Happy solstice.  It’s the last night of spring, or the first hours of summer, depending on your p.o.v. — and it’s not too late to make a pilgrimage, if you’ve a mind to do so.  Robert A. Scott writes:  “We tend to associate pilgrimage with springtime, no doubt in part because of the evocative opening passage from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.”

You remember (I won’t cheat you by using a modern version):

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(so priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of engelond to caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
Bifil that in that seson on a day,
In southwerk at the tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To caunterbury with ful devout corage …

In his fascinating study Miracle Cures, which landed on my desk in time for the solstice, sociologist Scott says that spring was a popular season for pilgrimages — but not the only one.  “Nilson’s data from the cathedral churches at Ely, Hereford, Durham, and Canterbury suggest that the income from these shrines was greatest during the autumn, followed by the spring and early summer” — that means right now.

Robert A. Scott (Photo: Kate Shemilt)

But don’t grab your hat:  “a pilgrim did not act on impulse and of a morning, stumble out of bed, decide over breakfast to take to the road, pack a few belongings, and leave.  Pilgrimage required substantial forethought and planning. … Except for journeys of a day or two to a local shrine, permission of various kinds had to be obtained: from the pilgrim’s family, from the lord of the manor to which he belonged, and from the village priest.  For longer journeys, wills had to be drawn up, signed, and witnessed in case the pilgrim died along the way.  Debts had to be settled, provisions made to cover work obligations, and, for the head of a household, decisions taken about how to provide for the family.  An itinerary had to be prepared spelling out the route to be followed, the time of year to depart, what form gifts for the saint should take, and the proposed timetable.”

Scott wants to know, however, why people go on pilgrimages in the age of advanced biotechnology and MRI scans.  Why is it still a major industry?  Using the latest research, he examines accounts of miracle cures from the medieval times onwards, the power of relics and apparitions, and — here is the book jacket talking — “the transformative nature of sacred journeying, and shines new light on the roles that belief, hope, and emotion can play in healing.”

Sounds like Scott knows a good deal about the medieval world, and he does.  His earlier book was The Gothic Enterprise: A Guide to Understanding the Medieval Cathedral.  One of the fascinating aspects of medieval studies is the integration:  architecture affects music, poetry affects painting, literature influences liturgy, early science and religion mingle — ages before it all shattered into shards.

Hannah Arendt, about the time she wrote her dissertation on the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine, under Karl Jaspers

Last month, I wrote about an international conference on Hannah Arendt — best known for her Eichmann in Jerusalem (which coined the term “banality of evil”); article is here.  At the conference, the organizers played a 3-minute clip of the political philosopher speaking — Arendt’s friend  Gerhard Casper and others called it “vintage Arendt.”

It was the first time I had heard her voice — so thickly accented in her native German  it’s almost impossible at times to decode, even though she had, by that time, spent more than two decades in America.  I wanted to include the sound clip with the article — to give a flavor of one of the last century’s most powerful thinkers.

No joy.  My ever-vigilant editors didn’t want to run the clip unless they could clear copyright permission.  We traced the talk back to a 1968 Bard College lecture that was once available online, but which had mysteriously disappeared.  Was it withdrawn because of flagrant copyright violations resulting from the link?

Never underestimate the power of the boo-boo.  We finally heard from Bard last week.  The clips had inadvertantly been dropped from the website during an update.  The link has been restored.  And we, belatedly, will be including it in the article.

Until that time, I include the links  here and here.  It’s more than three minutes.  I transcribed a short portion on the justifications of violence, and racism, before getting overwhelmed by the (at times) impenetrable accent.

Here she goes:

Casper at the conference, Robert Harrison in the background (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

“We all know to what an extent the old combination of violence, life, and creativity has survived in rebellious state of mind of the new generation.  Their taste for violence is again accompanied by the glorification of life, and it frequently understands itself as a necessarily violent negation of everything that stands in the way of the will to live.  … Nothing, I think, is more dangerous theoretically than this tradition of organic thought. You saw it in all three:  revolution and power and violence.  You saw it in the concept of progress,  in the concept of power, and in the concept of violence. … The precedence of violence is justified on the grounds of creativity.”

“So long as we talk about these matters in non-political, biological terms, the glorifiers of violence will have the great advantage to appeal to the undeniable experiences inherent in the practice of violent action.  The danger of being carried away by the deceptive plausibility of such metaphors is particularly great, of course, where racial issues are involved.  Racism, white or black, is fraught with violence by definition, because it objects to natural, organic facts — the white or black skin, which no persuasion and no power could change.  All one can do when the chips are down is exterminate their bearers. Violence,  interracial struggle is always murderous, but it is not irrational.  It is the logical and rational consequence of racism — by which I do not mean some rather vague prejudices on either side, but an explicit ideological system.  Today’s violence, black riots, and the much greater potential for white backlash, are not yet manifestations of racist ideologies and their murderous logic.  The riots, as has recently been stated, are a particular protest against genuine grievances — and much the same is true for the backlash phenomena.  The greatest danger is rather the other way around:  since violence always needs justification, an escalation of the violence industry may bring about a truly racist ideology to justify it, in which case violence and riots may disappear from the streets and be transformed into the invisible terror of the police state.”

The Q&A session is supposed to be particularly interesting — haven’t gotten to that yet, but if I’m up to it, I’ll include a few notes later.

Marilyn Yalom writes to say Irv Yalom’s When Nietzsche Wept just won the “Saint-Maur en Poche” prize administered by l’Académie Française for the best paperback of the year.  Nice touch:  The award came on June 13, psychiatrist Irv Yalom’s birthday.  Article in Le Point here.  The book was the toast of Vienna last year — we wrote about it here and here.

Adrienne Mayor’s acclaimed The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy, was a finalist for the National Book Award last fall.  Now it’s received the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY Awards) — a gold medal for biography.  The book was also one of The Washington Post critics’ Holiday Guide’s “Best Books of 2009.”

Her subject is a fascinating one:  Mithradates VI (134-63 BC), an historical figure most of us know shockingly little about — and won’t learn much about from the few scattered reviews that have appeared.

He claimed Alexander the Great and Darius of Persia as ancestors.  He inherited a wealthy Black Sea kingdom at 14, after his mother poisoned his father. His mother favored his kid brother — hence, the ruler-to-be fled into exile and returned in triumph to become a leader of daunting intelligence (according to Pliny the Elder, he spoke the 22 languages of the nations he ruled) and relentless ambition.

He was one of the few foreign leaders genuinely feared by Rome.  After massacring 80,000 Roman citizens in 88 BC, he seized Greece and Anatolia. He fought  some of the most spectacular battles in ancient history with Rome’s foremost generals, before he was finally defeated by Pompey the Great.  He was the original Comeback Kid: his uncanny knack for eluding capture and bouncing back after devastating losses rattled the Romans.  And he was a chip off the old block:  he knew his poisons, which allowed him to thwart assassination attempts and snuff his rivals — a group of Scythian shamans were constantly by his side to  advise about poisons.  (Perhaps his best protection was that he kept his mother and brother under lock and key.)

Like Cleopatra VII, one of the most calumnied figures in history, Mithradates the Great seems to have had as his life’s aim the consolidation and continuance of his substantial kingdom in the face of a devouring Empire to the West.  Cleopatra lost Egypt —  rather than relaunching the Ptolemies, the Greek ruler became the last of the pharoahs forever.  Egypt became a Roman province after her suicide … or perhaps murder.  And Mithradates?

He too committed suicide, but he had a hard time of it.  Thanks to systematically building his immunity, he survived his attempt at self-poisoning, and appealed to his bodyguard to kill him by the sword.

I like this story the best: At night, Mithadates’s most reliable bodyguards were a horse, a bull, and a stag, which would whinny, bellow, and bleat whenever anyone approached the royal bed.  I wouldn’t have liked to clean up that bedroom — or try to get much sleep in it.

"Is He Dead?" on Broadway (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Some familiar names surface in the June 4 The Times Literary Supplement — the most recent one to land in American mailboxes.

UC-Santa Cruz’s Susan Gillman comments on the “over-the-top spirit of the Mark Twain industry,” which is working itself up to a fever pitch this year — did you know that there was a petition drive “respectfully requesting Pres. Obama to designate 2010 ‘the year of Mark Twain'”?  I didn’t, either.

Gillman contributes to the “all Mark Twain, all the time” spirit with her lengthy cover piece on the unstoppable Twain industry (with a mention of Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain Tonight! which visited here very recently).

Holbrook as Twain

Gillman’s through-line:  “Is He Dead?”  Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s revival of the play of the title, directed by Michael Blakemore in 2008, gets a mention.  So does Twain’s famous line, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”  Gillman writes: “As we return to and repeat his words, it is a joint venture in which we, author and readers together, bring him back to life, again and again.”

Some time ago, I discussed Fishkin’s insightful Library of America Mark Twain Anthology of writers and thinkers on Twain.  I had excerpted Dick Gregory’s essay here, and received a correction from Fishkin herself:  The term “Nigger Jim” never appears in Huckleberry Finn.  Who knew?  Apparently not Norman Mailer, writes Gillman:

“Mailer stepped right into the racial hornet’s nest with his phrase ‘Nigger Jim’, which Fishkin notes was used by Hemingway, Ralph Ellison and others but never by Mark Twain.  African American parents who in 1984 were worried about the reading aloud by teachers and students in classrooms of the word ‘nigger’, which is used many times in the novel, would surely not be comforted.  … Those apocryphal Twainisms just won’t go away … Scholars may tear out their hair over it but Mailer, Ellison and others collected in The Mark Twain Anthology keep the phrases alive.

Fishkin edited the mega-volume The Oxford Mark Twain, but Gillman notes that she got one thing wrong, in every single volume:  “the Editor’s Note in all 29 volumes reverses the birth and death dates: ‘the year 2010 marks the Centennial of Mark Twain’s birth and the 175th anniversary of his death.'”  That’s what second editions are for.

***

Also in the TLS: Dick Davis doesn’t care for Homa Katouzian’s The Persians (Yale University Press).  Davis, the foremost translator of Persian literature into English, ever (as well as a gifted poet in his own right) writes:

“One would be hard put to say anything positive at all about the political culture Katouzian describes as perennial in Iran, and yet the artistic sensibility that produced the great works of Iranian culture, the majority of which were produced in or for a court milieu, was clearly highly civilized, cultivated and humane.  Given hat this sensibility must have come from somewhere, that it cannot have existed in a cultural vacuum, it would seem that we are not being given the whole story.  And even if we restrict ourselves to the modern political sphere, the Iranian people’s struggles to establish a just and representative government, from the moment of the country’s constitutional revolution early in the twentieth century up to the disputed election last June, constitute a record that for its combination of idealism and sheer dogged determination is incomparable anywhere else in the Middle East.  The simultaneous difficulty and necessity of marrying ethics and politics is a major theme of medieval Persian literature, and it is one that still resonates within the culture.”

New edition

Francine du Plessix Gray reviews Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier’s newly translated edition of Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex in the New York Times here.  The original translator, Howard M. Parshley, cut 15 percent of the original 972 pages of the book — the new edition restores the lost pages; the new edition promises to bring a new generation to the work.  While Gray salutes the “fierce, often wrathful urgency” of the feminist classic, she finds it largely dated.

The review concludes:

“What a curse to be a woman!” Beauvoir writes, quoting Kier­kegaard. “And yet the very worst curse when one is a woman is, in fact, not to understand that it is one.” No one has done more than Beauvoir to explain the conditions of that curse, and no one has more eloquently, irately challenged us to turn that curse into a blessing.

Not everyone agrees, however, that Gray’s review is a blessing.

Among the three letters in today’s New York Times is one from Marilyn Yalom.  Author Yalom faults Gray for avoiding Beauvoir’s central contention that women will be second-class citizens until they can support themselves.  Women still make — what? — 70 or 80 cents for every dollar a man makes.  Surely the hand that not only rocks the cradle but pays for it in monthly installments ought to have have achieved pay parity in 2010.

Yalom also takes issue with Gray calling Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman “preposterous.” Gray bases her argument on seeing male toddlers grabbing cars and guns while girls cuddle their dolls.  Writes Yalom: “Let me simply add my personal experience to Gray’s: as the mother of three sons and one daughter, I observed a much greater fluidity in their choice of toys, marked less by gender than by individual temperament.”

Old edition

Via blog, may I add my own observation as well?  My daughter went for the trucks and the dinosaurs (with a brief, but intense, foray into sharks), and had only a passing interest in dolls.  An eminent physicist of my acquaintance, Stanford Prof. Patricia Burchat, tells me her own sons wanted a dollhouse.  Why not?  The family drama has an intense fascination for children of both sexes, and what better place to control and reenact it than a dollhouse?  Pat triggered mild alarm when she brought legos to a little girl’s birthday party years ago — so tell me again, please, that toddlers have no gendered programming by that age?

Yalom finally zeroes in on Gray’s lambasting the new translation, which the critic finds wordy and cumbersome.  Yalom counters:  “The Second Sex is — among other things — a philosophical text. Would anyone think of translating Heidegger so that he flows nicely, when he rarely does?”

Judge for yourself with an excerpt here, or Judith Thurman’s introduction to the volume here.  Meanwhile, Gray takes another whack from Stephen Heyman in “Being and Frumpiness;  he notes that Gray once described Beauvoir’s “look as ‘bleakly emancipated,’ which sounds something like being ugly while wearing comfortable shoes.”

Hayden White at KZSU

Writing from Santa Cruz, where the Pacific is the deliriously blue backdrop to every landscape, and where there’s a great falafel place on Mission Street.

The university  is now the home of the octogenarian thinker Hayden White, who came to UC-Santa Cruz after retiring as a professor of comp lit at Stanford.

His name came to my attention last week, while I was having coffee at the Stanford Bookstore with cultural historian Ewa Domanska, one of the editors of Re-Figuring Hayden White.  Ewa brought White’s The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957-2007 to the table for discussion.

I was aware of the “History of Consciousness” program at UCSC, wasn’t aware he had created it.

Ewa Domanska

In the history of political activism, White is remembered for less scholarly reasons:  as a UCLA professor in 1972, he brought suit against the Los Angeles Police Department for gathering covert intelligence on college campuses.  The case made it to the California Supreme Court, which decided unanimously in his favor.  White, the sole plaintiff, took issue with the illegal expenditure of public funds when police officers registered as UCLA students, took notes on class discussions, and made police reports based on them. Because of the 1975 court decision, police need a reasonable suspicion of a crime for such surveillance.

From Ewa’s essay on White in Postmodernism: The Key Figures:

“No theory, no active thinking,” claims White. But there is good and bad theory: “that which is conducive to morally responsible thought, and that which leads away from it.”  The usefulness of a theory is related to its aim, which is always either political or ethical in character.  For White, the objective is to promote “good theory,” that is, theory which will ultimately serve humankind.”

A radio interview with White at Entitled Opinions here.