy and the wife, beautifully designed, which prints the poem with notes on provenance and references – and a glossary.

Ezra Pound in 1914

The teacher or lecturer is a danger. He very seldom recognises his nature or his position. The lecturer is a man who must talk for an hour.

A pleasure of aging: to reconsider books that have helped to form your attitudes. Another: not having to talk for an hour.

Ezra Pound’s The ABC of Reading (1934 – but I read it in the early 1960s) could be described as an eccentric textbook, but it’s more of a manifesto. It comprises a little generalisation about literature, a lot of examples of poetry – almost an anthology – some commentary and a reading list.

Pound thought it necessary to have a standard, to read the best that has been done in its kind. What complicates this goal for him is that no one language holds a monopoly of literary virtue. For Pound, a real understanding of poetry requires a swag of languages (Chinese, Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, French, Italian, Provencal and more). Cross-cultural comparison holds no terrors. To see that Greek drama is not all that good, he advises you to read Homer. Don’t bother with German – he has read it all for you, and found nothing standard-setting. The monoglot gets a look-in. Pound concedes that you can get most of it by reading ‘authorised’ translations such as Pound’s own of Seafarer, Golding’s Ovid or Gavin Douglas’s Virgil. But the strongest impression left by the book – on one seventeen year old reader, at least – is that anyone without a working knowledge of half-a-dozen languages is a dabbler.

As Pound might say: balls. But at seventeen, the book conjured up a marvellous, if deeply confusing landscape – all those exotic peaks waiting to be conquered – and the promise of initiation into the mysteries of the craft, all presented far more enticingly than the plodding textbooks with their pother about iambic pentameter. I suppose I was open to the idea of a cosmopolitan canon because of my immersion in music ?