понеделник, 26 декември 2011 г.
четвъртък, 22 декември 2011 г.
понеделник, 19 декември 2011 г.
неделя, 11 декември 2011 г.
четвъртък, 17 ноември 2011 г.
петък, 28 октомври 2011 г.
четвъртък, 20 октомври 2011 г.
вторник, 20 септември 2011 г.
понеделник, 19 септември 2011 г.
Rare-book dealers
March 25, 2007
PROFILE | GLENN HOROWITZ
The Papers Chase
By RACHEL DONADIO
When writers die, their work lives on — and their papers go to Texas. Or Yale, Harvard, Emory, the New York Public Library, the British Library and other scholarly institutions that collect authors’ manuscripts and correspondence. How such papers change hands — and find monetary value — is the result of a peculiar alchemy between market forces and literary reputations.
One leading alchemist is a Manhattan rare-book dealer named Glenn Horowitz, who in recent years has come to dominate the rarefied market in literary archives. Like the art and real estate markets, the archive market has gone through the roof, and Horowitz, with his wealthy clients and a belief that books will gain increasingly fetishistic status in the digital age, has helped bolster it. Among other deals, he has brokered the sale of Norman Mailer’s and Don DeLillo’s papers to the deep-pocketed Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin — where he also helped place the Watergate notebooks of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for an astounding $5 million in 2003.
Cultivator of well-placed authors, widows and heirs, Horowitz combines the curiosity of an intellectual with the instincts of a businessman. He is known for sharp elbows, unyielding persistence and the high — some say inflated — prices he extracts for his clients. Through his two galleries on the Upper East Side and in East Hampton, which he runs with the art dealer John McWhinnie, Horowitz organizes book and art exhibitions — and parties that glamorize books as luxury products and help drum up business. “As Glenn himself says, he’s a terrific combination of a scholar and a grifter,” said Rick Gekoski, a book dealer in London who regularly does business with Horowitz.
With his wide social network and vast Rolodex, Horowitz has added glitz to a profession once considered musty and obscure. When I visited his unassuming office near Union Square, several well-known people dropped by — including James Frey, the author of the notorious memoir “A Million Little Pieces” and, according to Horowitz, a friend he’d met through Cynthia Rowley, the fashion designer. (Frey was paying a call on Horowitz’s wife, Tracey Jackson, a screenwriter and film producer.)
As we spoke, Horowitz — an exuberant man of 51 who dresses nattily and speaks extremely quickly — buzzed around his conference room, opening up binders and pulling books off shelves. One shelf held a valuable collection of Evelyn Waugh first editions, another some private correspondence of Gerald Ford. (Horowitz bought it from the former president before his death.) Nearby was Ezra Pound’s personal copy of Dante’s “Purgatorio,” a thick leather-bound volume with Pound’s penciled notations.
A glass vitrine held an exceedingly rare manuscript by one of the most famous American writers of the 20th century. Typed on yellow paper with a celebrated editor’s pencil marks in the margins, it offered a never-before-seen view of the writer’s creative process. When my jaw dropped, Horowitz quickly requested that the item be struck from the record and the author kept anonymous. But wasn’t it showcased in plain sight, begging for attention? No, he insisted, his office was private. This too seems part of the Horowitz approach, at once mystifying and demystifying the material. Like a born politician, he sometimes avoids direct answers and tends toward long, upbeat digressions. He frequently uses the word “blessedly” — collections he was blessedly able to acquire, people he was blessedly able to meet — and calls a long list of people his “very dear friend.”
However hyperbolic his style, Horowitz delivers the goods. Back in his conference room, he opened a plastic loose-leaf binder. There, in green ink on mottled cream-colored paper, was a letter Leonard Woolf wrote to Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf’s close friend and sometime lover, on March 28, 1941 — the day of the novelist’s suicide. “That one letter from Leonard to Vita touches on everything that interests us about Virginia,” Horowitz said excitedly. “The public and the private, the war and the writing — they go to the heart of the myth of Leonard as the caretaker.” The letter reached Horowitz through a member of the Sackville-West family. “Most of what we acquire comes directly from the original generators and/or the original recipients of the material generated by the writers,” he said. Half comes to him, half he seeks out. But it’s how he packages the material — turning, say, a newspaper clipping with a writer’s jottings in the margin into a significant cultural artifact — that sets him apart from less inventive dealers.
Like many who’ve built careers around literature, Horowitz once aspired to be a writer himself. In the late ’70s he studied fiction at Bennington College with Bernard Malamud (whose archive he later sold to the Ransom Center). After working for a few years in the rare-book room at the storied Strand bookstore in New York, he opened his own business in 1979, when he was 24, with a shop near Grand Central. In his first significant deal, Horowitz bought and resold a collection amassed by a criminal defense lawyer from New Jersey, with first editions by Hemingway, Thomas Hardy, John Steinbeck and Lillian Hellman. Horowitz borrowed the money from his father, who owned a furniture store and vacation cottages in the Catskills. In the ’80s, he became the go-to dealer for important collectors, including Carter Burden, the New York politician and socialite who built one of the most important collections of 20th-century American first editions; after his death in 1996, Burden’s family donated it to the Morgan Library. “We talked every day,” Horowitz said of Burden, who held the wedding reception for Horowitz’s first marriage, to the writer and former political cartoonist M. G. Lord. “He really entrusted me with a great deal of authority.”
Horowitz said his first big archive sale was that of W. S. Merwin, for $185,000, in 1983. He also sold the archives of Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Nadine Gordimer. But what really put him on the map was the 1992 sale of Vladimir Nabokov’s literary estate to the New York Public Library, widely believed to have been the first archive sale to top $1 million. (On archive sales, Horowitz collects an agent’s fee of 10 to 20 percent.) Horowitz had spent years winning over the executors to the estate: Nabokov’s widow, Vera, who died in 1991, and the couple’s son, Dmitri, who lives mostly in Switzerland. Although both the library and the Nabokovs were enthusiastic, it took two years to consummate the complicated arrangement. Ultimately, Horowitz agreed to lower the purchase price, provided the library pay Dmitri in full in one installment.
In the business, Horowitz is known for his creative deals, which include a combination of gifts and sales. (Under current tax law, living writers and artists derive no tax benefit from donating their work.) Mailer’s $2.5 million deal with the Ransom Center, for instance, stipulated that the author donate a certain amount back toward cataloging and conservation. “If there’s any magic to the craft, it’s in trying to find a figure that will be comfortable ... to both the seller and the buyer,” Horowitz said. Sometimes all it takes is lowering the price until the buyer agrees. “Each transaction is unique. It’s not like taking a company public and finding a value to float the stocks.”
Horowitz says he’s tried to represent both sides of a sale ever since one deal “blew up in my face, in a big way.” In 1998, he pre-emptively showed Harvard the catalog he’d prepared for the papers of the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote “A Raisin in the Sun.” But, he said, Hansberry’s executor bristled at the prospect of a sale to Harvard and wanted the papers to go to the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, where they are today.
Successes often involve matchmaking and connections more than price. Institutions shy away from bidding wars, so dealers court one at a time. Over the years, Horowitz has developed a close rapport with Thomas Staley, the director of the Ransom Center, whose vast holdings in 20th-century American and British material include the archives of everyone from Isaac Bashevis Singer, Alfred Knopf and Doris Lessing to The London Review of Books. “Glenn knows how to put a deal together,” Staley said. “He understands better than most how to leave something on the table, how to realize that in a deal ... you’ve got to work with both parties.”
Although some competitors grumble that Horowitz has tried to lure away their clients and unravel their deals, most say he’s been good for the business, boosting prices and interest. But this has come at a cost. “He inflated the market so much,” said Marvin Taylor, the director of the Fales Library at New York University. High prices, Taylor believes, have prohibited institutions from being able to acquire major collections. “It’s doing a disservice to scholarship.” With the market so strong, “people don’t donate nearly as much as they used to,” Taylor added. Institutions have to weigh price against research value. “In the ’60s, you could buy Elizabeth Barrett Browning notebooks for $10,000 to $15,000,” said Isaac Gewirtz, the librarian of the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection. “Now you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single notebook. In the past, my predecessor could buy 7 to 10 stellar items in a fiscal year.” Today, “I couldn’t do that more than a couple of times.”
But Horowitz isn’t the only one driving up prices. “The Ginsberg started it,” Taylor said of Allen Ginsberg’s papers, which had been on deposit at Columbia until Ginsberg’s powerful literary agent, Andrew Wylie, sold them to Stanford for just over $1 million in 1994. Among authors, “everyone wants what Allen got,” Taylor said. “Everyone thinks they have the same collection of the same caliber.” But for most writers, the price range is far lower. The typical archive is worth between $50,000 and $250,000, if it’s saleable at all, in the view of Gekoski, the London dealer. “That’s simply how the market works. If you take a decent writer — given that there’s nothing extraordinary here, like a cache of letters from Sylvia Plath — the market says that, and you have to decide where in that band you are,” Gekoski said. “If an author has a literary correspondence with 10 important people, that makes a hell of a big difference.”
An archive sale is essentially a long-term investment in a writer’s reputation, an assessment of his or her place in the larger cultural landscape. As such, it ranks high among the brutal ways writers measure themselves in the literary pecking order. “In all these great writers’ biographies there’s going to be a note about how much Glenn sold his archive for,” said Douglas Brinkley, the historian and the literary executor for Hunter S. Thompson — who died in 2005 and whose archive Horowitz says he is eager to sell.
Some see the link between financial and literary value as highly unpredictable. “There’s just not nearly as much correlation between literary reputation and the market,” said Ken Lopez, a rare-book and manuscript dealer in Hadley, Mass., who sold the William Burroughs archive to the New York Public Library. “A lot of it has to do with who has money at what time and what they can afford and what’s being offered. If something sells for $100,000 instead of $200,000, it’s not because of the guy’s reputation, but because that’s what’s available.”
It also depends on who’s buying. Horowitz’s clients have included the financier Steve Forbes (whom he helped amass an important Churchill collection) and Martha Stewart(gardening books). It was Horowitz who bought some personal papers of Franklin Roosevelt for $3.3 million in 1999, then sold them the following year to Conrad Black, the former head of the media company Hollinger, for $8 million — a transaction scrutinized after it emerged that Black, who was writing a Roosevelt biography, had bought the documents with company money.
Another of Horowitz’s clients was Dennis Silverman, the former president of Local 810 of the Teamsters, who happened to be in the market for first editions in the early ’80s. “Silverman took my advice when I suggested that he build a James Joyce collection,” Horowitz said. “I dictated what he bought.” Under Horowitz’s tutelage, Silverman, known for his bespoke suits and handmade shoes, amassed one of the most important Joyce collections, including two rare signed first editions of “Ulysses”: the Anderson edition (named for the dedicatee), which Silverman bought at auction in 1986 for $38,500, and the Kaeser edition, which he bought two years later for $48,500. Then Silverman ran afoul of the law. Under investigation for having appropriated $3 million in union pension funds, Silverman sold Horowitz his entire library for an undisclosed sum in 1995. (Unlike some of his purchases, the library was deemed Silverman’s personal property.)
The trajectory of the Kaeser edition is a case study in how a savvy dealer can drive up prices, getting a slice of the profits every step of the way. In 1996, Horowitz placed the Joyce material for sale. To gin up interest, he organized a museum-quality exhibition and catalog, including first editions and the proofs of the first English edition of what became “Finnegans Wake.” (An exhibit on “Ulysses” at his gallery in 1998 included work on loan from the National Library of Ireland.) Horowitz sold the Kaeser “Ulysses” for $115,000 to Roger Rechler, a Long Island real estate developer whom Horowitz cultivated and persuaded to collect first editions of 20th-century literature. Rechler had just restored a town house on the Upper East Side, with a library. “We just kept the conversation going until I prevailed upon him to build a collection to fill this library, of first editions,” Horowitz said.
In 2002, Horowitz arranged for the Rechler collection to be auctioned at Christie’s. Six of the books brought in record bids for their authors: “The Great Gatsby” ($163,500), “Lolita” ($273,500), “On the Road” ($185,500), “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” ($152,500) and “The Lord of the Rings” ($152,500). In a somewhat unusual arrangement, Horowitz himself bought back most of the books at the Christie’s auction, acting on behalf of private collectors, as well as the Morgan Library and the New York Public Library. Horowitz bought the Kaeser “Ulysses” for a private collector on the Upper East Side — for $460,500, almost 10 times what Silverman had paid 15 years earlier.
But Horowitz isn’t done with the deal yet. Leaning back on his conference-room chair, he tells me he’s still trying to get the Kaeser “Ulysses” back. Why? “Because I know someone who wants it.” He thinks it could be the first 20th-century volume to break the $1 million mark. “That’s what I do,” he says. “I trade books.”
Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.
Correction: April 8, 2007
A profile on March 25 about the rare-book and archives dealer Glenn Horowitz referred incompletely to M.G. Lord, his first wife. Her last work in the field of political cartooning was some 15 years ago; she is known today as a writer.
The profile also misstated the year that the University of Texas in Austin acquired the Watergate notebooks of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. It was 2003, not 2004.
събота, 2 юли 2011 г.
American Civil War
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June 30, 2011
How the British Nearly Supported the Confederacy
By GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT
A WORLD ON FIRE
Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War
By Amanda Foreman
Was it a civil war twice over? Not only did the “war between the states” divide the American people, it sundered the larger English-speaking community stretching across the Atlantic. The conflict was followed with consuming interest by the British, it affected them directly, many of them fought in it — and it split them into two camps, just as it did the Americans.
Now that Americans are taught that the war was a noble conflict waged by Lincoln and the forces of light against misguided and contumacious Southerners, it’s especially valuable to be reminded that this was far from how all the English saw it at the time. To be sure, almost no Englishman defended slavery, long since abolished in the British Empire. The British edition of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had sold an astonishing million copies, three times its American sales, and the Royal Navy waged a long campaign against the slave trade: on his first visit to Downing Street, President Obama was presented with a pen holder carved from the wood of one of the ships that conducted that campaign.
But while some English politicians, like the radical John Bright and the Whig Duke of Argyll, ardently supported the North, plenty sided with the Confederacy. They even included W. E. Gladstone, on his long journey from youthful Tory to “the people’s William,” adored by the masses in his later years. Apart from sympathy with the underdog, many Englishmen believed that the South had a just claim of national self-determination.
As Obama remembered to say at Buckingham Palace recently, a large part of the American population claims ancestry from British immigrants, great numbers of them arriving throughout the 19th century. Plenty of those took part in the war, and they were joined by more volunteers who came just for the fight, on one side or the other. The extraordinary cast portrayed in “A World on Fire,” by Amanda Foreman — who is also the author of “Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire” — extends from men who fled England to escape poverty to aristocratic Union officers like Major John Fitzroy de Courcy, later Lord Kingsale, a veteran of the Crimea, not to mention Colonel Sir Percy Wyndham, a soldier of fortune whose knighthood was actually Italian. Some, like the Welshman Henry Morton Stanley, even managed to fight for both sides.
Then there were the reporters, like Frank Vizetelly of The Illustrated London News and, most notably, William Howard Russell of The Times of London, who had become famous covering the Crimean War and reporting on the activities of Florence Nightingale. (In an odd conjunction, Foreman says that “Russell was the ideal choice. . . . Overeating and excessive drinking were his chief vices.” This is sometimes said of journalists, but rarely by way of commendation.)
Such eyewitnesses provide a wealth of vivid description — and here is the one drawback of this thoroughly researched and well-written but exceedingly long book. The presence of so many Englishmen means that Foreman can too easily slip away from “Britain’s crucial role” to a general history of the war and its every battle. But there truly is no shortage of such histories, and we have all often enough vicariously supped full of the horrors of Antietam and Fredericksburg.
What for American readers will be a more riveting — because unfamiliar — tale comes whenever Foreman turns from the patriotic gore to her true subject of the British and the war. While guns blazed, another battle was being waged, for English hearts and minds, at both the elite and popular levels. From Fort Sumter on, the London government was in a quandary, and so was Lord Lyons, who had the bad luck to be sent as minister to Washington shortly before the war began (the British representative was not yet an ambassador, of whom there were then very few, although not just three, as Foreman thinks).
Lyons carried out his difficult task with patience and courtesy. On the one hand, Southern politicians threatened that if London did not recognize the sovereignty of the Confederate States, the cotton trade would be cut off, driving England to economic collapse and revolution. On the other, the Union administration warned that such recognition could lead to war. In the event, London toyed with recognizing independence, and angered the North quite enough by acknowledging the South’s belligerent status.
Both sides had agents hard at work in England. Charles Francis Adams, scion of a famous Boston dynasty, was sent as American minister to the Court of St. James’s. He did as well as he could, although it didn’t help that he hated small talk, drinking and dancing, and that, as his son Henry said, “he doesn’t like the bother and fuss of entertaining and managing people who can’t be reasoned with,” which might be considered a definition of any diplomat’s job.
What nearly did take Washington and London to war was the principle of freedom of the seas. To make his case in London, Jefferson Davis dispatched two Confederate commissioners in November 1861 aboard the Trent, a British mail packet. But the electrifying news came that crewmen from the U.S.S. San Jacinto had boarded the ship near Cuba and seized the two.
“Have these Yankees then gone completely crazy?” Friedrich Engels asked his colleague Karl Marx, who himself wrote a good deal about the Civil War. Taking “political prisoners” in this way, Engels thought, was “the clearest casus belli there can be. The fellows must be sheer fools to land themselves in war with England.”
Despite this provocation, war did not follow. Other Confederate envoys reached London, and many Englishmen remained susceptible to the Southern claim. An unlikely British best seller was “The American Union,” written by James Spence, a Liverpool businessman who had traveled widely in America. Although he was scarcely disinterested — Liverpool had prospered in the slave trade and then by cotton — he argued plausibly that North and South were so different that enforced union was futile. And he held, not so implausibly either, that since slavery was doomed in any case, it was better that it should be ended without violence. This was taken up by John Delane, the editor of The Times, who maintained that the war was a contest for Southern “independence” against Northern “empire.”
Still the Union blockade of the South continued, and many English ships continued breaking it or trying to; Wilmington, N.C., to Bermuda was one favorite route. Meanwhile, the Confederate government clandestinely commissioned warships from English shipyards. Most famous of these was the Alabama, built by Laird & Sons. The intended purpose of the ship was obvious, as Adams’s Liverpool consul told him, and as the London government belatedly admitted. But the Alabama escaped from under official noses in July 1862 to begin a devastating career raiding Northern ships, to the fury of Washington.
As if that rage weren’t enough, Lyons had to deal with the problem of British subjects caught up in the fighting. Both sides treated prisoners of war harshly. Of the 26,000 Confederate soldiers held over the course of the war at Camp Douglas near Chicago, more than 6,000 died, and at one point the prisoners there included 300 who claimed to be British subjects. They pleaded for Lyons’s intervention, but there was little he could do. One of the prisoners was the deplorable Stanley, who adroitly solved the problem by switching gray uniform for blue, unconcerned with politics: as he said, “there were no blackies in Wales.”
A succession of Southern victories further encouraged English sympathy for the South. In late 1862 Lord Hartington, subsequently a cabinet minister, and nearly prime minister, visited both North and South (it was surprisingly easy to cross from one to the other), at first proclaiming his neutrality. But in Virginia he met Jefferson Davis, as well as the modest and agreeable Robert E. Lee, and was persuaded that the South was fighting virtuously for her rights. Hartington couldn’t pretend that blacks were flourishing, but then “they are not dirtier or more uncomfortable-looking than Irish laborers” (an unhappy comparison so soon after the great famine, and from a man whose family owned huge estates in Ireland).
In its later stages, the war saw Southern terrorist conspiracies initiated from Canadian soil, which further inflamed the North. But English sympathy for the South lingered up until Lee surrendered at Appomattox in April 1865. Then, within days, came the shattering news that Lincoln had been assassinated. All at once, “newspapers that had routinely criticized the president during his lifetime,” Foreman writes, “rushed to praise him.” There were some wonderfully hypocritical about-faces, one from The Times, but best of all from Punch. Having just included Lincoln with Napoleon III in a gallery of April Fools, the magazine now hailed him as “a true-born king of men.”
Not the least absorbing part of Foreman’s story comes after the war. Stanley was hired by The New York Herald and set off on his African journey to find Dr. Livingstone, before returning to England, a seat in Parliament and a knighthood. That fascinating figure Judah Benjamin, the Jewish lawyer who served as Confederate secretary of state, fled to London, where he became a barrister and published “Benjamin on Sales,” a commercial law textbook that made him rich.
No American politician was now more vehemently Anglophobic than Senator Charles Sumner, who continued to denounce England, and whose verbal violence delayed a settlement of the Alabama dispute. His great rival, William Henry Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, also turned up the heat, demanding the Bahamas in recompense for the Alabama’s depredations, although he had further designs on Canada, as so many Americans did.
In the end, the Alabama question was settled admirably, by jaw-jaw rather than war-war, as Churchill might have said, when an arbitration tribunal meeting in Geneva awarded large damages against Great Britain. The London government paid without complaint, inaugurating a period of comparative harmony, until Anglo-American war nearly broke out again in 1895 over an obscure Venezuelan boundary dispute.
Altogether Foreman’s remarkable book should be a caution against one foolish phrase. A relationship, no doubt — but “special”?
Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s books include “The Strange Death of Tory England” and “Yo, Blair!” He is writing a book about the reputation and posthumous cult of Winston Churchill.
понеделник, 27 юни 2011 г.
сряда, 15 юни 2011 г.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
Often, on returning home from one of those mysterious and prolonged absences that gave rise to such strange conjectures among those who were his friends, or thought that they were so, he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that never left him now, and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and aging face on the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass. The very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure. He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul. He would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age. He would place his white hands beside the coarse bloated hands of the picture, and smile. He mocked the misshapen body and the failing limbs.
There were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleepless in his own delicately-scented chamber, or in the sordid room of the little ill-famed tavern near the Docks, which, under an assumed name, and in disguise, it was his habit to frequent, he would think of the ruin he had brought upon his soul, with a pity that was all the more poignant because it was purely selfish. But moments such as these were rare. That curiosity about life which Lord Henry had first stirred in him, as they sat together in the garden of their friend, seemed to increase with gratification. The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them.
Notes and exercises:
1. Mark that the digraph “ai” is pronounced as [i] in a final unstressed syllable: portrait, fountain, mountain, captain, bargain.
2. Read paying attention to the spelling and pronunciation of the following words:
þ box sex execution reflexive exile xylophone
þ extra extract executor execrate sexual exaggerate
þ examine execute axe Xerxes except existence
þ exercise existent anxious excess anxiety exhibition
þ exact excel luxury exhaust luxurious complexion
þ exert excellent example mixture xenon sexuality
þ wax obnoxious exhibit exigent exceed Xenophobe
þ exist exclaim axiom exhort excite xylograph
3. Verbs ending in “e” preserve this letter in the present participle form in cases where omission of it would lead to ambiguity. The preserved “e” shows what the pronunciation of the preceding letter should be. For example, if the “e” is omitted from the verb “to singe” in the formation of its present participle, the resulting form will coincide with the present participle of the verb “to sing”. The “e” is preserved in: singeing, cringeing, hingeing, impingeing, swingeing, tingeing. It is preferred in ageing, and is preserved, too, in the present participle forms of verbs ending in “–oe”: canoeing, hoeing, shoeing, tiptoeing, eyeing, dyeing.
4. The word canvas (a noun meaning “strong coarse cloth used for large bags and for oil paintings”) should not be confused with the verb to canvass (to go from person to person and ask for votes, subscriptions, etc.).
5. Learn the spelling of the following words in which the “g” is mute:
þ poignant sigh gnash resign gnu sovereign
þ foreign gnaw reign campaign diaphragm align
þ gnome feign champagne malign gnostic deign
þ lorgnette benign gnarled phlegm physiognomy gnat
6. Spell the words given in phonetic transcription:
Ü Did you [ri´si:v] the letter I sent you from London
Ü It suddenly [¶´k¶:(r)d] to Jane that she might try to become a [moudl].
Ü We were [´konò¶s] of the fact that he had done it for [´konò¶ns] sake.
Ü What’s the [hait] of that building over there?
Ü Some aspects of the use of [moudl] verbs are difficult for [´forin] students of English.
Ü [´ru:m¶tizm] is not an infectious [di´zi:z].
Ü A [k¶´na:l] is an artificial water [´tòæn(¶)l] used for carrying water to the fields, for town supply, or for purposes of navigation.
7. Word study:
conjecture opinion formed on slight or defective evidence; a guess
sear to dry up; to scorch; to render callous and insensible; seared—dried, withered
poignant distressing to the feeling, deeply moving, keen
gratification pleasing, indulging
ravenous hungry, greedy, intensely hungry; rapacious, voracious
8. Translate the following expressions and use them in sentences of your own:
a fair young face, the fair sex, a fair aim (a careful, deliberate aim), a fair copy, a fair deal, fair and square (just, openly honest), a fair-weather friend (a false friend), a fair name, fair water, fair handwriting, fair wind, fair play, it is only fair to say, it is all fair and above board, a fair share, all is fair in love and war, by fair means, a fair chance, a fair judge of, fair and softly, none but the brave deserve the fair, fair-dealing, vanity fair
The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
| H |
is eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him. What was it, he wondered. He went towards the little pearl-coloured octagonal stand, that had always looked to him like the work of some strange Egyptian bees that wrought in silver, and taking up the volume, flung himself into an armchair, and began to turn over the leaves. After a few minutes he became absorbed. It was the strangest book he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world, were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.
It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes
Notes and exercises:
1. The sound [i] is transcribed by the letter “a” in the adjective-forming suffix “–ate”: separate, elaborate, affectionate, etc.
2. Memorize the spelling of the following words which have a silent “p”:
| psychology psyche coup psychic psalm psychological raspberry coup d’état pseudonym Sappho psychoanalysis cupboard pneumonia sapphire Ptolemy psychiatry pseudo- pneumatic receipt Hampstead |
3. The long [i:] in the following words is spelt “ae”: mediaeval, encyclopaedia, formulae, paeon, Aesop, Caesar, aegis, aeon, aesthete, anaemia, anaesthetize, anapaest, larvae, antennae.
4. Mark that the following words of French origin are spelt with an “ie” in the end: reverie, bourgeoisie, bonhomie, gaucherie, sortie.
5. Read paying attention to the pronunciation of the digraph “ch”: archaism, orchid, technique, technical, technician, characterize.
6. Word study:
raiment clothing
dumb show the communication of ideas by means of acting but without words, a pantomime
incense smoke of a substance producing a sweet smell when burning
cadence rhythm in sound; the rise and fall of the voice in speaking
7. Translate the following expressions and use them in sentences of your own:
he took up the volume, to take after, to take advantage of, to take chances, to take effect, to take hold of, to take pains, to take offence, to take it out of, to take pride in, to take to, to take the rough with the smooth (to accept philosophically both pleasant and unpleasant things: If one becomes a soldier, one must be ready to take the rough with the smooth.), to take in tow;
to turn over the leaves, to turn a new leaf, beautiful enough to turn any man’s head, success turned his head, to turn one’s back on an old friend, to turn a deaf ear to, he kept turning the matter over in his mind, to turn failure to account, to turn up one’s nose at, to take turns, by turns, one good turn deserves another, he was waiting for the turn of the tide, to turn up, the turn of events, to turn tail (to turn and run away: When the thief heard the police he turned tail and fled.), a turncoat
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