The Growlery (May 2003)
Essays by
Michael Gilleland
|
Musical Torture
Boredom
Most Recent Essays
Archives
|
|
The Growlery (May 2003)
|
|
On a recent Sunday afternoon drive I stopped at Loome Antiquarian Booksellers in Stillwater, Minnesota, where my wallet was lightened by more than a few dollars. Among the treasures I picked up were four volumes in the Loeb Classical Library series (volumes 2 and 3 of Demosthenes, 6 and 7 of Lucian), for the reasonable price of eight dollars each (the current list price is $21.50 per volume). Unfortunately I was forced to leave behind Xenophon's Cyropaedia -- I hope it's still there on my next visit.
In a letter to Jacob Batt dated April 12, 1500, Erasmus (who translated Lucian from Greek into Latin) wrote, "I've turned my entire attention to Greek literature, and as soon as I've received money, I'll buy Greek authors first, then clothes." The same week I went to Loome's, I spent ten dollars on ten shirts at a church rummage sale. The symptoms of bibliomania haven't changed much in the five hundred years since Erasmus wrote his letter.
For those not familiar with the series, the Loeb Classical Library is a collection of writings by ancient Greek and Latin authors. The Greek volumes are sturdily bound in green, the Latin ones in red, each with the monogram LCL in gold on the front cover and the series number stamped on the lower back cover near the spine. Inside are the original texts on the left-hand pages, with facing translations on the right-hand pages.
The series gets its name from James Loeb (1867-1933), a philanthropist who also founded the Institute of Musical Art, now part of the Juilliard School.
The Loeb Classical Library is perhaps best known to college students majoring in Greek and Latin (an endangered species nowadays, alas), who consult the translations when they are stumped trying to construe a passage in the original languages. In my school days, recourse to Loebs was a last resort, a shameful admission that you lacked the mental equipment to figure out what the originals meant unaided. You wouldn't want to be apprehended by your Latin teacher in flagrante delicto, furtively reading a Loeb in the library stacks. The older I get, the more shameless I become, and I'm now the proud owner of dozens of the compact green and red volumes, most picked up at second-hand bookstores.
Used books have histories, and it was an easy matter to trace the previous owner of the four Loeb volumes I purchased at Loome's. They're marked "Wadhams Hall/Seminary Library/Ogdensburg, New York." A Catholic institution of higher learning, Wadhams Hall opened its doors in 1924 and closed them in 2002, when Loome must have acquired its library. At its peak in 1966, Wadhams Hall had about 140 students. Ogdensburg is in St. Lawrence County, New York, at the point where the St. Lawrence and Oswegatchie Rivers meet, on the border with Canada, opposite Prescott, Ontario. To judge from the blank circulation records pasted inside the back covers, the volumes I bought were never checked out of the library by anyone.
The following poem by Charles Larcom Graves (1844-1956) in praise of the Loeb Classical Library was printed in his collection of verse New Times and Old Rhymes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1921), pp. 35-36. So far as I can tell, it appears here for the first time on the World Wide Web. A few explanatory notes follow.
THE "FIRST HUNDRED" Of LOEB
(The Loeb Classical Library, founded by a munificent
American millionaire, Mr. James Loeb (prononcez "Lobe"),
and edited by Dr. E. Capps, Mr. T.E. Page and Dr.
W.H.D. Rouse, has now reached its hundredth volume.)
When ways are foul and days are damp,
When agitators rage and ramp,
And Smillie, with the aid of Cramp,
Threatens to rend the globe;
When margarine is scarce, or beef,
And drinks are dear and few and brief,
I find refreshment and relief
And comfort in my Loeb.
Good print, good company, a text
By no vain annotations vexed
Which call from students sore perplexed
The patience of a Job;
And, page by page, a first-rate crib,
Neither too faithful nor too glib --
That, without fulsomeness or fib,
Is what we get in Loeb.
Let scientists on various fronts
Indulge in their atomic stunts,
Or harness to our prams and punts
The puissant radiobe;
Me rather it delights to roam
Across the salt Aegean foam
With old Odysseus, far from home,
And bless the name of Loeb.
To soar with Plato to the heights;
To find in Plutarch's kings and knights
The human touch that more delights
Than crown or regal robe;
To taste the fresh Pierian springs,
To see Catullus scorch his wings
With the fierce flame that sears and stings --
For this I thank thee, Loeb.
I've made no fortune out of beer;
I'm not a plutocrat or peer,
Nor yet a bloated profiteer,
An OM or e'en an OBE;
But if I'd thirty pounds to spare
I'd go and blow them then and there
Upon the Hundred Books that bear
The sign and seal of Loeb.
Robert Smillie (1857-1940) was a labor leader and politician opposed to Britain's involvement in the First World War, while Cramp was the name of a famous Philadelphia family of shipbuilders. In real life, pacifist Smillie would never have asked for aid from arms dealer Cramp.
The word "radiobe" isn't in my dictionary. Is it a hapax legomenon, coined to rhyme with Loeb?
An OM is one who has been awarded the Order of Merit (established by King Edward VII in 1902), and an OBE is an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (established by King George V in 1917) -- in other words, lackeys of the British monarchy.
On December 20, 1989, United States troops invaded Panama in Operation Just Cause. A few days later, on Christmas Eve, Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega sought asylum in the Vatican Embassy in Panama City. He was finally forced out on January 4, after being bombarded by blaring rock and roll music (The Animals, Bobby Fuller, Bruce Springsteen) around the clock for several days.
Taking a cue from that successful Army psychological operation, a mall in Florida, the Port Charlotte Town Center, supposedly pipes country music over its sound system to discourage teenagers from congregating at the mall in large numbers.
This type of musical torture would easily reduce me to submission. Noriega resisted for days, but I would probably surrender within minutes. My personal vision of hell is to spend all eternity in a smoky bar, forced to listen to rock and roll.
A somewhat milder, self-induced form of musical torment is the silly song which you hum continually and just can't get out of your head. The Germans have a special word for this phenomenon -- Ohrwurm (earwig. literally ear worm). An academic at the University of Cincinnati, James Kellaris, has even written a scholarly paper on the subject: "Identifying Properties of Tunes That Get 'Stuck in Your Head': Toward a Theory of Cognitive Itch,” in Susan E. Heckler and Stewart Shapiro, edd., Proceedings of the Society for Consumer Psychology Winter 2001 Conference (Scottsdale, Arizona: American Psychological Society).
The Ohrwurm that afflicted me for several days recently is my high school song. I couldn't remember all the words, and the song wouldn't quit my mind until finally a classmate filled in the gaps in my memory:
Stand up and cheer for Brewer, Cheer for a Brewer victory! Cheer for the good old Witches, The orange and the black for me! Rah, Rah, Rah! Cheer for our alma mater, We're telling you she is swell. So fight, fight, fight for Brewer The school we all love so well!The tune is just as inane as the words, believe me.
I don't have perfect pitch, but I sometimes suspect it's a mixed blessing. A choir singing a cappella sometimes drifts from its starting point, ending up a fraction of a tone lower than it started. Wouldn't this be a torment for someone with perfect pitch to hear? I've met two people in my life so tone-deaf that they sang practically in a monotone. This handicap didn't seem at all to dampen their enthusiasm for singing along with songs on the radio, but it was agony for me to listen to them.
A few years ago Sixty Minutes correspondent Morley Safer labelled St. Paul, Minnesota, one of the "most boring" cities in the United States. In response, my wife temporarily changed our telephone answering machine message to "Hello. You have reached the most boring family in the most boring city in the United States. Leave your message at the tone." She was joking (I think).
It's a reliable rule of thumb, that only boring people are ever bored. The German philosopher Schopenhauer in his essays (translated by T. Bailey Saunders) constantly harps on this theme:
An intellectual man in complete solitude has excellent entertainment in his own thoughts and fancies, while no amount of diversity or social pleasure, theatres, excursions and amusements, can ward off boredom from a dullard. (The Wisdom of Life, chap. 1: Division of the Subject)
For in solitude, where every one is thrown upon his own resources, what a man has in himself comes to light; the fool in fine raiment groans under the burden of his miserable personality, a burden which he can never throw off, whilst the man of talent peoples the waste places with his animating thoughts. (The Wisdom of Life, chap. 2: Personality, or What a Man Is)
It is easy to see why people are so bored; and also why they are sociable, why they like to go about in crowds -- why mankind is so gregarious. It is the monotony of his own nature that makes a man find solitude intolerable. (Counsels and Maxims, Section 9)
Morley Safer labelled the city of St. Paul boring; I'd label him a dullard, incapable of amusing himself.