This week I’ve been teaching from two Penguin Books editions, Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799) and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920). I’ve read and used a lot of Penguin’s books over the years. One of my college roommates had shelves and shelves of Penguin paperbacks — at that time the spines were a light green — because he looked the look of them but even more the feel of them in his hands. Newer Penguins have a different link, but they still have the same feel.

All that may be about to change.

Earlier this week, Penguin’s CEO John Makinson gave a demonstration in London of some prototype e-books that Penguin is preparing for the iPad. Have a look at one of the futures of the book:

Maybe I’ll be holding an iPad the next time I teach Brown or Wharton!

I still love my MacBook, even though it’s developed a case of screen rot.

I don’t regret switching to Mac as my primary computing platform, but let’s face it, Macs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Macs hardware is elegant, but in recent years Macs have been plagued by significant manufacturing flaws. Probably more than we’ve heard about. The woes of the 27″ iMac — the flagship of the iMac line — have been well documented. I’ve just discovered, however, that those machines aren’t the only Macs with yellow screen problems.

I recently noticed what looked like a yellow splotch on the left side of the bottom third of my MacBook’s screen. The splotch has grown and expanded sideways. So I thought I’d contact FAS Computing support to see if it is something that warrants warranty service. It apparently does. What I’m told is that”all Apple computers of recent origin have problems with the quality of their display hardware.” Moreover, I should expect that the screen “will indeed continue to darken and spread as the phosphorous layer in there deteriorates — it’s a manufacturing defect. The only way to resolve this is having the unit replaced by warranty.”

So that’s what we’re going to do. Luckily, our tech support will copy my hard drive to a loaner unit so I won’t be without a Mac while we wait for the repair, which apparently can take anywhere from a week to two months.

Ironically, the problem has occurred just as I was starting to convince my wife to make the switch herself. I guess we’ll be holding off on that.

A young Edith Wharton

This morning I was giving a lecture in my Writing New York class on Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920), and I was framing it with a discussion of the genre of the novel of manners. We adopt an expansive idea of the genre in the course, including not only predictable examples such as Henry James’s Washington Square (1880) and Wharton’s novel, but also Stephen Crane’s Maggie and Abraham Cahan’s Yekl (1896), with nods back to the plays we read earlier in the term: Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787), Benjamin Baker’s A Glance at New York (1848), and Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion (1848).

I was explaining how the category of “manners” means more than simply “good manners” and “good taste,” that it signifies the mores, customs, and social codes that bind a group together. “Manners” are therefore a system of social regulation designed to designate who the insiders are and who the outsiders are — and often the inculcation of “good manners” and “good taste” are part of the process of teaching people to become insiders.

I’m invoking Lionel Trilling and Pierre Bourdieu, likening the novel of manners to Shakespearean comedy and to detective fiction — and basically I’m on a roll.

And then I hear the crinkling of paper. Out of the corner of my eye I notice a young woman in one of the front rows pulling her breakfast out of a paper bag. Loudly. And for quite a while.

The noise stops, but it’s soon replaced by another: nose-blowing. Loud nose-blowing. I slow down; the nose-blowing continues, and there are some snickers from the audience. I ask a question so that there is silence. Except for the silence. And a few more snickers.

I continue. Eventually the nose-blowing stops.

A little later, I give a sidelong glance in the young woman’s direction. She is surveying something on her Blackberry.

I’m generally not bothered by students who aren’t giving me their full attention, though (as any lecturer will tell you) I can see basically everything that’s going on out there. But there are limits.

Manners.

If only she’d been listening.

I watch professional sports for the narratives they produce. In the pilot for the series Friday Night Lights, which is about big-time football in a small Texas town, the coach’s daughter, who is reading Moby-Dick in her English class, tells her father: “Moby-Dick is actually the perfect metaphor for this town. The cold black sea representing the season in all its uncertainties. The magical white whale is the Holy Grail.” Her dad gets the reference and realizes that if she’s right, then he’s Ahab.

I knew I would like the show once I heard those lines, not only because I love Moby-Dick, but also because I agree with Julie’s suggestion. A sports season is a narrative, sometimes dull, sometimes compelling, sometimes even sublime. The same is true for a single game or contest. And what I call is “the athletic sublime” is a climactic narrative moment when a player lives up to and exceeds all expectations.

Take today’s Olympic Gold Medal game, for example. If you’d been watching a film that dramatized its events, you’d have called it unbelievable, even corny. Team Canada, under tremendous pressure to win the gold medal at an Olympics held on Canadian soil, had lost to Team USA earlier in the tournament, forcing them to play an extra game in order to make the quarterfinals. They’d almost blown a 3-0 lead to Slovakia in the final seconds of its semifinal match, and tonight they did blow a 2-0 lead, as Zach Parise, the most dynamic U.S. player throughout the tournament, scored the equalizer with some 20 seconds left and the US goalie pulled for an extra skater.

I was due at an English Department event earlier in the evening, but stayed at home watching until the end of regulation. But, as I was walking along 14th Street, I noticed the game on a widescreen television in a nail salon and paused to watch. I’d told our babysitter that the four-on-four format for the overtime would favor Canada, which had some highly skilled skaters on its roster, most notably Sidney Crosby, the so-called “Next One,” the heir apparent to “the Great One,” Wayne Gretzky.

Crosby was mostly a non-factor during the tournament, perhaps due to the fact that Team Canada was built for an old-fashioned Canadian game that emphasized fierceness over than flair: this year, the tournament was being played on NHL-sized rinks which are smaller than the international rinks usually used in the Olympics. I always love watching the Olympic tournament precisely because the larger rinks bring out the artistry of the skilled player, with fleet passing and deft skating trumping crunching bodychecks. Not so this year, but as a result Crosby didn’t seem to find a way to shine.

Until, with seven minutes gone in the overtime, Crosby finds the puck on his stick after a quick cycle and pass from Jarome Iginla. Canada, as I suspected, had been dominating the overtime. A flash of Crosby’s stick, and the puck was behind goalie Ryan Miller. Canada had its goal. Miller would be named the tournament MVP, but it was Crosby who turned out to be larger-than-life.

The athletic sublime.

I would have preferred a U.S. win, which would have made Parise’s goal one of the most significant moments in the history of U.S. hockey, maybe even in U.S. international athletics.

But it’s a better story this way.

[Photo: Harry How/Getty Images from the account of the game posted at espn.com]

*

“That’s a real sled,” a mom tells her son.

*

They’re talking about the vintage Flexible Flyer that I’m carrying home, after a morning of sledding on a gentle hill in Stuy town with my younger son. That’s a picture of it on the right. It’s more than forty years old and served me well in Riverside Park, where my sister and I used to hurtle down the double hill below street level at 116th Street (what we used to call “down in the park”). It’s a model Model F052, produced at 400 Lake Road, Medina Ohio, 44256,according to the markings on the bottom side of the slats. You can see workers posing in front of the Medina plant in 1969 in this recent article from the Medina Gazette. (The sled on the far left looks like mine.) Apparently, the sleds were produced there from 1969-1973; 1969 would have been the year that my parents bought the sled.

As its model number would suggest, it is 52 inches long; it has a chrome front bumper and steel runners, painted red. It’s still in great shape after all these years, though the yellow nylon cord is new this year. The old white rope that my dad had put on broke this year while my wife was towing one of the boys on this year’s Snow Day #1 (much to her chagrin).

The F052 was actually my second sled. My sister inherited our original 41J, which as its name would suggest is 41 inches long. It’s very similar in design to the  F052, though the wooden side rails are painted red. This sled was manufactured by the S. L. Allen Company in Philadelphia, PA.

It was Allen who originally designed the Flexible Flyer in the 1880s. Allen’s company was a manufacturer of framing equipment and garden equipment, which was a seasonal business. Allen began designing and manufacturing sleds in order to provide work for the employees of his company during the winter when sales of farming equipment was slow.

According to this history of the “Flexible Flyer” at eHow.com, the sled design was patented on February 14, 1889. What made it “flexible” was the bendable spot at the front of the sled that allowed the rider to turn the sled by flexing the runners. Below is an ad for sleds that appeared in comic books in the early 1960s:

Walking home with the Flexible Flyer under my arm, I realized that it and its sibling are among my most prized possessions. It makes me happy to see my sons riding them down a snowy hill. I’m hoping that one day they’ll be bring grandchildren the same kind of joy. They’re certainly sturdy enough.

And, while I’m there, I’m might get myself one of these, as well:

At each of the post-film discussions at which I’ve been present, when the talk turns to a discussion of which film should be named Best Picture, the two films that inevitably become the subject of discussion are James Cameron’s Avatar and (his ex-wife) Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. I’ve seen the former twice (in IMAX); the latter is on the docket for a home viewing this weekend. Almost all of the students think that The Hurt Locker should win. They find it “powerful,” “groundbreaking,” and “realistic”; they think it “speaks” to their generation. They think it’s different from other war movies, which they see as action films that romanticize war.

The Hurt Locker may be that good. I’ll write about it once I’ve seen it. But the students’ comments make me wonder what war films they’ve actually seen. At least since Apocalypse Now (1979) almost thirty years ago, American war films have tended to be brooding meditations on the futility of war. Even films that overlay a more archetypal storyline — for example, Oliver Stone’s Platoon — or make use of a more conventional narrative structure — for example, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan — have made it a point to dramatize the ugly violence of war in visceral terms that assault the audience. So I’m wondering if I will find The Hurt Locker any more “gripping” or “realistic” than, say, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001).

Is the The Hurt Locker a breakthrough film in the war film genre? Or is it simply a well-made film that forces today’s college-age kids to come to terms with a war that they’ve taken for granted and about which they have worried less than the Vietnam generation did about its war?

Today, toward the end of a section meeting that I was visiting for the Writing New York course, I had a thought: What would Henry James’s Washington Square look like as seen through the lens of trauma studies? Dr. Sloper might emerge as a victim of both personal and cultural trauma. The personal trauma is the death of his wife in childbirth, which leaves him a cold, detached man who erects barriers of irony to protect himself from the world around him and produces, in his daughter Catherine, another traumatized subject. The cultural trauma might be the waves of immigration into the lower parts of Manhattan that push men like Dr. Sloper further and further uptown. Not to mention the history of the Square itself, with its hanging tree and its paupers’ graves.

I think I’ll suggest this to Bryan Waterman as a way of approaching James’s novel when we write about it for the cultural history of New York City on which we are collaborating.

[The picture above shows NYU's neo-gothic Main Building on the west side of the square ca. 1850. It was demolished in 1894. For a Washington Square timeline, see this post over at PWHNY.]

We’ll start tomorrow with Joel Barlow’s sunny, pastoral, mock-epic “The Hasty Pudding,” before turning to his dark final poem, “Advice to a Raven in Russia,” which describes the horrific scene that is left after one of Napoleon’s battles in Russia. From there, the graveyard school of poetry: Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard” and its American counterpart, Philip Freneau’s “The Indian Burying Ground.”

Then on to Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” (the title of which means “meditation on death”), which I will present as an Americanization of Wordsworth’s poetics, followed by a consideration of Poe’s “Raven” as the example of a Coleridgean approach to poetry. A few words about Poe’s style, which I will defend against Harold Bloom’s scathing criticisms, and then a brief consideration of “William Wilson” to set up the idea of the Doppelganger, which might help the students read Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly over the weekend.

And then — if I’ve timed everything correctly — a bit of fun stuff via video.  Here’s a hint:

The Metropolitan Opera announced the schedule for its 2010-2011 season today. It’s good timing for me, because I’m currently putting together the syllabus for next January’s J-term course on “New York and Modernity,” and I’d like to include a series of co-curricular trips to the opera, the symphony, and the theater.

I’m thinking that a good choice might be the production of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West, which I’ve never managed to see live in more than a quarter-century of opera-going. The production marks the 100th anniversary of the opera’s premiere at the Met and stars two wonderful singers, Deborah Voigt and Marcello Giordani. If we can manage to get tickets (which may be tough, since the only performance that would work is the Saturday matinee), I can pair it with the first chapter of Alex Ross’s marvelous study of twentieth-century classical music The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which includes a brief account of the genesis of the opera in a trip that Puccini made to the U.S. in 1907. Most of that chapter is about Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, and guess what — the New York Philharmonic is featuring some Mahler in the first week of January. Now if only there were an O’Neill play next January …

[Click here to read the press release about the Met's new season. And click here to read the New York Times's take on the season (written by one of my college classmates).]