Wednesday, April 27, 2011

financial matters

Years back, when Raghuram Rajan was chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, I used to post about the fragility of the global economy.[1] I didn't write as an expert on the subject, but as a civilian struggling to understand a complicated situation that's too often discussed by economists and pretty much ignored by people like me.

Unlike almost all the others whose writings I attempted to master, Rajan wrote clearly and imparted a coherent and convincing point of view.[2] I was not the only one to feel this way and the blog posts I wrote gathered an unusually large number of hits. In 2007, when Rajan left the IMF, its press releases suddenly became much less useful from my point of view and, at about the same time, its influence was seen as waning. The world's economic condition was no less perilous, but I'd lost my primary source for understanding it.

Fortunately, I'd begun earmarking Steven Pearlstein's excellent columns in the Washington Post. The WaPo archive of his work, going back to July 5, 2006, can be found here.[3]

This week's column, The politics and economics of a falling dollar, is especially good.

He recognizes that people like me find it difficult to focus our attention on global financial matters, but, he says, "it turns out they are at the heart of most of the economic issues we're dealing with, from budget battles to the euro crisis to the rising price of gasoline." He explains how the US dollar became and continues to be the world's dominant currency, tells how this results in unimaginable quantities of dollars being held outside the United States, and predicts (as others have been doing) that America's debt problems are producing a devaluation of the dollar which will, in time, result in the decline of the dollar as dominant currency. He says "the global system is forced to rely on the currency of a once-dominant economy that has piled up too much debt and can't quite figure out how to deal with it."

He concludes:
There are two ways this dollar story can play out.

In the optimistic scenario, a credible budget deal is reached in Washington, the Fed manages to sop up all the excess liquidity it has created, and the long-term slide in the dollar remains gradual enough for the world to muddle through until a new order and a new architecture can emerge.

In the darker scenario, hinted at last week by the leading credit-rating agency, the failure to adopt a budget deal triggers a U.S. credit crisis that spawns a dollar crisis, which sets off another global financial crisis — one that makes the last one look like child’s play.
In the column, Pearlstein quotes Gordon Brown's speech at this year's Bretton Woods Conference. The speech is quite long, but admirably free of jargon and not difficult to understand. In it, Brown makes a persuasive call for a new set of international agreements for regulation of global finance. Here's a short summary of his talk by the New Yorker's John Cassidy.[4]
Gordon Brown, who was voted out of Downing Street last year, delivered a sweeping survey of global economic issues. Noting that he had recently enjoyed a “period of reflection, enforced reflection,” he argued that most of the problems facing the world—financial instability, recessions, trade disputes, environmental degradation — ”cannot be addressed on an individual basis and can only be resolved by global coördination.” In the area of financial regulation, Brown pointed out, coördination was sorely lacking, with some individual countries pursuing their own agendas and trying to cozy up to big financial institutions. “I believe we are going back to a race to the bottom,” Brown said.
Brown also pointed out that the old industrial nations of the North Atlantic would soon be surpassed in wealth by China and the other newer ones. It's virtually inevitable that the purchasing power of the Chinese population will dwarf that of the United States within the next two decades. Inhabitants of China will then be the world's greatest consumers; Americans may be able to export goods to feed this Chinese demand, but that's not a certainty. Careful oversight at the international level will be required to make likely a smooth transition from the past half century's American dominance to whatever is to follow it.

This graphic, from wikipedia, gives one economic projection for the next four decades. It estimates the ten largest economies in the world in 2050, measured in GDP nominal (millions of USD).


Here is the video of Gordon Brown's speech at this years Bretton Woods Conference.



---------

Notes:

[1] These posts, going back to 2006, are mostly on the global economy and are mostly drawn from the work of Rajan and the Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein.
[2] The authors of the wikipedia article on Rajan say
In 2005, at a celebration honoring Alan Greenspan, who was about to retire as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Rajan delivered a controversial paper that was critical of the financial sector. In that paper, "Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?", Rajan "argued that disaster might loom."Rajan argued that financial sector managers were encouraged to
(take) risks that generate severe adverse consequences with small probability but, in return, offer generous compensation the rest of the time. These risks are known as tail risks.[...] But perhaps the most important concern is whether banks will be able to provide liquidity to financial markets so that if the tail risk does materialize, financial positions can be unwound and losses allocated so that the consequences to the real economy are minimized.
Thus Rajan described the 2007-2008 collapse of the world's financial system.

The response to Rajan's paper at the time was negative. For example, former U.S. Treasury Secretary and former Harvard President Lawrence Summers called the warnings "misguided."
[3] Articles by Steven R. Pearlstein

[4] Cassidy is author of How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities (which I recommend) and Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era

Monday, April 25, 2011

Newspaper Story

Made in 1914, this painting shows newspaper consumers at their task.

{Caption: Subway riders, New York City, 1914, by F. Luis Mora, The Sun Printing & Publishing Assoc., Sunday, Dec. 13, 1914"; source: NYPL Digital Gallery}


When I was in elementary school we'd be taken on field trips once or twice a year. One memorable time the yellow buses drove thirty miles south to Manhattan and deposited us at the building where men wrote, printed, and published the New York Times. I recall highlights of the visit. We saw the huge, noisy Linotype typesetting machines, the paper matrices from which the curved printing plates were made, the gigantic rolls of paper and the even more gigantic presses into which they were fed, and we saw the assembled, cut, and folded stream of newspapers flowing out of the press to the circulation room. It was mind-boggling to my ten-year old eyes. I loved to see men working at big noisy machines and loved the transformation of text from typed sheets of paper, first to lead slugs, then to the big, curved printing plates, and ultimately to printed newsprint. It was pretty clear how the miracle was accomplished, but my new knowledge of the stages of production didn't take away my sense of awe in what the men and machines were able to do.

A little before then, in 1950, Encyclopedia Britannica Films brought out a short documentary called "Newspaper Story" which might have been seen in classrooms like the one I occupied that year (but not ours, since we had filmstrip projectors, but never, that I can recall, saw motion pictures in class). The sixteen minute film is hokey in a pleasantly 1950ish way, but what it shows about newspaper printing is clear, accurate, and just as fascinating to observe now as was the awesome field trip of some six decades ago.

The video brings back not just the sights, but the sounds of the newspaper enterprise in full operation: ringing phones, clicking typewriters, chattering telex machines, clanking Linotype typesetters, screeching stereotype plate trimmers, and the dramatic acceleration of the press cylinders. I recommend you give it the six minutes it takes to watch it:


{Alternative source: Newspaper Story (1950) on Internet Archive. Here's the description given in IA: "Steps in the completion of a newspaper story from recording the incident through the taking & finishing of pictures, writing, editing, setting in type, printing the paper & distributing it are depicted. Produced by Encyclopedia Britannica Films, Inc. in collaboration with Kenneth E. Olson, LL.D, Northwestern University."}

I wrote about the class trip once before. In that post I showed photos taken in the New York Times building in 1942. The post is NYT Sept 1942.

Here are some photos from an earlier time. It's surprising that the manufacture of newspapers changed so little in the years between the 1890s and the 1970s.[1]

1. This shows the New York Herald Building in the early nineteen hundreds. I've written before about its location on Herald Square.[2]

{Herald Building, New York, N.Y., Detroit Publishing Co. taken between 1900 and 1910, George Grantham Bain Collection; source: Library of Congress}

2. The Herald's press room took up most of a city block along Broadway from 35th to 36th Streets. It was on ground level and large Italianate windows looked in on it.

{Herald Building, looking into press room, New York, N.Y., Detroit Publishing Co., taken between 1900 and 1910, George Grantham Bain Collection; source: Library of Congress}

Here are some close up details of the people watching the giant presses at work.





3. This one is not a detail from the previous image, but taken by a Bain photographer at the same time.

{New York, N.Y., watching the Herald presses, Herald Building, Detroit Publishing Co., taken between 1900 and 1910, George Grantham Bain Collection; source: Library of Congress}

4. This shows the rotunda at the front of the Herald Building, where people came to place ads and transact other business.

{Newspaper publishing - N.Y. Herald: The rotunda, N.Y. Herald Bureau Office, 1902, George Grantham Bain Collection; source: Library of Congress}

5. This shows the Herald's City Room.

{City room of the New York World, taken between 1900 and 1910, George Grantham Bain Collection; source: Library of Congress}

6. This shows the composing room with its Linotype machines.

{Newspaper publishing - N.Y. Herald: Composing room and linotype machines, 1902, George Grantham Bain Collection; source: Library of Congress}

7. This shows the machine on which the Linotype operators worked. It's an 1896 Mergenthaler. Continually improved, this equipment was used until the 1970s when photocomposition began to replace it.

{source: MuseumVictoria}

8. As the video shows, the type slugs produced by the Mergenthalers were locked together to make up a page of type (plus headlines, illustrations, and elements that the Linotypes couldn't produce). This forme, as it's called, is used to make stereotype printing plates that can be mounted on the rotary presses. This photo shows men making the plates. It's called the "electro" department because the making of stereotype plates was called electro-stereotyping or electrotyping for short.

{Newspaper publishing - Electro Dept., N.Y. Herald, 1902, George Grantham Bain Collection; source: Library of Congress}

9. This is a paper mat from which the stereotype plates are made. The mat itself is created by pressing a wet cardboard onto the forme. The mat is dried and bent into a casting drum.

{Newspaper Publishing - A mat, N.Y. World, ca. 1902, George Grantham Bain Collection; source: Library of Congress }

10. This postcard illustrates the manufacturing of stereotypes for the printing of newspaper pages at the Philadelphia Record.

{Making stereotype plates; source: Metropolitan Postcard Club of New York City}

11. This photo shows one of the massive presses in the New York Herald press room. The Herald, like most big papers, would have half a dozen of these. For example, by 1909 the New York World possessed a couple of 32-cylinder presses (16 paired cylinders for printing on both sides at the same time), plus two smaller presses for color work, and 11 other presses. Not counting the color presses, the capacity of the World operation was well over half a million 16-page papers an hour.[3]

{Newspaper publishing - N.Y. Herald: Corner of press room, 1902, George Grantham Bain Collection; source: Library of Congress}

12. This Double Octuple perfecting press is a smaller version of the pair of 32-cylinder presses at The World.


13. In the 19th-century newspapers evolved from sheets of type on paper, to complex layouts of graphics and type. First came simple engraved line drawings in black ink, then half tone images from drawings or photographs, and, as the century came to an end, full color work. This image shows the photo department of the New York World in 1909.

{Newspaper Publishing - Photo Dept. N.Y. World, 1909, George Grantham Bain Collection; source: Library of Congress}

14. By the end of the 19th century advertising was as important to a paper's success as were its sales to readers. This photo shows part of the advertising operation of the New York Herald in 1909.

{Newspaper Publishing - Advertisement Bank in Composing Room of N.Y. Herald, ca. 1909, George Grantham Bain Collection; source: Library of Congress }

15. This shows part of the Herald's advertising department in 1902.

{Newspaper publishing - N.Y. Herald: Where the advertisers reply to the advertisements - the advertising dept., 1902, George Grantham Bain Collection; source: Library of Congress}

16. Newspapers were sold by subscription, by newsagents at subway stations and other strategic locations, and of course by newsboys -- and girls. This photo was taken by Lewis Hine as part of his extensive campaign to establish and strengthen child labor laws.

{2 newsgirls. Location: Wilmington, Delaware, taken by Lewis Wickes Hine, 1910 May, George Grantham Bain Collection; source: Library of Congress }

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Some sources:

Newspaper Gallery Nieman Reports, Nieman Foundation, Harvard University

Mergenthaler Linotype Company on wikipedia

Linotype machine on wikipedia

THE FUTURE HOME OF THE NEW-YORK HERALD

The new Herald Building presented a very rare and, in some respects, a unique architectural opportunity, of which, upon the whole, Mr. Bennett's architect has taken admirable advantage.

THE PROGRESS OF A GREAT JOURNAL; THE PROGRESS OF A GREAT JOURNAL; HOW NEWSPAPERS WERE MADE TWENTY FIVE YEARS AGO, AND HOW THEY ARE PRODUCED TO-DAY--IMPROVEMENTS IN THE MECHANICAL DEPARTMENTS OF THE TIMES--TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO AND NOW--WALTER PRESSES, STEREOTYPED PLATES, AND PAPER BY THE LEAGUE--OUR OLD AND NEW HOMES. New York Times, September 18, 1876

THE WALTER PRESS; OUTLINE OF ITS PRINCIPAL FEATURES. THE NEWEST AND MOST PERFECT METHOD OF NEWSPAPER PRINTING--THE PROCESS OF STEREOTYPING--THE WAY IN WHICH THE MACHINE PERFORMS ITS WORK. New York Times, March 10, 1875. I propose in the following pages to offer some account of the newest and most perfect method of newspaper printing, with such observations as may occur regarding the influences which it is having, and is likely to have, upon the press and the people.

A NEWSPAPER AT HOME; "THE TIMES" AT LAST IN ITS NEW QUARTERS. THE ROOMS WHERE ITS BUSINESS IS TO BE CONDUCTED AND EDITORIAL AND MECHANICAL WORK PERFORMED. New York Times, April 8, 1889 More or less accurate descriptions of the new building of THE TIMES appeared last Winter in difference publications. As the descriptions were obtained, generally, from the plans rather than from the building, perhaps none of them did the building justice.

What Printing Has Become; Marvels of Newspaper Making Nowadays, The Sun, New York, March 7, 1909

Printing in the Nineteenth Century by Theodore L. De Vinne of the De Vinne Press, The Evening Post, New York, January 12, 1901.

Many Details Involved in Making a Modern Newspaper, Geneva Daily Times Thirtieth Anniversary and Industrial Edition, 1925

NOTABLE EDITION MARKS TIMES BUILDING OPENING; Story of Great Structure Told in Special Supplement. AN ENGINEERING MARVEL Total Weight, 82,923,000 Pounds -- 80,000 Field Rivets Used -- 74 Miles of Electric Wire. New York Times, December 31, 1904. THE NEW YORK TIMES, to commemorate its removal to its new building in Times Square to-morrow, will publish one of the most notable newspaper editions on record.

The Newspaper Workshop, Special Supplement to the New York Times, January 1, 1905

Stereotype plate making

Photography and the Black Arts

The Old Grey Lady: The Way It Was by Robert D. McFadden (This article first appeared in Ahead of The Times, an in-house Intranet site of The New York Times.)

The Penny Press, 1830-1860

History of the printing press: The nineteenth century from The Great Republic By the Master Historians, Vol. IV, edited by Hubert H. Bancroft (1902)

"Printing and Publishing" in Six thousand years of history , Volume 10 (E. R. DuMont, 1899)

"Evolution of the Printing Press" in American printer and lithographer Volume 17 (Moore Publishing Co., 1893)

"The Physical Basis" in The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social Instrument Alfred McClung Lee (Psychology Press, 2000)

"Story in a Newspaper" in The wonder book of knowledge: the marvels of modern industry and invention, the interesting stories of common things, the mysterious processes of nature simply explained by Henry Chase Hill (New York, J. C. Winston Co., 1921)

Rotary Printing Press and Autographic Printing History

Printing press

Linotype History: 1900—1927

Ottmar Mergenthaler

Typesetting Machine - Mergenthaler Linotype Model 1 Line Casting, 1896

"Marvels of the World Pressroom" in The World almanac & book of facts (Newspaper Enterprise Association, 1909)

-----------

Notes:

[1] Compare the EBF video to this description of the New York Times operation in 1905: The Newspaper Workshop, Special Supplement to the New York Times, January 1, 1905

[2] Here are links to the three Herald Square posts on this blog:

[3] From an account published in 1909:
The World's two latest improved double octuple, duodecuple and quadriquadruple combination presses, with central folders, are not only the two largest presses The World pressroom ever received, but they are also the largest in any pressroom in the world. Each of these presses is practically four quadruple presses in combination, yet they can be operated as four units, or separate quadruple machines independent of each other, or as a double octuple or two separate octuples, or two sextuples with color.

These presses are 37 feet long, 12 feet wide, 10 feet 6 inches high and weigh 160 tons. They are from entirely new designs, and each press contains more than 75,000 pieces. The two presses (have 32 pairs of plate and impression cylinders, which require a complement of 256 plates, weighing 12,600 pounds. They carry 32 rolls of paper 73 inches wide. As each roll weighs about 1,500 pounds, twenty-four tons of white paper are required to start both presses The composition rollers, 560 in number, weigh fourteen tons. The two presses have 32 ink fountains, each containing 100 pounds of ink, a total of 3,200 pounds, or one and three-fifths tons. Twenty-four paste fountains paste the papers.

At a running speed these monster presses will produce 400,000 four, six or eight page papers an hour; 200,000 ten to sixteen page papers, all inset and delivered folded, pasted and counted in lots of fifty; 100,000 eighteen to thirty-two page papers, all inset or composed of two uneven sections, at will, as one paper, or 50,000 thirty-six to sixty-four page papers, composed of four even or four uneven sections, all delivered as one paper. In addition to this the presses will print in color.

To The World's pressroom a new color press has been added, a duplicate of the eleven-cylinder, multi-color, half-tone, electrotype web press already used to print the color magazines and comic sections of the Sunday World. These two presses, representing an outlay of $120,000, have a running speed per hour of 100,000 twelve-page magazines, with covers, printed in three colors and black, or 50,000 twenty-page magazines with a four-page comic. Many other combinations are possible. These color presses are 40 feet long, 12 feet wide and 16 feet high, and run from electrotype plates only.

The immensity of the combined capacity of the presses in The World's pressrooms may be judged by the fact that they will print 1,300,000 four, six or eight page papers an hour; 725,000 ten or twelve page papers; 675,000 fourteen or sixteen page papers, or 361,000 eighteen, twenty, twenty-two or twenty-four page papers, and the larger number of pages in proportion. To this must be added the product of the two large color presses.

-- "Marvels of the World Pressroom" in The World almanac & book of facts (Newspaper Enterprise Association, 1909)

Saturday, April 23, 2011

a singularly exhilarating performace

On Thursday evening, April 23rd, exactly 115 years ago, New Yorkers seated in Koster and Bial's music hall were the first paying customers to see an American movie.


{source: Library of Congress}

The New York Times did some build up for the event.

{New York Times, April 14, 1896}

And gave it a rave afterwards.

{New York Times, April 24, 1896; The "Chevalier" mentioned in the review was Albert Chevalier, a well-known English comedian.}

The venue was Koster & Bial's Music Hall at Broadway and 34th St.

{source: Library of Congress}

The theater had been New York's opera house and it would soon be torn down to make way for Macy's grand new department store.

{Koster and Bial's at 34th and Broadway; source: scfitzgerald.wordpress.com}

The projector was created by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat; they quarreled and Armat sold it to Edison who bought it on condition he could claim to have invented it himself.

{Vitascope projector; source: precinemahistory.net}

I can't find a video showing the film shown on April 23, 1896, but that same year Edison did make this little view of Herald Square where the music hall was located.

{Herald Square 1896, on Youtube}

This drawing shows an artist's rendering of the Vitascope projector in operation at Koster & Bial's.

A site called Who's Who of Victorian Cinema gives some details: "The Koster & Bial's Music Hall stood at Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street, New York, where Macy's store stands today. John Koster and Albert Bial first opened a concert hall on 23rd St on 5 May 1879. In 1893 they bought the Manhattan Opera House from Oscar Hammerstein Sr, and, suitably remodelled, it re-opened as Koster & Bial's Music Hall. It was here that the Edison Vitascope received its premiere, on 23 April 1896. The projectionist was the projector's co-inventor, Thomas Armat... The music hall continued to include film presentations among its variety programme, including Biograph shows, until its closure on 21 July 1901, when the site was sold to Macy's. -- Koster & Bial's Music Hall, New York

The New York show was not the first time a movie had been projected before an audience. A few months earlier, on December 28, 1895, the Lumière Brothers had shown a film at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris.

The movie at Koster & Bial's included an Umbrella Dance performed by the Leigh Sisters. According to the Silent Era the film "premiered 23 April 1896 at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York, New York, used as part of the premiere presentation of Edison’s Vitascope motion picture projection system."

---------

Some sources:

Who's Who of Victorian Cinema

Koster & Bial on the Library of Congress web site. Extract: "On April 23, 1896, the Vitascope movie projector made its debut at Koster & Bial's Music Hall in Herald Square, New York City. The vaudeville circuit was a fitting venue because it not only provided a ready audience but also a source for film subjects including Annabelle, the 'butterfly dancer' and the theatrical production of 'A Milk White Flag.' During the premiere, film was projected onto a screen set within an gilt frame to create literally a "moving picture" for an amazed audience. This is an example of Koster & Bial's stock poster that was designed to be overprinted with information about a specific attraction."

Film History,
"When were films first projected in a New York theatre?" by Larry Wild, Assistant Professor of Theatre, Northern State University.

Koster and Bial's Music Hall on wikipedia

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Auden's God

A couple of weeks ago we attended the funeral of an aunt. We'd had tea with her maybe a month before, but didn't know she had an aortal aneurysm that could have killed her at any time. We loved her, wish we'd seen more of her, and miss her now.

The celebrant was an Episcopalian priest who didn't know her and didn't pretend to. He conducted a short, dignified, and to me a memorable ceremony. His voice was gently sonorous and his diction precise. He did not declaim but simply spoke, yet the effect, if in no way the act, was as a musical performance, like listening to a string quartet and being carried away by the complex and familiar sounds. I felt dreamy-contemplative, one part of me communally present and the other privately wandering. He spoke the words of the King James version of the Bible, so familiar to him that he did not so much read as render them from memory. And so familiar to me that the words did not convey their usual prosaic meanings but rather, as when hearing a difficult poem, they had a collective, emotional impact more than a commonplace intellectual one.

I listened more attentively when the priest quoted Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. The letter says we are transformed when called into heaven. "All flesh is not the same flesh." As people, beasts, fishes, and birds all differ, "so also," the passage reads, "there is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars." When a person dies, he says, the "natural body" "is raised a spiritual body."[1]

Thinking about the "spiritual body" I recalled a homily once heard at Mass in which the priest said God is eternal, immaterial, without dimension and outside time. This description conforms to Spinoza's definition of a being that is infinite, necessary, uncaused, and indivisible.

W.H. Auden's concept of God was similar. He felt that God as father, lord, or other anthropomorphic descriptors was an artifact of language. We can't comfortably request blessings from Spinoza's God, can't envision such a being in our prayers, can't invoke what's basically indescribable in normal discourse. It followed for Auden, as Spinoza, that the immaterial God for which the anthropomorphized one stands isn't outside us but lies as much within as without. However, where Spinoza said all religion is superstition, Auden found a way to craft belief — and a commitment to religious observance — out of his faith. It mattered to him greatly that it was an act of this God to breathe into his Adam not just life, but consciousness, understanding of time's motions, and the ability to plan, make judgments, and cause things to happen.

Auden called this gift "making, knowing, and judging."[2] He believed that the way to God was through God's human creatures. Although Saint Matthew has Jesus say there are two fundamental commandments, Auden says they are one: "love thy God" (the first) is "like" (meaning identical with) "love thy neighbor" (the second).[3] Auden wrote "If it [i.e., an expression, a poem or other work of art] praises the Creator, it does so indirectly by praising His creatures..."[4] This gift which Auden's God gave humans was a terrible one; not terrible in the sense of wrongly done, but terrible in the sense of unimaginably frightening. This gift — the freedom of humankind to perceive themselves as separate beings, to make individual judgments, to create and to destroy — was once thought to have God-imposed limits, but events of the 20th century, particularly from the rise of Nazism onward, proved this belief to be a false one.

Auden considered this subject more than once, probably most memorably in a poem called Friday's Child.[5] The poem was a tribute to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and theologian who was executed by hanging on April 9, 1945, for his efforts to assassinate Hitler. He was one of a very few religious leaders who not only opposed National Socialism but actively worked to subvert it.

In writing about Bonhoeffer Auden concealed in a kind of joke the depth of his feeling about what seems have been a cosmic injustice. Concerning the power that totalitarian states use in order to destroy the lives of millions the poem asks:
What reverence is rightly paid
To a Divinity so odd
He lets the Adam whom He made
Perform the Acts of God?
The poem says the God-given human mind (the "self-observed observing Mind") has little skill in using the freedom it possesses:
Though instruments at Its command
Make wish and counterwish come true,
It clearly cannot understand
What It can clearly do.
The poem ends with a sorrowful meditation on Good Friday.
Meanwhile, a silence on the cross,
As dead as we shall ever be,
Speaks of some total gain or loss,
And you and I are free

To guess from the insulted face
Just what Appearances He saves
By suffering in a public place
A death reserved for slaves.
Auden agreed with what Bonhoeffer said: "To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to cultivate some particular form of asceticism.., but to be a human being. It is not some religious act which makes a Christian what he is, but participation in the suffering of God in the life of the world." The awful freedom which humans possess necessarily entails suffering. For Auden, the pain endured by God and humankind is mutual. We have the freedom not to experience this, but he believes we are wrong when we so choose.

These words make Auden seem profoundly pessimistic, but he was not. He believed in laughter, in getting on with life. He recognized that he had a choice between hope and despair and he chose hope and therefore learned to "bless what there is for being:"
That singular command I do not understand,
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing?[6]
As Hannah Arendt said of him, his response to "the curse" was a "praise that pitches itself against all that is most unsatisfactory in man's condition on this earth and sucks its strength out of the wound." Arendt wrote this as a comment on lines in Auden's poem on W.B. Yeats.[7] Addressing Yeats, Auden makes a request:
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse.

In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.




--------

Some sources:

canzoni

"w. h. auden - family ghosts" website by Nicholas Jenkins, Department of English, Stanford University

Auden and Christianity by Arthur C. Kirsch (Yale University Press, 2005)

Auden’s Memorial to Yeats by Katherine Bailey

W. H. AUDEN’S WISDOM, FAITH, AND HUMOR by Walter G. Moss (pdf)

Auden and God by Edward Mendelson, reviewing Auden and Christianity by Arthur Kirsch (pdf)

"Reflection on the Right to Will": Auden's "Canzone"and Arendt's Notes on Willing by SUSANNAH YOUNG-AH GOTTLIEB

"The Quest for Auden" by Austin Warren in The Sewanee Review, Vol. 87, No. 2 (Spring, 1979), pp. 229-248. Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27543545

"Auden's Religious Leap" by Justin Replogle in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Winter - Spring, 1966), pp. 47-75. Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207210 .

Auden and the Limits of Poetry by Alan Jacobs

Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity 2011 April 12,
by Joshua Miller

Regions of sorrow: anxiety and messianism in Hannah Arendt and W.H. Auden by Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (Stanford University Press, 2003)

"Auden in the Fifties: Rites of Homage" by Monroe K. Spears in The Sewanee Review, Vol. 69, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1961), pp. 375-398. Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27540685 .

The Bible Is Dead; Long Live the Bible by Timothy Beal

Auden Explains Real Function of All Ritual published in the April 1, 1944 issue of the Phoenix

Prose: 1939-1948 by W.H. Auden, Vol. 2 (Princeton University Press, 2002)

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Notes:

[1] This is I Corinthians 15:39-41, 44. It concludes,
And so it is written, 'The first man Adam became a living being.' The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural, and afterward the spiritual. The first man was of the earth, made of dust; the second Man is the Lord from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are made of dust; and as is the heavenly Man, so also are those who are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly Man.
[2] "Making, Knowing, and Judging" by W.H. Auden, from The Dyer's Hand, Part IV

[3] Matthew 22:36-40 (King James Version)
Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him,
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
[4] Auden wrote this in The Dyer's Hand ("Making, Knowing, and Judging"). Here is the context:
The impulse to create a work of art is felt when, in certain persons, the passive awe provoked by sacred beings or events is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship or homage, and to be fit homage, this rite must be beautiful. This rite has no magical or idolatrous intention; nothing is expected in return. Nor is it, in a Christian sense, an act of devotion. If it praises the Creator, it does so indirectly by praising His creatures among which may be human notions of the Divine Nature. With God as Redeemer, it has, so far as I can see, little if anything to do.
[5] Here is the whole poem. It's available on a number of web sites. I don't mean to abuse copyright, however, and will remove it if shown that I've put it here improperly.
Friday's Child

(In memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred at Flossenbürg, April 9, 1945)

He told us we were free to choose
But, children as we were, we thought---
"Paternal Love will only use
Force in the last resort

On those too bumptious to repent."
Accustomed to religious dread,
It never crossed our minds He meant
Exactly what He said.

Perhaps He frowns, perhaps He grieves,
But it seems idle to discuss
If anger or compassion leaves
The bigger bangs to us.

What reverence is rightly paid
To a Divinity so odd
He lets the Adam whom He made
Perform the Acts of God?

It might be jolly if we felt
Awe at this Universal Man
(When kings were local, people knelt);
Some try to, but who can?

The self-observed observing Mind
We meet when we observe at all
Is not alarming or unkind
But utterly banal.

Though instruments at Its command
Make wish and counterwish come true,
It clearly cannot understand
What It can clearly do.

Since the analogies are rot
Our senses based belief upon,
We have no means of learning what--
Is really going on,

And must put up with having learned
All proofs or disproofs that we tender
Of His existence are returned
Unopened to the sender.

Now, did He really break the seal
And rise again? We dare not say;
But conscious unbelievers feel
Quite sure of Judgement Day.

Meanwhile, a silence on the cross,
As dead as we shall ever be,`
Speaks of some total gain or loss,
And you and I are free

To guess from the insulted face
Just what Appearances He saves
By suffering in a public place
A death reserved for slaves.
[6] This comes from Auden's poem Precious five of 1950.

[7] On this, see my last blog post: insufflation.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

insufflation

Hannah Arendt opposed autocratic government in her homeland, left Europe to escape imprisonment, arrived in New York without resources, ignorant of the language, lacking skills that would provide her with a good income, and forced to make the best of a bad situation. Her experiences parallel the men who emigrated to New York following the failure of the German Revolutions of 1848. America in the latter half of the 19th century was generally kind to its German immigrants and the Forty-Eighters — the five whose lives I've described — flourished.[1] Like her, they were well-educated and highly articulate. They found it easy to write, but, for the most part, did not take up writing as their main occupation. Like her, they remained true to their early beliefs and were active in their new country as progressives. They opposed political corruption and advocated reforms to correct the many injustices suffered by people less fortunate than themselves. Like her, they

-- were (again for the most part) adamantly independent in thought as well as political affiliation,
-- understood the central place of cultural institutions in civic life,
-- found New York to be a congenial place to live.
Like her, as young immigrants, they set out to establish themselves during a time when a clash of opposing ideologies produced horrible battlefield slaughter and dislocation of millions of destitute people. The Forty-Eighters saw the beginning of class-based political struggles which continued in Arendt's lifetime.

Yet she was much unlike them. The Forty-Eighters knew poetry and revered the famous poets, but were not themselves poetical, showed no inclination to put in words what the great poems meant to them. They were practical thinkers, not, as she was, a passionate one. They were all socially prominent, active in politics and deeply involved in numerous business ventures; they all became sufficiently well-to-do as to be able to enjoy leisure. They traveled widely. They often used their influence to advance their own interests, but, as often, what they did benefitted others without much benefitting themselves. Their paths to prosperity were hardly smooth ones — there were panics, there were attempts by competitors to impoverish them; there were temptations, to which they sometimes succumbed, to squander their savings on foolhearty ventures, and there were times when even government agents conspired against them. Nonetheless they were able to attain modest wealth, or better, and were disposed to use their leisure to advance worthy causes.

Although she mixed freely in the world of the New York intelligentsia, Arendt wasn't a clubby person. You can't picture her in your mind's eye singing gay German songs over frothy steins. It's hard to imagine banquets being given in her honor by her close friends, complete with lengthy tributes given as toasts by prominent guests. The Forty-Eighters enjoyed eating and drinking together and they did give one another such large scale social events. They spent Sunday afternoons roistering in New York's German beer gardens. The sang in weekly gatherings of Liederkranz. They enjoyed their lunches and dinners in the city's restaurants and clubs.[2]

More significantly, the Forty-Eighters could not have imagined the transformation of a repressive form of government they knew and loathed — conservative autocracy — into a radical new and far worse one — totalitarianism — with fundamentally perverted moral values. And, much less, they could not foresee the uncountable murders committed by the totalitarian regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and others.

Arendt was a political philosopher. She studied public persona and power relationships in societies and nations. As a political theorist she would not have been expected to show a deep interest in literature and it therefore it may seem a bit odd that she loved poetry. Political theory concerns itself with the power relationships, governance, and the conflicts of people in class, tribal, and cultural groupings, and poetry is a form of literature which is often taken to be personal, private, and free of at least external factiousness. All the same she revered the famous poets and worked hard to put into words what it was that makes their best work penetrate your waking and sleeping existences, give you shivers, cause you to stop and think, stop and feel deeply emotions that seem to have, and perhaps really do have, elemental authenticity.

She became friends with W.H. Auden, deeply read his poetry, and, on his death, wrote feelingly about the man and his worth.

There seems much that separates Arendt and Auden — woman and man, German Jewish pariah and English Anglican member of a conforming middle class, theorist and poet — yet they had much in common. They were both well educated, both immigrants from societies that had become alien to them, both secularized but paradoxically deeply religious, and both outsiders at odds with dominant social norms.

Both felt strongly, as Arendt put it, "the grimness of the present," burdened as it is both with the atrocities of the past and with a future which could as easily be worse as better.[3] Yet neither was pessimistic. When Auden died, Arendt wrote that his power as a poet came from his capacity to express his assent to life in the present, this grim present. She wrote of his capacity to sing a "praise that pitches itself against all that is most unsatisfactory in man's condition on this earth and sucks its strength out of the wound"[4] She shared this capacity. As early as 1929, in her Ph.D. thesis, she wrote about expressing gratitude for the gift of life, however miserable be this existence. The writing is a complex analysis of St. Augustine's consideration of the many forms of love: Godly, carnal, charitable, self-regarding, ... and ways in which a certain kind of love, caritas, permits a person to be unworldly pure and still fully participate in the world's chaotic disturbances. This concept of love requires facing up to reality and acknowledging one's own faults and the world's. It is not a passive giving in, but active and engaged.[5]

Arendt and Auden sought to show this unifying love in their own work. Auden expressed the idea more than once, but probably most succinctly in the need to "make a vineyard of the curse." The line appears in his poem In Memory of W. B. Yeats. In it, addressing Yeats and invoking his own powers and those of all great poets, Auden asks the poet:
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse...[6]
Arendt copied out this poem when preparing notes for her essay on Auden at the time of his death. Of the last couplet — "In the prison of his days / Teach the free man how to praise." — she said "Praise is the key-word of these lines, not praise of 'the best of all possible worlds' — as though it were up to the poet (or the philosopher) to justify God's creation &mdash but praise that pitches itself against all that is most unsatisfactory in man's condition on this earth..."[7]

In a note card she typed while preparing her remembrance of Auden, Arendt seems to have acknowledged that this love that is expressed as holy praise is elusive and the poet or philosopher who sings this praise — who can "bless what there is for being" — is, paradoxically, no less a mortal soul than any other. The card quotes without comment Auden's famous line: "Poetry makes nothing happen." In the essay she helps us understand this line by quoting Auden's statement that "mad Ireland hurt [Yeats] into poetry" and reflecting it back on Auden — he also was hurt into poetry.

The same card quotes a phrase Auden used to express an immanent God, present but elusive, easily misperceived or not perceived at all. The phrase is "At his holy insufflation" and she adds one that follows about a "bubble-headed creature" whose sense of identity with holiness screens him off from elbow-jostling men and women in the streets and roads.[8] Auden reminds the reader that God chose man as receptical for the grace of the Holy Spirit. He asks what if God had chosen some other creature; have you ever considered what might be the result? Arendt knew and saw that Auden knew as well, that what I'm calling holy praise could not be simply willed into existence, not attained by training or right living. There is something more needed — a facing up to, and even praising an awkward and frequently unspeakably ugly reality — but how to do that they do not say.

These note cards by Hannah Arendt can be found in the The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress



"At his holy insufflation"


----------


{Auden in 1939 by Carl Van Vechten; source: wikipedia}



{Hannah Arendt, German Postage Stamp of 1988; source: wikipedia}

---------

Some sources:

Reflections on literature and culture by Hannah Arendt, edited by Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (Stanford University Press, 2007).

Love and Saint Augustine by Hannah Arendt (University of Chicago Press, 1996) an edited version of the thesis Arendt wrote under Karl Jaspers in 1929.

Love and Saint Augustine reviewed by George McKenna

What St. Augustine Taught Hannah Arendt about “how to live in the world”: Caritas, Natality and the Banality of Evil by Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott (pdf)

"Reflection on the Right to Will": Auden's "Canzone"and Arendt's Notes on Willing by Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb

"Reflection on the Right to Will": Auden's "Canzone" and Arendt's Notes on Willing
Author(s): Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Spring, 2001), pp. 131-150
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3593505.

The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, Preface to the First Edition

The origins of totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994)

Wonder and Gratitude in the Thought of Arendt by Richard J. Gill

"Thinking What We Are Doing," a review of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, by W.H. Auden, in A company of readers: uncollected writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling edited by Arthur Krystal

In Memory of W. B. Yeats by W.H. Auden

The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress

The Cambridge companion to W.H. Auden edited by Stan Smith (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

W. H. AUDEN: FROM MYTH TO PARABLE by Edward Mendelson

Selected poems by W.H. Auden (Vintage, 2007)

---------

Notes:

[1] My great-grandfather was one of the five Forty-Eighters. I've written frequently about his life in New York. See, for example, this post: an obituary. I've also made a family history web page that takes its focus from life: Louis Windmuller and Family. Here are links to three posts about the four other Forty-Eighters and one about their wives: The four men were Carl Schurz, Henry Villard, Abraham Jacobi and Oswald Ottendorfer.

[2] There are lots of sources attesting to this love of communal eating, drinking, and speechifying. See for example: Banquet to the Honorable Carl Schurz, Banquet in Honor of Dr. Jacobi, Annual banquet, of the New York Chamber of Commerce, Herr Windmuller Confesses, and Club men of New York: their occupations, and business and home addresses: sketches of each of the organizations: college alumni associations (Republic Press, 1893).

[3] From the introduction to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism: "We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain."

[4] "Remembering Wystan H. Auden, Who Died in the Night of the Twenty-eighth of September, 1973," in Reflections on literature and culture by Hannah Arendt, edited and with an Introduction by Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb

[5] She puts forth this argument in her Ph.D. thesis of 1929, Love and Saint Augustine by Hannah Arendt (University of Chicago Press, 1996) an edited version of the thesis Arendt wrote under Karl Jaspers in 1929.

[6] The extract is from In Memory of W. B. Yeats by W.H. Auden

[7] Same source as note 4.

[8] The phrases come from Auden's poem "Bucolics, I Winds (for Alex Leger)". Here is the context:
That Pliocene Friday when,
At His Holy insufflation
(Had He picked a teleost
Or an arthropod to inspire,
Would our death also have come?)
One bubble-brained creature said:--
‘I am loved, therefore I am’--:
And well by now might the lion
Be lying down with the kid,
Had he stuck to that logic.
-- Selected poems by W.H. Auden (Vintage, 2007)
I had to look up the word insufflation, it's a pumping of air into an orifice or a breathing in. OED gives this quote: "With the insufflation of his soul, Adam received also the grace of the Holy Spirit." (J. W. Burgon in Fortn. Rev. Apr. 593, 1887).

Wednesday, April 06, 2011

Meander, fourth post

William Walsh was surely right when he said Napier's famous dispatch ('peccavi') has often been treated as authentic though it was really just a "typical joke of Punch".[1] There were many who thought Napier had actually written the dispatch and others who gave credit to wits who weren't connected with Punch. Among those who wrongly ascribed it to Napier were an MP (speaking on the floor of the House of Commons in 1881), a compiler of famous puns in 1890, two noted scholars of English history (both writing in 1903), and, in our time, William Safire, author of the column, "On Language," in the New York Times (in 1982, in 1987, and again in 1993).[2]

Surprisingly, the author of the History of Punch (1895) was ignorant of its first appearance in that magazine. He wrongly ascribed a misquoted version of the quip to the man who edited the magazine in 1857.[3]

What seems to be the first correct attribution in print appeared in the endlessly diverting journal Notes and Queries. In 1853 two of its frequent contributors wrote — in the pleasant and somewhat quaint style of that journal — to supply information lacking to another. As you see, the first is correct, the second mistaken.

{Notes and queries, a Medium of Inter-Communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, Etc. Vol 8, issue for December 10, 1853 (George Bell, Fleet Street, 1853)}

In 1881 a person going by the name of Bubbles also pointed out that Mr. Punch was responsible for the pun, but, like the author of the History of Punch, Bubbles gave an inaccurate version of the quip. This item appeared in the "Notices to Correspondents" section of Monthly Packet of Evening Readings for Members of the English Church

{Monthly packet of Evening Readings for Members of the English Church, 3rd Series, Vol 2, edited by Charlotte Mary Yonge, Christabel Rose Coleridge, and Arthur Innes (J. and C. Mozley, 1881)}

In 1889 the New York Times correctly cited "Napier's famous dispatch" as a joke, but mistakenly says it was committed not by Mr. Punch but by General Napier himself.[4]


In 1904 a frequent contributor to the correspondents' columns of the Times' Book Review, wrote to say "It was Punch's idea that Sir Charles Napier.., the conqueror of Scinde, should so have announced his conquest."


In 1907 a correspondent to a journal devoted to the study of missions credited not Mr. Punch but an actual person with the pun.

{"Editorial Notes" in the October-December issue of The East and the West, a Quarterly Review for the Study of Missions, Vol 5 (Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Great Britain, 1907)}

Although this attribution has the ring of truth, it's odd that either Mrs. Macintosh or the editor got the punster's name wrong. It was not Catherine Wentworth but Catherine Winkworth, a translator and leader in the struggle for women's rights. Before the year was out the lexicographer, A.L. Mayhew, gave Notes and Queries readers the information that appeared in The East and the West and said he saw nothing to contradict the claim.[4]

In 1913, Walter Woollcott (father of the famous Alexander) wrote a long piece on the peccavi joke in the "News for Bibliophiles" column of the Nation. In it he listed some of those who got their facts wrong. He also listed people who had been named as author and found no credible evidence for any but Catherine Winkworth.

The most interesting and extended investigation of the pun appears in the Presidential Address which the Indologist, Wendy Doniger, gave to the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in March 1999.[5] She quoted the joke as it appeared in Punch, gave full explanation and context, and listed a few who got the attribution wrong (the authors of a 1990 biography of Napier and of an article in the online Encyclopedia Britannica as well as paleontologist and historian, Stephen Jay Gould). She also gave her opinion that an editor of Punch was the inventor. However, she did not refer to, and apparently did not know of Mrs. Macintosh's letter to The East and the West or A.L. Mayhew's reference to it in Notes and Queries. Had she seen it, I believe she might have agreed that evidence supports Catherine Winkworth as the originating wit.

I believe also that she would have been pleased that Winkworth was the most-likely source since her thesis was that we should not be too quick to condemn the Victorians for their writings about India, but rather recognize the complex response of Britons to their imperial expansion in the sub-continent, and it's an indicator of this complexity that Winkworth was no typical Victorian John Bull. She was known in her time not just as a translator of German hymns but also as a fierce proponent of university education for women and women's suffrage.

As I say, I think Wendy Doniger would have appreciated learning about this unexpected source of the joke and appreciated, as well, the irony of its source in an untypical Victorian, since her main thesis concerns a natural tendency among people of our generation to condemn the 19th-century's dead white males, who — as "Dead White Male Orientalists" — wrote about India. By Orientalists, she meant the academic, cultural, and literary authors who wrote about the Indian sub-continent. She quoted the cultural critic, Lee Siegel, on the contributions that these men made: "Those hegemonic, imperialist, Euro-centric colonialists were such amazing writers and they knew so much more about India than all of us. They could ride horses, too."

Having begun with the Napier-pun and its interplay of Scinde and sin, she developed her main theme as an extended riff on the complex aspects of the Horse as cultural icon and "contradictory symbol of human political power." She said "horses offer a paradigm for us to use in our struggle to come to terms with the blotted copybook bequeathed to us by British Orientalism" and, having led her hearers (and us readers) through an extensive exploration of Indic horsiness her final thoughts were these: "The Hindu villagers' ability to appreciate the beauty and power of a creature that was the instrument of great political injury to them might inspire us to try once again to appreciate the tarnished but precious gift bequeathed to us by British Orientalists. Sometimes we cannot help looking a gift horse in the mouthpiece, or even in the ideology, but we can still accept the gift. Flawed as they are, the Orientalists are our ancestors, and, as Hamlet wisely cautioned, 'Use each man after his own deserts, and who shall 'scape whipping?'"

Catherine Winkworth

{source: wikipedia}

----------

Some sources:

Monthly packet of Evening Readings for Members of the English Church, 3rd Series, Vol 2, edited by Charlotte Mary Yonge, Christabel Rose Coleridge, and Arthur Innes (J. and C. Mozley, 1881)

Musing about Peccavi and Twitter and accessibility

The American historical reviewVolume 9 (American Historical Association, 1904) Extract: 'An occasional good story is told in the volumes, as one of Soyer, the great French chef, who put on his irascible wife's tombstone "Soyez tranquille". India developed some bon mots, as after the relief of beleaguered Lucknow, one of Clyde's officers telegraphed home "Nunc fortunatus sum", i.e., "I am in luck now." Was it Napier in 1843 who sent the despatch "Peccavi", i.e., "I have Sindh"?' (From a review of Wolseley, The Story of a Soldier's Life by Theodore Avrault Dodge).

Last word by Ben Macintyre, Times (of London), March 4, 2006

Notes and queries, Volume 116, edited by William White (London, John C. Francis, 1907)

The East and the West, Volume 5 (Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Great Britain, 1907)

Memorials of two sisters:
Susanna and Catherine Winkworth, edited by Margaret J. Shaen (Longmans, Green, 1908)

Catherine and Susanna Winkworth From: Dictionary of National Biography

Charles James Napier in wikipedia

Rambles in books edited by Charles Francis Blackburn (S. Low, Marston & Company, 1893)

The history of "Punch" by Marion Harry Spielmann, Volume 1 (Cassell and company, limited, 1895)


ON LANGUAGE; EXIT FOR HAIGSPEAK by William Safire, The New York Times, July 11, 1982

Democritus in London, with the mad pranks and comical conceits of Motley and Robin Good-fellow, to which are added notes festivous, etc. by George Daniel (W. Pickering, 1852)

"INDIA AND AFGHANISTAN (1815-1869) by William Lee-Warner in "The Cambridge modern history, Vol 11, Baron Acton, Ernest Alfred Benians (Cambridge University Press, 1909)

"Notes for Bibliophiles" by Walter Woollcott in The Nation Vol 96 (The Nation Company, 1913)

A history of modern England, Vol 1, by Herbert Woodfield Paul (The Macmillan company, 1904)

"Peccavi", Letter to the Editor of the New York Times Book Review by E.A. Hart, October 15, 1904

American notes and queries Vol 4, edited by William Shepard Walsh, and others (W.S. and H.C. Walsh, 1890)

"'I Have Scinde': Flogging a Dead (White Male Orientalist) Horse" and it appears in The Journal of Asian Studies (Vol. 58, No. 4, Nov., 1999 — JSTOR URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2658491)

----------

Notes:

[1] Handy-book of literary curiosities by William Shephard Walsh (London, Gibbings, 1894)

[2] The reference to the MP appears in Monthly packet of Evening Readings for Members of the English Church, 3rd Series, Vol 2, edited by Charlotte Mary Yonge, Christabel Rose Coleridge, and Arthur Innes (J. and C. Mozley, 1881). The compiler of puns was none other than William Walsh: American notes and queries Vol 4, edited by William Shepard Walsh, and others (W.S. and H.C. Walsh, 1890). The two historians were William Lee-Warner and Herbert Woodfield Paul ("INDIA AND AFGHANISTAN (1815-1869) by William Lee-Warner in "The Cambridge modern history, Vol 11, Baron Acton, Ernest Alfred Benians (Cambridge University Press, 1909) and A history of modern England, Vol 1, by Herbert Woodfield Paul (The Macmillan company, 1904) respectively). Safire's three mistakes appeared in his column "On Language" in the New York Times on July 11, 1982, August 30, 1987, and November 21, 1993.

[3] The history of "Punch" by Marion Harry Spielmann, Volume 1 (Cassell and company, limited, 1895)

[4] Notes and queries, Volume 116, edited by William White (London, John C. Francis, 1907)

[5] The address is entitled "'I Have Scinde': Flogging a Dead (White Male Orientalist) Horse" and it appears in The Journal of Asian Studies (Vol. 58, No. 4, Nov., 1999 — JSTOR URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2658491).

Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Meander, third post

I gave some examples of telegraphese in a recent post. It's an interesting literary genre but not one that's easy to search out on the internet.[1] There's a small sub-category of this genre which consists of martial, bilingual puns. The earliest and best known is just a single word. Here's how Punch described it.
Foreign Affairs: It is a common idea that the most laconic military despatch ever issued was that sent by Caesar to the Horse-Guards at Rome, containing the three memorable words "Veni, vidi, vici," and, perhaps, until our own day, no like instance of brevity has been found. The despatch of Sir Charles Napier, after the capture of Scinde, to Lord Ellenborough both for brevity and truth, is, however, far beyond it. The despatch consisted of one emphatic word — "Peccavi," "I have Scinde," (sinned).[2]
-- PUNCH, Vol 6, 1844
That witticism appeared in 1844 about a conquest that took place in 1843. In 1857 Punch was the first to tell the world of a second military dispatch as bilingual pun.
"Peccavi! I've Scinde," said Lord Ellen so proud — Dalhousie, more modest, said "Vori I've Oude!"[3]
-- The history of "Punch" by Marion Harry Spielmann, Vol 1 (Cassell and company, limited, 1895)
Almost two decades later, the third example shows up, again in Punch.
That Clever Czar! We have all heard of Julius Caesar's" Veni, vidi, vici" and Sir Charles Napier's "Peccavi" despatch. The last achievement in the line of epistolary brevity is the Czar's despatch, in answer to the proposal of General Ivanhoff, commanding on the Central Asian frontier, to annex more territory. It was a blank, with the direction phonetically spelt — "General I've Enough."
-- PUNCH, Vol 68, 1875
In the same year our final example appeared. Here, the story is related by the commanding officer at the time.
A clever man in imitation of Caesar's "Veni, vidi, vici" had described Sir Charles Napier's conquest of Scind in the one word "Peccavi." It was superior in wit to the Roman's alliterative description of his success, as Napier was commonly supposed to have sinned much in his attack upon the Ameers and by his annexation of their province. A witty friend of mine, Major the Hon. James Dormer, who was A.D.C. to Sir Colin Campbell, wrote as if from his general to describe his capture of Lucknow, "Nunc fortunatus sum" ("I am in luck-now."). If not as elegant as Caesar's three words, nor as witty as Napier's supposed despatch, it passed muster in our camp, and amused many at a time when even a small joke was thankfully received.[4]
-- The story of a soldier's life by Viscount Garnet Wolseley, Volume 1 (A. Constable & Co., Ltd., 1903)
It's probably clear that none of these examples of telegraphese were genuine — not, that is, in the sense that they were sent by telegraph from the field to a military headquarters in order to convey important information to a military headquarters. They're all witticisms and most were probably inspired by the first. In his Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, William Walsh adds to the fun:

{Handy-book of literary curiosities by William Shephard Walsh (London, Gibbings, 1894)}

Here are images of the other text passages I've quoted:



----------

Some sources:

The story of a soldier's life by Viscount Garnet Wolseley, Volume 1 (A. Constable & Co., Ltd., 1903)

More puniana, or, thoughts wise and other-why's; a new collection of the best riddles, conundrums, jokes, sells, etc., etc. by Hugh Rowley (Chatto & Windus, 1875)

Rambles in books by Charles Francis Blackburn (S. Low, Marston & Company, 1893)

David Cameron's ancestor and the greatest Latin joke ever by Harry Mount in the Telegraph (UK)

Rambles in books edited by Charles Francis Blackburn (S. Low, Marston & Company, 1893)

Handy-book of literary curiosities by William Shephard Author (London, Gibbings, 1894)

----------

Notes:

[1] Here's what little I've found so far. [2] Sir Charles Napier was Charles James Napier was Britain's Commander-in-Chief in India; Lord Ellenborough was Baron Ellenborough, India's Governor-General of India. Scinde was the province of Sindh, then in India, now in Pakistan.

[3] Note that the 'peccavi' quip is attributed to Lord Ellenborough in this version; Dalhousie was James Broun-Ramsay, 1st Marquess of Dalhousie, a successor to Napier as C-in-C; Vori means "I devour"; Oude was the British name for a principality — Awadh — in north-east India.

[4] Sir Colin Campbell was Colin Campbell, 1st Baron Clyde C-in-C of India, who commanded an army that relieved the city of Luknow during the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

Monday, April 04, 2011

canzoni

Turmoil is too weak a descriptor for the heart-rending tragedies inflicted by gods and their fellow men on earth's undeserving souls. In celebrating the genius of W.H. Auden, Hannah Arendt tries to help us come to terms with it all. She quotes the poet:
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
And she says his deep acknowledgement of "unsuccess" in himself and all of us is one of the things that made him not just good but great. He invoked Yeats' voice and his own in a hymn of praise, not as thanksgiving but as reconciliation. She says the poets' praise "sucks its own strength from the wound." For her Auden, Yeats, and all the great poets sang of gods that "spin unhappiness and evil things toward mortals so that they may be able to tell the tales and sing the songs."

Here is how Auden rendered this song:
Faces, orations, battles, bait our will
As questionable forms and noises will;
Whole phyla of resentments every day
Give status to the wild men of the world
Who rule the absent-minded and this world.

...

Our claim to own our bodies and our world
Is our catastrophe. What can we know
But panic and caprice until we know
Our dreadful appetite demands a world
Whose order, origin, and purpose will
Be fluent satisfaction of our will?

...

For through our lively traffic all the day,
In my own person I am forced to know
How much must be forgotten out of love,
How much must be forgiven, even love.

...

Dear fellow-creature, praise our God of Love
That we are so admonished, that no day
Of conscious trial be a wasted day.

Or else we make a scarecrow of the day,
Loose ends and jumble of our common world,
And stuff and nonsense of our own free will;
Or else our changing flesh may never know
There must be sorrow if there can be love.
Auden told us, Arendt says, to shun rhetoric, doctrine, and theoretical systems, and to beware of seductions that blind one to reality. He wrote,
I could (which you cannot)
Find reasons fast enough
To face the sky and roar
In anger and despair
At what is going on,
Demanding that it name
Whoever is to blame:
The sky would only wait
Till all my breath was gone
And then reiterate
As if I wasn't there
That singular command
I do not understand,
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing?
Photos from more than a decade before they met, when both were young.

{Arendt; source: outlaws4x4.com — Auden; source: drudginggoblin.blogspot.com}

Welcome to National Poetry Month.

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A note on sources:

Arendt's comments on Auden were first published in the New Yorker in 1973 and, since then, in Reflections on literature and culture by Hannah Arendt, edited by Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (Stanford University Press, 2007).

The first poem quoted is Auden's In Memory of W. B. Yeats.

The second is his Canzone.

The third is his 'Precious five'.

Other sources:

Hannah Arendt: for love of the world by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (Yale University Press, 2004)

"In Memory of WB Yeats" by W H Auden (poetry reading) on Youtube

"Reflection on the Right to Will": Auden's "Canzone"and Arendt's Notes on Willing by Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb

Hannah Arendt: for love of the world by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (Yale University Press, 2004)

"Reflection on the Right to Will": Auden's "Canzone" and Arendt's Notes on Willing
Author(s): Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Spring, 2001), pp. 131-150
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3593505 .