Monday, June 4, 2018


Dear Quote Investigator:  My question concerns a provocative aphorism about memory, schooling, and curriculum.  Here are four example statements that can be grouped together: 
1)  Culture is that which remains with an individual when he has forgotten all he learned.
2)  Culture is what is left when what you have learned at college has been forgotten.
3)  Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.
4)  Education is what is left after you have forgotten all you have learned. 
It would be possible to split this set into two subgroups:  adages for education and adages for culture.  But all the statements conform to the same underlying template, and this leads to a natural collection.  The French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot has been linked to the saying about culture.  The famous physicist Albert Einstein and the prominent psychologist B. F. Skinner have been connected to  sayings about education.  Would you please examine this family of expressions?  Quote Investigator:  This family of quotations has been evolving for more than one hundred years, and instances were already circulating before linkages were established to any of the persons named by the questioner.  Newspapers credited Edouard Herriot with a comparable adage about culture by 1928.  Albert Einstein wrote an essay in 1936 that included a commensurate remark about education, but he credited the words to an unnamed “wit”.  In 1942 E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax employed the remark about education during a speech.  Later the statement was reassigned to the 17th century figure George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax.  Read more at https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/07/forgotten/

THE WAGNER OF GEOLOGY AND THE MODERN MICHENER   The novels of James A. Michener are the direct inspiration that led to the novels of Edward Rutherfurd; and I am happy to confirm that fact.  I was still a teenager when my father, knowing of my desire to write novels and my delight in history, suggested that I should look at James Michener's work.   He had been particularly impressed by The Source and The Covenant.  So far as I know, it was Michener who invented the genre in which he wrote--the highly researched novel, tracing the history of a single location down many centuries, through the stories of fictional families.  It was Chesapeake, above all, that I kept at my side, as an example and an inspiration, during the writing of my own first published novel Sarum.  The reason I chose Chesapeake was because it has for me a special lyrical and echoing quality that seemed the perfect guide for my own attempts to capture something of the huge resonance of the area around Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral.  His treatment of animals, and his little account of the life of the migrating geese also gave me the idea to attempt something of the same kind in my account of the life of a deer in The Forest.  I also tried to follow his even-handed approach to religious controversy in my handling of the Reformation in London and the vexed question of the Catholic and Protestant divide in my two Irish books.  Where I shall never be able to follow Michener, however, is in his descriptions of geology, especially in Centennial.  He could somehow bring to those huge, geological movements, over aeons of time, a drama as if they were great stage sets being moved about in front of us.  He's the Wagner of geology!  So for my part, if people are kind enough to call me 'The Modern Michener', I consider it the greatest honor.  Further references to Michener and his work will be found in my accounts of my life and books.   Link to titles of Edward Rutherfurd's books at http://www.edwardrutherfurd.com/reference/James-A-Michener

Mirin is an essential condiment used in Japanese cuisine.  It is a type of rice wine similar to sake, but with a lower alcohol content and higher sugar content.  The sugar content is a complex carbohydrate that forms naturally during the fermentation process; no sugars are added.  The alcohol content is further lowered when the liquid is heated.  Three types of mirin are common.  The first is hon mirin (literally:  true mirin), which contains about 14% alcohol and is produced by a 40- to 60-day mashing (saccharification) process.  The second is shio mirin, which contains alcohol as low as 1.5% to avoid alcohol tax.  The third is shin mirin (literally: new mirin), or mirin-fu chomiryo (literally: mirin-like seasoning), which contains less than 1% alcohol, yet retains the same flavor.  In the Kansai style of cooking, mirin is briefly boiled before using, to allow some of the alcohol to evaporate, while in the Kantō regional style, the mirin is used untreated.  Kansai-style boiled mirin is called nikiri mirin  (literally:  thoroughly boiled mirin).  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirin

Mikhail Sholokhov’s vast And Quiet Flows the Don is one of the most important, and unfairly overlooked, Russian novels of the 20th century.  Spanning an ambitious timeframe, the book creates a panoramic impression of the Don Cossack as their lives are torn apart by the political forces of war and revolution.  Part of the reason behind the novel’s absence from Western reading lists can be explained by politics.   Sholokhov was a loyal member of the Communist Party and later became a staunch critic of dissident writers in the Soviet Union.  And Quiet Flows the Don deserves a revival.  Often referred to as a 20th century War and Peace, this four volume epic is an important historical reference to the events unfolding in Russia’s Deep South.  While Tolstoy’s masterpiece concerns itself with the gilded ballrooms of the nobility, Sholakhov’s book is a gritty affair, dedicated to life on the margins of society.  Out on the harsh steppes of Russia, life is harsh but exhilarating.  Bradley Jardine  https://www.bookwitty.com/text/and-quiet-flows-the-don-russias-civil-war/59a40e7d50cef7636e638cf0
                                                  
The Quiet Don was published in four parts between 1928 and 1940.  (The earlier sections were formerly better known in English as Quiet Flows The Don, the later ones as The Don Flows Home To The Sea.)  Ever since the end of the 1920s there have been rumours that Sholokhov was not the only, or even the main, author.  These suspicions have recently received fresh support in the form of an unfinished manuscript by a Russian critic, no longer living, which was published in April 2016 in Paris by the YMCA Press under the title Stremya “Tikhovo Dona” (The Current of “The Quiet Don”), with an introductory essay by Alexander Solzhenitsyn which appears here in English for the first time.  Read essay at https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/sholokhov-and-the-riddle-of-the-quiet-don/

And Quiet Flows the Don is a three-part epic 1958 Soviet film directed by Sergei Gerasimov based on the novel of the same title by Mikhail Sholokhov.  The first two parts of the film were released in October 1957 and the final third part in 1958.  In 1958 the film won Crystal Globe award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and the Best Picture Award at the All-Union Film Festival.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oau-Au9GpFs  1:43:56


http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1897  June 4, 2018 

No comments: