WARNING: DO NOT PRONOUNCE "PARTHENOPE" THE WAY JOHN BRYANT TELLS YOU TO!!!!!!

I am asking to post a version of this on a Melville site.

In his long review of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition THE WRITINGS OF HERMAN MELVILLE in the June 2019 LEVIATHAN on p. 110 John Bryant instructs us on basic pronunciation:

          "Parthenope (pronounced PAR-thin-OH-pee) is now the newly sanctioned title for what we have in the past referred to as Melville’s Burgundy Club Sketches.” [That is what Bryant says.]

Bryant wants us to say “PAR-thin-OH-pee.” Well, let him say it that way.

But what about the way Melville really might have said it? Or the way Wordsworth said it. Melville knew this poem on Sir Walter Scott’s sailing for Italy:

On the Departure of Sir Walter Scott from Abbotsford, for Naples

By William Wordsworth

A trouble, not of clouds, or weeping rain,

Nor of the setting sun's pathetic light

Engendered, hangs o'er Eildon's triple height:

Spirits of Power, assembled there, complain

For kindred Power departing from their sight;

While Tweed, best pleased in chanting a blithe strain,

Saddens his voice again, and yet again.

Lift up your hearts, ye Mourners! for the might

Of the whole world's good wishes with him goes;

Blessings and prayers in nobler retinue

Than sceptred king or laurelled conqueror knows,

Follow this wondrous Potentate. Be true,

Ye winds of ocean, and the midland sea,

Wafting your Charge to soft Parthenope!

My copy of Melville’s own edition is boxed up to go to the Berkshire Athenaeum so I use an Internet version.

“Wafting your Charge to soft PAR-thin-OH-pee!”

Oh what rhythm!

Why, you wonder, did John Bryant decide he had to instruct everyone how to say Parthenope, and to get it wrong?

Bryant says: "Parthenope (pronounced PAR-thin-OH-pee)."

Try HM:

“Neapolitans, ay, ’tis the soul of the shell

Intoning your  Naples, Parthenope’s  bell.

Is it possible to let all Melville lovers know not to follow the mispronunciation of JOHN BRYANT?

New Publication in SOUTHWESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY July 2019. My copies of the issue just came.

What fun for this old man to publish in a Texas journal after living there in Escobas 1936-1940, in Hebbronville a short while in 1940, and Port Arthur 1957-1959. And the article is about a tragedy in which a Hill cousin played a part.

Ducks--Too confused by the fog to get in a row

Emily Aldridge's Private Dust Jacket for MOBY-DICK--Blurbs from HP & NH!

Today's rye loaves--not pretty, so I was not going to post this

But the bread lover raved about it, so I am putting it out in the world.

Scoff-laws with illegal dog--caught doing unspeakable acts in a tight knot

now you glimpse it now you don't--2 pictures

How often Is Ancestry.com's "Thru-Lines" accurate in "Potential Ancestors"?

Not often, I am finding. Often, people are identified as potential ancestors on the basis of their being on many family trees. The problem is that people copy old family trees in trying to grow their own trees. Example: Samuel Porter Glenn 1746-1813 is put forward as 5 Great Grandfather--DNA "SHARED MATCH" "A KNOWN CONNECTION"! Oh, how many family trees he is in! WHAT COULD BE STRONGER? But I can't see one document showing his connection to the purported son, John Glenn, my 4th Great Grandfather one way and 5th Great Grandfather another way. (We believe in keeping the family bloodlines pure.) So I go to the Glenn family DNA and find that my Glenns are of the Renfrewshire tribe (and the Astronaut-Senator is, too), but Samuel Porter Glenn is of another bunch of Glenns. I go with DNA, in the Glenn site, not with SHARED MATCH in Amazon.com, until I see some better evidence than is there now.

If you go early you have a private beach--looking south, looking north

Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein? More likely, an innocent horse or child.

Proverbs 26:27 KJV - Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: - Bible ...

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+26%3A27&version=KJV

1. Cached
2. Similar

Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him

My Review of Sheldon Russell's A FORGOTTEN EVIL (Cynren Press).

I have just finished reading A FORGOTTEN EVIL. Let me put my response in context. As a farm boy in eastern Oklahoma I read Hamlin Garland's BOY LIFE ON THE PRAIRIE and was astounded that someone could make literature out of something I knew so well. Literature could really be about what I knew as real life. What Sheldon Russell has done in A FORGOTTEN EVIL is far better. More profoundly and more simply than any historical novelist I have ever read, he shows his hero living his life among 19th century flora, fauna, foodstuffs, tools, weapons, physical pleasures and pains, customs, &c. Not once does Russell pause, as so many historical novelists do, to hold up a tiny gem he or she trusts is unfamiliar to us and ask us to marvel at the deep historical research required to uncover such gems and the cleverness to display them casually. A FORGOTTEN EVIL is a different kind of historical novel. I see that Russell is scheduled to talk at the Oklahoma Genealogical Society on "Researching for the Historical Novel" in a few months from now, November 11, 2019. Perhaps that session will be published, but for now I go by the product. Throughout the book, it feels as if the writer has lived himself convincingly into a now lost world. This is a remarkable achievement. I know how hard it is to achieve, because, transcribing hundreds of family letters, studying thousands of documents, I tried hard to depict Herman Melville's life in two long volumes. I think in this book Russell succeeded better than I managed to do. I did not have to master believable 19th century idioms (I could quote them) and I did not myself have to be witty in sayings and in badinage. My cap is off to Russell--for the depth of his research, for his wit and for his restraint. Now, as a Glenn and a Tucker, names notorious from the Glenn-Tucker Lawsuit which resulted in the Bureau of Indian Affairs preserving hundreds of affidavits by my mistreated kinfolks, I have vested interest in the treatment of American Indians. As a Melville scholar I will never forgive the arrogant young George Armstrong Custer for murdering six of John Singleton Mosby's men instead of treating them as prisoners of war. I was uneasy when I saw on the back cover that Custer was a character in the book. I applaud the way Sheridan and Custer are mentioned before one of them is depicted. I applaud the great restraint with which Sand Creek is mentioned and dropped. I honor Russell for his masterful ending at the Washita River. This is a historical novel in which the author achieves his most powerful effects by his exercise of restraint. Think how hard that must have been to do. 

Came on this--A GREAT NEW CHANCE TO TALK ABOUT HOW A NEW DOCUMENT CAN ENLIGHTEN SOMETHING VAST

26 July 2019. Minor point--NCL asked me to review the article by a future biographer of Melville arguing absurdly that Melville wrote REDBURN in 1839. I refused. Now, what I should have done in tracing Gretchko's champion of Jeanne Howes on REDBURN was very simple.

I should have called their attention to brother Tom's start of an 1849 diary as he waited to sail on the Navigator. It's very clear what happened. Ten years almost to the day after Gansevoort saw Herman off to Liverpool Herman was in NYC going aboard the ship to see Tom off for China. Everyone was still grieving for Gansevoort, dead three years while launching Herman's career. Melville ALWAYS when revisiting some place important to him REMEMBERED and reflected on what was the same and what was different.  Look at what he says about seeing the Nelson statue in Liverpool again, after years. In 1849 Melville had other plans, vaguely expressed, but within days of seeing Tom off he announced that he had a project under way, REDBURN. He wrote REDBURN when he did because he had just seen Tom off. Documents documents. (NYPL dated the diary "1860?" but it took only minutes to date it correctly.)

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

New lies about me & Harry H & Harry M: What's a blog for if not to slap down new lies?

Instant Self-Defense from False Reports!! Let’s Hear it for the Blog!!

A couple of days ago I had a Google alert from Ishmailites, a Melville group. John Gretchko, it turned out, had been reviewing and defending Jeanne Howes’s claims that Melville must have written REDBURN OR THE SCHOOLMASTER OF A MORNING which had been published anonymously soon after his return from the Pacific. Jeanne Howes developed an obsession about Melville’s authorship of the poem so strong that it overwhelmed her discovery of the truth. She did the right scholarly thing—she conducted a census of copies, and in one copy discovered that the author was John Carroll. Then she could not rest but continued with increasing anger to criticize anyone who was skeptical of her claims. I was as tactful with her as I could be, but I have seen a letter berating me for my unbelief. Well, people have their obsessions. A biographer of Melville first came to my attention with the claim that Melville wrote REDBURN (HIS book REDBURN) in 1839 or 1840, just after his voyage to Liverpool. What else was there to do when he was just teaching school?

I was astounded to see Gretchko’s claims. This in italics is Gretchko in an Ishmailites post:
Yes, the many obvious coincidences between Herman Melville and the
“Redburn” poem are all solidly documented on known facts of Melville's life
prior to the publication of the poem and on recognized characteristics of
Melville's literary style as noted by Melville scholars. The particulars of
Melville's school teaching career: the associations with his uncle Thomas,
cousin Robert and the farm; the contemporary mood of Berkshire County;
allusions to his Manhattan and Albany background; to his brother
Gansevoort's failed hat business, invalidism, and political
ambitions---together with that clear opportunity and apparent motive aboard
the “United States” for writing the poem; and the date of its
publication---all fit precisely into the proper time frame of Melville's
life. In addition, certain remarkable passages and points of view, the basic
themes, range of imagery, quirks of vocabulary, playful tones, and the
vibrant mix of realism and reverie, clearly present in the “Redburn” poem,
are traits forecasting the unique style of Melville's mature works."
Then I must wonder why Hershel Parker made no reference to this poem at
all in his book about Melville as poet. Even if one believes that the poem
had been written by someone else, it should be mentioned because of all the
similarities. But Parker believes that this work is beneath Melville. Or so
he indicates elsewhere. But if Melville had been writing this poem with a
girl friend in mind, that fact could not jibe with Melville as homosexual.
Parker along with Hayford, Murray, and Vincent and others form that branch
of Melville studies who want to believe that Melville was homosexual---for
which there is no proof. This is probably the real reason that the
“Redburn” poem has received short shrift.

Those two paragraphs are Gretchko.

This is me again, HP.

What Gretchko says here is not true. I know what Hayford thought, I know what Murray told Hayford, and I know what I thought. It is not true that we “want to believe that Melville was homosexual.” And that false statement has nothing to do with the poem’s receiving “short shrift.” I gave that theory long, long, longsuffering shrift in replies to Howes, far more shrift than it deserved. And I did not mention it in MELVILLE: THE MAKING OF THE POET because I was dealing with important poems that Melville was exposed to or actually read.

When I read this I wrote a long eloquent untesty comment on Howes, very scholarly, and a comment on the last accusations and posted it and saw it disappear into the ether of Ishmailites. Well, I can’t recreate such fine spontaneity, I realized, so I waited a day and tried again, and failed again. But now things were worse: Gretchko was claiming that Hayford and I had privately told him something which I knew we had not done.

Here is the new message from Gretchko, again in italics to keep it visible:

Just look at the cover to volume one of Parker's biography.
Melville is made to look as some kind of fruitcake. But I am not completely
put off by Sendak's drawing.
No, I cannot point to anything in Parker's or Hayford's writing
which paints Melville as anything but heterosexual. However, talking to
these two privately revealed their true feelings.


That’s the end of the new comment from Gretchko.

Is there any possibility that my posting something on this blog really will have any effect?

Let me try. It is absolutely false that Hayford, Murray, and I ever said that Melville was a homosexual. I don’t know Howard P. Vincent’s views. I am not being coy. I just did not know him well. And I know Hayford’s opinions and my own so well that I can tell you that neither of us ever “privately revealed” to Gretchko anything that does not fit with our public comments. It is not true that Hayford, Murray, and I thought or said that Melville was a homosexual.

In my second lost post I went into some detail about Melville’s slow awareness of homoerotic components in his early enthusiasm for Hawthorne. See CLAREL for Melville’s great good humor in portraying Clarel’s feelings with full understanding of their eroticism. He knew about buggery on ships and he knew, at least after the fact, about the erotic component of his admiration for Hawthorne. Erotic arousal, we should recognize, is part of every intense compositional process. See Albert Rothenberg’s THE EMERGING GODDESS! He’s perfect. In my biography I described what happened as a consequence of Melville’s not understanding his own arousal as he finished the essay on MOSSES. This is a far cry from saying that Melville was a homosexual. I was very clear and very funny about this scene only to have professional gay critics declare that it was too bad I did not understand what I was describing. Duh!

I thought when Wineapple, Brodhead, Delbanco, and Schultz steamrolled over me I could pick myself up and not be treated this badly ever again! Alas, no. But, here’s my blog at work!

NY TIMES ONLINE BRIEFING: "News quiz: Did you follow the headlines this week? Test yourself."

No, I did not follow them so there is no point testing me. I am back in denial.

At 9 this morning

Why I am still here at 10 am--Egg Bread, some with figs, loaf with leftover dough

Grammerly should keep Jill Lapore from using "ham-handed" of a Jew and someone named Hershel

Really tone deaf if not ham handed! And knee-jerk sexist rather than reading what I say about the Melville women all through the volumes. Deaf to irony.

Leaden-Eared Jill Lapore calls me Ham-Handed

So in the NEW YORKER Jill Lapore, impervious to irony, calls me Ham-Handed. I am the only one who ever treated the Melville women with love and respect!
What can I say? When you are tone-deaf and rely on Grammerly to "take the guesswork out of great writing" . . . .

And does she assume that because my name is Hershel . . . .

Dragonfly

One Rider Thrown Off Near the Rock

End of 2011--Wretched Cat takes over another chair

How can you miss such a wretched beast?

2 Photos of Icebergs at Sunset

Part of string of 500 people all going the wrong way. Why am I always the only one going the right way?

1979 Fannie Farmer

For a small woman what does it take to get a Blood Alcohol level of 0.24? ASK SLO Tribune reporters.

• THIS IS THE FIRST CHART I SAW--
• SOMEONE LET THE CAL POLY STUDENT LEAVE A HOUSE OR BAR OR WHATEVER AND GET IN HER CAR. IS THERE ANY PUNISHMENT FOR LETTING A FRIEND DRIVE HOME DRUNK, REALLY DRUNK?
• A BAC in the range of .37 to .40 or higher can cause death.
• Most people begin to feel relaxed, sociable and talkative when BAC reaches 0.04.
• Judgment, attention and control are somewhat impaired at 0.05, and the ability to drive safely begins to be limited.
• At 0.25 to 0.30, drinkers have near total loss of motor functions, little response to stimuli and may lose consciousness or be unable to stand or walk.
• A 120-pound woman would have to consume seven drinks in an hour to reach a BAC of 0.30. The same woman would be at 0.35 with 10 drinks in an hour. Two drinks in an hour would bring her BAC to 0.08, the legal limit for driving.

Back to Why John ("PAR-thin-OH-pee") Bryant has always been so Hostile to Me

It goes back--I can probably find the day if I look--in the late 1980s or so when John Bryant asked me to write a letter of recommendation for him. He was applying for money from some Pennsylvania fund. I read the proposal and did not think it merited my support, so I told him I could not in good conscience recommend it. He sputtered and finally said that I did not know how to get along in the world. In this academic world, I rubbed his back and he rubbed my back.
Well, I was not that kind of smart get-along-by-going-along guy.

THE SAN LUIS OBISPO TRIBUNE: SEXIST, CLASSIST (I.E., ELITIST), AGE-IST, AND RACIST.

So the female Cal Poly student was a tad over the limit with booze. 0.7 gets a finger waved through your boozy breath. 0.8 gets you arrested.
0.24 is what the exemplary near-graduate tested.
Mr. Au is dead.
Now, has the Tribune sent out its reporter-bunnies to locate the place the student was coming from at 2:30 am before she got on the highway going the wrong way. Who were the friendly folks who watched her slugging more liquor than a mighty man could drink? The reporter-ettes were so eager to get to the family of Ms Scalone. Have they not gone looking for the drinking partners, or was the driver from Hell drinking alone till 2:25 am?
I think an investigation of the drinking practices of Cal Poly students is a great assignment for the goody-bunny got-the-scoop reporters. Sordid. Rough. Real. True.

TOXICOLOGY REPORT ON CAL POLY STUDENT WHO KILLED Mr. AU ON JUNE 12

The female student days from graduation killed Mr. Au, who was driving to work. Her blood alcohol level was 0.24. That's THREE TIMES the limit.
The SLO Tribune posted a glowing account of her as a woman who wanted world peace.
The SLO Tribune in the treatment of the tragic murder of Mr. Au was

SEXIST, CLASSIST (I.E., ELITIST), AGE-IST, AND RACIST.

The reporters who glorified Nicole Scalone  should be fired.

Morro Rock in its 7:45 am Glory

Still amazed that no one stopped John Bryant from Self-Destructing in the June LEVIATHAN

Any academic dope

Mispronounces Penelope.

It takes a dope like Johnny B.

To mispronounce Parthenope.

"SOWING CONFUSION," I WROTE ABOUT JOHN BRYANT IN 1994, my words in my diary imperfectly recalling the King James Version:

Proverbs 6:14 - Frowardness [is] in his heart, he deviseth mischief continually; he soweth discord.

So in his long review of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition THE WRITINGS OF HERMAN MELVILLE on p. 110 John Bryant instructs us on basic pronunciation:

          "Parthenope (pronounced PAR-thin-OH-pee) is now the newly sanctioned title for what we have in the past referred to as Melville’s Burgundy Club Sketches.” [That is what Bryant says.]

THIS IS SOWING CONFUSION, SOWING DISCORD, ON A MASSIVE SCALE. HOW LONG BEFORE READERS OF LEVIATHAN CATCH ON?

Bryant in his classist, elitist way loves to introduce me by saying, "Hershel hails from Oklahoma." "Hails from" is priceless snobbery.  John fawns over his academic friends from Columbia, Harvard, and Yale. What do they think of him, really? We know what the great old scholars like Sealts and Hayford thought of him. And see my various posts about ORNERY PEOPLE, my retirement project on who the Okies really were.

Any academic dope

Mispronounces Penelope.

It takes a dope like Johnny B.

To mispronounce Parthenope.

Never met a Choctaw Okie

Ever called it "PAR thin OH pee."

Some items on "John Bryant" a.k.a. Chowderhead in my 1990 Diary and the scary (wrong) instruction on how to say Parthenope

John Bryant's review essay, "Editing Melville in Manuscript" reveals an astonishing lack of control, and I have not said a word  about his ideas on textual editing.

Some items from my1990 diary.

2 March 1990 [I] discovered a Melville letter at NYPL in Duyckinck Collection folder of undated letters from unidentified correspondents. [This is the letter refusing to review a book by D.D.]

3 March Called Harry [Hayford] about [new] letter

3 March Called [John] Bryant [because he is in charge of EXTRACTS, the place to put new discoveries]. ADE session on Editing Melville. Told him Melville Research is where the action is. S[ai]d I wdn’t be on [a panel] with crazies like mmmmmm mmmmm or xxx or xxxxxxx. Harry is furious at him [Bryant].

20 March [Harry] talked also of J Bryant, toward whom he is . . . contemptuous . . . .

28 March--Talked to Harry--errors in M’s Reading--He’s to call Young Bryant & say “hold horses”-- Warburton not source for Koran on wine/Arnaut

30 April--call from Bryant--idiotically pushing claim that Wm Dodd = DD [author of the book EAD asked HM to review --the letter I found at NYPL]--idiotic--wants to rewrite my introduction to letter. S[ai]d no

15 October--nasty letter from young Bryant about New Hist[oricism] program.

23 October-- Long call from Harry about Mrs B in the poem & other matters--told him about Young Bryant’s censoring me

[This in these square brackets is not diary but a letter from me a few years later, 2000] I tell someone: “I had always assumed xxxxx was going to do the book--but life is so short that if Leviathan will print you swiftly and if you are content with John Bryant’s handling, I would go with Leviathan. I always find that John is the sort of editor who “fiddles” and makes things worse--he made me and Brian say something we did not say--and [Robert] Milder slammed us in print for saying it, when we had not said it. So I am wary of him as editor.”] [He never once gave good advice but always wanted to fiddle, and did so every time if you did not make yourself very clear and get some power behind you, as when I got Gail Coffler to keep him from messing up my memorial for Walter Bezanson, one of the best things I ever wrote. Bryant had a compulsion to put himself into everything, to make himself somehow the center, the star or chief mourner, and always he would mess up anything he touched, as when he set Brian Higgins and me up for ridicule.]

30 December [Chicago] Into the Lions’ Den--Wai-chee & audience contemptuous of HH & me. Party line of Lauter about CEAA pristine texts--“Ethan Brand” still about HM [though NH wrote it long before HM was a writer]. HH: Bullshit: “not on same wave length.” Hostility to my Auguste Davezac plea. Seelye attacking me--“Discredit the Expansionist!” (without knowing him). Only Kenneth Dauber seeing that it was an ethical issue I raised. Why is he an asst prof still? Mediated Gretchko and Young Bryant. Lunch with Walt & Gail HH Lynn Mary K Gretchko Bryant, Sandberg. [THEN] Alone on Wall St. on Sunday. [Brian was sick.] In snow took 2 1/2 mile walk--Water Tower Place--. . . Old Town up Wells--far up Clark past Fullerton to Barry . . . 14 degrees--That was the time to take a cab bk--Afraid of frostbite on face

[This was the meeting where Bob Wallace described  the “petulant” red-bearded stranger who kept shouting from the doorway, THE FACTS DON’T MATTER! THE FACTS DON’T MATTER! and were I remember the prophet as the Satanic red-bearded stranger. This was the meeting after which I never went to the transformed Bryant-Wai-chee Melville Society in the United States. The facts really had stopped mattering.]

I am repeating this because it is so shocking.

I am stunned that the June 2019 LEVIATHAN would print Bryant saying this:  "Parthenope (pronounced PAR-thin-OH-pee) is now the newly sanctioned title for what we have in the past referred to as Melville’s Burgundy Club Sketches.” Did no one at LEVIATHAN have the power to help him control himself?

You can ask any dope
How to say Penelope,

But it takes a Johnny B.

To Mispronounce Parthenope.

This would be merely amusing if in what passes as the final review of THE WRITINGS OF HERMAN MELVILLE John Bryant in LEVIATHAN had not gotten so very much wrong. At least we won't be around if Melvilleans centuries hence go about saying PAR-thin-OH pee! PAR-thin-OH pee! PAR-thin-OH pee! PAR-thin-OH pee!

Many little birds in these 2 pictures. How many can you see? They are tiny.

Knowing him as Chowderhead for 3 Decades is one thing but his new review is downright scary.

In this review in Leviathan June 2019 John Bryant says it is "fair enough" to say I merely "surmise" the existence of two lost Melville books, there being no hard evidence such as "rejection slips"---Yet we have Charles Scribner's letter rejecting POEMS. And for the 1853 volume we have Herman Melville's letter to the Harpers on 24 November 1853 laying out what he has in hand: "In addition to the work which I took to New York last Spring, but which I was prevented from printing at that time; I have now in hand, and pretty well on towards completion, another book . . . ." Something is seriously askew in approving anyone's saying I merely surmised THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS.

Something is wrong. Someone should have tried to talk to him. I always refused to be on the editorial board because I knew he would not listen to reason. I will post something else about his "fiddling" with contributions (as when he drove Merton Sealts to slam down the phone after withdrawing his paper).

So in his review of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition THE WRITINGS OF HERMAN MELVILLE on p. 110 John Bryant instructs us on basic pronunciation:

          "Parthenope (pronounced PAR-thin-OH-pee) is now the newly sanctioned title for what we have in the past referred to as Melville’s Burgundy Club Sketches.” [That is what Bryant says.]

OK, not “Par then OPE” but “PAR-thin-OH-pee.” We get it. Except that Bryant is wrong.

                                 Be true,

Ye winds of ocean, and the midland sea,

Wafting your Charge to soft Parthenope!

That’s what Wordsworth wrote about Scott’s seeking health in Naples.

You can ask any dope
How to say Penelope,

But it takes a Johnny B

To Mispronounce Parthenope.

This would be merely amusing if in what passes as the final review of THE WRITINGS OF HERMAN MELVILLE John Bryant in LEVIATHAN had not gotten so very much wrong. We won't be around if Melvilleans centuries hence go about saying PAR-thin-OH pee PAR-thin-OH pee PAR-thin-OH pee PAR-thin-OH pee!