Which BLANK are you?

Paradoxically, perhaps, the more time I spend on Facebook, the less in touch with almost everything I seem.  As Fb-ers know, there are all of these little "tests" that one can take and share ("Which Beatle are you?" "Which Hogwarts teacher are you?" "Which Star Wars Episode II character are you?" "Which Stieg Larsson girl are you?", etc...), none of which I really know enough to care about...well, except the Beatles one, and then I'm either Pete Best or Cynthia Lennon, so who cares?

I wish I had whatever technical knowledge one needs to create my own tests, but then I realize mine would surely be the ones no one else would take:

Which Cotton Mather opus are you? (7 possibilties depending upon how you answer the questions): The Magnalia Christi Americana, The Biblia Americana, The Christian Philosopher, The Wonders of the Invisible World,  Bonifacius, or Manductio as Ministerium

or

Which minor pop performer are you?: Toni Basil, Nick Gilder, Gilbert O'Sullivan, Sanford and Townsend, the 1910 Fruitgum Company

or

Which Montefusco are you?: The father, the mother, the priest son, the daughter married to the non-Italian, the non-Italian...

Well, you get the idea.  For the time being I'll just keep not taking the quizzes and not making up any of my own...

well, except maybe "Which Sinatra album are you?"

Quick book takes

Read very recently:

Michele Monro's biography of her father, The Singer's Singer: The Life and Music of Matt Monro...a great singer whose record sales never equaled his talent, but whose career working with George Martin, while Martin was producing the Beatles, makes for a fascinating case study of cosmic timing, and whose life raise the question of how art can arise from the most unlikely of backgrounds

Mark Twain's The Tragedy of Puddnhead Wilson...a remarkable examination of race in America and a pretty swell mystery, too

The Pox and the Covenant: Mather, Franklin, and the Epidemic that Changed America's Destiny by Tony Williams... the best pro-Cotton-Mather book in recent memory and one that suggests the time is ripe for my next anthology idea: The Touch and Feel of Cotton (Mather)!

The more things change...

It's like the good Reverend Mather could have been living right next door to us:

"The Feast of Christ's Nativity is spent in Reveling, Dicing, Carding, Masking and in all Licentious Liberty,'' thundered the Rev. Cotton Mather of Boston in 1712, "by Mad Mirth, by long Eating, by hard Drinking, by lewd Gaming, by rude Reveling."

Well, that and a little ping pong!

This is why my next anthology idea, "Cotton Mather:...

...The Fabric of Our Lives," for which I've already started collecting material, makes so much sense.!

(It's going to be a hard sell as a follow up to Sinatra: But Buddy I'm a Kind of Poem and the forthcoming Ava Gardner: Touches of Venus, both from Entasis Press, but I gotta try!)

I'd try and use the comic image as the cover, of course.

I already have the one of the comics in which the Reverend appears, but it popped up today on Prof Hacker!

Some Cotton Mather for a Friday Afternoon Undergraduate Research Conference

Yesterday was our annual English Department Undergraduate Research conference (the brainchild and labor of love of our Chaucerian Professor Candace Barrington), and in Chairman's welcome, I offered the following quotation from the good Reverend Mather:

"I would by all possible Insinuations gain this Point upon [the students], that for them to learn all the brave Things in the world, is the bravest Thing in the world. I am not fond of proposing Play to them, as a reward of any diligent Application to learn what is good; lest they should think that Diversion to be a better and nobler thing than Diligence."

"Some Special Points, Relating to the Education of My Children"
February 1705/06
The Diary of Cotton Mather Volume I. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, Co., 1911.

My point to them was simply this: as reward for their hard work (i.e., most of these presentations sprang from papers and projects done in literature, linguistics, and writing classes in the Spring '09 semester) was quite appropriately more work to prepare for this conference. That said, their being there:

1) was indeed a brave thing, and

2) should nevertheless be quite enjoyable.

Their willingness to present their work in front of peers and faculty is a daring act, but, at the same time, they should enjoy the chance to offer their ideas for critique and discussion.

I managed to see two of the six panels, and all six of the presenters did very well and, if their smiles during and after their talks were any indication, seemed to enjoy it!

Call this another SUCCESS, Professor B.!

Happy Birthday, Cotton!

Yes, it's Abraham Lincoln's and Charles Darwin's birthday, but let's not forget Cotton Mather -- born 12 February 1663.

In 1713, he became the first and only American clergyman to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and, in 1721, he was the most prominent and vocal proponent for small pox inoculation -- which he learned from his West Indian slave, Onesimus.

Oh, sure, in 1692 he defended the Salem Witch Trials with his Wonders of the Invisible World, but, hey, you can't be right all the time!

Ten (Nonfiction) Books I Wish I Had Written/Edited

Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh
The Complete Directory of Prime Time Network TV Shows 1946-Present (First Edition, 1979)

Steele Commager
The Odes of Horace: A Critical Study

Philip Furia
The Poets of Tin Pan Alley

Thomas M. Greene
The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity

Pete Hamill
Why Sinatra Matters

Cotton Mather
Bonifacius or Essays to Do Good

Fred J. Nichols
Anthology of Neo-Latin Literature

Alan Schwartz
Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics

Lee Server
Ava Gardner: Love is Nothing

Jan Ziolkowski and Michael Putnam
The Virgilian Tradition: The First 1500 Years