Life is going by too fast today. I went to Lincoln Center last night to see a press preview of The Frogs, the new Nathan Lane-Stephen Sondheim musical. This morning I lashed myself to the mast and wrote my Wall Street Journal theater column for Friday in a single sitting. After that I filled out yet another National Council on the Arts-related form, this one for the Senate, then ran around in the noonday sun getting it notarized, making photocopies of various personal documents, and shipping the results off to Washington, D.C., via Federal Express. (The NEA warned me to FedEx everything–their incoming snail mail is irradiated and often delayed as a result, sometimes forever.) Tonight I return to Lincoln Center, this time to see Complicit

Or the blogwaves are theirs; it hasn’t quite all shaken out yet. The point is that bloggers and WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR station, are finding themselves in various forms of collaboration, both more and less formal, this month.

First up, ALN friend and fellow culture blogger Sam Golden Rule Jones has been brought on as the book critic of Ed Lifson’s new Sunday arts show, Hello Beautiful. This is a brilliant move. Sam will focus on Chicago writers; last week he reviewed a book with “strong bones,” Irene Zabytko’s story collection Luba Leaves Home. Sam reflected on the relative paucity of well-known fiction about women coming of age in Chicago–relative to the bevy of Bellows and Farrells writing about young men–and found that Zabytko is “particularly good at showing a young woman’s difficult devotion to both her bonds and her dreams.” Hear Sam’s sparkling review for yourself. He returns next week with a review of Ward Just’s latest, An Unfinished Season. I’ll be listening.

The shoe is on the other foot too this week, as Gretchen Helfrich, who anchors WBEZ’s consistently fascinating interview show Odyssey, will be guest blogging at Preposterous Universe beginning Friday. Gretchen is fiercely smart and knowledgeable and has a sense of humor, so it will be fun to see what happens when Preposterous‘s regular proprietor (oog, try saying that five times fast), physicist Sean Carroll, hands her the reins. Go check it out now, while Sean’s still in the house–only about half of his content is about physics, making fully half of it comprehensible to science know-nothings like me.

In other switcheroo news, I’m going to teach my mother’s fifth-grade class for a day while she edits, blogs, and goes home to watch seven consecutive episodes of “Law and Order.” Somebody should write a book about it.

Not the most ambitious all-time feat of memorization, but:

My lizard, my lively writher,

May your limbs never wither,

May the eyes in your face

Survive the green ice

Of envy’s mean gaze;

May you live out your life

Without hate, without grief,

And your hair ever blaze,

In the sun, in the sun,

When I am undone,

When I am no one.

It’s Theodore Roethke, published in 1964, and I had to look up the punctuation and the title: “Wish for a Young Wife.”

Meanwhile, such bloggers as Maud Newton, Carrie at Tingle Alley, and Will Baude at Crescat Sententia have spun off on a variety of tangents from my original post about the joys of memorizing poetry. Each of these folks takes the topic in their own new direction, with fascinating results all around. It’s all very bloggy and good.

As I mentioned a week or two ago, I’ve been rereading Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time in preparation for writing a review of Michael Barber’s Anthony Powell: A Life, out in September from Duckworth Overlook. At lunch with Maud the other day, I was trying to describe Powell’s technique of alternating Hemingway-like naturalistic dialogue with discursive commentary by Nick Jenkins, the narrator of Dance and Powell’s fictional alter ego. I’ve been posting quotations from Dance as almanac entries of late, but I’ve dogeared so many pages since I started rereading it that I thought it might be fun to go ahead and empty the whole bag.

Forgive me if some of these quotes have already been posted. As an old Powellian, my experience has been that they profit from repetition!

– “Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one’s dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction.” (A Question of Upbringing)

– “I felt unsettled and dissatisfied, though not in the least drunk. On the contrary, my brain seemed to be working all at once with quite unusual clarity. Indeed, I found myself almost deciding to sit down, as soon as I reached my room, and attempt to compose a series of essays on human life and character in the manner of, say, Montaigne, so icily etched in my mind at that moment appeared the actions and nature of those with whom that night I had been spending my time. However, second thoughts convinced me that any such efforts at composition would be inadvisable at such an hour. The first thing to do on reaching home would be to try and achieve some sleep. In the morning, literary matters might be reconsidered.” (A Buyer’s Market)

– “These hinterlands are frequently, even compulsively, crossed at one time or another by almost all who practise the arts, usually in the need to earn a living; but the arts themselves, so it appeared to me as I considered the matter, by their ultimately sensual essence, are, in the long run, inimical to those who pursue power for its own sake. Conversely, the artist who traffics in power does so, if not necessarily disastrously, at least at considerable risk.” (A Buyer’s Market)

– “Prejudice was to be avoided if–as I had idly pictured him–Members were to form the basis of a character in a novel. Alternatively, prejudice might prove the very elemtn through which to capture and pin down unequivocally the otherwise elusive nature of what was of interest, discarding by its selective power the empty, unprofitable shell making up that side of Members untranslatable into terms of art; concentrating his final essence, his position, as it were, in eternity, into the medium of words.” (The Acceptance World)

– “I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some

In case you haven’t noticed, slip over to the right-hand column and feast your eyes on four brand-new Top Five picks. (It would have been five, but I haven’t yet managed to get to a show of Joan Mitchell lithographs on which I have my eye. Be patient.)

Incidentally, our traffic has bumped sharply upward of late, and it shows no signs of sinking back. Don’t rest on your laurels–tell a friend about “About Last Night”! The more, the merrier.

“After the lunch conference I run into my cousin Nell Lovell on the steps of the library–where I go occasionally to read liberal and conservative periodicals. Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upside down: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.”

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (courtesy of Doug Ramsey)

I was excited to find this piece in City Journal extolling the educational benefits of memorizing poetry. “Empower” is a word I mostly tuned out long ago, but this use of it seems to me warranted: “Progressive educators call it ‘drill and kill,’ but learning poetry by heart empowers kids.”

I wish I had more poetry committed to memory, and every now and then I make a plan to learn, for instance, a poem a month. Lately, alas, such enlightened self-improvement plans haven’t had much chance of surviving the onrush of everyday demands. The last poem I half-learned was W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” where the biggest hurdles come early, but the last half is all downhill. I always found Auden’s poem to be one that almost entreats you to learn it. Read it just once through, and chances are good you’ll come away with the commanding cadence of “the day of his death was a dark cold day” echoing in your ears well into tomorrow.

Michael Knox Beran has a fuller account than I do of what is so valuable in learning poetry by heart–an expression, by the way, that he takes somewhat literally. Here he talks about what, exactly, the heart has to do with it:

Some of the ancient methods, [St. Augustine biographer Peter] Brown conceded, strike a modern mind as “servile”: but the paradoxical result of this early servitude was mental liberation. Augustine, Brown wrote, came “to love what he was learning. He had developed, through this education, a phenomenal memory, a tenacious attention to detail, an art of opening the heart, that still moves us as we read his Confessions.” In Virgil’s epic picture of the multiple passions of human life–paternal, filial, pious, romantic, patriotic, heroic–Augustine found a key to understanding his own heart, and in the rhetorical perfection of the Aeneid’s speeches he found a key with which to unlock the hearts of others.

“An art of opening the heart”: this is a nice way of capturing the extra-intellectual aspects of memorizing poetry. To memorize something effectively, you have to expend some interpretive effort on it, and with this effort you wind up in something like a conversation with the text. Grasping at least the literal meaning–not necessarily as easy as you might think, I’ve learned in my teaching–is the most efficient way of mastering a poem, so you can’t help but learn something more than just the words in the process. And the richer the text, the more there is to absorb. It’s sad that such a truly mind-expanding practice has been saddled with a reputation as just the opposite.

Here’s a brief history of my happy career as a memorizer of poetry. I had a teacher in elementary school who made us learn and recite poetry, as well as some famous orations, weekly: “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” “Paul Revere’s Ride,” The Gettysburg Address, and “Casey at the Bat,” to name a few. In high school we memorized speeches from Shakespeare and, most rewardingly of all, stretches of “The Canterbury Tales” in the original Middle English, with audiotapes as aids. During and after college, I memorized some Romantic and Victorian poetry in the process of writing papers (sometimes, of course, memorizing happens by accident in the course of studying something intently) and, later, just for the pleasure of it. The one poem I’m certain I’ll take to my grave is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” one of the most melodious and indelible works in the language. Once you know it, its music leads you inexorably from one line to the next. If you’re looking for something to start with, I highly recommend Coleridge’s heady little fragment. It’s got a wicked hook.

Here’s some more of what Beran has to say, all of it more empirical and less impressionistic than my free-associating:

No less important, memorizing poetry turns on kids’ language capability. It not only teaches them to articulate English words; it heightens their feel for the intricacies and complexities of the English language–an indispensable attainment if they are to go on to speak, write, and read English with ease. Susan Wise Bauer, author of The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had, argues that memorization “builds into children’s minds an ability to use complex English syntax.” The student “who memorizes poetry will internalize” the “rhythmic, beautiful patterns” of the English language. These patterns then become “part of the student’s ‘language store,’ those wells that we all use every day in writing and speaking.” Without memorization, the student’s “language store,” Bauer says, will be limited: memorization stocks “the language store with a whole new set of language patterns.”

It also stocks those bins with a generous supply of the English language’s rich accumulation of words. Research suggests that the size of a child’s vocabulary plays an important part in determining the quality of his language-comprehension skills. “The greater and wider the vocabulary,” says education historian Ravitch, “the greater one’s comprehension of increasingly difficult material.” Bauer points out that if “a student reads a word in a novel, she might or might not remember it for later use. But when she commits it to memory in proper context (as the memorization of lines of poetry requires), she is much more likely to have it at her ‘mental fingertips’ for use in her own speaking and writing.”

Terry also reminds me that “when Nabokov taught in America, he gave his students extra credit on their final exams for disgorging accurately memorized excerpts from the works under discussion,” which I’d heard but forgotten.

I went on Saturday night to hear the North American premiere of Il Sogno, Elvis Costello‘s first full-length orchestral work. It’s a ballet score based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, composed in 2000 for an Italian dance troupe, and the Brooklyn Phiharmonic performed it as the climax of a three-night Costello mini-festival presented by the Lincoln Center Festival.

Though I’m a Costello fan, I confess to having had a small critical chip on my shoulder. But as I reported in this morning’s Washington Post, Il Sogno deserves to be taken seriously:

Not only did Costello write it without assistance, he orchestrated it as well, and though the Brooklyn Philharmonic, conducted by Brad Lubman, was conspicuously underrehearsed, the performance was decent enough to leave no doubt that Costello knows what he’s doing. The scoring isn’t perfect — the middle register is cluttered and thick-sounding at times, and the vibraphone is used to sugary excess — but it’s perfectly competent.

That alone made my jaw drop. Even Duke Ellington relied on professional orchestrators when writing for symphony orchestra, while Paul McCartney hired so many collaborators to help him produce the embarrassingly bloated “Standing Stone” that I described it at the time of its 1997 premiere as “the first as-told-to symphony.” What’s more, “Il Sogno” (“The Dream” in Italian), though it rambles a bit, is more than just a long string of songlike cameos placed end to end: Costello has channeled his thematic material into simple, formal structures that he uses in the disciplined manner of a bona fide classical composer….

It’s not cut-rate Prokofiev or Bernstein, but a lively, ingratiating piece of mainstream modernism, with decorous snippets of symphonic rock and jazz thrown in from time to time to spice things up. If anything, it’s too polite: Costello was clearly on his best musical behavior when he wrote it, and I’m sure he felt he had something to prove to all the “legit” musicians who took it for granted that no mere rock star could bring off so ambitious an undertaking….

Mind you, Costello doesn’t need to write large-scale orchestral works to be taken seriously as an artist. Rock has produced no better songwriter. But if he really wants to set up shop as a part-time classical composer, he’ll need to polish his craft still further. After the unexpected success of “Rhapsody in Blue,” Gershwin toiled for 11 years and ended up with “Porgy and Bess.” Is Costello in it for the long haul? Or will “Il Sogno” turn out to be a fluke? I hope not.

Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: Alex Ross has a fascinatingly different take on Il Sogno. You can tell from reading our pieces side by side that we were, as the saying goes, at the same concert–only we didn’t come to the same conclusions.