We have to understand the context

From E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy.

The recently rediscovered insight that literacy is more than a skill is based upon knowledge that all of us unconsciously have about language. We know instinctively that to understand what somebody is saying, we must understand more than the surface meanings of words; we have to understand the context as well. The need for background information applies all the more to reading and writing. To grasp the words on a page we have to know a lot of information that isn't set down on the page

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The chief function of literacy is to make us masters of this standard instrument of knowledge

From E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy.

The chief function of literacy is to make us masters of this standard instrument of knowledge and communication, thereby enabling us to give and receive complex information orally and in writing over time and space. Advancing technology, with its constant need for fast and complex communications, has made literacy ever more essential to commerce and domestic life.

Where communications fail, so do the undertakings

From E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy.

Why is literacy so important in the modern world? Some of the reasons, like the need to fill out forms or get a good job, are so obvious that they needn't be discussed. But the chief reason is broader. The complex undertakings of modern life depend on cooperation of many people with different specialties in different places. Where communications fail, so do the undertakings. (That is the moral of the story of the Tower of Babel.) The function of national literacy is to foster effective nationwide communications. Our chief instrument of communication over time and space is the standard national language, which is sustained by national literacy. Mature literacy alone enables the tower to be built, the business to be well managed, and the airplane to fly without crashing. All nationwide communications, whether by telephone, radio, TV, or writing are fundamentally dependent upon literacy, for the essence of literacy is not simply reading and writing but also the effective use of the standard literate language.

A kind of easy-going panache

From Priscilla Napier's A Late Beginner, available directly from Slightly Foxed. "Priscilla Napier grew up in Egypt during the last golden years of the Edwardian Age - a time when, for her parents' generation, it seemed the sun would never set upon 'the regimental band playing selections from HMS Pinafore under the banyan tree.'"

Recounting her visits home to England in the early teens of the last century, when she would have been three to six years of age, she offers this recollection of those magnificent servants of the crown; a more positive (and probably more deserved) judgment than has been the fashion of late to offer.

Not all Edwardian men can have had such very long legs: possibly it was one's viewpoint that gave one this impression. Their far up faces, above unaccountably deep collars, seemed always to be breaking into laughter. Their salient characteristic was their relaxedness, a kind of easy-going panache glossing theirs words and actions. Their legs in narrow trousers carrying them inexhaustibly up hill, or thrown, in gleaming leggings, over a horse's back, moved with an unhurried and purposeful elan. Their voices, heard in mockery, affection, or sternness, rang always with that confident buoyancy that was to sink for ever in the mud of the Great War battlefields, with that unquestioning sense of the rightness and fitness of the Pax Britannica and of their place within it. They basked in what they imagined to be its high noon, in what were in fact its last rays, in the sun never setting upon the regimental band playing selections from H.M.S. Pinafore under the banyan tree. Consciously Christians, of a sort, they fought the good fight against an excess in drinking, smoking, or spending; against paying insufficient regard to mothers-in-law or dull old relations. They believed in practically everything except Father Christmas and votes for women, and it made for great peace of mind. Straddling the world, with their graceful wives and their strangely over-dressed babies, they believed in marital fidelity and in kindness to animals which included their rapid despatch when they were being shot, hunted, or fished for. They believed in right and wrong, with a strong line drawn between. They were listening without self-consciousness to the last faint echoes of Roland's horn. They said family prayers, and made endless practical jokes, and tipped one golden half sovereigns. To later critics they could be said to have lived in an innocent, callous, enjoying dream, in some ways perhaps never quite growing up. But they were true to their ethic, and remained, even to people who were not their relations, curiously lovable. Their self-mastery, and not only or mainly in sexual matters, was truly adult; and when the appalling calamity of World War I avalanched over them, they confronted it without self-pity. From their loss we all still suffer. In their rare and more perspicacious survivor, Churchill, we all rejoice. There was something marvellously entire about them.

Define: Plug-ugly

Wodehouse is a great logo coach (word coach?). I never realized quite how much he probably contributed to the development of my youthful vocabulary until I recently reread Jeeves in the Morning (Audio) and was struck by how many allusions he made to things that ought to be known but that I probably did not really know enough about or used words that I have always just interpreted from the context of his use.

Plug-ugly for instance. I have managed to work it, improbably, into a conversation or two over the years but actually never had a precise definition beyond my inference from Wodehouse.

I had also had to be similarly firm with Jeeves, who had repeatedly hinted his wish that I should take a cottage there for the summer months. There was, it appeared, admirable fishing in the river, and he is a man who dearly loves to flick the baited hook. "No, Jeeves," I had been compelled to say, "much though it pains me to put a stopper on your simple pleasures, I cannot take a risk of running into that gang of pluguglies. Safety first." And he had replied, "Very good, sir," and there the matter had rested.

From Merriam-Webster.

Main Entry: plug-ug ly
Function: noun
Date: 1856

Amid the bustle of waiters, the chink of fine silver and the hum of dozens of conversations,

For any independent reader who is a Sherlock Holmes enthusiast (as I was at that age), there was an article in the January 2010 Smithsonian, Sherlock Holmes' London, which might be of interest.

One summer evening in 1889, a young medical school graduate named Arthur Conan Doyle arrived by train at London's Victoria Station and took a hansom cab two and a half miles north to the famed Langham Hotel on Upper Regent Street. Then living in obscurity in the coastal town of Southsea, near Portsmouth, the 30-year-old ophthalmologist was looking to advance his writing career. The magazine Beeton's Christmas Annual had recently published his novel, A Study in Scarlet, which introduced the private detective Sherlock Holmes. Now Joseph Marshall Stoddart, managing editor of Lippincott's Monthly, a Philadelphia magazine, was in London to establish a British edition of his publication. At the suggestion of a friend, he had invited Conan Doyle to join him for dinner in the Langham's opulent dining room.

Amid the bustle of waiters, the chink of fine silver and the hum of dozens of conversations, Conan Doyle found Stoddart to be "an excellent fellow," he would write years later. But he was captivated by one of the other invited guests, an Irish playwright and author named Oscar Wilde. "His conversation left an indelible impression upon my mind," Conan Doyle remembered. "He had a curious precision of statement, a delicate flavour of humour, and a trick of small gestures to illustrate his meaning." For both writers, the evening would prove a turning point. Wilde left with a commission to write his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which appeared in Lippincott's June 1890 issue. And Conan Doyle agreed to produce a second novel starring his ace detective; The Sign of Four would cement his reputation. Indeed, critics have speculated that the encounter with Wilde, an exponent of a literary movement known as the Decadents, led Conan Doyle to deepen and darken Sherlock Holmes' character: in The Sign of Four's opening scene, Holmes is revealed to be addicted to a "seven-percent solution" of cocaine.

Children's literature, bad books and ideas

In an article (Children's Literature by Feroza Jussawalla in College Literature, October 1997) otherwise marked by academic gibberish and predetermined strawmen imposed willy-nilly upon reality, Feroza Jussawalla quotes this line from Peter Hunt from his book An Introduction to Children's Literature, my emphasis added:

Children's literature is a powerful literature, and . . . such power cannot be neutral or innocent, or trivial. This is especially true because the books are written by and made available to children, by adults .. Equally obviously, the primary audience is children, who are less experienced and less educated into their culture than adults.

I think this is in part the answer to an enduring conundrum presented to book enthusiasts when assaulted with the charge that books are dangerous because of the ideas or prejudices or values that they transmit. (And to be clear, this is an equal opportunity charge coming as it does from either left or right.) The conundrum is that as soon as one advances the belief, indeed the conviction, of the importance of books to children - as most bibliophiles do - then one must accept that books can have negative consequences as well as positive consequences.

I believe the charge to be true, books are a potentially powerful influence either for good or bad, but that the bibliophiles answer lies in Hunt's statement "books are written by and made available to children, by adults." Bad values, or stereotypes, or prejudice, or facts received via books are not inherently corruptive - it is the context in which they are received, and vis-a-vis children, the mediation of parents and adults that determines whether the ideas, values, etc. are affirmative or corruptive in nature.

It is important for a child to have their parents shaping the portfolio of books to which they are exposed (and in what sequence) and it is important for there to be reasonable variety which would include variety not only in subject, style, genre, etc. but also in terms of issues, values, and ideas. The impact of those ideas are substantially filtered through the prior influence of the parent in shaping the child's weltanschauung as well as the discussion the parent might have about those ideas as the child reads. It is not the book in itself that might be the problem but rather the environment and context in which it is read.

Poetry, Imagination, and Education

Poetry, Imagination, and Education an essay by Amy Lowell. Originally published in Poetry and Poets: Essays (1930). While the essay is cast in the form of the age-old debate of whether education is meant to teach children to think or to know (process of learning versus acquiring facts) - a ridiculous debate when it is clear that both are needed - Lowell's discussion is actually much richer than the constraints imposed by that model and with many well-turned observations. She is actually focusing on the importance of the cultivation of imagination in conjunction with a comprehension of facts. Well worth reading the essay in its entirety. Among the morsels:

These deal with the facts of life, and facts are most important things, but fancies are important too, and the fancies are not much cultivated today.

It is doubtful if fancy can be cultivated directly, it is too subtle and elusive, it must grow of itself, but conditions can be made conducive or the reverse. To be conducted through the realms of poetry and romance by a grown-up person, as one of a class of children all with differing needs and perceptions, at a given rate of speed, is not conducive to such growth.

To gain the greatest amount out of a book, one must read it as inclination leads; some parts are to be hurried over quickly, others read slowly and many times over; the mind will take what it needs, and dwell upon it, and make it its own.

Its connotations are really what make a book of use in stimulating the imagination. As a musical note is richer the more overtones it has, so a book is richer the more it ramifies into trains of thought. But there must be time and space for the thought to develop; the reader must not be interrupted by impertinent comments and alien suggestions.

At first the child merely knows that this story or that story is interesting, that certain other stories are not interesting, he does not attempt to analyse why. Later he will make his first true criticism; he will say, 'It does not seem real,' or 'Nobody would do so.' He has detected bad writing; his imagination refuses to give credence to what its instinct declares not to be true. Gradually these criticisms of matter are added to by criticisms of form, and we have 'Nobody would talk like that.'

What makes the child think that nobody would do thus and so, or that nobody would talk in such and such a way? Partly his knowledge of life as he has lived it, of course. Though he has lived a very small life and his experiences have necessarily been few, yet through the life of his imagination he has been able to live much more, he has gained a conception of life far beyond anything that he has ever experienced.

If one can imagine oneself a child of twelve years old denuded of any knowledge or idea of anything except what he can have known or seen in his daily life, one will at once see how much more meagre his conceptions would be than is actually the case. Therefore what makes the child think that this or that thing that he is reading about is false is the knowledge that he has gained through his imagination.

The power of judgment is like water running up hill; water cannot rise higher than its own level, and judgment cannot go beyond the experience which informs it. To be sure that the judgment is sound, the school in which the experience is gained must be true to life. Only the best in literature and art is this, and it is with the best in literature and art that our children must be familiar.

There is no education like self-education, and no stimulus to the imagination so good as that which it gives itself when allowed to roam through the pent-up stores of the world's imaginings at will.

There is a class of people known to all librarians as 'browsers.' They wander from shelf to shelf, now reading here, now there. Sometimes dipping into ten books in the hour, sometimes absorbed in one for the whole day. If we look back to our childhood we shall see how large a part 'browsing' had in our education. One book suggested another, and as we finished one we knew the next that was waiting to be begun. They stretched on and on in a delightful and never-ending vista. The joy of those hours when we sat cross-legged' on the floor, or perched on the top of a ladder, a new world hidden behind the covers of every book within reach, and perfect liberty to open the covers and enter at will, can never be forgotten.

We talk about 'creating a demand for books' among the children of the masses, and about ' giving them the reading habit,' and the best way to do this is to have a well-stocked reading-room of good books, books for grown-up people as well as for children, and let the children have free access to the shelves. They will be found reading strange things often, strange from the point of view of the grown-up person, that is. But in most cases their instincts will be good guides, and they will read what is best for them.

We love and admire certain things rather inspite of what people say than because of it. We like to compare notes with some one who enjoys the same things that we do, but the real enjoyment was there before. Beauty cannot be proved as a mathematical problem can. If beauty is its own excuse for being, it is also its own teacher for perceiving. Contact with beautiful things creates a taste for the beautiful, if there is any taste to be created.

Define: adventitious

From the January 23rd, 2010 edition of The Spectator, in an article by Jacob Heilbrunn, Meet the Fantastic Mr. Fox.

The martial imagery is not adventitious.

From Merriam-Webster.com

Main Entry: ad ven ti tious
Pronunciation: \ˌad-(ˌ)ven-ˈti-shəs, -ven-\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin adventicius
Date: 1603
1 : coming from another source and not inherent or innate {a Federal house without adventitious later additions}
2 : arising or occurring sporadically or in other than the usual location

- ad ven ti tious ly adverb

Rice and Japanese culture

From the December 19th, 2009 edition of The Economist, a very interesting article,You Are What You Eat, on changes in Japan related to the culture of farming and food. I blogged on food changes in Germany (under A vegetarian butcher, eh? Well it's an interesting business model for a challenging time). In the Japanese article, they mention a proverb tightly tied to the practice of rice agriculture as it relates to the cultivation of values, as so many adages and proverbs do.

A famous proverb written about rice serves as a metaphor for humility, a virtue the Japanese hold dear: "The heavier the head of rice, the deeper it bows."