THEN AND NOW
A Now and Then Newsletter
June 2023
The Vermeer Phenomenon:
All 450,000 tickets for the exhibition of Vermeer’s paintings sold out before anyone could book a ticket for Amsterdam. Now a new Vermeer may have turned up in Philadelphia, as John Immerwahr explains on a not-to-be-missed video on YouTube. Genuine or not. the painting is part of the recent wave of interest in Vermeer and his work.
Such interest may seem surprising at a time as overscheduled, overcommitted, overly frantic as ours. Why are people paying attention to these placid images from a Dutch master of the 17th century when we have so many more pressing things to do? He should be totally out of fashion—a dead, white, European, binary male, dependent on or even a product of Dutch colonialism. Yet even those most burdened by such baggage find their way to the sheer, simple beauty of his paintings, as Teju Cole shows in a remarkable essay in the New York TIMES.
Perhaps that placidity is the force that draws us back to him -- the quiet, domestic interiors, the recurring yellow dress, the gentle light through the predictable window -- tranquility interrupted only by an occasional message from the outside. All this may serve as an antidote to the frenzied pace of our time.
Courage amid a Tectonic Shift:
I find the Vermeer phenomenon deeply encouraging in a literal, etymological sense. It instills courage at a time when beauty, visual and literary, and those who value it often get pushed aside in the rush toward the contemporary, the politically correct and the profitable. That should embolden all of us who are facing the “tectonic shift” affecting the Humanities, as described in the last Then and Now Newsletter. (Still available at https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog). New evidence continues to show a shift away from the study of the humanities toward STEM fields with their promise of prompt high “returns on investment.” The trend is clear and continuing. Recent reports document it at Yale (Thanks to Jean Houston for pointing me to the Yale Alumni Magazine ), and at the University of Maryland as Nick Anderson has reported in The Washington Post. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/05/19/college-majors-computer-science-humanities/) Thanks to Tom Barron for calling my attention to this article.
The shift is real, not a set of misleading statistics nor a PR problem, as some have suggested. It will almost surely profoundly change American colleges and universities and the sudents who enroll in them in coming years.
Still, many people, including students majoring in STEM disciplines, are, I believe, hungry for the nourishment that Vermeer and many other great artists and thinkers of the past unapologetically provide. The greater the STEM stampede, the greater the opportunity for an unflinching affirmation of the humanities.
--
“Why Are We Losing the Humanities When We Most Need Them?”
Maureen Dowd explores that question in “Don’t Kill ‘Frankenstein’ with Real Frankenstein at Large” And congratulations to her on her recently earning her M.A. in English from Columbia University.
--
Outliers:
In every system there are “outliers,” that is, individuals, programs or departments that outperform the norm. That’s certainly true in the Humanities.
The trick is to make the outliers the norm.
That means looking hard to see if what works in one setting can be put to work in other settings. Here are two cases worth a closer look. The chair of the English Department at Pace University in New York City reports that her department “has experienced a 40% growth in majors over the past few years. Click here to see how they present themselves. On the west coast at UC Berkeley, as Axios reports, “the number of first-year ... students declaring majors in the arts and humanities ... was up 121% over last year. “ In Forbes Michael Nietzel digs deeper into the situation at Berkeley, and quotes Dean Sara Guyer’s observation that many of us have “
“ ... found ourselves in a series of unprecedented situations without a compass or guide, ... It is not at all surprising that students are turning to the arts and humanities as a way to make sense of our current moment. The imaginative, ethical, creative and analytical contributions and historical observations of humanities research and artistic production provide a valuable way to understand the complexities brought on by contemporary challenges.”
--
“The Age Demanded”:
The greatest long-term threat to a humanistic education comes, I suspect, not from the outside, but from within - – humanists’ fear that they must respond to the demand for
the catchy, the fashionable, the trendy -- things more likely to reinforce the prejudices of a befuddled age than to challenge its orthodoxies. There’s always the excuse “The age demanded.” Before going down that road, however, a few scatological verses from Ernest Hemingway are in order:
The Age Demanded:
The age demanded that we sing
And cut away our tongue.
The age demanded that we flow
And hammered in the bung.
The age demanded that we dance
And jammed us into iron pants.
And in the end the age was handed
The sort of shit that it demanded.
--
Word of the Month:
Sisu: Finnish for endurance through difficulties – perhaps like our word grit, but Finns think of it as part of their national character. Is that part of the reason why Finland keeps beingranked as the world’s happiest nation?
--
What Can Greek Lessons Do for (or to) You?
Try “Greek Lessons: A Novelby Han Kang ,
”I don’t think the book is about the characters, ... and it’s certainly not plot-driven either. What is steering the craft? One answer is that it’s language itself, and the dissolution of language “
Review in The Guardian. (Thanks to Pam Machold for calling this novel to my attention.)
--
Riddles and Poetry:
“I was the image of the waxwing slain
By the false azure of the windowpane “…”
Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire
When riddles morph into poetry, as they often do, what is our response? Is it to convert the poem into explanatory prose, or is it to pause and let perplexity turn into delight?
--
Outlandish Speech Acts, Continued:
Then and Now has looked at riddles, palindromes, and in the last issue, a koan in which a Zen master responds to an inquiry about Zen by pouring tea until his visitor’s cup overflows. Note how this koan works. It’s a narrative but the answer within it is non-verbal. The overflowing cup raises thoughts of fullness and emptiness, and eventually the recognition that the latter must precede the former.
Sometimes speech acts work that way, and not just in Zen monasteries.
--
Quotable:
“Words are the only victors.” Salman Rushdie.
.--
Three Cheers Discouraged by gloomy statistics about American education? Here are three developments worth watching, and maybe your encouragement.
First: Latin at home. Home schooling doubled during the first year of the pandemic, then declined a bit, but now almost 6% of K -12 kids are homeschooled. Clearly, a significant number of parents find it works; many of them want their kids to learn Latin. Homeschooling is tricky and controversial, but before dismissing it read Kevin Mahnken’s essay, “Amid the Pandemic a Boom in Classical Education.” (Thanks to Hunter Rawlings for calling it to my attention.)
Second, some charter schools are providing things that other public schools don’t, and seeing good results. Example: the Washington Latin Public Charter School in D.C. (Thanks again to Hunter Rawlings, who has served on its Board, and is convinced that it is a great school, with a very diverse student body, high graduation rate, and many of whose students go on to top colleges.)
Third, The Paideia Institute for Humanistic Studies. Its leader, Jason Pedicone, writes., “At Paideia, we are ... focusing mostly on developing self-paced online teaching tools that can keep Latin and Greek in schools, even if they don't offer formal programs. Read more about our new HS Latin Curriculum here, and our Elementary School curriculum here..’’
Notate.Bene.: Most of these projects have been developed off the paths beaten by conventionally-minded funders. That may have given them freedom to innovate, but fund-raising is hard. If you can help Paideia, here’s the address:
The Paideia Institute for Humanistic Study, Inc
P.O. Box 670
New York, NY 10012
--
Viral
“There’s nothing wrong with dying. All the best people in history have done it.” That’s Paul Woodruff’ in his essay “My Death Is Close at Hand, but I Do not Think of Myself as Dying.“: His essay in the Washington Post went viral. You can read it here, or access it via YouTube.
--
A Taboo Broken:
When Paul Woodruff speaks so unabashedly of “death” and “dying” he frees us from the taboo that demands we avoid such words and speak instead of “passing,” as if dying were some cosmic course exam. If one cannot speak of death and dying, one must also pretend not to grieve and thereby deny oneself the consolation from friends and the closure mourning can bring. Thank you, Paul, for this and for so much else!.
But how is one to grieve or to console? That was also an issue in antiquity and led to some serious thinking . For ancient advice see Michael Fontaine’s “How to Grieve: An Ancient Guide to the Lost Art of Consolation.”
--
Some Good News (for a change) about Freedom of Speech on Campus
The Washington Post reports some encouraging developments on maintaining free speech on campuses. Campus leaders are recognizing how important it is that all points of view be heard, even if it makes some people “uncomfortable.” Here’s the link, Thanks to Jean Houston for calling it to my attention..
--
Quiz: What Do Tintin, James Bond, Inspector Poirot and Dr. Seuss Have in Common?
They are being rewritten so no one feels “uncomfortable” reading them – and to sell more copies., as is explained by Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris in “As Classic Novels Get Rewritten for Today’s Readers, a Debate about Where to Draw the Line.”
A modest solution: Add an apparatus criticus to the bottom of the page, that is a brief note showing what has been changed. Any good classical text provides this information when manuscript editions disagree or scholars propose a new reading. Shouldn’t publishers provide something similar whenever the original wording of a work is changed?
--
Vocation of the Month: “Sensitivity Reader”
A novelist friend of mine, well established and respected, recently told a group at a reading that to get a book published today, the book must win the approval of a Sensitivity Reader” before the publisher will launch it.
The vocation began a decade or so ago as a service to white writers who wished to include black or other disadvantaged people in their works but weren’t quite sure about word choice. Now initial good intentions may be morphing into yet another form of censorship.
--
Ponderable:
“An omniscient divinity would surely know that creatures in a paradise would focus on the one thing that was prohibited, and soon violate that prohibition, eating the fruit that conferred the knowledge of good and evil upon them. Then they would surely set out to create their own paradise based on precisely that forbidden knowledge.”
Maurice Brendenheim, Confessions I I p. 127
----
Can the New Artificial Intelligence Solve Riddles?
Answer: “Better than I can.” Test yourself against Chat GBT here.
--
Etymology of the Month:
Sully (verb). See soil.
soil (verb)
“early 13c., "to defile or pollute with sin," from Old French soillier "to splatter with mud, to foul or make dirty," originally "to wallow" (12c., Modern French souillier), from souil "tub, wild boar's wallow, pigsty," which is from Latin solium "tub for bathing; seat" (from PIE root *sed- (1) "to sit") or else from Latin suculus "little pig," from sus "pig."”
from Etymonline.
--
Richard Moran on Living in The Past:
“We can’t live in the past, and even if we could, we wouldn’t want to. But we can draw on the past, our own experience and those qui ante nos fuerant. That’s like going to the well on a hot day and drawing cool water to drink.”.
Moran’s whole article can be found at Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/95177090/The_Philosophical_Retreat_to_the_Here_and_Now_Notes_on_Living_in_Time?email_work_card=view-paper
--
Gift Subscriptions: No charge, just send an email to [email protected] (You can unsubscribe that way, too.).
Bob Connor
A Now and Then Newsletter
June 2023
The Vermeer Phenomenon:
All 450,000 tickets for the exhibition of Vermeer’s paintings sold out before anyone could book a ticket for Amsterdam. Now a new Vermeer may have turned up in Philadelphia, as John Immerwahr explains on a not-to-be-missed video on YouTube. Genuine or not. the painting is part of the recent wave of interest in Vermeer and his work.
Such interest may seem surprising at a time as overscheduled, overcommitted, overly frantic as ours. Why are people paying attention to these placid images from a Dutch master of the 17th century when we have so many more pressing things to do? He should be totally out of fashion—a dead, white, European, binary male, dependent on or even a product of Dutch colonialism. Yet even those most burdened by such baggage find their way to the sheer, simple beauty of his paintings, as Teju Cole shows in a remarkable essay in the New York TIMES.
Perhaps that placidity is the force that draws us back to him -- the quiet, domestic interiors, the recurring yellow dress, the gentle light through the predictable window -- tranquility interrupted only by an occasional message from the outside. All this may serve as an antidote to the frenzied pace of our time.
Courage amid a Tectonic Shift:
I find the Vermeer phenomenon deeply encouraging in a literal, etymological sense. It instills courage at a time when beauty, visual and literary, and those who value it often get pushed aside in the rush toward the contemporary, the politically correct and the profitable. That should embolden all of us who are facing the “tectonic shift” affecting the Humanities, as described in the last Then and Now Newsletter. (Still available at https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog). New evidence continues to show a shift away from the study of the humanities toward STEM fields with their promise of prompt high “returns on investment.” The trend is clear and continuing. Recent reports document it at Yale (Thanks to Jean Houston for pointing me to the Yale Alumni Magazine ), and at the University of Maryland as Nick Anderson has reported in The Washington Post. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/05/19/college-majors-computer-science-humanities/) Thanks to Tom Barron for calling my attention to this article.
The shift is real, not a set of misleading statistics nor a PR problem, as some have suggested. It will almost surely profoundly change American colleges and universities and the sudents who enroll in them in coming years.
Still, many people, including students majoring in STEM disciplines, are, I believe, hungry for the nourishment that Vermeer and many other great artists and thinkers of the past unapologetically provide. The greater the STEM stampede, the greater the opportunity for an unflinching affirmation of the humanities.
--
“Why Are We Losing the Humanities When We Most Need Them?”
Maureen Dowd explores that question in “Don’t Kill ‘Frankenstein’ with Real Frankenstein at Large” And congratulations to her on her recently earning her M.A. in English from Columbia University.
--
Outliers:
In every system there are “outliers,” that is, individuals, programs or departments that outperform the norm. That’s certainly true in the Humanities.
The trick is to make the outliers the norm.
That means looking hard to see if what works in one setting can be put to work in other settings. Here are two cases worth a closer look. The chair of the English Department at Pace University in New York City reports that her department “has experienced a 40% growth in majors over the past few years. Click here to see how they present themselves. On the west coast at UC Berkeley, as Axios reports, “the number of first-year ... students declaring majors in the arts and humanities ... was up 121% over last year. “ In Forbes Michael Nietzel digs deeper into the situation at Berkeley, and quotes Dean Sara Guyer’s observation that many of us have “
“ ... found ourselves in a series of unprecedented situations without a compass or guide, ... It is not at all surprising that students are turning to the arts and humanities as a way to make sense of our current moment. The imaginative, ethical, creative and analytical contributions and historical observations of humanities research and artistic production provide a valuable way to understand the complexities brought on by contemporary challenges.”
--
“The Age Demanded”:
The greatest long-term threat to a humanistic education comes, I suspect, not from the outside, but from within - – humanists’ fear that they must respond to the demand for
the catchy, the fashionable, the trendy -- things more likely to reinforce the prejudices of a befuddled age than to challenge its orthodoxies. There’s always the excuse “The age demanded.” Before going down that road, however, a few scatological verses from Ernest Hemingway are in order:
The Age Demanded:
The age demanded that we sing
And cut away our tongue.
The age demanded that we flow
And hammered in the bung.
The age demanded that we dance
And jammed us into iron pants.
And in the end the age was handed
The sort of shit that it demanded.
--
Word of the Month:
Sisu: Finnish for endurance through difficulties – perhaps like our word grit, but Finns think of it as part of their national character. Is that part of the reason why Finland keeps being
--
What Can Greek Lessons Do for (or to) You?
Try “Greek Lessons: A Novelby Han Kang ,
”I don’t think the book is about the characters, ... and it’s certainly not plot-driven either. What is steering the craft? One answer is that it’s language itself, and the dissolution of language “
Review in The Guardian. (Thanks to Pam Machold for calling this novel to my attention.)
--
Riddles and Poetry:
“I was the image of the waxwing slain
By the false azure of the windowpane “…”
Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire
When riddles morph into poetry, as they often do, what is our response? Is it to convert the poem into explanatory prose, or is it to pause and let perplexity turn into delight?
--
Outlandish Speech Acts, Continued:
Then and Now has looked at riddles, palindromes, and in the last issue, a koan in which a Zen master responds to an inquiry about Zen by pouring tea until his visitor’s cup overflows. Note how this koan works. It’s a narrative but the answer within it is non-verbal. The overflowing cup raises thoughts of fullness and emptiness, and eventually the recognition that the latter must precede the former.
Sometimes speech acts work that way, and not just in Zen monasteries.
--
Quotable:
“Words are the only victors.” Salman Rushdie.
.--
Three Cheers Discouraged by gloomy statistics about American education? Here are three developments worth watching, and maybe your encouragement.
First: Latin at home. Home schooling doubled during the first year of the pandemic, then declined a bit, but now almost 6% of K -12 kids are homeschooled. Clearly, a significant number of parents find it works; many of them want their kids to learn Latin. Homeschooling is tricky and controversial, but before dismissing it read Kevin Mahnken’s essay, “Amid the Pandemic a Boom in Classical Education.” (Thanks to Hunter Rawlings for calling it to my attention.)
Second, some charter schools are providing things that other public schools don’t, and seeing good results. Example: the Washington Latin Public Charter School in D.C. (Thanks again to Hunter Rawlings, who has served on its Board, and is convinced that it is a great school, with a very diverse student body, high graduation rate, and many of whose students go on to top colleges.)
Third, The Paideia Institute for Humanistic Studies. Its leader, Jason Pedicone, writes., “At Paideia, we are ... focusing mostly on developing self-paced online teaching tools that can keep Latin and Greek in schools, even if they don't offer formal programs. Read more about our new HS Latin Curriculum here, and our Elementary School curriculum here..’’
Notate.Bene.: Most of these projects have been developed off the paths beaten by conventionally-minded funders. That may have given them freedom to innovate, but fund-raising is hard. If you can help Paideia, here’s the address:
The Paideia Institute for Humanistic Study, Inc
P.O. Box 670
New York, NY 10012
--
Viral
“There’s nothing wrong with dying. All the best people in history have done it.” That’s Paul Woodruff’ in his essay “My Death Is Close at Hand, but I Do not Think of Myself as Dying.“: His essay in the Washington Post went viral. You can read it here, or access it via YouTube.
--
A Taboo Broken:
When Paul Woodruff speaks so unabashedly of “death” and “dying” he frees us from the taboo that demands we avoid such words and speak instead of “passing,” as if dying were some cosmic course exam. If one cannot speak of death and dying, one must also pretend not to grieve and thereby deny oneself the consolation from friends and the closure mourning can bring. Thank you, Paul, for this and for so much else!.
But how is one to grieve or to console? That was also an issue in antiquity and led to some serious thinking . For ancient advice see Michael Fontaine’s “How to Grieve: An Ancient Guide to the Lost Art of Consolation.”
--
Some Good News (for a change) about Freedom of Speech on Campus
The Washington Post reports some encouraging developments on maintaining free speech on campuses. Campus leaders are recognizing how important it is that all points of view be heard, even if it makes some people “uncomfortable.” Here’s the link, Thanks to Jean Houston for calling it to my attention..
--
Quiz: What Do Tintin, James Bond, Inspector Poirot and Dr. Seuss Have in Common?
They are being rewritten so no one feels “uncomfortable” reading them – and to sell more copies., as is explained by Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris in “As Classic Novels Get Rewritten for Today’s Readers, a Debate about Where to Draw the Line.”
A modest solution: Add an apparatus criticus to the bottom of the page, that is a brief note showing what has been changed. Any good classical text provides this information when manuscript editions disagree or scholars propose a new reading. Shouldn’t publishers provide something similar whenever the original wording of a work is changed?
--
Vocation of the Month: “Sensitivity Reader”
A novelist friend of mine, well established and respected, recently told a group at a reading that to get a book published today, the book must win the approval of a Sensitivity Reader” before the publisher will launch it.
The vocation began a decade or so ago as a service to white writers who wished to include black or other disadvantaged people in their works but weren’t quite sure about word choice. Now initial good intentions may be morphing into yet another form of censorship.
--
Ponderable:
“An omniscient divinity would surely know that creatures in a paradise would focus on the one thing that was prohibited, and soon violate that prohibition, eating the fruit that conferred the knowledge of good and evil upon them. Then they would surely set out to create their own paradise based on precisely that forbidden knowledge.”
Maurice Brendenheim, Confessions I I p. 127
----
Can the New Artificial Intelligence Solve Riddles?
Answer: “Better than I can.” Test yourself against Chat GBT here.
--
Etymology of the Month:
Sully (verb). See soil.
soil (verb)
“early 13c., "to defile or pollute with sin," from Old French soillier "to splatter with mud, to foul or make dirty," originally "to wallow" (12c., Modern French souillier), from souil "tub, wild boar's wallow, pigsty," which is from Latin solium "tub for bathing; seat" (from PIE root *sed- (1) "to sit") or else from Latin suculus "little pig," from sus "pig."”
from Etymonline.
--
Richard Moran on Living in The Past:
“We can’t live in the past, and even if we could, we wouldn’t want to. But we can draw on the past, our own experience and those qui ante nos fuerant. That’s like going to the well on a hot day and drawing cool water to drink.”.
Moran’s whole article can be found at Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/95177090/The_Philosophical_Retreat_to_the_Here_and_Now_Notes_on_Living_in_Time?email_work_card=view-paper
--
Gift Subscriptions: No charge, just send an email to [email protected] (You can unsubscribe that way, too.).
Bob Connor