an old book

Have you been following the press coverage about the copy of Shakespeare's First Folio that showed up at the Folger Library recently? The Washington Post rushed in to somewhat breathlessly cover the story when it first broke and followed up later with a personality piece on the man who brought it in. The NYT has been somewhat more restrained. While the British tabloids are loving it up:

- Cuban lover of Briton at centre of Shakespeare Folio probe tells of her shock at his arrest

- 'I'm innocent', says book dealer arrested over £15m Shakespeare ...

And the British press in general has had some fun with it:

- I want my book back arrested man says

- Experts examine mountain of books at Folio suspect's home

- FBI investigate Shakespeare theft drama

I particularly like this from the Sunderland Echo: My innocent role in Shakespeare drama, by Ross Robertson.

It's hard to know how serious to take this. The alleged perp is far from the usual type of obsessive, clinically depressed, and reclusive rare book thief. Ditto his alleged accomplice. The persons connected with the discovery and all the academics called upon to spout about its importance are clearly reveling in their pleasant moment in the public eye. I suppose the story will ravel in time though may not be news when it does.


It does interest me that the Folger has nothing on its web site about the incident, not even in is "press room" section.

Also, I'm interested in the role played by Garland Scott, Folger's press secretary. She appears to have done her job well, fronting for the org and keeping its employees from being pestered by the press. She was clearly a main source in the original WaPo account:

"It's come back after all this time, and there is an interesting tale to it," said Charlie Westberg, a spokesman for the Durham Constabulary. "That is what will make this a great movie one day," said Garland Scott, head of external relations for the Folger library. . . . When the mysterious man arrived at the Folger last month, he had a story to go with his book: He said the work was from a family library in Cuba, and he was representing the family. "From time to time, people have asked us to help them to figure out what a book might be," the Folger's Scott said. "On the other hand, usually those people have called or e-mailed beforehand. It's a little unusual to just show up." Librarian Richard Kuhta met the man and examined the book. "It's clear to Richard immediately that this is something important," Scott said. Kuhta asked the man if the library could keep the volume for further study, and the man agreed to leave it for two days. "Alarm bells" were going off in the minds of the library's staff, Scott said. "It's the first time a genuine First Folio has walked into our doors unannounced."

You can read about her :here and in this brief profile in a local weekly freepaper, the Hill Rag: A Capital Person: Garland Scott.

Finally, this all interests me because I've been working with a whole lot of books published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I've read, skimmed, and glanced at somewhat more than 600 so far, and thought myself a bit blasé about old printed books when the Folger discovery hit the news. A Shakespeare first folio, I have to say, is another thing altogether.

Also, I was stirred to pull this stuff together now on reading this nice piece in Slate today: Folioed Again!
Why Shakespeare is the world's worst stolen treasure, by Paul Collins.

Some photos from sources cited above:


Scott with alleged accomplice and her mom.

Raymond Scott, of course.


Police hauling stuff away from Scott's place.

amazing

A young relative of mine is participating in a celebration of poetry this week. The event is amazing: gut-wrenching, funny, lyrical, pumped-up, engrossing, somber, and just, well, amazing. Strangely, you wouldn't know anything about it from reading the local press. There's no coverage. Not an inch. Bloggers, yes; newsmedia, no. This is sad because what's being presented are works of art, some of them really, really good. It's poetry that's written, staged, and performed by the authors, some individually, some in groups of two to four. The subject matter ranges from deeply and painfully personal to historical and topical to social and political. The writing standard is high and the emotions are strong. The audience becomes deeply involved in the performaces, encouraging, punctuating, feeding back deep feelings as they're being received.

Some details:

The event involves young people in their teens, participating as teams in a style of judged competition where you find kids responding to each other's work in a most uncompetitive way (cheering others' work as much as their own). They come from across the country. The venues are small theater spaces. A web page called UpWords calls the event a poetry party. In announcing the event this site says:

Across the land, teenagers participate in poetry slams and other events organized by teachers, schools, local poets, community organizers and youth workers. Although the slam is a competitive event, competition is de-emphasized and commitment to craft and growth in the writer as person and community member are encouraged. From these local events and programs, 4-6 poets (13-19 years old) are selected to represent their city at Brave New Voices. More than 400 young poets will participate in this year’s festival held in Washington DC July 2008 representing over 44 parts of the country and globe.

Here's a link to a video of the opening ceremony: Video from the 11th Annual International Youth Poetry Slam.

Some other links:

- press release for the event (pdf)
- Festival home page
- Anouncement on the FreeinDc site.
- A blog post on the event
- Another blog post

Guizhou Weng'an riots

EastSouthWestNorth, a China newsblog by a Hong Kong resident named Roland Soong (wikipedia) has continued to update its compilation of stories and photos on the Weng'an Mass Incident. Currently, the article at the bottom of the page is a long summary of events from a Chinese newsmagazine called Southern Weekend, a weekly newspaper from Guangzhou, China (wikipedia). The article illustrates something that's interested me about coverage of the event: The official news agency, Xinhua, at first tried to whitewash the event, but was never able to establish its spin and suffered servere criticism on blogs and both foreign and domestic news coverage for its inept attempts: its bland weasel-worded accounts of the incident, its quotes from officials speaking bureaucrateeze and quotes from locals who were obviously, and painfully, trying to say what they thought officials wanted to hear. So, as things turned out, the Chinese press coverage was pretty thorough and pretty well balanced; raising questions and pointing out contradictions in different accounts. Other things about coverage are also interesting: (1) how much cell-phone photography there was, how quickly photos and videos showed up on blogs, how inventive people were in getting around internet censorship in China; (2) how the riot managed to limit itself to destruction of property with no loss of life and very little injury to participants or police; (3) how the frame enlarged from the tragic death of a 15-year-old to include the ineptitude of local officials and police and the legitimate grievances of residents; and (4) how much the current Chinese version of totalitarianism lacks totality -- police so unprepared to deal with crowd violence that the police station itself could be trashed, the family of the dead girl able to claim her body and display it (for payment of contributions) in a refrigerated coffin on the banks of the river where she died, the friends who were with her at time of death first sequestered by authorities but then released to be interviewed and, being interviewed, not mouthing official pieties, and the release, finally, of information that balanced against rumors of rape and murder (some plausible motiviations for the girl to be distraught because of actions by her family). I don't expect there will ever be a single "truth" that emerges from the story, but that's normal for emotion-charged events outside Communist societies as well as within them.

TIOOYK

This year's version of the Tour de France starts Saturday. Organizers promise us the cleanest Tour ever. They've said that before. But after the debacles of previous years, what are they to say? It's true that there's much more dope testing than ever before, but organizers are still on the defensive.

Here are some sites on which to follow the action:

- Cyclingnews: 95th Tour de France, July 5-27, 2008

- Velonews

- PEZ

- The official Tour de France site

There are also bunches of rider diaries to follow. I'm fond of the ones from Garmin-Chipotle.

One of these, Will Frischkorn's, isn't on the main site. Here's his latest: One last night of peace, and then — the Tour, By Will Frischkorn, Team Garmin-Chipotle, posted Jul. 1, 2008. Will also has a flickr photostream: willfrischkorn's photostream.

On the other hand, one of the best rider blogs is on the Garmin-Chipotle site. David Millar knows his stuff and writes well. Here's his latest: When Superbad is soothing, Author: David Millar.

The same site has an interesting post by the woman who puts together all the stuff that riders need to keep them going day by day: The Tour packing list!.

And there's a link to a profile on Taylor Phinney which leads me to mention a good post on one of the best Tours ever, the one held in 1986: Tour Redux: 7-11's Crazy Weekend, Wednesday, July 02, 2008, by Edmond Hood.

I'll be following the Rabobank Team in general and Joost Posthuma in particular, but I'm not confident that this will be a good year for either of them.

Here's a look at the week ahead: TDF08: Parcours Up Close - Week 1, Wednesday, July 02, 2008, by Richard Pestes.

If you're curious about the title of this post, look here. After Merckx made that memorable quote, the initialism it showed up repeatedly on the old bike racing newsgroup, rec.bicycles.racing and eventually found its way into the group's FAQ. (It's one of those internet shorthands that have so many uses.*) As David Millar says, " Having so many of the world’s most talented cyclists at 100% of their fitness and motivation racing against each other is something to behold. And that’s the biggest difference between this race and others, everybody is excellent."

-----------------
* For example what the phrase Doing Push-Ups has now become. See here, and here, and here.

more on the Weng'an, Guizhou riots

Here's a short update to my post just below (a death in Guiyang). (I seem to be the only person refering to the event by the city where the riot took place, Guiyang. I've put the more common reference points in the subject of this post.)

There's still plenty of coverage in the news media, although it's not front page stuff. As Kenneth Tan says on shanghaiist, the best coverage of this story continues to come from the blog eastsouthwestnorth.

The ESWN bloggers are saying that Chinese web portals are deleting posts related to the event as quickly as they show up. On one forum it was estimated that Weng'an-related posts had an avererage lifespan of only 15 seconds. Because of this most discussion of the event appears as comments on the official Xinhua news reports.

Xinhua, the Communist Party news agency, is reporting that a high ranking official is investigating the death of the teenage girl. The report says the "incident was a simple affair that a small number of people with ulterior motives managed to manipulate and leverage, with the direct participation of organized crime forces, to provoke and challenge the Party and the government publicly." The blog comments on the Xinhua article: "The above Xinhua article is just about unreadable because it is just another stream of homilies without content. Is this how people really think and talk?"

ESWN also points out the confusion caused by government efforts to take control of coverage, to put their own spin on it, and give it the frame they wish it to have:

The second phenomenon was the amount of noisy chaff released. On one hand, there is the legendary "50-cent gang." These are supposed to be professional Internet writers who get paid 0.50 RMB for every post favorable to the government position. When yet another version of the Weng'an mass incident gets published as being the ultimate truth, the author is accused of being a member of the "50-cent gang" who is trying to confuse the public. Indeed, if you read through enough versions, you will probably throw up your hands and decide that you don't know what the truth is anymore. Instead, you change your investigation to questioning the motives of the people who are producing these versions.

On the other hand, there is the legendary "Internet special agent (??)." These are supposed to be professional spies who are paid by anti-China hostile forces to publish unfavorable information about China. For example, some of the posts mentioned that the People's Liberation Army has been dispatched to Weng'an with tanks and artillery, with the hint of a Tiananmen-like massacre to follow. Immediately, the other netizens reacted by pointing that these posts are coming from "Internet special agents." The netizens want to draw a very clear line: they may be protesting against what is happening in Weng'an but they will not serve the purpose of the anti-China hostile forces. This is very clear.

ESWN also provides a link to another blog site which gives a quote from a local Communist Party newspaper that is unaffiliated with Xinhua. In an editorial comment, the paper criticizes the response by government leaders and the national press, saying that there wouldn't have been a riot with great property damage and the rest if leaders had addressed the core element in the story. The editorial writer says:

But the actual fuse that led to this incident, the details on the actual case involving the death hasn’t been explained or described. The short description that “some people are dissatisfied with the determination of ’cause of death’” isn’t enough of a conclusion. This is no different than wrapping gunpowder with paper (ed: similar to the English idiom walking on land-mines), and will lead to guesses and assumptions, and the people’s dissatisfaction is completely understandable.

A comment on the posts in this other blog site says that Xinhua has now published a report by editor Yan Liang giving many more facts and indicating for the first time why local residents were so upset. The article says:

But the police account proved difficult to accept for the girl's family and their supporters. Li's classmates and her landlord said she was a good student and couldn't have killed herself.

"She was a quiet and nice child. She seldom hung out or played around. I don't think she killed herself," said landlord Liu Jinxue, who helped pull her body from the river. Li's hometown was a rural township and she lived in a rented apartment in the county.

Liu told Xinhua that the girl's uncle, Li Xiuzhong, had several serious confrontations with the police, and was beaten by unidentified men in the street.

The uncle was in a county hospital last week, but had since been transferred elsewhere, Xinhua learnt.

Li's grandmother Lu Xiuzhen said the girl's father had departed for provincial capital, Guiyang, to petition the government and could not be reached. The mother had "gone mad" since the incident, she said.

"I demand the government thoroughly investigate the incident and give us a justifiable explanation," she said.

What's interesting -- according to other commenters on the blog -- is that Xinhua put this up on the English-language part of its web site. The version of the Chinese-language side of the site is apparently much more bland:

The English one was written by writers working for Xinhua, and contains a fairly reasonable report of the incident with quotes from various parties. The Chinese article, however, comes from local Guizhou news report (????-????), and is, frustratingly, of the typical style of official non-sense and white wash everyone hated so much. That article basically reported that the party boss of Guizhou held meetings with local officials to discuss the incident, already casting it as mostly caused by misguided people incited by a few and laid only light blame on officials who “didn’t do a good enough job” locally.

Here's the blog post in shanghaiist:

More on the Weng'an, Guizhou riots

As usual, Roland Soong of EastSouthWestNorth is on top of the incident, busy piecing together all the information he can find. He informs us that Weng'an is now a sensitive word, the uncle of the female student is still alive, and the body of the student is still resting in a refrigerated coffin awaiting autopsy despite this popularly-believed story. Soong also observes that the Xinhua story (which all Chinese media are made to carry) opens more questions than it answers, paving the way for all sorts of unsubstantiated rumours to dominate public opinion.

An AP story has some photos by Andy Wong.

Chinese paramilitary police officers patrol in Weng'an county of Guizhou province, China, Monday, June. 30, 2008. Authorities detained hundreds of people suspected of setting fire to police and government buildings in southwest China in protests over a teenage student's death, a human rights organization said Monday.

a death in Guiyang

I saw a link to a BBC news story with the headline Chinese riots over girl's death. There's so much Chinese news these days, what with the upcoming Olymic Games, the ongoing tragedy following from the massive earthquake in Sichuan Province, the Tibetan conflict in which the Dalai Lama figures, the slowing of China's unbelievably fast-growing economy, Chinese massive energy requirements, Chinese environmental problems, and social problems stemming from the fast growth of China's middle class. The BBC article piqued my interest partly because I'd seen a recent headline on the Chinese power structure which pointed out that Communist Party leaders in local areas were practically autonomous. That article tallied with conclusions I'd drawn from reading Qiu Xiaolong's gritty detective stories set in southeast China.

News accounts of the riots are interesting partly because they don't all say the same thing. In the west, it seems to me, when there's broad coverage of an event, all the reporters have pretty much the same sources and their accounts differ very little from one another. It's more difficult to cover a closed society like China and -- sources being more difficult to find -- the accounts differ somewhat more.

In this case the western stories tend to build on one another as the set of facts enlarges. They differ in that, but also in the emphasis they place on the story's main elements. The current lead paragraphs in the AFP account gives some of the basics up front:

Rioters in southwestern China torched government buildings and cars after anger over a probe into a schoolgirl's death exploded into violent protests, locals and state press said Sunday.

The riots occurred Saturday in Guizhou province when protesters ransacked three government and police buildings after the girl's uncle died from an alleged beating by police trying to stop him from protesting against the handling of the case, locals and Internet postings said.

The BBC gives the map I put above and adds a crucial point:

Local residents were angered after a police inquiry concluded that the girl, found dead in a river earlier in June, had committed suicide. Her family accused the son of a local official of raping and killing her.

Reuters makes the cause of local anger more plain:

"Local residents were very angry about the injustice exercised by local authorities," the resident, who is an official at a local government office, told Reuters by telephone.

It's not surprising that the account in the politically-controlled Chinese news agency contrasts dramatically with the reports in free-press media. The Chinese story tells that there's been a riot, but the reporter tells us that a bunch of misguided people went overboard and attacked the local police station and government buildings because they were "dissatisfied with the medicolegal expertise on the death of a local girl student." The emphasis is on destruction of public property and efforts to restore order. The action of the mob is described as torching government office buildings and assaulting local officials. The scene is characterized by the word chaos.

You'd think that all reports coming out of China would be similarly slanted, so I was surprised to find an account on a Shanghai web site that I find better than many of the news stories that originate outside China. The site gives succinct coverage and a number of useful links:

Riot in Weng'an County, Guizhou Province

Several thousand rioters have gathered in Guizhou's Weng'an County, torched a police station, ransacked government buildings and overturned police cars, after allegations of a cover-up over a 15 year old girl's death blew up. Ming Pao reports the son of the county's vice-deputy mayor had raped and murdered the girl along with another youth and tossed her body into the Ximen River. Police only detained the suspects for five hours and released them without charge. EastSouthWestNorth says unconfirmed, conflicting reports are now swirling around the Internet but has several telling pictures which indicate a large proportion of the population was out on the streets. [Xinhua] [Reuters] [AP] [AFP] [Youtube videos 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

By Kenneth Tan in News | Link

You can learn more about the shanghaiist site from their about page. It seems they actually publish from Shanghai in China. The wikipedia article on the city makes it sound like a very interesting place.

Here are photos from a site called eastsouthwestnorth. Notice that they all come from myspace.cn, the Chinese myspace site that went live about a year ago.

This is the young woman:


This shows the size of the crowd:




The city apparently has a large central square surrounded by government buildings:


One of the accounts says that locals hate their police:


One account says how much smoke there was:


Here you can see, in the aftermath, that young people participated:

Windmuller, Heine, and Lorelei

Catching up with Arts & Letters Daily after a couple weeks, I've found a lot of interesting stuff. I've put some of the teasers at the bottom of this post so you can see what I mean.

One of the items deals with the German poet, Heinrich Heine, with whom I have a remote familial connection. The item is a book review by Michael Dirda in the Wall Street Journal. Here's the link: Touring With an Eccentric Guide (June 14, 2008; Page W11). The book is Travel Pictures, by Heinrich Heine (Translated by Peter Worstman, Archipelago, 223 pages, $17).*

Dirda's review is typically good. He says

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) once described himself as the last of the romantics and the first of the moderns, which may account for the winning combination of the playful and the serious in his writing. Today he is largely remembered for his ballad-like poetry, much of it set to music by Schubert, Wolf and other lieder composers. In his own day, however, this author of such verse masterpieces as "Die Lorelei" -- about the siren who lures Rhine boatmen to their doom -- was equally celebrated as a prose writer, spending much of his adult life in Paris as a journalist, explaining the French to the Germans and the Germans to the French.

Throughout his life, though, this witty man of letters was utterly serious about defending civil liberties and religious freedom, counting among his friends not only artists like Balzac and Berlioz but also revolutionaries like Karl Marx. In one of his plays Heine, who was Jewish, presciently observed that "where they begin by burning books, they will end by burning people."

While I was reading this review the family connection with Heine came to mind. My great grandfather, prominent New Yorker of the late 19th century, once led a committee that collected funds to have a statue to Heine installed in a New York park. The effort succeeded and the elaborate fountain can be seen in what is now called Joyce Kilmer Park in the Bronx.

The New York Times did an article on the appearance of my forebear before the park commissioners to request the installation: THE HEINE MEMORIAL MONUMENT Description Furnished the Park Board -- Mr. Windmuller's Plea (April 4, 1895, Wednesday, Page 16).** It includes a sketch of the statue with description by an art expert. Here's the sketch; click image to view full size:



Here are excerpts from the art expert's description of the monument:




And here is a bit of history from the web site for Kilmer Park.

The Lorelei fountain celebrates the German poet, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), author of an ode to Die Lorelei -- a siren from German mythology who lured sailors to their deaths on the Rhine. The fountain was created by German sculptor Ernest Herter for the poet's home city, Dusseldorf. However, political groups opposed to Heine's Jewish origins and political views blocked its installation there. The fountain was finally erected in the Bronx in 1899, thanks to a subscription led by Americans of German ancestry. Funds are now being raised to restore the fountain, the victim of decades of weathering and vandalism, to its former glory.

Windmuller shared Heine's politics and (by birth anyway) his religion. He contributed much to promoting German arts and culture in New York and the welfare of Germans in America. He sided with German liberals like Heine and Karl Schurz in opposition to the growing irrationality of men like Wagner, Nietzsche, and Spengler. There's no proof, but it's pretty likely he emigrated from Munster in 1850 as an indirect result of his participation in the radical uprisings of 1848.

There's a park in Queens that's dedicated to his memory which, a year ago, was the "park of the month:" Windmuller Park. A Google search turns up information about it.

For what it's worth, New York has a park named after Carl Schurz too, but none for Wagner, Nietzsche, or Spengler.

---

Here are the promised teasers from today's Arts & Letters Daily

Share your grief and you may double your sorrow. Better, perhaps, that all you’ve seen, and all that you suffered, should go with you to the grave... more»

The rise of the therapeutic and the eclipse of the tragic ensures college students’ expectations soar even as their intellectual abilities to handle life’s setbacks erode... more»

We get the art we deserve, and today what we deserve is the splashy, pretentious, dumbed down trophy art that dominates the art world ... more»

An “it-wasn’t-my-fault” industry now produces books like Scott McClellan’s White House memoir. Next in line: Donald Rumsfeld... more»

Country music knows what it means to be trapped by poverty, a lousy job, lust, and booze. To grasp the USA, just listen... more»

John Updike started with art as a small child, newspaper comics at first. Edward Hopper and Mark Rothko came later... more»

A butterfly flaps its wing and a hurricane hits Mongolia. Or whatever. Everybody loves the “butterfly effect,” and everybody gets it totally wrong... more»

Q: “So is Marxism-Leninism scientific?” A: “Surely not. If it were, they would have tested it on animals first.” Old Soviet jokes... more»

For all of Churchill’s faults, we may still be grateful for a 1930s politician who found it intolerable even to breathe the same air as the Nazis... more»

The British invented curry? Not quite. But the Madras curry (Tamil: kari) was born with the East India Company... more»

Will unplugging our cellphone chargers or turning TVs off standby reduce energy use and help fight global warming? How do the numbers stack up?... more»

“I am astonished that the Bush people are so robotic,” says Peggy Noonan. Criticize the boss and you’re banished from the kingdom... more»

Add more signs, directions, and limits on the road, and drivers will be safer, right? Wrong. Drivers tend to compensate... more»

Paris is a miraculous city in no small measure because modern architects have not been able to get their hands on it. Roger Scruton explains... more»

Under Kinderarchy, parents are little more than indentured servants. It’s all about the kids: their schooling, brightness, cuteness, and their quite astonishing creativity... more»

The central image of Samuel Johnson in James Boswell’s Life is that of a heroic figure battling his demons and keeping them at bay... more»

Critical texts to go with contemporary art are so twisted and woolly they could pass for self-parody. Yet they require us to take them seriously... more»

------------------------
Notes:
*You can download an older translation of the book from Google Book Search: Pictures of Travel, by Heinrich Heine; translated by Charles Godfrey Leland (New York : D. Appleton, 1904).
**I'm not sure why, but I had to use Internet Explorer to follow the Times link to the pdf article.

country life, 1905

{click to view full-size}

This photo is from the Smithsonian Institution's photostream on flickr. The Smithsonian has joined the Library of Congress in making available some of its vast collections of images in taggable sets. The intro page is here. A post on the subject on the flickr blog is here. The flickr inititative by which public institutions post their photos is called The Commons. The other two participants in the project are the Powerhouse Museum and the Brooklyn Museum.

The description line for this photo says the subjects are unidentified. It's from the National Postal Museum collection and shows a rural free delivery post carrier using a two-wheel horse drawn mail cart.

The curator who wrote the description says the carrier is a man The person with reins in hand looks like a woman to me. So maybe the other person is the one they mean. Or, maybe I'm wrong about the sex of the driver.

I like how this photo is nicely unlike other documentary shots of its time. It was taken in 1905, when photo subjects still tended to be stony-faced, yet this group is pretty cheerful. I like how the horse is observing the camera along with the people. And I like to think that the driver is a woman.

My son told me about the Smithsonian photos on flickr. Thanks to him!

June that breathes out life for butterflies

Do you know anything about Amy Winehouse? I was only vaguely aware of her existence until some lyrics she wrote turned up on a web page devoted to John Keats. Turns out she's won umteen awards and gets enormous press coverage for her troubled life as much as her musical achievements. She also has a striking appearance with trademark beehive hairdo. She's a Londoner to the core, and not posh West End.* The web page is good: Amy Winehouse.

The Keats site on which her name appeared is Keatsian News. I began tracking it after reading a book of Keats' letters, a short biography on him, and re-reading the poems. I recommend the letters; despite the too-frequent horrors of his brief life, he was a prolific and wholly engaging correspondent. The web site quotes from one of these letters:

I heard that Mr L Said a thing I am not at all contented with - Says he 'O, he is quite the little Poet' now this is abominable - you might as well say Buonaparte is quite the little Soldier - You see what it is to be under six foot and not a lord - ' (John Keats in a letter to his brother George, February 1819).

The web site entry for June 1 gives a quote for the day from his poem, To the Ladies Who Saw Me Crowned: 'June that breathes out life for butterflies', which evokes the month well does it not?

The Keats news site led me to Winehouse when its author got snide about an article in which a student was quoted as saying: 'Poetry doesn’t have to mean Keats and Byron.' Of this he says, 'Indeed, it does not. On that note, let's all wallow in some crappy modern stuff.' He goes on to say: 'And kudos to the English prof who compared the Bee Gees to King Lear. Way to encapsulate the sad decline of your discipline with one smudgy quote.' It was in following up on the Bee Gees comparison that I wandered into Winehouse-land.

The student was quoted in an article in The Times (UK of course): Amy Winehouse gets into Cambridge, by Nicola Woolcock. A blog on digitaljournal.com covers the same story:

Cambridge Exam has Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Raleigh and Amy Winehouse?

Cambridge University students were surprised when they had to compare Amy Winehouse lyrics with Sir Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth for their exams.
The final-year English literature students at Cambridge University were surprised to find Amy Winehouse in their practical criticism exams.

The students received the following lyrics from the song “Love is a Losing Game” from her album “Back to Black”.

Though I'm rather blind
Love is a fate resigned
Memories mar my mind
Love is a fate resigned,
Over futile odds
And laughed at by the gods
And now the final frame
Love is a losing game.

The students were then asked to compare these lyrics from Winehouse with Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Milton and Wordsworth for literary analysis.

There were mixed reactions from the students; some were surprised, some were irritated and the others praised the teachers who prepared this exam.

One student told AFP:

"It was really bizarre…I sat there looking at the paper in shock. I wouldn't consider a controversial pop singer a literary figure."

The exam asked students to compare a Sir Walter Raleigh’s poem “As You Came from The Holy Land” from 1592 with the song lyrics from Amy Winehouse, “Fine and Mellow” by Billie Holiday and “Boots of Spanish Leather” by Bob Dylan.

Winehouse's "Love is a Losing Game" won a British Ivor Novello (music) award for Best Musical and Lyrical Song, last week.

One student told AFP:

"I think it's cool…Poetry doesn't have to mean Keats and Byron. That said, there were a lot of surprised people."

Winehouse, best known for her song Rehab, was arrested after being secretly filmed at her home in East London, apparently taking drugs. Police decided not to press charges, for lack of evidence. Her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, is in jail awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

Amy and Will


OK, so what about the Bee Gees and King Lear? A site called beegees-world.com explains:

BEE GEES and KING LEAR

In July 2001 undergraduate students at Cambridge University were asked to write about Bee Gee lyrics in their final exam.

The question, one of 27 on a three-hour English finals exam, asked students to discuss: "Tragedy, when you lose control and you got no soul, it's tragedy," with reference to characters and plots from Biblical and Greek stories. They were also told to make use of the writings of Nietzche, Dostoevsky and Racine.

John Kerrigan, the chairman of the English finals examination board, said that the question was intended to examine the forms tragedy takes in the modern world.

He said: "We wanted to see how far tragedy survives into modernity; whether it has died in the face of science and rationalism. Tragedy is essentially an archaic form. We wanted to see if it had metamorphosed into different forms.

"There are elements to the Bee Gees songs that could have directed you to the great central canonical texts. The line in the Bee Gees song where he sings 'the feeling's gone and you can't go on' is a fair summary of the end of King Lear," he added.

A spokesman for the Bee Gees said the brothers would be proud at being compared to great literary figures. "They have been compared with songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Burt Bacharach, but never Ibsen and Shakespeare."
(The Telegraph)

Here's the whole of Winehouse's lyric plus Raliegh's for comparison:

Amy Winehouse

For you I was a flame
Love is a losing game
Five storey fire as you came
Love is a losing game
Why do I wish I never played
Oh, what a mess we made
And now the final frame
Love is a losing game
Played out by the band love is a losing hand . . .
Taken from
Love is a Losing Game

Sir Walter Raleigh

As you came from the holy land
Of Walsinghame,
Met you not with my true love
By the way as you came?
How shall I know your true love,
That have met many one,
As I went to the holy land,
That have come, that have gone?
She is neither white nor brown,
But as the heavens fair;
There is none hath a form so divine In the earth or the air . . .
Taken from
As You Came from the Holy Land

Here are two Youtube videos of Amy singing the song:

---

Notes
_______________________
*From wikipedia: "Amy Winehouse was born in the Southgate area of Enfield, London to a Jewish family who shared her love of jazz music. She was raised in a family of four: her father Mitchell (a taxi driver), her mother Janis (a pharmacist), and her older brother Alex. She attended Southgate School before leaving to go to Ashmole School.[citation needed] At age ten, Winehouse founded a short-lived rap group called Sweet 'n' Sour with childhood friend Juliette Ashby. She was trained initially at The Susi Earnshaw Theatre School from the age of eight years old. She stayed for four years before seeking full time training at Sylvia Young Theatre School, but was allegedly expelled at fourteen for "not applying herself" and for piercing her nose. With other children from the Sylvia Young School, she appeared in an episode of The Fast Show in 1997. She later attended the BRIT School in Selhurst, Croydon."

________________________
**
TO THE LADIES WHO SAW ME CROWNED

What is there in the universal earth
More lovely than a wreath from the bay tree?
Haply a halo round the moon--a glee
Circling from three sweet pair of lips in mirth;
And haply you will say the dewy birth
Of morning roses--ripplings tenderly
Spread by the halcyon's breast upon the sea--
But these comparisons are nothing worth.
Then there is nothing in the world so fair?
The silvery tears of April? Youth of May?
Or June that breathes out life for butterflies?
No none of these can from my favorite bear
Away the palm--yet shall it ever pay
Due reverence to your most sovereign eyes.

___________
My images are from The Times, digitaljournal.com, and the Keats news site.

getting ahead

A member of my family recently graduated from college. She got herself an excellent liberal arts education, achieving a GPA high enough to qualify for Cum Laude and getting Honors in her major as well. She made the right choice of school and right choice about balancing academic work with the rest of her life. In both cases she succeeded -- to her credit and for her benefit -- in avoiding an environment of hotly-competitive over-achievement.

The commencement program lists all the honors and awards which the seniors attained. Although my daughter has lots of friends in disciplines outside her major, there are a few in her class whom she never got to know even well enough to pick out in a crowd. One or two of these are the students with double majors, receiving honors in one or both, graduating summa cum laude with an award or two. She suggests she didn't know them because -- studious as they were -- they were invisible.

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum has a nice piece today on the inevitable hyper-attention that's given this time of year to the rising high school juniors and seniors and their quest to get accepted at top-tier colleges and universities. She says the pressure-cooker lives that these stories depict exists in fact, but the children that suffer so much to shine in the eyes of admittance committees are actually a pretty small group out of the population at large. Nobody, not Applebaum even, says they are an elite, but that's what they are.

She does relate this frenzy to the competition among families in places like the UK and Korea where a single exam determines the fate of those who seek high academic prestige. This makes me think of soul-destroying competition in the top French lycées which we hear about from time to time.

You have to wonder what this intense focus on a single goal does to kids and their parents. Applebaum links to a front-page article in the New York Times about one small indicator: how many high school students skip lunch because, as one says, “I would never put lunch before work.”

This quoted young person, it turns out, attends the high school from which I graduated close to 50 years ago. In my day we thought we knew what mix of subjects, taken at Advanced-Placement level, with what level of success, and what combination of sports and extracurricular activities would give us the most acceptances in the colleges and universities to which we applied. I don't recall much if any parental pressure in my own home or those of my friends (one excepted). And, I don't recall that (a) we actually agonized over getting the highest grades in the most difficult subjects, or (b) made sure we had some exactly ideal mix of other credentials (though we did do lots of miscellaneous stuff). We certainly never sacrificed a lunch hour to any kind of work unless we were late with required assignments and totally frantic. Of course my memory about these things could be wrong. From the occasional reunion weekend I know that my high school classmates have quite different memories of the short period of life we shared together.

I do also recall thinking of myself as landing at "the bottom of the top" which is to say I found myself at the low end of an imaginary scale that showed the attainments of gifted kids in my own environment and (so it seemed from my scores on nation-wide aptitude and achievement tests) across the country. In all the turmoil of that period of my life (hormonal, emotional, social, above all simply transitional) I think that actually felt a pretty comfortable place to be.

Having said all that, I wonder why the New York Times (et al) do annual scare stories about over-stressed high school students and not college undergraduates. Why focus so much on the scramble for the small number of places in classes at the best of the best schools of higher education? Maybe it's because of the parents. They can and often do have pretty much total control over the lives of kids at home. (And this means, where I live now, that many compete for their kids' admission to schools at all levels, right down to kindergarten and even pre-school.) Parents have traditionally been less intensely involved in the undergraduate lives of their children.

There's been a change in the amount of this involvement in my lifetime I think. I recall next to none myself and believe it's been growing over the years since I attended college. But I expect the media focus on high schools is probably parent driven because I expect it's as much their ambitions which the children are supposed to fulfill as it is the kids' own and because they have the ability to act on their mania for vicarious success while the kids are still living at home full time.

I suspect this is not good for parents or kids, not at the time it occurs and not in the long run. Applebaum suggests there's a conflict between the societal quest for immediate gratification and the work discipline for an anticipated gratification in later life: two opposing ways of attempting to enact the American-dream "pursuit of happiness." I think there might be too much of both in our lives: too much focus on living happy and not enough on a good life lived well.

Here's a link to the Applebaum column with a brief extract:

The Busiest Generation, by Anne Applebaum, Washington Post, Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Thus our kids are both stupider than we were and harder working -- though perhaps this makes sense. America is, after all, the industrialized country with the fewest paid vacations, as well as the only nation, as far as I know, that considers the "pursuit of happiness" a fundamental right. We invented both the assembly line and the modern notion of "leisure." So welcome back to work today, if you even bothered to take yesterday off: Spring is here, the beaches beckon -- and you've got only a few weeks left to find an impressive summer job for your high school junior.

And here's a link to the NYT article, also with brief extract:

Busy Students Get a New Required Course: Lunch, by Winnie Hu, New York Times, May 24, 2008

At Briarcliff High School in Westchester County, many students eat in class. Others, citing heavy workloads, don’t eat at all.

High school students in this well-to-do Westchester suburb pile on four, five, even six Advanced Placement classes to keep up with their friends. They track their grade-point averages to multiple decimal places and have longer résumés than their parents.

But nearly half the students at Briarcliff High School have packed their schedules so full that they do not stop for lunch, prompting administrators to rearrange the schedule next fall to require everyone to take a 20-minute midday break. They will extend each school day and cut the number of minutes each class meets over the year. Briarcliff currently does not require students to have a lunch period.

David Millar races Italy

David Millar, a world-class professional cyclist from Scotland, writes an interesting blog for his current team, Slipstream. Today's post is particularly good: The good and bad breaks of cycling. He writes about his experience in stage five of the Giro d'Italia in which he's poised to make a winning move when his chain breaks.

Millar's career has had its ups and downs. He's had a great deal of success and, like many of the guys who made it to the winners' podiums in top races, he was caught using a performance-enhancing drug, EPO. He confessed and was banned from competition for two full years. Now he's riding for the cleanest team in the sport -- one that proves its athletes are drug-free by constant testing of its own in coordination with the official testing of cycling authorities.

This year's Giro is one of the toughest ever run and all the more interesting because the number of potential winners is unusually large.

Cyclingnews provides a good review of the race so far. Notice that one of the top favorites is now racing with a fractured elbow. Here's the link: Giro enters second week with demanding time trial.

Pez Cycling News also provides good coverage. Today it features an interview with the guy who's (temporarily) in second place overall: Giro PEZ-Clusive: Matthias Russ Interview!

Here's are some photos of stage five from CyclingNews:

Riccardo Riccò (Saunier Duval-Scott) Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Stage four winner Mark Cavendish (High Road) Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Paolo Bettini (Quick Step) Photo ©: Roberto Bettini
David Millar waits for the team car Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Pavel Brutt launches his winning move. Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Riders enjoyed stunning views. Photo ©: Roberto Bettini
Liquigas has matching pink and magenta jerseys Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Oleg takes a "sip". Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Oleg Tinkov had his own champagne Photo ©: Roberto Bettini
Paolo Bettini (Quick Step) Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Oleg Tinkov was overjoyed Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Daniele Bennati (Liquigas) Photo ©: Roberto Bettini
Simoni and Giovanni Savio Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Emanuele Sella (CSF Group) Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Davide Rebellin (Gerolsteiner) Photo ©: Roberto Bettini
Pellizott tucks his hair in Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Franco Pellizotti (Liquigas) Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Gibo Simoni signs autographs Photo ©: Roberto Bettini
Pavel Brutt Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Best young rider Morris Possoni Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	British champ David Millar (Slipstream) Photo ©: Roberto Bettini
Fröhlinger has a dig Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Fun! Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Gilberto Simoni is relaxed Photo ©: Roberto Bettini
Pavel Brutt (Tinkoff) Photo ©: AFP	Brutt in major oxygen debt Photo ©: AFP	The break of five approaches Contursi Photo ©: AFP