A correspondent said she was reading a “virago book.” I said. “Is it by, or about, one?” It turns out Virago is a distinguished publishing house. As if on cue, this informative review of Lennie Goodings’s memoir appears.
Virago started up in London in 1973, with a mission to “shake the canon out of its primness and timidity, to shatter the silences around women’s lives.”
Goodings, a young Canadian, teamed with founder Carmen Callil in 1977, and found publishing to be “a fusty little industry, with men her own age braying at her, demanding coffee.”
They published Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Adrienne Rich, Grace Paley, Maya Angelou, Stevie Smith. Callil is credited with resurfacing the work of Vera Brittain, Willa Cather, Elizabeth Taylor, Rebecca West, and many others.
Anthony Burgess piggishly harrumphed in earshot of Virago about “chauvinist sows.”
The reviewer’s summation has supportive nuance:
… This deeply modest book… contains its own critique and argues against its own circumspection, deploring the feminine habits of “modesty, likability and anxiety.”
(Parul Sehgal, “When Publishing Women Was a Radical Act: A British Editor Looks Back,” NYTimes, 12-15-20)
(c) 2020 JMN
EthicalDative 
Language and Music
“It takes a lifetime to learn shakuhachi. The earlier you start, the longer it takes.”
(Japanese saying quoted by Zac Zinger on Adam Neely’s podcast. The shakuhachi is a bamboo flute.)
I learned Spanish because I had to. From puberty forward it kept calling and I spent thousands of hours at it. It was a dementedly persistent grappling for the mechanics and spirit of the language inflamed by lust to inhabit a different culture from mine.
When it came to teaching Spanish, however, I lacked the requisite charisma and phlogiston. The prescribed pedagogy said to avoid the stultification inflicted by conjugation and descriptive grammar. Apply instead dynamic improvisation, role playing, spontaneous invention of phrase-eliciting scenarios, fomentation of rich classroom interactions, targeted motivational cultural contextualization, and other strategies conducive to inciting a desire to acquire practical fluency within the confines of a compressed timeframe and mandated curriculum of core competencies exclusive of the foreign language elective.
A comparable evasiveness infiltrates guitar manuals and instructional videos; they, too, try to shorten the path. They dwell on finger patterns, eliding the complex business of grasping the musical structures and relationships behind those patterns.
In my own guitar peregrination I’ve doubled back to acquire more of the rules and grammar of music: Where are all the B-flats on the neck? Which notes of a chord is each finger playing wherever the chord is fretted? This sterner, more exacting cerebration applied to practice gets me further than tourist riffs and licks.
A chord properly diagrammed has a compressed power akin to that of a verb paradigm or math formula or elegant algorithm.
(c) 2020 JMN