Spoken Word
In Silence, Sounding Out the Words
It’s Monday night of the last week in October, and I am at a poetry reading. It is taking place in the Barker Center’s Thompson Room. Henri Cole is reciting. Full disclosure: I don’t know much about poetry. I read poems, often, for their beauty, and for the truth found therein—for, after all, as John Keats wrote, “that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” In terms of analysis, however, I admit incompetence. Connotation often eludes me. Sometimes even denotation, too.
When I eased open the paned glass door of the Thompson Room to attend my first reading last February, I felt at once like an intruder. Tweed and skinny jeans alternated on the plush quilted seats; tenured professors and hipster students interspersed, if not intermingling. The introduction was punctured by chuckles at jokes I didn’t understand. Every so often the couple in front of me exchanged knowing smirks at allusions whose meanings I also probably missed.
What Our Miscommunications Tell Us
A moment’s mishearing made the national news last week—prompted by, of all things, the announcement of National Book Award finalists. The murmurs began when six novels, rather than the usual five, were announced for the Young People’s category. It turned out that there had been a “miscommunication,” according to the award’s sponsor, the National Book Foundation. Instead of Franny Billingsley’s “Chime,” the book the judges had intended to include, someone had added Lauren Myracle’s “Shine” accidentally.
“For security reasons, we do everything by phone,” explained Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the National Book Foundation. “We don’t write things down when [the judges] transmit the titles to our staff. And someone wrote it down wrong.”
The Inspirational, the Intimate, and the Inane
Shortly after hearing of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s untimely death last week, I began to see the same YouTube link posted over and over again on email lists and Facebook feeds: the video of Jobs’s 2005 Stanford University commencement address.
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon,” Jobs said then, “is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.” Given such a subject, it is hardly surprising that this speech is what we have turned to in making sense of a life.
'Ulysses' Speaks: Bloomsday and Oral Poetry
Bloomsday is an odd sort of holiday. Every June 16, people around the world gather to commemorate the single day—June 16, 1904—described in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” The celebrations begin in Dublin, where participants trace the wanderings of the novel’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom, through the city. They continue with pub crawls in Buenos Aires, dramatic reenactments in New Zealand, and a sweeping potpourri of festivities in New York: Bloomsday on Broadway, Radio Bloomsday, and A Rap Tribute to James Joyce.
Such gleeful celebration strikes me as peculiar for a book whose goal was, according to Joyce, “to keep the critics busy for 300 years.” Dense, intricate, and populated with obscure and wide-ranging references, the nearly 1,000-page tome is hardly Harry Potter.
Speeches, Soundbites, and Shopping Week
Nowhere are the rules of the American marketplace more relevant to us Harvard students than in that strange scholasticized capitalism we call shopping period. Gregory Mankiw emerges from his lair to woo freshmen, never to be seen again (except, perhaps, for Parents’ Weekend); Paul Farmer makes a layover between Haiti and Rwanda, advertising global health to would-be do-gooders; other professors use every skill of rhetoric and eloquence at their disposal to win a coveted spot on our Study Cards.
This is not universally true, of course, and for those with stricter requirements or higher self-assurance shopping period is only a name. Yet it is striking how much emphasis many of us place on it. The oratorical power of a professor, we believe, tell us much more than a mere syllabus or coursepack could. This is what compels us to go to class even when it’s not technically necessary—or, conversely, never attend lecture even when we should. They are why Michael Sandel’s “Justice” continues to draw a thousand students, even though all his lectures are taped and he has written a full-length book hardly different from his class.