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January 17, 2003
Front-Page
News
New
York, New York
The New York Times Book Review list of notable books of
the year (December 8) included Darlington’s Fall: A Novel
in Verse (Knopf, 2002) by Brad Leithauser, Emily Dickinson
Senior Lecturer in the Humanities. A little more than a week later,
on December 19, Leithauser’s piece on Pulitzer Prize—winning
writer Booth Tarkington (1869–1946) appeared in the New
York Review of Books. Best known today as the novelist behind
the movies Alice Adams, directed by George Stevens, and
Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, Tarkington
is remembered by Leithauser for Penrod, Penrod and Sam,
and Penrod Jashber, three books about the misadventures
of eleven-year-old Midwesterner Penrod Schofield that are “all
about being ‘bad’—and the vagaries and inconsistencies
of adult discipline in the face of badness,” writes Leithauser.
According to Leithauser, the books convey American boyhood with
“satisfying particularity” and “tactile and often
olfactory reality.” They also “capture that stage of
early adolescence when mortification is felt so acutely the word
recalls its etymological sense of death; it’s that awkward
age when you frequently feel you really might die of embarrassment.”
Although marred by the presence of the “great cankering flaw”
of “casual racism” typical of Tarkington’s era,
the books retain their appeal, writes Leithauser, even for adults
like himself who first fell under their spell as children.
All American MHC Lecturer in English Sven Birkerts contributed
the essay “The Compulsory Power of American Dreams”
to Writers on America, a State Department anthology created
to bolster world understanding of American values such as freedom,
diversity, and democracy. Birkerts was one of fifteen contemporary
writers asked to participate in the project, which includes pieces
by Julia Alvarez, Michael Chabon, Billy Collins, Robert Creeley,
Richard Ford, Bharati Mukherjee, and Robert Pinsky. Birkerts describes
his youthful desire to shed “every trace” of the Latvian
heritage that marked him as “other,” and to become the
stereotypical “full-fledged American.” Writes Birkerts,
“It was not a tall order, as dreams go, but I might just
as well have asked to be a Ninja warrior or a gaucho from the
Argentine pampas . . . . We were strangers from a strange land.”
It wasn’t until he encountered other voices of alienation
and difference, first in adolescent novels and, later, in 1960s
counterculture, that Birkerts began to question and set himself
against this American ideal, “a fantasy spun for me by Madison
Avenue.” He turned to foreign novels, finding in them “strangely
kindred atmospheres” that enabled him to rediscover his Latvian
heritage and, eventually, to stake out a professional niche as
“broker” between American literary culture and European
literature. “A different core awareness, a less obsessive
investment in these fantasies of WASP normalcy might have made
my passage easier, less painful,” writes Birkerts. “Alas,
intriguing as these surmises can be, they lead us exactly nowhere.
We are shaped by what we dream, and there we have no control.”
We Rate Mount Holyoke was included on Black Enterprise
magazine’s list of “Fifty Best Colleges for African
Americans,” which was published in its January 2003 issue.
The magazine asked 1,855 African American professionals in higher
education, each employed by one of the 482 institutions in the
study, to rate colleges based on whether they felt the schools
were a good social and educational environment for African American
students. Mount Holyoke was ranked twenty-nine (up from forty-two
in 2001). Atlanta’s Morehouse College topped the list. In
addition, Debra Martin Chase ’77 was named one of Black
Enterprise’s “Top 50 Black Power Brokers in Entertainment”
in that magazine’s December issue. Chase manages her own
Disney-based company, Martin Chase Productions, which has produced
such successful films as The Princess Diaries. Chase is
the producing partner in BrownHouse Productions, singer Whitney
Houston’s production company, and is also recognized for
her long-standing involvement in politics and the arts and for
her recent election as a trustee of Columbia College of Chicago.
Language of Flowers “Peonies,” a poem by Emily
Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities Mary Jo Salter, appeared
in the New Yorker’s December 16 issue. It is dedicated
to Ellen Berek, wife of Peter Berek, MHC professor of English,
who gave Salter the peony bushes that inspired the poem. “Peonies”
will appear in Salter’s new book, Open Shutters, to
be published by Knopf in May 2003.
Peonies
Heart transplants my friend handed me:
four of her own peony bushes
in their fall disguise, the arteries
of truncated, dead wood protruding
from clumps of soil fine-veined with worms.
“Better get them in before the frost.”
And so I did, forgetting them
until their June explosion when
it seemed at once they’d fallen in love,
had grown two dozen pink hearts each.
Extravagance, exaggeration,
each one a girl on her first date,
excess perfume, her dress too ruffled,
the words he spoke to her too sweet—
but he was young; he meant it all.
And when they could not bear the pretty
weight of so much heart, I snipped
their dew-sopped blooms; stuffed them in vases
in every room like tissue boxes
already teary with self-pity.
Kudos The Dickinsons of Amherst (University Press
of New England, 2001), by Jerome Liebling (photographs), MHC English
professor Christopher Benfey, Polly Longsworth, and Barton Levi
St. Armand, was selected as the winner of the 2002 Umhoefer Prize
for Achievement in the Humanities, presented by the Arts and Humanities
Foundation. The photographer and authors each received a medallion
and a cash prize. The foundation announced the award with an advertisement
in the late December double issue of the New Yorker magazine.
Ellis Book Touted by the Boss When asked by Rolling
Stone if he would recommend anything he had read in 2002,
rock musician Bruce Springsteen mentioned Founding Brothers:
The Revolutionary Generation (Knopf, 2000) by MHC history
professor Joseph J. Ellis. The Boss’s seal of approval was
included in an interview in Rolling Stone’s “People
of the Year” issue. Founding Brothers, Ellis’s
seventh book, focuses on John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr,
Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George
Washington, who, together, within a decade, shaped the American
political system we know today. It won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize
for History.
Missing the Boat Rather than helping the nation’s
economy, President Bush’s proposal for a ten-year, $617 billion
tax cut is likely to be harmful in the long run, John O. Fox,
visiting lecturer in complex organizations, told the Springfield
Union-News. In a January 13 interview with staff writer Patrick
Johnson, Fox notes that the tax plan cuts revenue without addressing
government spending, paying no attention to looming problems such
as the Social Security deficit. In short, he says, “The president
really missed the boat.” Fox, the author of If Americans
Really Understood the Income Tax: Uncovering Our Most Expensive
Ignorance, was also interviewed on WFCR, the public radio
station serving western New England.
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