History Boy Speaks
Last week I was perusing the Apple trailers and saw the one for The History Boys, which I sent it to Rueful Red, since it’s about a bunch of history students trying to get places at Oxbridge, and he actually studied (read?) history at Cambridge. I hadn’t heard from him in time to put on my list of movies from the other day, in case he came back that he thought it was a load of bunkum. He did come back with reservations, but I think this scores some points in its favour:
History man (2)
As the inspirational history teacher in Alan Bennett’s hit The History Boys, Richard Griffiths has developed strong views on education.
He believes his generation has failed the “History Boys” of tomorrow. “The 1960s and 1970s generation really messed up the education system,” he told me at the launch of Nigel Havers’s autobiography, Playing with Fire, last week.
“They lowered the standard of teaching and their ideas led to a breakdown in manners and discipline in the classroom.”
And Griffiths has an unlikely solution. “The best education a young boy can have is to fall hopelessly in love. This Government hasn’t got a clue about that: it’s obsessed with b------- like league tables.”
November 1st, 2006 at 1:35 am
Er, I’d have like to have had the time to fall in love. As it was, I read Virgil, Cicero, Ovid, Horace, Plautus, Terence, Shakespeare, Austen, Chaucer, Blake (both William and Robert), Donne, Vaughan, Herbert, Hopkins and for some unaccountable reason Arthur Miller. Oh, and a bunch of historians. That was the diet of the averagely bright working-class grammar school kid in those days.
Then of course my generation decided it couldn’t be arsed to teach its own children these authors - what was the point, they’re all equally “valid” to different people and apart from Austen and Miller they were all DWEMs.
The result has been the triumph of a toxic sentimentality. Because no-one knows what’s good and why it is, they’re defenceless against authors who are modish but crap, possessing a surface plausibility which hides hidden shallows of dishonest sentimentality. I’m talking about the likes of Martin Amis, Hunter S Thompson, Brautigan, the bugger with the seagull, the bloke with the motorbike repair kit, Bellow and Heller. Crikey, don’t forget Eric Segal himself -who reamrkably enough is genuinely interesting when he writes about Plautus.
When my generation’s all dead, I reckon its grandchildren will have a great time rediscovering for themselves that which we neglected to teach their parents. Who knows? It might be on a par with the great rediscovery of ancient learning in the early Renaissance.
End of rant. Carry on everyone. Move along there, Madame.
November 1st, 2006 at 4:15 am
“Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind”: bloke with repair kit.
November 1st, 2006 at 5:37 am
Swoon!
November 1st, 2006 at 7:14 am
There she goes again!
I was thinking of you at the weekend, RC2. My tutor in my first year at Cambridge was a chap called Simon Schama, who’s now rather well-known for his telly programmes (which to people who know about the history weren’t quite as impressive as he thought them). His latest series is about great works of art.
The programme last Friday evening was about Bernini’s statue of the Ecstasy of St Theresa of Avila in S. Maria della Vittoria in Rome. (Incidentally, one wonders the victory in question was. I suppose just the one between the Goths and Garibaldi can’t be counted excessive.) The sculpture is of course absolutely wonderful both technically as a piece of carving and emotionally as a portrayal of what happens when we have a more developed capacity to contemplate the magnitude of God’s love for us.
Not good enough for our Simon, I’m afraid. With his customary sneering and mugging, he came over all excited at the thought of what the stuffy old men who ran the Church in Bernini’s day must have made of a sculpture, the erotic component of which was central and unmistakable. “Golly!” he observed in so many words, “this’ll have got them all worked up!”.
At which point one wanted to tell the 59 year-old Schama it’s time to grow up. Or, failing that, direct him to the very substantial body of Catholic thought into the role and nature of both and Eros and Agape in God’s love for his Church and mankind. Given that these telly-types resent time wasted reading, perhaps the best brief meditation on the subject was by B16 earlier this year, as glossed and amplified so very usefully by RC2. Had he had chance to read that, one hopes he’d have come up with a more substantial an appreciation of the statue, or at least more than the sort of stuff one might expect from a 14 year-old with spots. The Church knows a damn sight more about the erotic - and its purposes - than does our Simon, a thought that doesn’t seem to have struck him.
You’d have thought that after 30-odd years he’d have lost some of his power of irritation: but he hasn’t. An achievement of some sort, I suppose.
November 1st, 2006 at 8:07 am
Thanks for the kind words. He could of course read something even shorter: Ephesians 5, with its teaching of the “great mystery” that marriage –specifically marital intimacy– is the truest image this side of heaven of the relationship between God & the Church or between God and the human soul. I’d like to see “our Simon” deal with that!
November 1st, 2006 at 8:38 am
Well, he wouldn’t have had a telly programme had he read that, he’d not have been able to set up the false opposition on which the programme depended. You could even say that his ignorance was an essential precondition both for him to write the programme in the first place, and for him to have had the nerve to broadcast it as well. I know he’s Jewish and won’t probably know the New Testament all that well, but it’s not too much to ask him to mug up on the basics, is it?
There’ll be a book of the series of course. Wonder whether it’s worth badgering his publishers to include an erratum slip? That would be fun.
November 1st, 2006 at 9:55 am
(Gosh aren’t we scholarly this morning?)
In my Art History (II) class when we did that sculpture, the lovely Dr Gregory had the slide up of the side view that you see from the floor, and was explaining what was going on and everything, then whipped to a detail of her face and quipped “We’ve all seen that expression before, or I hope so” and everyone laughed uproariously. Admittedly, it was a bit of a Bob Hope line (all about the delivery) so you’ll have to take my word for it that it was really quite funny.
There was an In Our Times podcast on Heaven at the beginning of last year, and they kept slipping into historical views of Hell, Dante especially, but others as well. Full of demons and torture. And the poor host kept trying to drag them back to heaven and they kept quoting various poets and authors (Red probably knows the ones) that thought heaven sounded rather boring since all you did was stand around singing, and somebody pointed out that obviously the problem was that people just couldn’t envision perpetual ecstasy. So as for St Theresa and the naughty references, I think they’re rather necessary.
And then there’s the small fact that most commissioned art up to the present modern art-for-tax-dollars was about stuffy old men hanging porn in their living rooms and telling their friends “Oh it’s art, isn’t it. Hey hey!”
November 1st, 2006 at 1:27 pm
Almost all you need to know about heaven comes from a Simpsons episode. See here: http://www.splendoroftruth.com/curtjester/archives/007284.php
November 2nd, 2006 at 2:09 am
That’s the funniest thing ever!! The Protestant version would just feel like an eternity. Put me down for perpetual lunch with the Italians, with summer breaks for cricket.
November 2nd, 2006 at 6:49 am
Bier and bluefish in the surf.
November 2nd, 2006 at 9:13 am
That’s so funny. I almost posted it a couple days ago about something, but decided not to.
November 4th, 2006 at 1:16 am
Hunter S Thompson, Brautigan, the bugger with the seagull, the bloke with the motorbike repair kit, Bellow and Heller.
I never read the seagull thing, my sister told me about it tho, she was shaken.
Heh, Heller and Thompson are pretty good if you’re manic by choice or disposition.