At home with Thomas Jefferson

Artist Maira Kalman, who keeps a wonderful blog for the New York Times, recently spent some time at Thomas Jefferson’s house, Monticello, possibly one of the most desirable places on earth. And of course she succumbed to the charm of this most extraordinary of men, who was insatiably curious, incredibly bright, shockingly well-educated, pretty sexy and, at the same time, deeply flawed – in Kalman’s words, “optimistic and complex and tragic and wrong and courageous”. Actually, it’s probably a good thing he never got round to making sure all men (and women) actually were equal, because how unbearably perfect would he have been then?

Anyway, let Maira Kalman take you on a trip of his house. I defy anyone to visit this place and NOT fall in love with Jefferson.

Great Non-Fiction: Confederates in the Attic

This book was recommended to me for this series by an invisible friend with the words “…it will let them laugh at the crazy Americans”. Now, while I don’t endorse Laughing at the Crazy Americans – a very narrow-minded European custom – I did indeed laugh at the many deliciously crazy people in this book, but I also enjoyed the unique window it provides into the American soul as well as the exciting adventures the author had on battlefields, in musty old museums and other godforsaken places.

Tony Horwitz, a former war correspondent in the Middle East, wakes up one morning to gunfire in his peaceful Virginia village, only to find a bunch of Civil War reenactors on his lawn, clad in Confederate uniforms so authentic (read: filthy) that even a very desperate Southern soldier on the point of freezing would probably have run from them. He is intrigued and has a good chat with them, which leads to his decision to tour the South in search of the different ways the Civil War is remembered these days.

Fun words: bowdlerise

Thomas Bowdler was an English doctor who thought that Shakespeare, among others, was rather immoral (so he is, of course, but in a good way) and really not suitable for women and children. So, he took his scalpel (figuratively speaking) and cut all the offending material out of the plays, in order to replace them with more suitable words.

This made him so famous that he lives on in the word “bowdlerise“, which is a synonym for “expurgate“.

And don’t you get the idea that people don’t bowdlerize literature any more, because the custom is still very much alive (link in German).

Something to give you courage

It’s only one day to go to the Abitur, so I’d like to encourage you to stop studying (if you ever started in the first place) and watch this extremely heartwarming video of street musicians all around the world collaborating, thanks to a brilliant producer.

This video has been viral all over the internet for over a week. I listened to an interview with Mark Johnson, the producer, who told this story that when they were recording in South Africa, these two unsavoury-looking characters came by and looked over their equipment; Johnson happily showed them his iPod with what they’d recorded so far and they were so enchanted that they promised they would watch the recording team’s back while they were there. Turns out they were actually the bigshot gangsters in this area, who ordinarily would have stolen everything and beaten them up. Ah, the power of music.

Last minute bonus speech

Invest a quarter of an hour into watching the speech Mr Obama gave at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It is chock-full of funny lines, self-deprecation and, at the end, even a little pathos. Most excellent.

Books I did not like: Sovay, by Celia Rees

Two years or so ago, I really enjoyed listening to the audiobook of Celia Rees’ YA novel Pirates, so when I saw this at the library and remembered it had been praised in my newspaper, I idly picked it up and devoured it in a day. And now I’m feeling slightly ill. Want to know why?

Emergency Abitur Update on Speeches and Rhetoric

In case next week’s English LK Abitur features a speech, here’s some last minute material to help you prepare. A lot of this is audio stuff, but I suggest listening to it pen in hand, as so many phrases and words might come in (I know…) handy.

• In March 2008, I liked Barack Obama’s speech on race. I still think this is one of the best. And hey! the guy has stuck around, no doubt just to please me.
• Analyzing Obama’s speech and cadence by John McWhorter mostly focuses on the spoken word in the speeches, but it is very interesting nonetheless, and completely proves Zadie Smith’s point.

• Analyzing Obama’s Inaugural Address by Geoff Nunberg has some great thoughts on how rhetoric has really gone out of style and why this made the Inaugural Address a good speech. You will also incidentally learn some stylistic devices that are a bit more interesting than good old anaphora. It’s also funny:

Rhetoricians have been botanizing this stuff for millenia. Today, there’s no way to put two words together that doesn’t have a Greek label, preserved in aspic by English department pedants.

• my esteemed colleague Jochen Lüders has a lot of worksheets on stylistic devices on his Abitur service page. Great stuff!
• I also assembled a Quizlet list for you.
• More great speeches can be found at The Guardian, with additional essay for each one by well-known writers, journalists and politicians. The collection includes old faithful’s like MLK’s “I Have A Dream”, but you will also find Earl Spencer’s tribute to his dead sister, the most hunted person of the modern age. Tom Clark, the editor of the series, contributed an essay about the art of rhetoric in which he demonstrates the most basic stylistic devices. I strongly recommend it.
• At the risk of sounding dull – if you want to experience the power of oratory, why not prepare for your exams by quickly reading Imperium?

Conspiracy!

You’re either into conspiracies or you aren’t. I’m not, and usually I would never ever even consider buying a book called Conspiracy, particularly if it had a very lurid cover.

However, just such a book has been announced for October 2009, and it’s going straight on my wishlist.

It’s by Robert Harris! And we all know what conspiracy it’s going to be about! The mother of all conspiracies, which no one understood back in 11th grade because both Sallustius and Cicero wrote such very thorny prose.

And if you haven’t read Imperium yet, you’ve still got all summer.

Zadie Smith: Speaking in Tongues

If you want to know more about Zadie Smith’s language, you can go to Youtube and actually listen to parts of her lecture:

The full article is here and I highly recommend that you read it, because it contains so many interesting ideas. Reading it, you will learn about

• English linguistic taboos
• Shaw’s Pygmalion
• Cary Grant (!)
• the many voices of Barack Obama
• unwritten rules of the black community
• blackness, whiteness and inbetweenness
• Shakespeare the equivocator
• the value of intellectual peculiarity
• the joys of living variously

The famous Stephen Colbert dinner speech

Re-posted by popular demand:

Stephen Colbert spoofing George W. Bush to his face: