Poetry

As many of you are probably aware, a terrible disease has overtaken this country, a disease whose primary symptom is the renaming of all months, days, and weeks, so that they no longer honor the gods of the ancients or the Sabbath or whatever else, but rather secretaries, veterans, mothers, mental health, stuttering awareness, and whatever else it has been decided needs to be recognized especially, or only (depending on your point of view) at a certain time of the year.

Since I can think of no way to beat this tendency, and since it does occasionally produce good things, I have decided to join it–not that I’m going to name a Samuel Johnson Appreciation Week (though that might be kinda fun). But, I am going to jump on the tail end of the April Is National Poetry Month Bandwagon, and urge all of you to contribute to Robert Pinsky’s 200th birthday present to the Library of Congress. It’s pretty simple: basically, you send an e-mail to stating your favorite poem–anything goes (although if it’s not in English they ask that you provide a translation, and they’re not accepting unpublished work). Robert Pinsky, as you may know, is our poet laureate, and he’s been accepting submissions all year, I think. Anyway, he’s going to have 1000 respondents read their selections onto audio tape, and some more onto video tape, and then put the whole mess in the Library of Congress as a sort of time capsule. So, get out your Oxford Book of English Verse or copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends or collection of haiku or whatever, and send in your selection by April 30th–that’s Friday–sorry about the short notice. And if you CC your submission to me, I’ll compile a list of favorites of The New Rambler.

Some of you may also have heard me talking about my Alphabet of Verse project. It is now done, in hard copy, and I’m working on getting it up on the Web, but that may not happen till this summer. Poetry, should, however, be a year-round preoccupation, so I trust you will all be as happy to spend a September evening with Ted Hughes or a drear-nighted December with John Keats as you are to spend a cruel April drenched with sweet showers with Eliot and Chaucer. Enough erudition–and a real New Rambler will be on the way, sooner or later.

In Praise of Elizabeth Wurtzel

If I were to ask the students in my class to quote any one line of ‘Ozymandias,’ I doubt that one of them could do it. Almost all of them, however, would be able to tell me that Shelley was a drunk and died by drowning. –quoted as best I can remember from JD Salinger; I can’t find the book at present

If there is one thing in the world I hate, it is people who express opinions of books they haven’t read. Of course, there are many things that I hate, and I express my views on Charles Dickens, whom I’ve barely read, all the time. But, to quote that ever-useful line of Walt Whitman’s, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.” This business of casting the ballot on books one hasn’t read happens all the time; in the past few months, however, one work seems to have born the brunt of it amongst the people I know: Elizabeth Wurtzel’s second book, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women.

Wurtzel’s first book was a memoir, Prozac Nation, and I could talk forever about what a fantastic book it is, how it is one of the only true represenations of depression that I know, and how I think it forms a paradigm for a new kind of writing, a post-everything mentality, blah blah blah. But a lot of other people have written about that. The book made the New York Times best-seller list. I’m not too worried about its place in the world. Bitch, however, I would like to address.

Bitch is the most refreshing book I have read in a long, long time. But every time I start to say that, somone says “Oh, I read a terrible review of that,” or “Oh, Naomi Wolf says that’s pseudo-feminism,” or, most frequently and worst of all, “Oh, I hear that got terrible reviews,” which would seem to suggest that the utterer of that statement isn’t even stealing the reviewer’s idea, they’re stealing someone else’s idea of the reviewer’s idea. And of course there are the comments I get when I carry the book around (which I kind of like to do even when I’m not reading it; sometimes I even think of putting the cover on other books, kind of like that grade school trick employed to read comic books in math class, but then I wouldn’t have the book on hand to read excerpts from it, as I started to do for a small audience while waiting to get my oil changed). These are probably due to the cover, which I have kindly stolen for you, courtesy of the good folks at amazon.com.

Bitch is the most refreshing book I have read in a long time because it achieves all of the things which The New Rambler strives for: it is brazen, it says the hell with most journalistic conventions, it concerns things which nobody seems to care about (Amy Fisher, Margaux Hemingway) or new aspects of things which have been overdone (Nicole Brown Simpson, Hillary Clinton). Bitch remembers women who go unremembered, or who are remembered only for their deaths or their sins, as Shelley is remembered for his drinking and his drowning. At 400 pages, yes, it rambles (but of course we encourage that around here), but amidst that rambling is some of the only intelligent stuff about being female that I, Miss Anti-Women’s Studies USA, have ever read.

Wurtzel has been criticized for being overly inflammatory, for not having a clear point, for contradicting herself, and for being unduly disclosive, among other things. I don’t always agree with Wurtzel; in fact, I’d really like to grind an ax about Jane Austen with her sometime (I’m pro, she’s con). But I don’t always agree with my friends, either, nor do our arguments always come to coherent conclusions. If the course of human history hasn’t yet answered the questions posed about the role of women in society, it seems unlikely that any one book will provide all the answers. But to find the right answers, it is often necessary first to ask the right questions, and I think Wurtzel has a lot of those, questions about just why one bothers with dictums one did not invent. Referring only in part to the atrocity known as The Rules, she writes:

Well, I for one am sick of it. All my life, one person or another has been telling me to behave, saying don’t let a guy know you’re a depressed maniac on the first date, don’t just be yourself, don’t show your feelings. . . . I don’t like it. It seems like, all this, all these years of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi–all that smart writing all so we could learn to behave? Bra-burning in Atlantic City–so we could learn to behave? Roe v. Wade–so we could learn to behave? Thelma & Louise–so we could learn to behave? The gender gap–so we could learn to behave? Madonna, Sally Ride, Joycelyn Elders, Golda Meir, Anita Hill, Bette Davis, Leni Riefenstahl–all those strong indefatigable souls so we could learn to behave?

Get out there, read Bitch, or read something, and remember how to think.

But Can She Type?

Ides of March 1999

I feel this issue ought to be about the Ides of March, or at least the number nine (number nine. . . number nine), but I’m afraid it’s not. It’s about typing.

When I was about, oh, say nine years old, I came across a poster in my grandmother’s house. In it, an old woman sat looking up at you with an expression on her face I still can’t place, and underneath was the caption, “But can she type?” I got the feeling that this was supposed to be a joke, so I applied to my grandmother for explanation. She informed me that the woman in the picture was Golda Meir, who had been the Prime Minister of Israel, and that yes, in fact, this poster was hilarious. I didn’t get it, so I just put it down to another one of those weird grown-up tics, like taking half an hour to finish a drink or engaging in long conversations with boring people after church.

Ten or twelve years later, I’ve grown up enough to realize that social chatter is necessary and not always boring and that one does not really want to gulp cocktails, but that poster still baffles me. Of course, I can see various possiblities for why someone might consider it funny. It could be pre-feminist “funny,” like ha ha, what good is a woman if she can’t type?, rather like the bit in The Bell Jar when Sylvia Plath’s–excuse me, Esther Greenwood’s–mother tells her that she’d better learn shorthand, because nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter.

It could be feminist era “funny,”–still what good is she if she can’t type, but this time like the punchline of the feminist lightbulb joke–“That’s not funny!” Or it could be post-feminist “funny,” as in, Look how far we’ve come and still the only question is, “Can she type?”, in which case it’s really not funny at all but quite sad.

The really sad thing is that Sylvia Plath’s mother was right–a plain old English major, or Classics major, or what have you, isn’t much good for anything. But throw in shorthand–or these days, computer skills, and suddenly they’re a much nicer commodity to plug into the machine.

I often say that I was a Classics major for the food, and as I made this little joke the other day, my friend remarked that one certainly didn’t go into Women’s Studies for that reason, and we had a laugh about Women’s Studies profs who probably think knowing how to cook is equivalent to laying down your life for the patriarchy. (I have no idea of the veracity of that; I never took a Women’s Studies course, as I object to them for my own reasons, which have very little to do with whether the cookies come from the oven or the store). That’s nonsense, of course: everyone should know how to cook. Food is a necessity of life, and you ought to be able to prepare it. But I can understand the problems it poses too, because I don’t think anyone ought to spend her life cooking, or typing, or cleaning, for others unless that’s what she really wants to do. I always cheer on Esther Greenwood/Sylvia Plath as she continues, “The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters,” and decides that if she never learns shorthand, then she’ll never have to be a secretary. At the same time, though, I get irritated every time I see someone pecking out letters with two fingers. I’m proud of my typing ability (due entirely, I imagine, to the large amount of time I spent in college sending instant BroadCast messages to friends), to the point that I frequently put down “Typing, 63 wpm” on my resume. But it kind of sickens me at the same time.

Later this month I’m going to have the rather stunning experience of getting paid to write something, which seems quite odd after four years of shelling out thirty grand in order to have the privilege of writing papers about John Smith and William Bradford, or women in Greek drama. It brings a whole new level of understanding to the Ani Difranco couplet, “I want you to pay me for my beauty [or talent, in this case], I think it’s only right/’Cause I have been paying for it all of my life.” On the whole, though, I still agree with my father (and whomever he got the line from) that the only man who has freedom of the press is he who owns his own press, and that’s part of the reason that I started The New Rambler. But to publish yourself, you need to know how to type, and run a computer, and do some stuff with the Internet. . . and that, in the end, is how I justify those skills. Learn them for the Man if you must, to make a living–but use them for yourself. Golda Meir would be proud.

An Interesting Series of Commercials

In 1969, African-American students at Vassar College took over several administrative offices, demanding a department of Africana Studies, more black professors, and a special advisor to black students. Most of these requests were duly granted. But that’s not all the students were asking for–they also wanted separate housing, off-campus. Desegregation of schools and buses and restaurants in the South had happened less than a decade before (and was probably still going on, since “all deliberate speed” was a rather loosely interpreted phrase), and yet these students wanted to resegregate themselves. The administration, needless to say, was less than psyched about this plan, though the students did get their request for a short time.

It would seem that this trend towards resegregation is taking place again, thirty years later, but this time it’s the segregation of music videos, television networks, and, of all things, fast food restaurants. Yes, really–Burger King’s recent advertising campaign has really convinced me that they are trying to be The Black Burger Joint. These ads rarely show humans. They don’t tell little stories, like McDonald’s ads, or provide testimonials to Dave, like Wendy’s. Rather, they just push the product–showing you pictures fries and burgers, steaming and dripping onions or cheese. But is that all they’re pushing? Listen to the music in the background. One commercial featured Motown-type vocals singing a song–which I have since been informed is the theme from The Jeffersons, a ’70s TV show about a black family moving into an upscale white neighborhood–that goes, “We’re movin’ on up/to the East side, to a big [something] apartment in the sky . . . we finally got our piece of the pie.” The text that flashed underneath the food was “Now that’s an uptown deal–at a downtown price.” In another commercial, the ambience is provided by a big-band recording of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” And the once commercial in this series which did have people, from several months ago, showed three black women singing and dancing a la the Supremes, complete with a flashback in black and white. And of course there is Burger King’s current slogan: “When You Have it Your Way, It Just Tastes Better.” I think all of this is a concentrated and targeted effort by Burger King to appeal to the downtrodden, and particularly historically down-trodden African-Americans, by offering them their “piece of the pie,” an opportunity to “have it [their] way,” and to move on up and be part of the number when the saints go marching in. Empowerment through TV advertising–you’ve just got to wonder what Malcolm X must be thinking right now.

To read more about the student takeover at Vassar, check out the entries from 30 April-2 November 1969 in this chronology of Vassar History (partially compiled by my old housemate, David Ley).

A Series of Commercials I Would Like to Kill

“Easy Mac–no brain required!” No brain required?!? This is supposed to be a good thing? You know the country’s in trouble when advertising is being that blatant about not wanting you to think. Granted, the general idea behind advertising is to prevent individual and original thought, but they usually try to be a little more subtle about it.

Irony

Apparently the Italian government is quite upset with the not-guilty decision of the court martial of the Captain William Ashby (accused of involuntary manslaughter–the plane he was flying cut through some gondola cables and killed 20 people). I haven’t reviewed the evidence myself, so I can’t give an opinion as to the correctness of the decision. But indignation about the findings of other people’s courts seems a little out of place for a country whose own courts just ruled that it is impossible for a woman wearing jeans to be raped.

The Grammar of Time Travel

NEWS:
The New Rambler has not disappeared; it’s just been lurking. That’s why it’s called an occasional periodical, you see.

The web page has some new stuff on it and will have yet more shortly, so check it out. You can read about Burger King commercials and how they relate to the Department of Africana Studies at Vassar, the movie Life is Beautiful, and (soon) why you should stop what you’re doing and listen to the New Bad Things. Go there.

And keep your eyes on the Iowa City (and Cedar Rapids, though I generally choose to ignore that part) ICON in the coming weeks. . . you might see a familiar name in its pages.

But now down to business. . . .

“If you read science fiction, you’ll like Herodotus.” –a college professor to her advisee in Tam Lin by Pamela Dean

Generally speaking, I am not a big fan of science fiction, mostly just because I’m far too snobby about literature for my own good. Lately, however, I’ve been giving some thought to the genre, brought on by either watching too many X-Files reruns or rereading too much Madeleine L’Engle (supposing such a thing to be possible, which I doubt).

Mostly I’ve been thinking about time travel–not about the possiblity of it, since, as a friend of mine pointed out, if time travel existed we’d have known about it long since by way of visitors to the past, or present, or what have you, from the future (unless, of course, all those folk are equipped with little Men-in-Black lasers and they’ve wiped our memories out)–but more about why humans have thought up something they don’t have verb tenses to express. Somewhere in Robert Heinlein’s 1957 sci-fi novel (so much for my good taste in literature pose) The Door Into Summer (which I highly recommend to anyone who likes cats or is feeling in need of a Damon Runyon-esque fix), which is all about time travel and a man trying to fix his life through it, the narrator comments, in the midst of a bewildering explanation of his where and when-abouts, that if time travel becomes common, they’re going to have to invent a whole new class of verb tenses. He’s probably right–and yet think of the distinctions language already makes. I try to point out to my Latin students that, as confusing as they find Latin, English has just as many peculiarities and degrees of specificity. In Latin, for instance, “I carry,” “I am carrying,” and “I do carry” are all expressed by the same verb, while in English they all have a different connotation, despite the high school English teachers who try to squash this perfectly natural impulse to use the continual form when talking about continuing action (I harbor no grudges, I swear).

You see, I think that time travel does exist, and it doesn’t require machines–just words. If we can imagine completed action in the future (“I shall have carried”), action which, had it occurred in the past, would have produced a different outcome (“If I had caught the train, I would have made it on time”), action which, if it did occur, would produce yet another outcome (“If he should come, I would be glad”), to name just a few, are we not travelling around in time, at least in our minds? I used to get in trouble in history classes because I wrote all my papers in the present tense, a habit learned through writing English papers, which are traditionally written that way. I never did it deliberately, but when I tried to force myself to write in the past tense, it never worked. Latin and Greek both have something called “the historical present,” a way of telling about a past event in the present tense to make it seem more alive, a story-telling technique which most people use all the time without realizing it. And it seems to me that if you’re writing about history, you are necessarily reinterpreting it, and it is happening for you. Why not write in the present tense? Or (the horror! the horror!) switch back and forth–for, as a friend of mine in high school said, we don’t think or live in one tense most of the time–why write that way?
I’ve realized that I don’t have room to bring Herodotus into this issue–but then, he’s history; he’s not going anywhere. In the meantime, I wish you all a future more vivid (my very favorite Greek condition).

Clinton at the Movies

It frightens me greatly when I see the morning news and I haven’t actually slept yet, as it’s not usually something I intend to do. Insomnia aside, however, if I’m not hallucinating, it would seem that the little melodrama our government has been involved with for the past year might actually be winding down. This issue was planned some time ago to provide suggestions for alternative political entertainment–but even if the Senate trial does end, we still all might need some of that.

In 1993, my friend and favorite movie companion Sara and I attended two films–Dave (excellent) and the remake of Born Yesterday (not, of course, as good as the original)–which both were strong on overcoming dirty politics and bringing good back to the government and so on. At the time, I was taking AP Government, and I mentioned to Sara that I thought there was some connection between Clinton getting elected and all these happy-Washington movies. Two years later, I went to see The American President with some alums of that same AP Gov class, and I decided that my theory was holding up even halfway through Clinton’s first term. Of course, the government doesn’t actually tell Hollywood what to do these days (though perhaps they’ve put subliminal messages into the wallpaper of the Lincoln Bedroom; I don’t know), but the movie-makers did seem to be behind the President back then.

That in itself is interesting enough, but what I find really fascinating is the about-face which has occurred in the past couple of years: Clinton’s second term in office. The movies about Washington, and the Presidency in particular, have taken on a whole different tone. 1997’s Wag the Dog (war with Albania “produced” to detract the country’s attention from scandal concerning the President’s private life) and 1998’s Primary Colors (ostensibly an only slightly fictionalized account of Clinton’s 1992 campaign, which does not, needless to say, paint him in particularly sympathetic hues) showed quite a different picture from that of Kevin Kline cavorting through photo-ops or Don Johnson or Michael Douglas pushing Democracy in America (both the book and the concept). I guess Mr. Smith got the bourgeois blues and left town for good.
Although Clinton’s approval ratings continue to soar, the portrayals of him in popular media continue to sour. Hollywood, of course, is more often out to make a buck than to make any political point, and it seems they’ve decided that sleaze makes the buck these days better than sincerity. Neither Wag the Dog nor Primary Colors was a bomb, which leads me to wonder. . . what will happen next? A fictitious Clinton who murders and is hailed as a hero? Maybe he could go hang out with OJ Simpson.

Hopelessly Midwestern

Administrator’s note: Since this is a retroactive blog, it is full of retro references, such as those to URLs below. These ramblings are now just a portion of the larger New Rambler web site, which you can visit if you want to learn more about the author, namely me.

Welcome back to old subscribers, and just plain welcome to the few of you I’ve since added to the list (and my apologies to those who weren’t included before–the trial audience was rather small, and looking back over the address book just now I noticed there were a number of people I thought were there who weren’t). What you have here is the sixth issue of The New Rambler, an occasional e-mail journal which I started some months ago as a small little soapbox and which seems to have acquired a life of its own. If you’re confused, just keep reading–it’s good for your head.

The big news is that [drum roll, please] The New Rambler now has a web site, which contains, in addition to the back issues, several other articles I’ve written which I deemed to be too topical for general distribution, a few links of possible interest or relevance, a nifty guestbook, and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting. It ain’t pretty, but it will take only split seconds to load–and I like to think I’m keeping with the Web’s original purpose of disseminating information rather than adding to its current glut of crowded graphics. But, I shall prolong the suspense no longer–here’s the url:

http://www.avalon.net/~rambler

So go check it out. . . it should all be in working order. . . I hope (of course, if you’re reading this on the Web, that should be proof positive).

In other news, I just returned from a whirlwind week in New York–Vassar, Brewster, and NYC all in the space of seven days. I’ve been telling people around here that the only reason I came back was that I was about to run out of money, which is partially true. When I’m in New York City, I can hardly imagine ever wanting to be anywhere else, and this trip was no exception. I went to see the Jackson Pollock exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, and, several hours later, when I emerged at the end, there were several moments in which I thought I could go blind right then and there, since I felt that I would be perfectly content if I never saw anything again. I didn’t, of course, and I did have to leave and come back here, and as always, as I was driving back to Iowa from Chicago (where I generally fly from), I discovered that that wasn’t at all a bad thing.

During that drive I thought, as I always do when driving long distance, about what a crazy, large, and varied place this country is. I’ve visited 23 of its states, and my goal is to make it to all 50. There are a lot of places I love–Chicago for its museums and its architechture and its skyline, which I think is the most beautiful one in the world; San Francisco for its vistas and its crazy bus routes and its weather (I actually like fog, and I love that it doesn’t get hot there in the summer); Maine, for the woods and the lakes; Wyoming, for the most amazing night sky I have ever seen. What I was thinking about as I drove was how lucky I am to come from the Midwest.

It’s often said that everything is in New York, and there certainly is a lot there–I can’t imagine why anyone who lived there would want cable TV, when a simple ride on the subway can expose you to more different sights and sounds and smells than you could ever get from a hundred different two dimensional channels. But at the risk of sounding trite, there are things you can’t get in New York, and things I think New Yorkers (and in general people who live in cities and on coasts) miss out on. Awhile ago my mother, who grew up in suburban Chicago, was telling me that before she moved to Iowa she never really thought of the weather as something people had to deal with anymore. Oh, sure, there were hurricanes and blizzards from time to time, but ordinary weather was something we’d conquered, something which didn’t affect the way people lived aside from the minor inconvenience of sweating outside in the summer and shovelling the sidewalks when it snowed. Living here, though, even if you don’t live on a farm or (like me) know a thing about farming, you still realize how very wrong that perception is. A few inches of rain too many or too few, an early frost, a hot summer or a mild winter–each of these has more direct influence on more people than you might ever think. Living here makes you more aware of that–closer to the land and closer to its history. Sometime in college I alluded to one of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books during a class, and I was met with blank stares. Finally someone said, “Oh yeah, those Little House books–I always thought those were stupid.” That experience was something akin to having a knife twisted in my gut, until, reflecting on it, I realized that everyone in that class was from an East Coast city–some of them–quite possibly all of them–had never seen a prairie (and I guess lacked the psychic ability of Emily Dickinson, who does go on about how she knows all about heather and waves though she’s never seen a moor or a sea). And then I just felt sorry for them.

One might, of course, argue that we Midwestern kids are equally deprived of a true understanding of, say, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by virtue of never having been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But Midwesterners are more likely to go to the alabaster cities (“Alabaster cities–New York City,” rhapsodizes Garrison Keillor in an old News From Lake Woebegon) than Easterners to go in search of amber waves of grain. “America the Beautiful,” though, includes all those elements–the purple mountains and the pioneers, the cities and the seas. I’ve been eyeing a new anthology called Writing New York in the bookstore for some time, considering whether I have the funds to purchase it, and right now I’m recalling Garrison Keillor’s commentary on it in the New York Times Book Review. He starts by talking about how just walking around NYC is one of the densest literary experiences you can have–or, as I frequently tell people, New York is fabulous because everywhere you go you’re somewhere. But that’s not true exclusively of New York–it’s true of everywhere. American writers do have a tendency to gravitate towards New York, but for as many as are drawn there, there are an equal number who resist its pull, and who have graced and illuminated so many other places with their touch–Mark Twain and the Mississippi, John Steinbeck and the Dustbowl and California, all those writers from the South.

People frequently ask me why I haven’t been to Europe, and while my explanations usually involve my shortage of funds and my inability to speak any living languages aside from English, the real reason is something far more intangible, something to do with the last sentence Jack Kerouac, whom I sometimes think appreciated America more than any other writer of the 20th century, wrote in On the Road: “So in America when the sun goes down. . . .” (Yup, you have to look up the rest of it yourself. Happy reading and happy travels.)

Isocrates

17 December 1998

The New Rambler will be on hiatus for some time now–probably until early or mid February–while I do various things such as moving to Minneapolis and trying to find a new job and teaching myself HTML and other such minor endeavors. But it will be back in full force–fear not–and with a web page featuring back issues, sundry information and links (I’d be happy to advertise the endeavors of my subscribers, you know), some ramblings on subjects which I thought were too topical or regional or generational to send out to the whole mailing list, and, I hope, a message board. A number of you have written me nice notes and pithy remarks and good insights and excellent commentary, and I haven’t been the best about replying to all of it, but I do appreciate it all.

I read [history] a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all: it is very tiresome, and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. –Jane Austen

Well. Today, 17 December 1998, is two days after my birthday, the day that impeachment votes were supposed to begin, the day after the United States added another chorus of bombing to what history may deem both a tragedy and a farce in the Middle East, and the day after Jane Austen’s 223rd birthday. In fact, I had a dinner party in honor of that occasion last evening. Listening to the radio reports as I prepared a trifle for dessert, I thought it an odd juxtaposition indeed, until I remembered once again the greatest boon I think I have gained from my education: that of perspective. Jane Austen lived, as we do (as has everyone, when you think about it), during a time of international upheaval, but she lived in a world where upheavals were caused by daughters running off with soldiers, or by passing comments made at parties at the expense of other guests, and it is that world that she wrote of, for that was the world she knew, the world whose history she could tell.

It is good to remember, from time to time, that all that will be has probably been before. I find it oddly comforting.

On a few occasions, people have asked me if I shall ever publish the writings of others in The New Rambler. I sometimes say I might consider it. Today that consideration becomes actuality, although I admit I did not obtain the author’s consent first. The following are excerpts from a class lecture by my father, John M. Crossett, which he used at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, the last place he taught before his death in 1981. His remarks are datedly funny (or funnily dated?) at times, but at others more timely than anything I’ve been able to say as I wrote and rejected various forms of this edition. Without further ado (since there’s probably been too much already), I present to you Isocrates, according to my father.

Most of you–I suspect all of you–have never heard of Isocrates. In fact, before the term is over–even before the lecture is over–you will confuse him with Socrates. Some of you are perhaps already confusing the names and saying, “Didn’t I hear this last week?” Well, to help you remember the difference, I shall do two things: first, I’ll give you a mnemonic device, a mechanical means for remembering: “Isocrates” begins with “I,” the same as the personal pronoun which you use to refer to yourself–and Isocrates is teh one you like; Socrates, on the other hand, is the one they killed, the one you’re supposed to like but really don’t. There, now that you have that straight, I can begin.

If you have read Isocrates’s essay, you will perhaps have some sense of what he was like. But it will help even those of you who have read it already to know something more of the man. Single-handed, he affected the Western world, and your lives, far more than did Plato or Aristotle. These two names, although they belong to men of infinitely greater worth than Isocrates, have a “press” which far outstrips their actual influence. We need only think of such facts as these: Aristotle’s works disappeared for almost 200 years after his death, and were not rediscovered until just before the time of Herod the Great and Christ; Plato’s works disappeared, except for a couple of dialogues, from the Western world for almost 1000 years. The kind of thing which Isocrates did–as we shall see–took form in political reality, not merely in ideas; and so those of you who believe that reality is more important than truth will easily credit him with being the more important man. If importance be measured by influence, you will be right.

Although Isocrates turned to rhetoric–to that “knack,” that form of “cookery,” so well analyzed and despised by Plato–he knew enough philosophy to try to redeem it from the vices which Plato remorselessly catalogued. In fact, he tries to re-define philosophy–to make it equivalent to what we call a liberal arts education: the kind of education which, in Milton’s words, “fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all of the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.” (Milton, “Of Education” [emphasis mine])

It will be worthwile to observe a few of the implications to be found in Milton’s words. First, the word “offices.” It comes from the Latin officium, and it is the title of one of Cicero’s works. It signifies “duties,” that is, the kind of thing whcih one is supposed to do in one’s office. Nowadays, alas, the office is onl the physical building where one does one’s work; but one’s office in antiquity was in the man’s official role, not just in a building. It went with him wherever he was while he was acting in that role. For instance, President Ford is not just president while he is in the White House; he is also president while he is travelling from one city to another on his airplane, or while he is talking to and mingling people, or–especially, alas–while he is being shot at by assassins.

Second, these “offices” are both public and private. You may remember the last lecture, in which I mentioned that the Greek word for a private citizen was idiotes, from which we get our word “idiot.” The Greeks emphasized public life, not private–a fact which we can tell simply from comparing their public buildings, like the Parthenon (which we all know) to their private homes, of which we know almost nothing. But Milton, in the tradition of Cicero and Isocrates, equates both public and private–in short, what we could call “the whole man.”

If you have read the Nicocles, you will perhaps have noted the remarkable defence which Isocrates makes for virtue, for arete [a loaded Greek word which we translate as virtue, but of course it’s rather deeper than that]: “. . . . we practise justice and the other aretai not so that we can be less well off than others but so that we can lead lives full of good things.”

Who would practise virtue, asks Isocrates, if it was of no practical benefit? It is a view which should be near and dear to all of you; in fact, it is a view which is near and dear to all of you. After all, for several decades, now, American educators have been selling a liberal arts education to the American people on the twofold grounds that a) it is a good thing to do; b) it leads to better and more high-paying jobs. We’ll probably take up that point in class; but if we don’t, try to remember this: that Isocrates is a decent Callicles, an influential Girgias, a mellow Polus.

Well, Isocrates, then–if I am right–tried to re-define philosophy: for Socrates and Plato it has been a dialogue plus dialectic, concerned solely with ethics and the state of the individual soul and concentrating on the state of the soul in the afterlife. Such is the point of the great myth which appears at the end of the Gorgias. For Isocrates, however, philosophy became culture–what we call a liberal arts education–and its aim was this world, just as the education given here at Cornell College, like that of virtually all other colleges of liberal arts both here and abroad, is designed to equip you to face what we call the “real world.” Just think of that phrase, the “real world,” and recall, if you can, our earlier distinctions between what is true and what is real. You will measure your progress, or corruption–dependent on your point of view–in this course by the degree that you come to think what is true is more important than what is real.

Best wishes for the holidays and the new year to all.