The Little Professor

That's (not) dancing

Terry Teachout has a very interesting article in the WSJ on the decline and fall--make that fall and collapse--of American dance.  This is much more his territory than mine, so I cautiously offer some additional thoughts:

• From my hobbyist's reading in American dance history, the current state of affairs appears to be the default position.  As Teachout notes, there was a massive uptick of interest during the 1950s, thanks in particular to the explosion of television variety shows that brought both Broadway and classical dancers to a mass audience.  (Although he doesn't mention them, Agnes de Mille's "Art of Ballet" [1956] and "Art of Choreography" [1956] specials were significant contributions to this project; her Agnes de Mille Dance Theatre was intended to serve the same educational purpose.)  But interest in dance appears to have fallen off again by the 1970s, since critics thought that the success of the super-soapy film The Turning Point marked a new interest in ballet.  Thanks in no small part, of course, to Baryshnikov, who succeeded Nureyev on the ballet superstar throne. 
• Ballet and modern dance may have vanished from the public's radar--the Alvin Ailey aside, how many modern dance companies were ever really on the public's radar?--but what about tap? Tap at its best is an improvisational form, which means that there isn't a repository of great tap dances lurking out there (aside from pieces choreographed for companies like the American Tap Dance Orchestra).  Yet I'd hazard that in recent years, the most widely recognized dancers in America have been a) the late Gregory Hines and b) Savion Glover. 
• Does it matter that viewers apparently no longer respond well to the dream ballets in 1950s Hollywood musicals? I haven't done a scientific survey, to be sure, but take a look at how Amazon reviewers or IMDb posters respond to the Oklahoma! dream ballet.  A surprising number are unable to figure out a) why it's there, b) why de Mille used dance doubles, or c) why it couldn't just be edited out (!).   All headshaking aside, though, I wonder if this means that viewers have lost touch with extended forms of dance; even a recent dance-oriented musical like Chicago  chopped all the choreography up into itsy-bitsy pieces.  (Does MTV rear its head here?)
• In recent years, there no longer seems to be much in the way of cross-pollination between commercial and concert dance.  Obviously, there's some--choreographers Garth Fagan, Lars Lubovitch, and Twyla Tharp have done Broadway musicals; dancers like Desmond Richardson have performed likewise--but overall, there's much less mobility.  George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, and Jerome Robbins, not to mention a host of others (Eugene Loring, etc.), moved back and forth between Broadway and ballet.  Moreover, performers seem to have enjoyed far more fluidity; not only did concert dancers work regularly in musical theatre during their (probably far too numerous) off-seasons, but Broadway dancers frequently wound up filling unexpected holes in even major concert dance companies.  Today, would American Ballet Theatre allow de Mille's favorite dancer, James Mitchell, within a mile of the stage--let alone assign him principal roles?
• You know, it can cost a lot of money to go to the ballet, just as it costs a lot of money to go to the theatre.  This is not a small problem.

UPDATE: slightly edited.

UPDATE II: According to John Rockwell in this morning's New York Times, "By most measures, in all of which Ailey excels, dance has rarely been healthier in this country."

End-of-semester musings: Ten things professors refuse to learn

1.  Any historical generalization you make in class will come back to haunt you. 
2.  Essential paperwork always conceals itself beneath towering stacks of quizzes.
3.  Students remember what you'd rather have them forget, and vice-versa.
4.  Grading always takes three times as long as you expect.
5.  MA theses normally arrive just before finals week.
6.  It is impossible to persuade students that "these poems have many similarities and many differences" is not a viable thesis statement.
7.  At the end of the semester, students are not necessarily in the mood for James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, or even Virginia Woolf.  (Admittedly, you may not be in the mood either.)
8.  Committee meetings happen.
9.  Restarting the semester after Thanksgiving break tends to be easier said than done.
10.  It is difficult to enthrall students with a lecture on compound-complex sentences. 

Dialogue for the day

LP: We're doing evaluations today.
STUDENT: Are you evaluating us? Or...are we evaluating you???
LP: Don't sound so enthusiastic. 

Boundaries

Some people appear to be astonished that Andrew Sullivan thinks that Mormons aren't Christian (or, at best, are a decidedly bizarre brand of Christian).  I'm astonished that anyone is astonished; it is always dangerous to assume that someone who dissents from orthodoxy on issue X will necessarily do so on issue Y.   Of course, being ruled out of bounds is an existential hazard.  Speaking as a Jew whose upbringing was somewhere between Reform and Reconstructionist, I know that some more Orthodox sorts regard my claims to Jewishness as, well, problematic.   (It is possible to survive such denunciations with reasonable equanimity.)  And, of course, there are the secular versions of this particular game.  Are you really a conservative? A leftist? A vegetarian? An English professor?

As it happens, this spat cropped up just as I started organizing my Victorian anti-Catholic sermons for this project.  It will come as no surprise that the preachers expend quite a bit of effort on demonstrating that Roman Catholicism is--you guessed it--not Christian.  Contemporary fundamentalists, some of whom depend heavily on Victorian writers for their theological arsenal, would not disagree with that assessment of the situation; in fact,  some of them regard Mormonism and Catholicism as analogical heresies.  In the Victorian period, this kind of attack-by-analogy (or, for that matter, self-defense by analogy) could twist writers into unintentional pretzels.  For example, Protestants commonly argued that Roman Catholicism and Judaism shared a number of theological errors; in fact, evangelical Anglicans sometimes called Anglo-Catholics "Judaizers" (an epithet with a much longer history).  This argument frequently led Protestants to simply read Judaism in the light of Roman Catholicism, or vice-versa, with comical results.  (A rabbi is not a Catholic priest.  Really.)  At the same time, Protestants also  argued that Jews were naturally antagonistic to Catholicism, given Jewish prohibitions against idolatry.  When the same writer tried to squeeze both positions into one text, the result was not entirely coherent.

Like their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century predecessors, Victorian Protestants argued that Roman Catholicism committed sins of addition.   Most of my readers are probably familiar with the claim that the Catholic Church simply added pagan survivals to "pure" beliefs; the Rev. John Gore Tipper, for example, argues that the Papal system originated with Semiramis somewhere around 1900 BC--another theory that's still with us, as the link notes--and goes on to "prove" that the cross on the priest's vestments refers to Tammuz [1]! But preachers usually claimed that all of Roman Catholicism fell under the heading of a false addition to the original truths.   Some more examples from my notes:

Under the baneful shadow of that Church’s influence and the usurped dominion of her head, the Bishop of Rome, this our Church of England had for ages suffered and groaned, heavy laden with the spiritual fetters which she had forged and diseased with the corruptions which she had fostered; at length through GOD’s mercy the light of the full truth of His Gospel shone out upon us now three hundred years ago: in the light of His open volume of instruction, and of the recorded teaching of primitive ages of the Church’s purity, we saw our errors, we learned to separate the precious from the vile, we retained our Catholic standing, and the great Catholic verities, the primitive truths and practices of the Church of CHRIST, as sanctioned by GOD’s Word, we removed those incrustations of deadly error under which they were well-nighed buried; we threw off that yoke of allegiance to the Bishop of Rome, to which by mere usurpation we had become enthralled, and the continuance of which would have been the means of perpetrating error—and we remained as we had been from the beginning THE CATHOLIC CHURCH OF ENGLAND, now reformed from uncatholic and pernicious errors, against which we have ever since continued in doctrine and practice to protest. [2]

But now we must be allowed briefly to explain the principles on which this deception of souls takes effect—the means by which it is made available. They resolve themselves, we conceive, into two—an imposition and an injustice—an act of tyranny and a claim of falsehood. The imposition consists in arrogating the name and authority of THE OLD—THE ONLY TRUE church. The advocates of Popery run over the promise made to the Church Catholic: they assume or take for granted that the Church Catholic is the Church of Rome, and so claim the promises for themselves. Though every Epistle almost repudiates the notion—though history systematically detests the mis-statement; yet reiterated assertion passes for cogent argument, and assumption is substituted for truth. Then antiquity is advanced as a plea for attachment. Now, it is the novelties of Popery against which we are bound to protest. The primitive Nicene Creed we accept—it is the modern additions of Pope Pius IV. that we condemn and reject. [3]

These are the principles, at once of primitive Christianity and of the English Reformation. We invented nothing. We added nothing. Nay, we altered nothing. We did but clear away the accumulated rubbish of the middle ages, and reach and rest upon the old foundations. [4]

Roman Catholicism, although old, becomes "new," while Protestantism, although new, becomes "old."  I've discussed this before. 

[1] Rev. John Gore Tipper, M.A., A Sermon Preached in St. Stephen’s Church, Canterbury, on Sunday Morning, February 10, 1867, Being the Day on which the attention of the Congregations throughout the Parish of Islington was directed to the subject of Ultra-Ritualism (London: Hatchard and Co., 1867), 7, 11-12.
[2] Rev. Nugent Wade, M.A., Romish Aggression: The Spirit in Which We Should Resist It.  A Sermon Preached in the Parish Church of St. Anne, Westminster, on Sunday, November 17...To Which are Appended the Parochial Addresses to the Queen and the Bishop of London: Together with His Lordship's Reply (London: John Masters, 1850), 7.
[3] Rev. J. Richardson, B.A., Popery a Deceiver of Souls.  A Sermon, Delivered in St. James' Church, Preston, on Thursday Evening, April 24, 1851 (Preston: H. C. Barton, 1851), 18. 
[4] Rev. Hugh M'Neile, D.D., The English Reformation, a Re-Assertion of Primitive Christianity.  A Sermon, Preached in Christ Church, Newgate Street, on the 17th of November, 1858, the Tercentenary Commemoration of the Accession of Queen Elizabeth, 2nd ed. (Liverpool: Adam Holden; London: Longman, Green, Longman, & Roberts, 1858), 39.

This Week's Acquisitions

• Anne Dennis Reynett, Poems Selected from the Writings of the Late Anne Dennis Reynett ([Operative Jewish Converts' Institution], 1871).  A privately-printed book of mainly devotional poems, not intended for general distribution.  Reynett was the sister of Sir James Reynett, and resided (along with some of her relatives) in Hampton Court Palace.   There's a Victorian description of the Operative Jewish Converts' Institution here. 
• Paul Bowles, The Stories of Paul Bowles (Harper Perennial, 2003).  The collected stories. 
• Alessandro Gavazzi, Father Gavazzi's Lectures in New York... (De Witt & Davenport, 1853).  Gavazzi was an ex-priest turned popular Protestant lecturer and organizer. In 1853, he sparked a series of riots in Québec.  The NPG has what may be some portraits of Gavazzi; see also an engraving at the NYPL. 
• Leslie P. Fairfield, John Bale: Mythmaker for the English Reformation (Purdue, 1976).  Study of Bale's historiography.

UPDATE: Don't miss Geoffrey Chaucer's own list of acquisitions, the highlights of which include The Doctours: The C and I Moost Dangerous Scholastic Thinkers in Europe ("The worste by far ys Thomas Aquinas, who hath argued from Aristoteles principle of the first entelechy that the forme of the soule containeth the sensitif and vegitatif soules, in contradiccioun of the gret tradiciouns of the chirche")   and the Harley Lyrics ("BOOOOOORNE TO WAXEN WOODE...").  

Must keep on

At Crooked Timber, Henry ignited a surprisingly long thread on a subject near and dear to many a reader's heart: authors who have not just worn out their welcomes, but worn them out so badly that readers cringe, snivel, and whimper at the very thought of their books.  (So far, Orson Scott Card seems to be the winner--or loser--by a Secretariat-like margin.)

This thread reminds me, though, of a related phenomenon: people who feel obligated to press on, dutifully or otherwise, with a television series or a film franchise--even though they announce to the world at regular (and, to be honest, aggravating) intervals that said series or franchise is relentlessly bad.  Unbelievably awful.  Mind-blowingly terrible.  (Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, as the King of Siam likes to say.)  Thus, people trooped off to see the second and third Star Wars prequels because, goshdurnit, they had invested themselves in this story; just because the execution left something to be desired (a lot to be desired...) didn't mean that they were going to act like the proverbial rats.  Similarly, when television shows go off the rails, die-hard fans may rant and rave, but they'll grimly announce that they're sticking it out until the bitter end [1].

This glum devotion seems to be a by-product of the serial format.   If the viewer abandons ship (or, at least, abandons narrative) in the middle of the plot, then there's no future payoff for the initial investment of both time and emotion; people want to know what happens to their favorite characters, want to see the villain get his comeuppance, want to find out what is hidden behind magic door #3, and so forth.  In some respects, the Internet has made it easier to drop the series itself--either temporarily or permanently--since the unhappy viewer can simply follow the plot by reading the fan boards.  Payoff without pain, I suppose.   At TWoP, for example, I've noticed posters who stop watching a show for months, then return to it once a storyline ends or a much-loathed character rides off into the sunset; other posters abandon the show altogether, yet still contribute regularly to the boards.  A given electronic community, in other words, can become the "real" entertainment.

To what extent does this sense of self-imposed obligation extend to the written word? Do people feel that they have a ball-and-chain connecting them to a given author--or, perhaps, to a given series? For example, do longtime fans feel that they must pick up the latest Pern or Xanth novel? (Are there still Xanth novels? I don't think I've read Piers Anthony since high school.)

[1] The flip side of this coin, of course, is the fan who triumphantly announces that s/he will stop watching after such-and-such a date.   

Delurking

It appears that it's delurking week.  Anybody out there?

LP in the House

[As the episode begins, the PATIENT OF THE WEEK--a small Victorianist--is striding about the classroom, gesticulating as she goes.]

PoTW: What is a "hard, gemlike flame," exactly? Have any of you ever seen a hard flame? No?

[The STUDENTS, perhaps understandably unenthusiastic about Walter Pater at this late date in the semester, wearily shake their heads.]

PoTW: Well, let's think about what Pater means.  [Gesticulating even more energetically.]  Can we connect the image to Pater's earlier allusions to flames? [Moves about with greater determination.] What about his interest in energy and intensity?

[Suddenly, the PoTW stops moving.  As the bemused STUDENTS look on, her face, neck, and hands suddenly blaze out in what appear to be letters of fire.]

STUDENT 1: Damn.  I thought we were learning about Pater, not the One Ring.
STUDENT 2: Does this mean that she's about to be reduced to a "tremulous wisp"?  Because if she is, then she probably won't be able to grade our papers. 

[The PoTW collapses, screaming in agony.  CUT to a hospital in Princeton, NJ, although why a PoTW from upstate NY has been transported to Princeton is not immediately clear.]

[CAMERON and and FOREMAN are fighting over who will have the most lines this week; CHASE is nowhere to be seen.  HOUSE enters.]

HOUSE: If you kids don't start playing nicely, I'm going to dose you with Kaopectate's new formula for logorrhea. [Sudden silence.]  Fine.   Twist your tongues around this tasty treat.  English professor, female, 35, entirely covered with mysterious texts.  Thoughts? And where's Chase?

CAMERON: Wow.  She's been...inscribed? That's so nineties.

HOUSE: We're debating her symptoms, not her belatedness.  Unless she's in Bloom, so to speak.  Where's Chase?

FOREMAN: Remember, il n'y a pas dehors du texte.  It's quite possibly an allergic reaction brought on by prolonged exposure to some literary theorist.  No way to tell which one without running the tests, though.

HOUSE: Since when are tests any use on this show? Just skip the tests, inject her with some Derrida, and send her packing back to upstate NY.  Where's Chase?

CHASE: Behind you.  [Everyone stares.]  Sorry--I fell into a lacuna.

FOREMAN: Look on the bright side--at least the posters at Television Without Pity will have something to discuss now.

[Cut to the PoTW's room.  CAMERON and FOREMAN are injecting her with Of Grammatology; Chase, once again, is nowhere to be seen.]

CAMERON: That's funny...she doesn't seem to be responding.  Her binary oppositions aren't destabilizing at all. 

FOREMAN: No wonder! Her chart says that her BA is from UC Irvine; she must have developed a resistance to Derrida.  I knew we should have gone with Foucault.

CAMERON: You know, I've been reading Judith Butler lately, and I'm wondering if we're seeing "regulative discourses" in action.  Maybe the cultural "scripts" through which we perform gendered identities have become somehow manifest on this woman's body!

[FOREMAN stares at CAMERON, mouth agape.]

CAMERON: Or not.

[CUDDY runs into the room for her token appearance, screaming.]

CUDDY: LawsuitsmmmmNNNNNmmmmmproceduresmmmmNNNNmmmmNNNNmmmmHousemmmmNNNNmmmdead!

[CUDDY exits, still screaming.]

FOREMAN: Um, some logocentrism would have been mighty helpful there.

CHASE [apparently out of nowhere]: Why? It's not as though we ever pay attention to anything she says. 

FOREMAN: You know, we'd feel more confident of your abilities if you could just keep yourself from falling into random lacunae.

CHASE [shrugging]: The writer left the hole in the bloody plot, not me.

[CUT to HOUSE, standing on a balcony and looking pensive.  WILSON--like CUDDY, making his token appearance--enters from an elevator.]

WILSON [looking puzzled]: That's funny--I could have sworn this balcony used to be somewhere else.

HOUSE: Thanks to the clods supposedly in charge of continuity, we're in the only self-deconstructing hospital known to mankind.  Next thing you know, my office will be in the women's locker room.

WILSON: And I'm sure you're just so depressed about that possibility.

HOUSE: No, I'm depressed about the moral pablum you're about to spew. Can't you make yourself entertaining during any of your token appearances? Do your best Bette Davis imitation, perform a five-minute version of Fiddler on the Roof, juggle flaming clubs...Heck, you could even, I dunno, practice some medicine. 

WILSON: Actually, the script says I'm supposed to contribute some gratuitous homoeroticism at this point in the plot.  Although it isn't clear if the writers are trying to appeal to fanfic writers or queer theorists...

HOUSE: I can see it now--"Wils(on)House: Dialogue and the Construction of Eroticized Professional Masculinities in Twenty-first Century Popular Entertainment."

[He pauses.  Wilson stares at him, mouth agape.]

HOUSE: That's it! It's elementary, my dear Wilson!

WILSON [looking hopeful]: You mean...we're about to make fanfic writers everywhere overjoyed?

HOUSE: No, that will have to wait for the next sweeps period.  Dialogue, you fool, dialogue! [He rushes off to the elevator, but can't find it.]  Where's the damn elevator?!

WILSON: Uh...I think the continuity demon got it.

[We're back in the PoTW's room, where things are looking bleak.  CAMERON and FOREMAN hover over the bed; CHASE, predictably, is invisible.  HOUSE bursts in, out of breath from racing down the stairs.]

HOUSE: How many minutes before the episode is over?

CAMERON: About eleven.  Why?

HOUSE: Great! That means it's time for the correct answer, now that we've spent the last hour making random guesses.  Since all of us forget basic diagnostic procedures whenever the writers think it's necessary, we neglected a vital clue.  What's actually written on the patient's body?

CAMERON: A novel by Jeanette Winterson?

FOREMAN: Nah.  It looks like...poetry?

HOUSE: They're dramatic monologues! [In his best plummy English accent]  I see Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lord Tennyson...

CAMERON: It's so cute when you try to do an English accent, but I've got to say that it always sounds fake.

[HOUSE rolls his eyes at the camera.]

HOUSE: She's suffering from monologism, you no-good New Critics! Once she's pumped full of Mikhail Bakhtin, she'll be up and around in no time.

CHASE [from somewhere near the ceiling]: I don't suppose we could inject a little more dialogism into the writing of our scripts? I'd love to have some actual lines...

ALL: Damn it, Chase...!

[Fade to black.]

*Mobile balcony originally pointed out at TWoP. 

Manual

Controversial handbooks or manuals--whether designed to introduce the reader to a given faith, help her convert others, or protect her from being converted--pop up regularly in the "Religion" section at your friendly neighborhood Barnes & Noble, but they've got quite an extensive history.  I own a few of the nineteenth-century variety, most of them anti-Catholic: James Begg's A Handbook of Popery, R. P. Blakeney's Manual of Romish Controversy, Justin D. Fulton's How to Win Romanists, Charles H. H. Wright's A Primer of Roman Catholicism, and so on.  Since these books are intended either to protect the reader from the blandishments of Rome or to help her convert unsuspecting Catholic neighbors, it's not surprising that most of them look like catechisms.  The Protestant's Manual; Or, Reasons for the Reformation departs from that norm: it consists of seventeen repurposed Religious Tract Society publications.  While there's no publication date, and I can't find any sign of the book in the BL or COPAC, the tracts date from the late 18-teens to about 1840.  (There's a long tradition of "manuals" for Protestants, going back to the late Reformation.)

The Protestant's Manual is hardly a seamless whole--the book isn't continuously paginated, the tracts are out of numerical order, and the typefaces vary from tract to tract--so did the compiler have some internal logic in mind?  The anthology starts with a historical sketch of the English Bible, immediately followed by an extract from Martin Luther on justification.  Then follows the longest tract (40 pages), about the conversion of an Irish Catholic named Andrew Dunn.  At first glance, the apparently nineteenth-century Dunn looks a little out of place, since he is immediately followed by the very sixteenth-century Catherine Parr (and extracts), Lady Jane Grey (and more extracts), and the Rev. John Bradford (yet more extracts).  Then we're back to the Bible again, with a brief tract on sola scriptura, extracted from a lecture by Joseph Fletcher.  Fletcher pops up again with another extract, this time on the role of Scripture reading and preaching in the Reformation.  Somewhat puzzlingly, we suddenly zip back to the fifteenth century for the martyrdom of Lord Cobham.  After that, there are four tracts by George Hamilton on extreme unction, the Biblical sanction for Protestantism (the old "where was your church before Luther?" question), Roman Catholic "heathenism" (the old "you stole your rites from the pagan" routine), and the worship of the saints.  Finally, we finish up with three tracts on the Scriptures: a series of prooftexts, laid out as a catechism, intended to refute Catholic claims; directions for reading the Bible; and a critique of claims that the Bible cannot be easily understood, and is therefore unsuited for common reading.

There appear to be logics involved here, not logic.  On the one hand, it makes sense that the collection begins and ends with the Bible: we start with the Bible's historical significance and end with how and why it is to be read now.  Given the manual's subtitle, it also follows that Luther on justification should appear very early on.  And Catherine Parr, Lady Jane Grey, and the Rev. John Bradford have clearly been lumped together as exemplary sixteenth-century figures.   On the other hand, it's not clear why Fletcher's and Hamilton's tracts appear where they do (why isn't Fletcher with the other Bible tracts?), and Lord Cobham is out of place, no matter how you look at it (he belongs with Queen Catherine and co.).  In other words, the book partly conforms to an overarching plan, and partly...doesn't; it's as though the editor couldn't figure out if the book should be read straight through or simply consulted on a need-to-know basis. 

That leaves us with the rather popular Mr. Dunn, whose narrative was last reprinted in 2001.  To hazard a guess, I suspect that Andrew Dunn's presence in a book supposedly devoted to all things Reformation has to do with what's frequently dubbed the "Second Reformation"--the Protestant evangelical missionary movement in Ireland, which kicked into high gear during the late 1820s.  (See here for a brief introduction.)  The book thus reminds the reader that the "reasons" for the Reformation have not been entirely displaced by the Reformation; the Reformation is an ongoing project, not a completed event or series of events.   

This Week's Acquisitions

• Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red (Vintage, 2002).  Art and murder in sixteenth-century Istanbul.
• Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler, eds., Romanticism And Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens (Ashgate, 2006).  Collection featuring essays on Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc.  I'm reviewing it for Choice. 
• Helen O'Connell, Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement (Oxford, 2006).  Study of Irish novels devoted to "demonstrating the value of hard work, frugality, and sobriety in a rigorously realistic mode, representing the contentment that inheres in a plain social order free of excess and embellishment."
• The Protestant's Manual; Or, Reasons for the Reformation (RTS).  Collects seventeen tracts on a variety of sixteenth-century topics, ranging from Irish Catholics to Catherine Parr.