The Glass-Bottom Blog

A slabbed-down mass of tabbage

2012-01-27T14:38:00.000-06:00

1. Robert Walser's story "Good morning, Giantess" (NYRB classics tumblr). I esp. liked this:

Cold and white the streets lie there, like outstretched human arms; you trot along, rubbing your hands, and watch people coming out of the gates and doorways of their buildings, as though some impatient monster were spewing out warm, flaming saliva. You encounter eyes as you walk along like this: girls’ eyes and the eyes of men, mirthless and gay; legs are trotting behind and before you, and you too are legging along as best you can, gazing with your own eyes, glancing the same glances as everyone else.

Cf. Chaucer:

Hold up thy tayl, thou Sathanas!' quod he;
`Shewe forth thyn ers, and lat the frere se
Where is the nest of freres in this place!'
And er that half a furlong wey of space,
Right so as bees out swarmen from an hyve,
Out of the develes ers ther gonne dryve
Twenty thousand freres on a route,
And thurghout helle swarmed al aboute,
And comen agayn as faste as they may gon,
And in his ers they crepten everychon.

2. Puritan names. Going around on the internet, but e.g. Helpless Henley, Wrestling Brewster, Faithful Teate, Magnyfye Beard, and Unfeigned Panckhurst are almost reusable.

3. John Burnside's poem "The Good Neighbor." (Previously noted: "Late Show.") Burnside won the T.S. Eliot prize this year, annoyingly the new book isn't out in the US yet, but there's a Kindle edition (!), which I suppose I'll have to buy.

Dazzle vs. neatness of finish

2012-01-21T15:46:00.000-06:00

Fascinating result in this week's Science (poss. gated) suggesting that bowerbirds might be using optical illusions (viz. forced perspective) to attract mates.

The males of avenue-species bowerbirds—including great bowerbirds—construct elaborate bowers composed of two stick walls. The bowers are aligned to run from north to south, and the ends are filled with “gesso” (a collection of gray to white shells, stones, and bones), upon which colored objects are placed and thrown. [...]. Females enter bowers from their south end and watch the male at the north end carry on a display that includes vocalizations, movements, and the tossing of colored objects in front of the gesso. Many males never succeed in attracting females to their bowers, and only a select few do most of the mating after females visit and inspect their bower.[...]

In a previous report, Endler et al. (3) discovered that the arrangement of the gesso is not random: Smaller objects are arranged near the opening of the display court, and larger ones more distant from the opening. When the researchers reversed the gradient, the bowerbirds rapidly restored it to its initial distribution (but not the individual objects, just the gradient). This study showed that male bowerbirds, for whatever reason, care about the gradient. The interesting observation was that the bower creates a condition conducive to creating experiences of “forced perspective,”[...].

Kelley and Endler provide insight into why the males care so much about the gradient. They report that the males most adept at crafting forced-perspective illusions are most likely to achieve mating success. [...] The projected gradients, as seen from within the bower, are more predictive of mating success than the actual physical gradients. [...] Have male bowerbirds mastered the laws of perspective and learned to manipulate them to achieve lascivious ends?

Although this possibility is intriguing, the current data are not yet sufficiently rich to sustain this remarkable hypothesis. The data provide compelling evidence that the quality of the gradient, from the vantage point of the female, predicts mating success, but the visual fact of the more uniform texture, not an illusion, may be the only factor determining her preference. Indeed, it has been previously reported that males with more symmetrical bower avenues have a higher mating success rate.

The -- immediately obvious -- argument for this view and against forced perspective qua depth-illusion is that the stones are arranged the wrong way round; they make the bower look smaller rather than bigger, and there cannot be any advantage to that as one could simply construct a smaller bower instead. (Also I don't know if bowerbirds have much depth-perception, though I'm sure this is something the authors have thought about.) But, upon reading the actual article [Science 335, 335 (2012)] it becomes clear that what the authors really want to claim is that it is the confusingness of the illusions that matters:

Any of these seven effects might hold the female’s attention longer than if absent, and still longer if the illusions interact. For example, females will not mate unless they have spent more than about 55% of their total time in the avenue watching the male display.

I'm curious to see how they test these hypotheses against each other. ("Common sense" is against the dazzle hypothesis but then it is also against the existence of bowerbirds.)

(I should remark in passing that the bowerbird has always struck me as a good symbol for most tumblrs and a certain kind of blog.)

(See also: Electric Brae.)

"Almost incurably frivolous"

2012-01-21T15:02:00.000-06:00

Ferdinand Mount, reviewing M.R. James (LRB, gated), brings up The Other James in a way "incomparably light and deft":

Towards the end of his life, in 1929, [MR] James wrote a survey of ghost stories for the Bookman [...] The article ends in a characteristically self-deprecating but also unusually abrupt way: ‘There need not be any peroration to a series of rather disjointed reflections. I will only ask the reader to believe that, though I have not hitherto mentioned it, I have read The Turn of the Screw.’ [...] Is Henry’s exhaustive psychological analysis precisely what Monty will not permit himself, even if he were capable of it? Like Bertie Wooster, M.R. James seems not entirely at home with the psychology of the individual; for that sort of stuff, he relies on Jeeves. On his only recorded meeting with the other James, he thought that Henry looked ‘like a respectable butler’.

A few marginalia: (1) Livermere is a good place name -- at least for a ghost story -- and probably superior to Mortmere. (Liverpool might once have had similar potential.) (2) Mount on the ghost stories: "his phantoms do not, on the whole, haunt. They lie doggo in their holes and only when roused make a single surprise appearance. They are cabaret turns." (3) Also:

The spectral bedsheet in ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ attempts to thrust its ‘intensely horrible face of crumpled linen’ close into the face of Professor Parkins as he cries for help. The gender of the bedsheet is unclear, but the fear of domesticity and the fear of sex, tangled and intertwined like the bedsheet, are unmistakable.

Torschlusspanik

2012-01-19T13:17:00.000-06:00

From yet another list of untranslatable words (cf.):

Torschlusspanik
From German, this word literally means “gate-closing panic” and is used to describe the fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages. This word is most frequently applied to women who race the “biological clock” to wed and bear children.

This is high up on my list of frequently-felt emotions, a little behind schadenfreude and buyer's remorse, and perhaps slightly ahead of envy. Also provides an excuse to quote Auden:

Certain it became while we were still incomplete
There were certain prizes for which we would never compete:
A choice was killed by every childish illness,
The boiling tears among the hothouse plants,
The rigid promise fractured in the garden,
And the long aunts.

And every day there bolted from the field
Desires to which we could not yield;
Fewer and clearer grew the plans,
Schemes for a life and sketches for a hatred,
And early among my interesting scrawls
Appeared your portrait.

(Another worthwhile untranslatable is "tartle" -- "a Scottish verb meaning to hesitate while introducing someone due to having forgotten his/her name.")

"It does seem what you need to be told"

2012-01-15T21:08:00.002-06:00

Interesting bit of Empsoniana, via pseudopodium: an exchange of letters between E. and Rosemund Tuve, occasioned by a disagreement re George Herbert's "Sacrifice" (readers of 7 types might remember an allusion to this in the preface to the 1949-ish edition). [Grouchy aside: the introduction is awful. Says E. went to Magdalen College, Oxford -- really it was Magdalene, Cambridge -- and astoundingly asserts that "neither [E. nor T.] is noted for style".] The longer letter by Tuve is interesting for its stylistic reasons; it is arch and benignant, and also unaccountably difficult to read. Empson's letters are Empsonian to the point of self-parody -- as so much of his work is -- but I enjoyed this remark (my emphases):

I was rather shocked at your saying that I neednt rewrite my bit posted to you because it is always a nuisance to rewrite. I rewrite everything I print about twelve times, mainly in the interests of intelligibility, and I think you had much better do that too. Checking references always seems to me a trivial duty compared to checking style. I think that your style has greatly improved in your last book but is still very bad, simply from failure of communication. I also think that if you tried to write more clearly you would find your own ideas are a great deal more muddled than you suppose. So I hope very much that you will write another book, but as a labour of love, intended to be agreeable in itself – the distinction between the writer and the reader becomes unreal (because the same thing pleases both) if you take your own style as seriously as you take the style of the authors you are describing. One can imagine this doctrine working out wrong, but it does seem what you need to be told.

Tuve (whom I am more sympathetic to on the merits, and to whom E. is occasionally condescending) also has some good moments in her second letter:

how am I not to snort at you if you plant your feet wide apart and say ‘I refuse to see concordance!’ Then you must not know what you would know if you saw concordance. [...] A scholar isn’t a fetcher and carry-er so that others haven’t to trouble; it wouldn’t even be safe.

I honestly think (or did, and am pretty sure I still would; it’s a long question) that the book gives proper and sufficient data for any claim that is therein made, as far as a quite tender and delicate scholarly conscience can watch such things – there are always ways in which the mind, being fallible, goes astray. But the only way you can be sure whether I have is, is to just go and read what I had.

Another note: Tuve wants to construe Empson as saying that scholarship is of no value to literary critics, which is a straw-man version of Empson's position, but not too much of one. Empson is infuriating about not checking his quotations, etc. As for the broader point about whether relevant scholarship helps one understand texts better -- I suppose some of the New Critics denied this; that this New Critical position was ever respectable now seems mysterious.

"Met him pike hoses!"

2012-01-13T22:42:00.000-06:00

Tickled to discover -- and so belatedly! -- that my birthday coincides with the anniversary of Joyce's death. I've been "reading" Finnegans Wake 140 characters at a time; it is much more digestible that way, one gets the intermittent good line ("the pillgrimace of Childe Horrid," "may foggy dews be-diamondise your hooprings! may the fireplug of filiality reinsure your bunghole!" "O murder mere, how did you hear?") without getting hopelessly bogged down.

Also, in re snouts, I learned on twitter today that "mere-swines" (aka "pork-fishes," aka porpoises) appear in the alliterative Morte Arthure: a character, prev. described as "harsh as a hound-fish," is now "fat as a mere-swine with carcass full huge / and all faltered the flesh in his foul lips." (ll. 1091-1092).

Word-hoards and lard-hoards

2012-01-12T17:30:00.000-06:00

1. In the wake of this exchange, Calista and I have been trading literary sightings of lard, pigs, and/or gross food broadly construed; we've recently started a new tumblr (currently titled "A Child's Larder of Verse" though really there isn't much verse there) dedicated to these. No by-lines as these would be purely embarrassing for me. Swift (Jonathan, not Tom) is the genius of the place.

2. A fascinating Language Log post about the writer Paul West who "emerged from [a] stroke with a near-total obliteration of language" and how he made the best of his way back to language:

Oddly, it was often the most obscure words that were easiest to recover. He struggled with words like blanket or bed, or his wife's name Diane, words that you would think over time should have seeped into his genes. Nevertheless, he could recruit words like postillion or tardigrades to get an idea across. This led to some counter-productive interactions with a speech therapist. Since aphasics often produce nonsense words without realizing that they aren't real words, one of the goals of therapy is to give the patient feedback on which words are real. But West would often produce bona fide words that were unknown to the therapist. [...]

The intimate wordplay between West and [his wife Diane] Ackerman also eventually resumed, with West fashioning novel terms of endearment as gifts to his wife. The offerings were delightful. Deprived of the usual routes to language, and along with them, the common clichés that many of us struggle to shed, West bestowed on his wife exquisite pet names such as: My Little Bucket of Hair; Commendatore de le Pavane Mistletoe; Dark-Eyed Junco, My Little Bunko; Diligent Apostle of Classic Stanzas. And at one point, the man uttered what has to be the most searingly romantic sentence ever uttered in history, by anyone, in any language:

"You are the hapax legomenon of my life."

"Irretrievable hippopotamus"

2012-01-08T15:25:00.000-06:00

From Janet Malcolm's collages (NYRB) based on "the papers of an émigré psychiatrist who practiced in New York in the late 1940s and 1950s":

Test words for dysarthria

Royal Artillery
Methodist Episcopal
West Register Street
[crossed out]
Massachusetts Constitution
Righteous Retribution
Irish Constabulary
Irretrievable Hippopotamus

And then there was also this (under "ouch ouch disease"):

Beak House

2012-01-05T16:51:00.001-06:00

Some lovely photographs of waterbirds at the Guardian (via Barb Milne on twitter). The avocets naturally caught my fancy -- further sign of aging, it took me a perceptible amount of time to remember what they were called -- but the grumpy, unastonished, Jacobean-looking heron (which for some reason I associate w/ the cardinal in one of Webster's plays) is perhaps the more impressive picture:

"Nine foot long, and seven foot broad"

2012-01-04T15:00:00.000-06:00

From Shakespeare's England (formerly Dainty Ballerina), the uses of polar bears (in a post that begins with a tangential remark about Jonson):

Then we rip'd up her belly, and taking out her guttes, drew her home to the House where we flayed her, and took at least one hundred pounds of fat out of her belly, which wee molt'd and burned in our Lampe. This Grease did us great good service, for by that meanes we still kept a Lampe burning all night long, which before wee could not doe, for want of Grease, and eery man had meanes to burned a Lampe in his Cabbin, for such necessaries as he had to doe. The Beares skin was nine foot long, and seven foot broad.

(Calista (who provided the Jonson quote below) and I have lately been collecting references to grease, boars, bears, do(ugh!)nuts, etc. under the unofficial rubric of A Child's Larder of Verse.) See also: "I've measured it from side to side / 'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide." The linked bear story includes the wonderfully anticlimactic end of an Arctic explorer:

In 1611, [Jonas] Poole suffered a broken skull and collar bone on Cherry Island while handling his cargo of walrus ivory and whale fat. He was brought home by a rival whaler and recovered sufficiently from his injuries to return to the arctic the following year. However, Poole's career as a whaler was cut short in September 1612 when he was murdered in Wapping in August, having returned home from what became his final voyage.

Also bear- and grease-related: from Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, a description of the character Ursula ("Urs." / "Urse"):

"Vastly replenished"

2012-01-03T17:41:00.001-06:00

1. A fine article in the LARB on dining out with Marianne Moore; here is Moore as theater critic:

But a production of Phèdre by the Comédie-Française with Marie Bell had impressed her when she hadn’t expected to be impressed. “I was so enthused after seeing Marie Bell’s Phèdre that I bought myself a bag of hot chestnuts and came home vastly replenished!”

A few bracingly negative views of younger poets (I agree with both of these):

“Randall Jarrell makes patchwork quilts of mediocre poetic ideas. His poems are good, realistic, honest — but not outstanding,” for instance, or “Richard Wilbur’s poems don’t stay in my mind, which must be an indication of their worth — to me, at least. He’s very accomplished, though. I like his translations of Molière.” When making “pronouncements” she had a way of tilting her head back a bit and lifting her right hand in the air, fingers curved, almost as if she were preparing to play the piano.

2. Geoffrey Hill has been knighted; this particular honor seems esp. appropriate in his case. I have quoted his poems in the past, but feel obliged to record an appearance of snouts therein (Mercian Hymns XI):

Swathed bodies in the long ditch; one eye upstaring. It is safe to presume, here, the king’s anger. He reigned forty years. Seasons touched and retouched the soil.

Heathland, new-made watermeadow. Charlock, marsh-marigold. Crepitant oak forest where the boar furrowed black mould, his snout intimate with worms and leaves.

"When I brought up Jorie Graham, he claimed to admire her too"

2012-01-02T18:11:00.000-06:00

1. Sam Anderson (NYT sentence-of-the-day guy) does a year-in-marginalia -- a form that is distinctly more natural for me than a Year in Reading (or a Month in Swindon); I particularly liked this Bolano passage:

And only then did I realize how eagerly, how recklessly he was exposing himself to the sun. He wasn't using sunscreen. And he knew he was dying and he was lying in the sun on purpose like a person saying goodbye to someone very dear. The old tourist was bidding farewell to the sun and to his own body and to his old wife sitting beside him. It was a sight to see, something to admire. It wasn't a dead body lying there on the sand, but a man. And what courage, what gallantry.

2. Stephen Haven (a.k.a. Heaven-Haven) describes a dinner in Beijing with the wonderfully named Chinese poet Duo Duo:

Duo Duo said, “No, that is not the difference. The difference is something else. British and American poets always have to ‘tell the story,’ and at the end of their poems they sum the story up. In France and Germany poets don’t do that.” Duo Duo said he admired Rilke, Paul Celan, Apollinaire, Rene Char, André Breton. [...] Maybe that is why modern, Continental poetry comes through better, because it is more powerfully built on imagery, especially when the imagery is surreal. Maybe Frost’s long narratives are untranslatable, I said, because they are so subtle [...] We talked about American and British poets Duo Duo admires. He said he loved Roethke, Charles Wright, R.S. Thomas, Ashbery, Mark Strand, Whitman, James Tate, James Wright, Dickinson. When I brought up Jorie Graham, he claimed to admire her too, and Hart Crane was also an important poet for him, many years ago.

3. Mark Lilla's review of The Reactionary Mind is awful in an exemplary way. (He thinks the book is awful in an exemplary way too, and perhaps it is; I haven't read it.) The book (by all accounts) argues that conservatives throughout history have really been driven by the desire to justify oppression and oppose equality. The review asserts that this is obviously incorrect because conservatives have disagreed with one another -- a non-sequitur if there ever was one; as if it weren't possible to disagree about the correct way to justify oppression -- and then goes on to restate a bunch of conventional tropes about conservatism and liberalism. (This story is evidently preempted by the argument of the book under review, which is that the metaphysics is a smokescreen for interest-group politics; but it is not clear if Lilla sees this. -- "Sees" is, incidentally, a palindrome like "eye" and its cognates.) However, I thought this antithesis of Lilla's was thought-provoking and not obviously wrong:

The quarrel between liberals and conservatives is essentially a quarrel over the nature of human beings and their relation to society. The quarrel between revolutionaries and reactionaries, on the other hand, has little to do with nature. It is a quarrel over history.

(I think the correct way to read "history" -- given the context of the rest of the article -- is as "large events"; i.e., you can unpack the claim as saying that reactionaries and revolutionaries are people whose views on politics hinge on the moral significance attached to specific historical events, rather than on a theory of human nature. It is not entirely implausible that some such distinction is behind some intra-left or intra-right squabbling. Lilla's attempts to apply this schema to contemporary politics are pretty weak, however.)

Story of Alan's life

2011-12-31T19:44:00.000-06:00

From Alan Bennett's 2011 diary in the LRB (gated, I think; comes with peculiarly robotic-sounding podcast -- or perhaps that is how all podcasts sound, I rarely listen to any):

15 April. Seeing a banana skin on the pavement reminds me how when I first read the Dandy and the Beano the presence of a banana skin meant that inevitably it was going to be slipped on. No matter that at that time, in the early 1940s, few children had seen let alone eaten a banana, the skin was still shorthand for calamity. Other comic clichés were a fish, almost certain to be stolen by a cat and always represented as a perfect skeleton devoid of flesh but still with the head on; a string of sausages, destined to be grabbed by a dog, the sausages trailing from the dog’s mouth like a scarf in the wind; a bull (beware of) in a field, a billy goat similarly, with a ladder another portent of disaster.

21 May. A plumpish young man gets off the train at Leeds just behind me.
‘Aren’t you famous?’
‘Well I can’t be, can I, if you don’t know my name.’
‘It’s Alan something.’
‘Yes.’
‘From Scarborough?’
‘No.’
‘So which Alan are you?’
‘I’m another Alan.’
‘Are you just a lookalike?’
‘Well, you could say so.’
He pats my arm consolingly.
‘Be happy with that.’

14 October. Were I Adam Werritty and going into lobbying and PR I would have changed my name at the outset. Verity has the literal ring of truth about it, Adam Verity a dauntless fighter for justice, whereas all Werritty suggests is some anxious yapping dog which, whatever his faults, Werritty hardly seems to have been.

"'Tis well an old age is out, / And time to begin a new"

2011-12-31T16:36:00.000-06:00

I thought of putting together a year-in-reading post but was confounded by the apparent length of this year, the sense that events in the psychological far past -- acquisition of Kindle, acquaintance with Cobbett -- really took place this March or April (the Kindle came about Apr. 15, I remember this because when I went home to collect it in the afternoon I found my landlady downstairs and said something about having to file my taxes). And it hasn't been a year that's defined by stuff I've read -- if anything, a year with swaths of mental paralysis cut through it, long intervals of staring at books and not registering a word -- although I discovered Thomas Bernhard [just noticed, and was amused by, his initials being TB] and Teju Cole. (Also: Cobbett, Saintsbury on prose rhythm, Flaubert's Parrot, Vertigo, The Ambassadors, two of Gissing's novels.)

Anyhow, it is a good time for a broader retrospective post, esp. because the year-end coincides with a "natural" break: I have just accepted a postdoc at Harvard, which I'll begin in the fall; while the thesis must still be written, I suppose I'm well into the home stretch. On this front at least, "things have turned out better / than I once expected or ever deserved"; I had multiple good options. Nevertheless, when I think back on the past five years or so the chief impression is one of waste, of time that I could have spent on various kinds of growth but did not, the sense that owing to my laziness I've been coming

to resemble
The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water
Or stone whose conduct can be predicted,

and that my immediate recourse to these lines -- which I might also have cited for similar reasons five years ago -- is further depressing evidence that they apply to me. But enough of this, it cannot be helped: one is less impressionable than one used to be -- people are -- and attempts to fight this are inherently limited. (One's memory is also less vivid than it used to be: it is appalling to think how little I remember of Proust. What else have I read as a grad student that really sticks in the memory? Lydia Davis, Thomas Browne, Urquhart's Rabelais, Sabbath's Theater, Hollinghurst. Muldoon's recent poetry -- especially this -- and fragments of Geoffrey Hill and Charles Wright. I went through a phase, in 2008 perhaps, when I bought a large amount of contemporary poetry; seems to me now that I only remember the titles of the books. Reading this list, I suspect that one thing I should definitely have read more of is literary criticism and/or philosophy.)

I am glad on the whole that I went to grad school in physics, and a little surprised that I've enjoyed the "work" aspect of it. (I cannot say much in defense of life in central Illinois, though.) I was fortunate to stumble quite blindly into an area -- in a field that I had been drawn to for its difficulty and lack of obvious correspondence with my strengths -- where taste and wide reading mattered as much as analytical ability, and to have an advisor who let me pick my own problems. I was fortunate to pick up the learning on the cheap, by going to talks rather than reading papers -- UIUC being fairly central in my field -- and especially by getting to spend fall 2010 in Santa Barbara where I was deluged with information at workshops and conferences. And I was fortunate, above all, that innumerable things did not go wrong that anyone acquainted with many grad students knows can easily go wrong. (I suppose some of this text will be reused in thesis acknowledgments.)

Which brings us to 2011, which was a strange year. (As a coherent unit it began Dec 18 2010 when I arrived in Chicago without an overcoat.) I had finished the paper that will presumably be most of my thesis in July 2010, and had spent the fall thinking of other things but mostly going to talks and meeting people; meanwhile the advisor decided to move to Atlanta, so when I came back I was in effect in the position of a postdoc without a group. I couldn't at that point have applied for any of the really nice fellowships -- deadlines tend to be Oct/Nov -- so the choices were (a) get a temporary postdoc and apply for fellowships in a year; (b) move to Atlanta; (c) stay on in Urbana and soldier on. Option (c) was the most appealing as it didn't involve moving, but also the most sensible as it turns out: really the imperative was to position myself optimally for the job market this year, and moving/completing thesis were much less useful than getting as much research done and published as I could. (Did not quite meet expectations but didn't fail completely either.) Esp. with the departure of two good friends in the summer and the encroachment on a third of child-rearing duties, I've had a wealth of solitude that I'm afraid I've mostly spent drifting about the internet, tweeting maniacally, and -- esp. in the fall -- inspecting the publication record of everyone who ever got a postdoc I wanted. I do not know if it was the solitude or the anxiety, but I have never had such an infertile year intellectually -- I cannot think of a single good idea.

But that's all over for now, and I can return, I hope, to attacking various things like a shark. I don't know when I'll be defending/moving yet, but it won't be until the summer: long enough to kippleize my surroundings a little further, write two or three papers, fill out some reimbursement forms, and figure out how to format a thesis according to UIUC registrar's specs. For the moment at least, I vaguely look forward to it.

(Previous, similar posts here and here.)

Loose connections (a principled take)

2011-12-28T21:47:00.000-06:00

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible. -- Virginia Woolf

(This quote occupies a rather prominent place in the chambers of my mind; my interests coincide fairly well with the category of "things that are attached to life at all four corners.")

Michael Dummett has died; I was convinced I had blogged about him but I can't find the post. He was an interesting character -- analytic philosopher, Tarot expert, and more -- but I knew him primarily through a 1975 essay on "The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic" that was in a book of philosophy-of-math readings. It appealed very strongly to me because Dummett's views ratified my biased belief that all the interesting problems in analytic philosophy could be restated as problems in the philosophy of mathematics. A few highlights (I realize that this is old hat for a lot of people, but it was my first exposure to late Wittgenstein -- late W. is a difficult writer and I needed someone to Dummett down for me): here he is describing the sort of theory of meaning an intuitionist could hold --

A model of meaning is a model of understanding, i.e. a representation of what it is that is known when an individual knows the meaning. Now knowledge of the meaning of a particular symbol or expression is frequently verbalisable knowledge, that is, knowledge which consists in the ability to state the rules in accordance with which the expression or symbol is used or the way in which it may be replaced by an equivalent expression or sequence of symbols. But to suppose that, in general, a knowledge of meaning consisted in verbalisable knowledge would involve an infinite regress: if a grasp of the meaning of an expression consisted, in general, in the ability to state its meaning, then it would be impossible for anyone to learn a language who was not already equipped with a fairly extensive language. Hence that knowledge which, in general, constitutes the understanding of the language of mathematics must be implicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge cannot, however, meaningfully be ascribed to someone unless it is possible to say in what the manifestation of that knowledge consists: there must be an observable difference between the behaviour or capacities of someone who is said to have that knowledge and someone who is said to lack it. Hence it follows, once more, that a grasp of the meaning of a mathematical statement must, in general, consist of a capacity to use that statement in a certain way, or to respond in a certain way to its use by others.

This essay was the first thing I'd read pointing out the similarity between Quine's philosophy of language and Hilbert's chronologically earlier -- earlier, btw, than Woolf -- philosophy of mathematics (both "holistic" in some sense -- see below -- and both of which must be rejected, as Dummett argues, by the "intuitionist" view).

it is not that a statement or even a theory has, as it were, a primal meaning which then gets modified by the interconnections that are established with other statements and other theories; rather, its meaning simply consists in the place which it occupies in the complicated network which constitutes the totality of our linguistic practices. [...] Frequently such a holistic view. is modified to the extent of admitting a class of observation statements which can be regarded as more or less directly registering our immediate experience, and hence as each carrying a determinate individual content. These observation statements lie, in Quine’s famous image of language, at the periphery of the articulated structure formed by all the sentences of our language, where alone experience impinges. [...]

For Hilbert, a definite individual content, according to which they may be individually judged as correct or incorrect, may legitimately be ascribed only to a very narrow range of statements of elementary number theory [sg. Hilbert was talking about operations like addition of integers etc. which one can "verify" with reference to collections of carrots, sticks, and the like]: these correspond to the observation statements of the holistic conception of language. All other statements of mathematics are devoid of such a content, and serve only as auxiliaries, though psychologically indispensable auxiliaries, to the recognition as correct of the finitistic statements which alone are individually meaningful.

(The connection with Virginia Woolf should be obvious.) Dummett goes on to suggest that if one rejects this sort of holistic view -- for which there are various reasons, Godel's incompleteness theorems not least among them -- one might find a path to a revisionist theory of meaning. I'm not going to bother with the argument here, interesting as it is (some of it also amusingly echoes his prescriptivist views on grammar in Grammar and Style (1993)); just one more amusing snippet:

The [conventional notion of mathematical truth] does not provide for inflections of tense or mood of the predicate ‘is true’: it has been introduced only as a predicate as devoid of tense as are all ordinary mathematical predicates; but its role in our language does not reveal why such inflections of tense or even of mood should be forbidden.

Finally I should mention that the Hilbert-Woolf-Quine metaphor comes up rather widely in discussions of mathematics; not just its validity but its value, as in this remark of Michael Atiyah's (quoted by Gowers, who is explicitly a Hilbertian formalist, though Atiyah probably isn't):

the ultimate justi cation for doing mathematics is intimately related with its overall unity. If we grant that, on purely utilitarian grounds, mathematics justi es itself by some of its applications, then the whole of mathematics acquires a rationale provided it remains a connected whole.

(I have always tended to hold something approaching this view about physics, but it is far less popular in the physics community -- partly because the appeal to direct applications is easier, partly because a fair number of physicists believe it is obvious that new theories supersede old ones rather than adding to them, a view that I have never been in complete sympathy with.)

Less-than-sterling

2011-12-27T22:20:00.000-06:00

Interesting Guardian article about CasaPound, an Italian fascist group named after the Pound:

[Pound's] daughter is now taking action to defend his reputation after an Italian fascist organisation named itself after the poet.
Mary de Rachewiltz, 86, has launched a lawsuit to force the far-right group CasaPound, which has about 5,000 members, to change its name.
"A politically compromised organisation like this has no business using the name Pound," said De Rachewiltz, who lives in a hilltop castle in northern Italy where she reads The Cantos to students.
[...]
Taking a lead from Pound's fascist ideals and denouncement of usury, CasaPound campaigns for cheap public housing but has been accused of attracting violent supporters. A Rome member was arrested last month on suspicion of assaulting leftwing activists.
[...]De Rachewiltz responded: "Pound was not leftwing or rightwing and you have to understand The Cantos to understand that. It is also a question of style. I have seen pictures of their shaven-headed leader and it does not impress me."

"The gray world of adulthood"

2011-12-27T22:13:00.001-06:00

From Amy Clampitt, "Black buttercups":

When,
under the same roof the memory of
a legendary comfort had endowed
with what in retrospect would seem
like safety, did the rumor
of unhappiness arrive? I remember waking,
a February morning leprous with frost
above the dregs of a halfhearted snowfall,
to find the gray world of adulthood
everywhere, as though there never
had been any other, in that same house
I could not bear to leave, where even now
the child who wept to leave still sits
weeping at the thought of exile.

(Vaguely topical as we had our first appreciable snowfall of the year this morning.)

The arbitrariness of the sign made flesh

2011-12-25T14:36:00.001-06:00

Two passages I'm fond of that remind me very much of each other (both are about growing up in small island countries; I do not know if there is an Anthology of Island Writing out there (or a Treatise on the Insular Bildungsroman), but it seems to me that someone should put one together) --

V.S. Naipaul in The Enigma of Arrival:

We lived, in Trinidad, among advertisements for things that were no longer made or, because of the war and the difficulties of transport, had ceased to be available. [...] Many of the advertisements in Trinidad were for old-fashioned remedies and "tonics." They were on tin, these advertisements, and enameled. They were used as decorations in shops and, having no relation to the goods offered for sale, they grew to be regarded as emblems of the shopkeeper's trade. Later, during the war, when the shanty settlement began to grow in the swampland to the east of Port of Spain, these enameled tin advertisements were used sometimes as building material.

So I was used to living in a world where the signs were without meaning, or without the meaning intended by their makers. It was of a piece with the abstract, arbitrary nature of my education, like my ability to "study" French or Russian cinema without seeing a film, an ability which was, as I have said, like a man trying to get to know a city from its street map alone.

What was true of Trinidad seemed to be true of other places as well. In the book sections of some of the colonial emporia of Port of Spain there would be a shelf or two of the cheap wartime Penguin paperbacks [...] It never struck me as odd that at the back of these wartime Penguins there should sometimes be advertisements for certain British things -- chocolates, shoes, shaving cream -- that had never been available in Trinidad and were now (because of the war, as the advertisements said) no longer being made; such advertisements were being put in by the former manufacturers only to keep their brand names alive during the war, and in the hope that the war would turn out well.

Now here's Halldor Laxness, in The Fish Can Sing:

This was about the time, not long after the Boer War, when the Barbed-wire Age was beginning in Iceland. This special commodity, which is banned by law in most countries except for military purposes and was indeed said to have been invented during the Boer War, has pacified the Icelanders more than any other foreign product one could name; and whereas in other countries there are severe penalties for putting this wretched stuff up in the open in peacetime, in Iceland barbed wire became the most desirable luxury commodity in the land for a while, next only to alcohol and cement. There are few things over which the nation has united so wholeheartedly as stringing this glorious material round every part of the land, over hill and dale, heath and moor, right up to the mountaintops and out to the farthest sea-cliffs. At first, many people behaved as the Boers had done towards the English, and simply climbed over the barbed wire whenever they came to it, but then the Althing passed a law declaring barbed wire to be inviolate in Iceland. [...]

After great detours and many digressions and the usual boys' dawdling for much of the day, we eventually reached some hillocks to the southeast of the horse-moors. There were a few scattered farms around, some up on the hills and others in the grassy hollows or dales, and the lands belonging to these farms were festooned with barbed wire for their full length and breadth.

One of the farms there was called Hvammskot. We halted on the bank of a stream just outside the home-field, where a strong barbed-wire fence had been erected -- quite at random, as far as one could see. And as we were standing there, out of sight behind a knoll, one of us volunteered the information that anyone who crossed a fence of this kind would be fined ten kronur.

We quickly agreed that it would be fun to risk a death-leap which was valued at such a high price. And because this crime had all the fascination that any kind of gambling has when there is money involved, we all set to and began jumping over the barbed wire. I will not say that the deed was done entirely without palpitations, and indeed we had a lookout posted to see if there were any spies about; but as we had really suspected all along, no one noticed the outrage we were committing, and no fines were imposed on us. [...] It was still not nearly suppertime when each and all of us had become prosperous from unclaimed ten-kronur fines.

[On this topic cf. Michael Wood on Joyce and Carroll:

But Carroll has a taste for sheer absurdity, the collapse or travesty of plausible meaning, whereas Joyce, as far as I can tell, wants only to multiply meanings [...] the famous arbitrariness of the sign: ‘a “borogove” is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round – something like a live mop.’ Try working that out from the name. Compared with these astonishing jinks Joyce’s antics can look almost reasonable. In relation to ‘jabberwocky’, say, a ‘jibberweek’ seems quite familiar – we’ve all had one of those. And when Joyce recites the names of days, they too sound like many days we’ve known: ‘moanday, tearsday, wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday’. Sunday is safe for the moment; safe because unmentioned.]

The poor, the sleepless, the wet, and the cramped

2011-12-24T19:09:00.000-06:00

1. A Thomas Bernhard story, "Two Tutors" -- as good a place to start reading Bernhard as any, though of course there is no excuse for not reading Wittgenstein's Nephew, which is short -- with some instantly recognizable Bernhard touches:

“If you can imagine,” he said, “that already as a child I had to lie in bed awake for ten, twelve nights in a row, dead tired, without being able to sleep. An adult,” he said, “can, thanks to his intelligence, control his sleeplessness, make it ridiculous. Not a child. A child is at the mercy of sleeplessness.” Above the New Gate, without as usual looking down vertically on the town, we turned, as every day, to the right, not to the left: he wants to turn right, turns right, so I also turn right, because at this point above the New Gate he has always turned right, he now no longer dares turn left, I think . . . It is up to me, one day to turn left, then he too will turn left, follow me, because he is the weaker of the two of us. . . For the same reason I have now for weeks been following him to the right . . . Why? The next time I’ll simply turn left, then he too will turn left . . . The time when I can be useful to him when as usual I allow him to turn right, follow him to the right, is over, I think, now I only harm him, when I let him turn right and follow him . . . He no longer has the strength all at once to turn left . . . Shortly after the fork he said: “What I said to you regarding my sleeplessness is related to my discharge from the Innsbruck establishment, in which, as you know, I was employed until the beginning of the holidays.” He said, “All my life I have led only an awful life, and it is my right to lead an awful life, and this awful life is my sleeplessness . . . But now, the story which led to my discharge from the Innsbruck establishment. Like all my stories it begins with my inability to sleep. I was unable to fall asleep. I take many drugs, but no drug helps me any more. I had,” he said, “walked for hours along the north bank with my students. We were all tired. My eyes open, incapable of distracting myself by reading, at the mercy of my lifelong sleeplessness, I was gripped by the most despicable thoughts and said to myself again and again: they sleep, I don’t sleep, they sleep, I don’t sleep, I don’t sleep, they sleep, I don’t sleep . . . This boarding school silence, this dreadful silence emanating from the dormitories . . .

2. A Christmas tree made of pencils; other things similarly constructed but merely rectangular:

3. Epic floods in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. (I'll put up a link to a relief/donations page when I can find one.)

4. Mike Konczal quotes T.M. Scanlon on the non-transferability of social obligations:

The strength of a stranger’s claim on us for aid in the fulfillment of some interest depends upon what that interest is and need not be proportional to the importance he attaches to it. The fact that someone would be willing to forgo a decent diet in order to build a monument to his god does not mean that his claim for aid in his project has the same strength as a claim for aid in obtaining enough to eat (even assuming that the sacrifices required on others would be the same). Perhaps a person does have some claim on others for assistance in a project to which he attaches such great importance. All I need maintain is that it does not have the weight of a claim to aid in the satisfaction of a truly urgent interest even if the person in question assigns these interests equal weight.

This makes sense at first glance but I am not sure I want to agree with it; as a descriptive statement it comes down to the observation that people are "paternalistic" towards other people (they're willing to "help" but only in matters in which they can imagine themselves wanting to be helped -- i.e., a typical limits-of-empathy problem). So the distinction most people would make between helping with the food and the monument is a moral failing in my book. Speaking of food, I recently came upon this Economist blog post:

as [Duflo and Banerjee] remark, “things that make life less boring are a priority for the poor”. They tell the story of meeting a Moroccan farmer, Oucha Mbarbk. They ask him what would he do if he had a bit more money. Buy some more food, came the reply. What would he do if he had even more money? Buy better, tastier food. “We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family when we noticed a television, a parabolic antenna and a DVD player.” Why had he bought all this if he didn’t have enough money for food? “He laughed and said ‘Oh, but television is more important than food.’”

As Sarah Duff recently said, Orwell has been here:

The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes – an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread…? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. … When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! ... Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the Englishman’s opium.

Scanlon would say, I suppose, that there's no obligation to let the poor buy the food they want. In a sense this is true: redistribution followed by frivolous use makes for bad politics; even non-fungible transfers to the poor are better than no transfers, and have the advantage of being politically (somewhat) safe. As a point of morality, however, I disagree, for reasons prev. discussed. (One could make a non-utilitarian argument for Scanlonian redistribution on the grounds that it reinforces civic participation or whatnot but I'm not interested in this line of thought.) The apparent broader lesson is that although redistribution and nannying are different issues in principle, they are largely the same issue in practice because people suck and are censorious/nosy. It is not clear what one can do about this: to the extent that morals are immutable, one either has to make pre-transfer outcomes much more equal (presumably by cleverly redefining the concept of transfers, or by intervening in economic activity) or give up on the issue.

(Perhaps because I have never attempted to run a business and have no interest in doing so, I'm not bothered by the idea of heavy economic regulations on corporations if the ultimate result is to give poor people more freedom to eat unhealthy food. I fear that this will always be a minority view.)

Horse-science

2011-12-23T19:42:00.000-06:00

Recent reading has thrown up a cluster of bilaterally related stuff that more thought could perhaps assemble into a complete picture. For now I'll just provide the list.

First, Michael Wood, writing about the future of universities in the LRB:

If we can’t speak the language of our enemies, not only will they not listen to us – they might not listen to us anyway – but they can’t. We need to be saying things they could hear if they would listen. ‘They’, by the way, includes all kinds of people within universities as well as outside them. But what if we can’t speak that language without losing the battle? What if the very language wins the battle by definition? What if we can’t speak of cost-effectiveness because we don’t understand either cost or effect in the way our enemies do?

Amusingly, an article about Michael Polanyi in the same issue suggests what the right language might be:

Michael thought, with few exceptions, that political meddling with a self-organising economy was wrong and destructive. (Nye notes that Michael Polanyi, Hayek and von Mises were all using the notion of ‘spontaneous order’ at that time, and while it has been claimed that Polanyi’s scientifically derived concept had priority, the usage was common in 19th-century European liberal thought.) [...] Scientific research, in its essential nature, is spontaneous, self-directing and self-organising, driven on only by its ‘internal necessities’ [...] Bernal talked of the freedom of necessity, while Polanyi asserted the necessity of freedom. Scientific autonomy had historically been a substantial fact and it had proved its rightness.

In other words, the argument against planning science -- either central or corporate -- is formally the same invisible-hand argument that the right uses to argue against planning the economy, and that "Burkeans" have used for various purposes. (It is trivial to generalize this argument to some aspects of the humanities, certainly the creative arts.) Of course, it would be silly for me to expect anyone on the contemporary right to find this persuasive, but that simply indicates the extent to which ideology is subservient to class warfare in politics (and probably has always been).

The article goes on to describe Polanyi's irrationalist defense of science:

The notion of ‘connoisseurship’ hasn’t often been attached to scientific judgment, but Polanyi repeatedly did just that: ‘Connoisseurship, like skill, can be communicated only by example, not by precept. To become an expert wine-taster, to acquire a knowledge of innumerable different blends of tea or to be trained as a medical diagnostician, you must go through a long course of experience under the guidance of a master.’ And so too to become a scientist.

Science is a vast fiduciary system. Scientists know what they do by finding trustworthy sources and then trusting them. It is also what Polanyi called a polycentric system, in which autonomous and only loosely co-ordinated groups of specialists – mildly sceptical and mainly trusting – periodically keep an eye out for what is going on next door. The coherence and integrity of the body of scientific knowledge arise through these processes of mutual adjustment. Finally, the bases of scientific judgment cannot be completely articulated because the ‘tacit dimension’ is ineliminable. It is not a fly in the formal ointment; it is what makes science science. You would understand that, Polanyi suggested, if you knew what it was to be ‘confronted with the anxious dilemma of a live scientific issue’. The further away you are from the quotidian life of scientific practice, the more you tend to be infatuated with myths of method.

Nye convincingly argues that the major purpose of Polanyi’s anti-rationalist philosophy of science was political and, specifically, that it was meant to counter Communist visions of hierarchical control. The political machinery of Communist planning proceeded through rational and formal method and it presumed rational and formal method in the object of planning. Conceptions of effective method had been devised to celebrate science, but in the middle of the 20th century they were having the unintended consequence of making people think they could command and control scientific inquiry in whatever direction they thought society needed. But you cannot plan and co-ordinate practices that are in their nature self-organising and whose most basic judgments are not formally specifiable. It was not just that a proper understanding of the nature of science was necessary to defend it; a proper understanding of science could contribute to the defence of liberal society as a whole: ‘The world needs science today above all as an example of the good life. Spread out over the planet scientists form even today, though submerged by disaster, the body of a great and good society.’ The fabric of science was political.

(When I hear "the fabric of science" I inevitably think of nylon.)

The bit in bold reminded me instantly of Michael Wood summarizing Auden:

Art can’t redeem the world, and that is why we must be modest about it. But it can show us what redemption would look like, and this is why it matters.

And thence, by a relatively short step, to Auden, in "Streams," writing about the innocent anarchic nature of water, which

tells of a sort of world, quite other,
altogether different from this one

with its envies and passports, a polis like that
to which, in the same of scholars everywhere,
Gaston Paris pledged his allegiance
as Bismarck's siege-guns came within earshot.

(There is an interesting tension here between the idea of art or science as romantic, spontaneous effusion that is implicit in this line of "spontaneous order" thinking, and the more common idea in Auden that the redemption is hard work, that it is something arrived at by a painful process of discipline. It is hard to think of redemption in non-Arcadian terms. The art/nature contrast and the planning/spontaneity contrast are not quite the same because traditional ways of life or scientific practice, which are spontaneously ordered, quite seamlessly include many very artificially organized activities. Conservatism is on this reading chiefly opposed to glibness -- David Brooks often says or implies this, but of course it is nothing if not glib to conflate this kind of view with the politics of the contemporary right.)

But to return to Polanyi. Shapin doesn't say this but his views on science are reasonably common among theoretical physicists; a good example is Steven Weinberg on scientific beauty in Dreams of a Final Theory:

A physicist who says that a theory is beautiful does not mean quite the same thing that would be meant in saying that a particular painting or a piece of music or poetry is beautiful. It is not merely a personal expression of aesthetic pleasure; it is much closer to what a horse trainer means when he looks at a racehorse and says that it is a beautiful horse. The horse trainer is of course expressing a personal opinion, but it is an opinion about an objective fact [...] that this is the kind of horse that wins races.

And elsewhere, flogging the horse metaphor on PBS:

The horse breeder has seen lots of horses and from experience with horses knows that that's the kind of horse that wins races. [...] So it's an aesthetic sense that's been beaten into us by centuries of interaction with nature.

(Weinberg's thoughts on this topic are stimulating but I disagree with them -- I think a majority of theoretical physicists nowadays would dispute the plausibility of "rigidity" as a criterion -- and I fear that it is ultimately just another example of the depressing trend where very successful people over-generalize from their success.)

I'm not sure how much weight any of these ideas individually bears, but I think they form an interesting strand in the history of 20th century liberalism.

Streaked and rayed

2011-12-23T16:39:00.000-06:00

Gavin Ewart, "Little girl writes a sonnet about her dead cat" (link asks for password, I recommend not following it -- poem is via Calista, who also offered a culinary interpretation of Lowell's "cured, I am frizzled, stale and small"):

That there's Cat Heaven, kitten-having-fun,
I don't believe---where any cat can lie
stretched out like streaky bacon, always fed,
happy and purring in perpetual sun.

(Arrgh purr-petual!)

Wallace Stevens, "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle":

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruits thereof.
Two golden gourds distended on our vines,
Into the autumn weather, splashed with frost,
Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque.
We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed,
The laughing sky will see the two of us
Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains.

Porcine, peregrine, passerine

2011-12-16T12:49:00.001-06:00

(Further adventures in naming and necessity)

1. From the Times archive (1828), a story about "Mr Hogsflesh, the Sapient Pig":

One day last week a man of the name of Hogsflesh, a vender of fish about the streets of Lewes, who, from the singular coincidence of his name and disposition, has obtained the nickname of the Sapient Pig, undertook for a trifling wager to eat a raw rabbit, which he devoured as hungrily as a ploughman would a beef-steak pudding, picking the head and legs in clever style. He is in a short time to eat a cat in the same raw state, for which purpose he has had a tooth drawn, which troubled him when tearing to pieces his raw meal.

2. I was delighted by this term in a PRL that came out today [Bailung et al., PRL 107, 255005 (2011); for solitons see here; cf. peregrine falcons, Peregrine Pickle...]

Peregrine analyzed the [non-linear Schrodinger equation] ... It has been suggested that rogue waves in the ocean are related to what are now called Peregrine solitons. Peregrine solitons have been observed in nonlinear fiber optics experiments [8]. They have also recently been observed in deep water wave experiments performed in a water tank.

3. I was also instantly reminded of Passerine's tanager (more commonly Passerini's but never mind that), a name that borders on tautology (tanagers being by definition passerines). (HT Jenny Davidson.)

4. The Philip Larkin toads trail in Hull (via Calista). It seems to me that there's a crude chiasmus in the fact that Larkin had a toad squatting on him, while Toad of Toad Hall was on a perpetual lark.

Ipsophagy

2011-12-15T16:20:00.001-06:00

From the bear section of "Flaubert's Bestiary," in F's Parrot by Julian Barnes:

From the chef to Their Majesties of Prussia Dumas obtained a recipe for bear's paws, Moscow style. Buy the paws skinned. Wash, salt, and marinade for three days. Casserole with bacon and vegetables for seven or eight hours; drain, wipe, sprinkle with pepper, and turn in melted lard. Roll in breadcrumbs and grill for half an hour. Serve with a piquant sauce and two spoonfuls of redcurrant jelly.

It is not known whether Flaubear ever ate his namesake. He ate dromedary in Damascus in 1850. It seems a reasonable guess that if he had eaten bear he would have commented on such ipsophagy.

From a fascinating LRB piece (prob. gated) on the medicinal properties attributed to human remains:

[Richard Sugg] makes disturbing revelations about the eagerness of the English to see the numerous bodies littering the war-torn countryside of Stuart Ireland as ‘a reservoir of profitable corpse materials’ – especially the usnea moss that grew on unburied skulls. As his account of the popularity of skull moss indicates, Sugg’s interest in corpse medicine reaches well beyond mumia to inspect all those strange concoctions of human tissue and waste favoured by early modern pharmacology: blood, ground skulls, crushed brains and human fat, not to mention ‘hair, nails, lice, sperm, saliva, milk, sweat, tapeworms, stones, urine and excrement’, ingredients which suggest that the potions contrived by the Earl of Rochester in his notorious impersonation of a quack – as Dr Bendo – may not have had the purely satiric intention usually attributed to them. By the same token, Sugg’s vivid accounts of epilepsy sufferers rushing to consume the blood gushing from the bodies of executed felons gives an unexpectedly literal twist to Hamlet’s ‘now could I drink hot blood.’

The health-giving virtues widely attributed to such sanguinary draughts suggest, he writes, ‘an uncertain but intriguing link with the most successful demon of postmodern culture, the vampire’. This is a connection Sugg follows through the prescriptions of the 18th-century Irish clergyman and amateur physician John Keogh, whom he calls ‘the cannibal priest’, to Bram Stoker. As well as mummy for green wounds, distillation of brains for epilepsy, and pulverised heart for apoplexy, Keogh recommended warm blood as a tonic for the falling sickness. In folk-belief Keogh’s prowess seems to have endowed the blood of all his descendants with mysterious properties, so that in 1883 William George Black recorded that Dubliners regarded Keogh blood as a proven remedy for the toothache, while an acquaintance claimed to know of a Belfast Keogh ‘whose flesh had actually been punctured scores of times to procure his blood’. Black does not explain to what use the dour bloodsuckers of Ulster might have put his vital fluid, but such rumours may have provided additional inspiration for the Dublin-born Bram Stoker.

Flaubert, of course, was epileptic, and is also reported to have said that "People are like food."

Two recent poems that are worth reading but have nothing to do with ipsophagy: "The World's Arm" by Brenda Shaughnessy and "Not Beyond All Conjecture" by John Ashbery.

Grief-bacon, contentment-bacon

2011-12-12T12:14:00.000-06:00

Dept. of stuff Germans have words for:

1. The German for living the good life is "to live like a maggot in bacon." (Hanging Noodles)

2. The German word "kummerspeck" means "excess weight gained by emotional over-eating" and translates literally as "grief bacon." (Nick Confessore, twitter)

3. From a W.G. Sebald poem that appeared in the New Yorker sometime this year:

A young woman
came up to me
& said that al-
though on vacation
she had spent
all day at
the office
which unlike

her apartment was
air-conditioned &
as cold as the
morgue. There,
she said, I am
happy like an
opened up oyster
on a bed of ice.

Snippets

2011-12-11T22:41:00.000-06:00

0. As a programming note, regular programming is back, as there's no imminent travel and won't be for a month or two.

1. Frances Cornford, "The Visit":

There is a bed-time sadness in this place
That seemed ahead so promising and sweet,
Almost like music calling us from home;

But now the staircase does not need our feet,
The drawer is ignorant of my brush and comb
The mirror quite indifferent to your face.

(I have always been vaguely fond of Cornford and of good Edwardian writing more generally -- Edward Thomas for example. Fleur Adcock brilliantly characterizes Cornford and her ilk as the "more ladylike" poets of the period; it is worth realizing that this description is not in itself an insult.)

2. from Yves Bonnefoy, "The Tomb of Paul Verlaine":

Humble, out of simple pride, he agreed
To be for others just a mirror
Whose tarnished silver would filter the sky.

Let them see that the sky was in him
At its reddest through the evening leaves
As the pigeons’ cooing darkens.

Via the indispensable seventydys on twitter.

3. Yet another argument in favor of booze (MetaFilter, via D. Avid):

More commonly known as rat lungworm, Angiostrongylus cantonensis is widespread in Southeast Asia and Africa. A growing problem is the spread of this parasite by the giant African land snail. Rat lungworm is known to cause disease in humans, but previously was confined mostly to those who had consumed a Thai dish called koi-hoi containing raw snail meat. Lovers of raw snails need not despair however, a study shows that ingesting alcohol along with your snails lowers the number of viable parasites.

"Rewrite man"

2011-12-04T11:11:00.000-06:00

Christopher Logue has died. I was never an unconditional admirer of War Music but have always sort of seen what others like about it; and some bits of description have stuck with me:

Achilles saw his armor in that instant
And its ominous radiance flooded his heart.
Bright pads with toggles crossed behind the knees,
Bodice of fitted tungsten, pliable straps;
His shield as round and rich as moons in spring;
His sword's haft parked between sheaves of gray obsidian
From which a lucid blade stood out, leaf-shaped, adorned
With running spirals.
And for his head a welded cortex; yes,
Though it is noon, the helmet screams against the light;
Scratches the eye; so violent it can be seen
Across three thousand years.

Apparently Logue was a colorful character:

In the 1940s he even penned a pornographic novel, entitled Lust, under the nom de plume Count Palmiro Vicarion.

His poems were set to music by both jazz musicians and in ballads by Donovan and Joan Baez.

"Some cemeteries are beefing up patrols"

2011-11-22T16:33:00.000-06:00

Follow-up on a couple of recent posts:

1. The WSJ picks up the Tribune story I previously linked to, re the recent urn theft fad.

On a recent day, Mr. Snook showed a visitor what the grave looked like when he discovered the theft this summer—with a gaping hole in the middle of the handsome marker where the vase should have been—and how the replacement vase now fits in.

"I think she'd like that we got a replacement and fixed it up so we can put her flowers in there," he said.

Obligatory Thomas Browne quote:

He that lay in a golden urn eminently above the earth, was not like to find the quiet of his bones. Many of these urns were broke by a vulgar discoverer in hope of enclosed treasure. The ashes of Marcellus were lost above ground, upon the like account. Where profit hath prompted, no age hath wanted such miners. For which the most barbarous expilators found the most civil rhetorick. Gold once out of the earth is no more due unto it; what was unreasonably committed to the ground, is reasonably resumed from it; let monuments and rich fabricks, not riches, adorn men’s ashes. The commerce of the living is not to be transferred unto the dead; it is not injustice to take that which none complains to lose, and no man is wronged where no man is possessor.

2. Having blogged about ASJ Tessimond I have an excuse to quote this letter in the new LRB:

Tessimond’s father died in 1936; it was on the occasion of his mother’s death in 1942 that the poet received the inheritance that he subsequently spent on chorus girls and analysts. I am writing a biography of the poet and have access to his unpublished journal, where he recalls this figure being nearer £7000. It is ironic that the money should have come from his mother: most of the analysts believed she was the cause of his problems.
James Bainbridge
University of Liverpool

Cigarette lighter or squid?

2011-11-20T21:41:00.000-06:00

The epigraph of Paul Muldoon's translation of Baudelaire's "Albatross" is from this BBC story:

Nearly two million Laysan albatrosses live [in the Midway Islands] and researchers have come to the staggering conclusion that every single one contains some quantity of plastic. [...] He explained how some chicks never develop the strength to fly off the islands to search for food because their stomachs are filled with plastic. [...] Many albatrosses are found to have swallowed disposable cigarette lighters - which look remarkably similar to their staple food of squid.

I can't see the resemblance myself, but it is exactly the sort of association that belongs in a Paul Muldoon poem. I've skimmed through the new volume, Maggot; it offers the usual pleasures, but there are perhaps too many stunt poems, e.g., sonnet sequences that exhaust all possible rhymes for a word. (I guess I was also expecting more maggots!) Nevertheless, if you like reading about someone "malformed in his formaldehyde" this is very much the kind of book you should read; the sequence on "The Humors of Hakone" in particular is very good. One of the best poems in the new volume, "Love poem with pig," is here; "Quail" is available here and used to be on Muldoon's website for a long time.

(Needless to say I'd welcome any insight into why/which cigarette lighters look remarkably like squid.)

"The psychological or human 'beginning'"

2011-11-19T14:36:00.000-06:00

I was strongly influenced (as an undergraduate?) by this remark of Helen Vendler's about Stevens:

I do violence to these lines in detaching them from what precedes and follows them, but I do so for a reason. More often than not, the human pang in Stevens is secreted inconspicuously in the poem, instead of being announced in the title or in the opening lines. It is the usual, if mistaken, way of the commentators to begin at the beginning and take Stevens's metaphysical or epistemological prolegomena as the real subject of the poem, when in fact they are the late plural of the subject, whose early candor of desire reposes further down the page. And so I isolate what I take to be the psychological or human "beginning" of the poem, its point of origin in feeling...

This was extremely useful advice: Stevens was an acquired taste for me, and even now I find that I usually have to rearrange a Stevens poem before I can appreciate it or understand why it is put together the way it is. There is a peculiar similarity here with the business of appreciating mathematical proofs, which I was reminded of by something Gowers said in his recent (and very good) post on proving the unique prime factorization theorem:

I worry sometimes that accounts like this of how a proof might be discovered can be off-puttingly long. So it’s important to stress that the actual proofs are much much shorter. Here’s how the proof that the above thoughts lead to ends up. I’ll just do the uniqueness part, and I’ll write the whole thing in logical order, which is more or less the reverse of the order in which one discovers the steps.

I am sympathetic to the idea that real appreciation is never without an element of reverse engineering, or of hypothetical intellectual history: the completed work in itself might offer some immediate delight, but to go any further you need to have some theory, accurate or not, of how it might have been arrived at, and why it was then organized as it was. (Notable exception here: Milton. But then I think of Paradise Lost as pure verbal texture a la Campion's songs.) I imagine that this is a more tenable procedure with a poem or a proof than it is with, e.g., a novel.

It has always struck me as a regrettable deficiency -- maybe a necessary one -- of education in math and physics that there is very little intellectual history, and I think it is fair to say that many practicing physicists are not connoisseurs by temperament; there is a widespread tendency to regard historical aspects as "impractical" -- which they are, for premeds and engineers -- though I have always found it invaluable to have a sense of how people have gone about doing things. (My views on pedagogy are too uninformed and too reactionary to discuss safely in public.)

[As an admin note I'll be traveling the two weeks after Thanksgiving: Boston Nov. 26-30, New Jersey Nov. 30-Dec 2, New York that Friday night and part/all of Saturday, San Francisco Dec. 6-8. It is only mildly indiscreet to note that this is all job-quest-related to some extent; the old talk has been revised and will have to be practiced and touched up repeatedly; it is against the culture of physics to read out any part of a talk, so that, in practice, one has to memorize the first three or four agonizing minutes until one hits one's stride.]

1Q66 and All That

2011-11-17T20:46:00.000-06:00

Charles Baxter reviews Murakami's 1Q84 (NYRB):

the locale also includes two moons, miniature angels or demons (it is hard to tell which they are) referred to as “Little People,” ghosts knocking on the door demanding payment, insemination-by-proxy, and air chrysalises: cocoons created by the Little People in which pod-like human replicas, referred to as dohta, are hatched. 1Q84 is a marathon novel. (Murakami himself is a marathon runner and has said that “most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day.”)

But the Little People are "absolutely mystifying. It is as if the Seven Dwarfs had gradually made their presence known and their powers understood in a novel by James T. Farrell." I'm not sure I want to read this novel. (I've read very little Murakami, but have a vaguely favorable impression of what I've read -- read 2.2 novels in succession in 2009, then forgot my copy of Norwegian Wood between the sheets in a hotel room in Vannes, and never returned to his work.)

In other news, the Lethem-Wood plot has thickened, with James Wood responding to comments at the Millions -- I recommend Ctrl-F -- disconcertingly, Wood refers to himself in the third person and then seems surprised when other commenters refer to him as "'James Wood'". (Back-story: Lethem recently wrote a content-free whinge at the LARB (naturally) about a supposedly dishonest/elitist review by Wood ca. 2003; this got more coverage than it deserved because everyone likes to bait Wood.) I haven't read the comments, there are too many of them, but I am indebted to the (as-of-now) very last one, by "Edmond Caldwell," for a phrase -- revanchist domestication -- that accurately if uncharitably describes my approach to the more experimental stuff I like.

(Re post title see here.)

"Not all good poetry is also 'important poetry'"

2011-11-12T16:00:00.001-06:00

Mark Ford has a good article in the new LRB (gated) on A.S.J. Tessimond and Bernard Spencer, two largely forgotten English poets of the Auden generation; on the strength of the quotations, Tessimond seems reasonably worthwhile, Spencer less so. (Ford's remarks on Spencer seem muddled to me. Not only is all the quoted verse bristling with Audenesque phrases -- "a word or a lock which gunfire may not break, / Or a love whose range it may not take" -- but surely the idea that one couldn't write tentatively while under Auden's influence is refuted by the example of Louis MacNeice.) Anyway, here is Ford on Tessimond:

Tessimond can’t be said to have developed as a poet in any clearly discernible way, and it’s not easy when reading his posthumously published poems to decide which is early, which middle and which late. All seem buoyed up by his wit and curiosity and compassion; this is especially surprising given that in middle age he developed severe manic depression and underwent extensive electric shock therapy.

And here are two Tessimond poems quoted in the article, both of which I like:

Letter from Luton

Dear Hubert,
                  Bored, malevolent and mute on
A wet park seat, I look at life and Luton
And think of spittle, slaughterhouses, double
Pneumonia, schizophrenia, kidney trouble,
Piles, paranoia, gallstones in the bladder,
Manic depressive madness growing madder,
Cretins with hideous tropical diseases
And red-eyed necrophiles – while on the breezes
From Luton Gasworks comes a stench that closes
Like a damp frigid hand on my neuroses,
And Time (arthritic deaf-mute) stumbles on
And on and on and on.
                      Yours glumly,
                                       John

In that cold land

Ghosts do not kiss, or, if they kiss, they feel
   Ice touching ice, and turn away, and shiver;
But there as here, perhaps, we still can steal
   Quietly off, and talk and talk for ever.

"The ambiguity of the apple"

2011-11-11T21:35:00.000-06:00

Alan Garner remembers Alan Turing (Guardian):

He was stocky, barrel-chested, with a high-pitched, donnish voice and the aerodynamics of a brick. He was funny and witty and he talked endlessly, but I understood very little of what he was saying, and it became clear that he ran in order to think. He seemed to be obsessed by mathematics and biology. That much I could work out.

We had one thing in common: a fascination with Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, especially the transformation of the Wicked Queen into the Witch. He used to go over the scene in detail, dwelling on the ambiguity of the apple, red on one side, green on the other, one of which gave death. We had both been traumatised by Walt.

Also an appealing piece in Nature News, casting doubt on the claim (which I missed at the time) that cows are magnetic:

Three years ago, Hynek Burda, a zoologist at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, and his colleagues added cattle to the magnetic family with a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team used data from Google Earth to show that domestic cattle seem to prefer to align their bodies along Earth’s magnetic field lines¹, and showed a similar phenomenon in field observations of deer. [...] Burda and his colleagues reanalysed the replication attempt by Jelinek and his colleagues⁴. Burda says that half of the Jelinek team's data should be excluded because some of the pastures are on slopes or near high-voltage power lines, for example, or because the images are too poor to make out cattle, or appear to contain hay bales or sheep instead. “One half of their data is just noise,” says Burda.

I wonder if Lydia Davis reads Nature News.

"Death to me subscribes"

2011-11-05T17:58:00.000-05:00

Thanks to my favorite twitter bot Willy Shakes, I discovered this Shakespeare sonnet, which I don't even remember having read before (though I must have) but now like very much indeed:

CVII.

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time,
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes:
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.

The last line is uncharacteristically good for a Shakespeare sonnet. I like the messing around with choriambs in the first two lines -- a stretch to call it a conscious rhythmical echo of "Exegi monumentum aere perennius," which the sonnet generally evokes, but it's very effective on its own terms. The second quatrain definitely refers -- to my mind -- to James I's peace with Spain ca. 1604, but there's some controversy about when exactly the poem was written. NB there is a very closely parallel passage by Drayton, who is more explicit about the events (Idea, LI):

Lastly mine eyes amazedly have seen
Essex's great fall, Tyrone his peace to gain;
The quiet end of that long-living Queen;
This King's fair entrance; and our peace with Spain,
We and the Dutch at length ourselves to sever.

"Quite useful"

2011-11-03T16:36:00.000-05:00

New issue of Science has a fascinating profile of the (depressive, hand-waving, enormously influential) evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers [Science 334, 589 (2011)]:

Stories of his reckless and aggressive side abound. He loves to use the words “fuck” and “motherfucker,” calling them quite useful, and he has gotten into public spats with many people over the years. Trivers can be brutally honest and plain rude, as many letters he has written to colleagues over the years testify.[...] Asked whether his discussion of Middle East politics might not turn off some people whom he might otherwise convince of his ideas, he just says, “Well, fuck 'em."

Trivers has accused Brown, who he says was in charge of the statistics, of preselecting the dancers and changing the values on some of the dancers' measures of symmetry to get that result. Trivers has even written a short book about it that he sends to whoever cites the paper. Brown will only say that Rutgers is investigating the matter, and Nature has no comment.

A potentially useful aphorism:

“Did you know that the enjoyment of sex is actually correlated with sperm count in the ejaculate?” he asks. “So it is true that in old age you appreciate the smaller things more. There are no big things to enjoy anymore.”

According to the profile, "Most biologists spend their lives studying ants, geese, or other animals and then extend their conclusions to humans later in life. Trivers tended to start with humans." The profile in general reminds me of something I've always disliked about the human-and-mammal end of evolutionary biology, which is that people's scientific opinions are really worldviews -- and usually the worldviews that you would expect them to hold given their temperament and background. (Not surprising: as Lewontin remarked in an article -- NYRB? -- I cannot find, if your motives were scientific in the conventional sense you'd probably be studying plants.) Now there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this, and you could even argue that the community picks out people whose worldviews happen to be good biology, but at a minimum it tends to blur the line between simplifying-one's-research and mouthing-off-in-general.

Hard-urned

2011-11-01T13:02:00.001-05:00

From today's Chicago Tribune:

A routine burglary call at a South Side apartment building early Monday led police to an unusual find: 89 funeral vases and a metal plaque, allegedly stolen from area cemeteries. [...]

"I remember a while back … it hit the news that it was a big theft problem because of the value of the metal and the scrap prices," Malecki said.

Of mice and shoes

2011-11-01T11:47:00.000-05:00

1. from Marianne Moore, "Silence":

Self reliant like the cat
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth --
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.

2. "Mice" in A.J. Snijders's Very Short Animal Stories (trans. Lydia Davis, in Asymptote):

A mouse inside a shoe is not a primal fear, not a trauma, but I do pay attention, all the same. It's because of the open roofs. I have a house with three tile roofs. They used to be haylofts, they were not timbered, the wind had to be allowed to blow through freely, against the heat and damp. Time and objectives change, I timbered one roof, gas was installed, the electricity went underground, drainage pipes were laid, but the mice stayed. The house is in the fields, there are mice everywhere. [...] Yesterday in a forgotten cupboard I found two pairs of shoes. I recognized them, old, but still useable. First I hold them by the tips, and I shake them—to be absolutely sure, I even poke them with a little piece of wood. Then I put them on; once my feet are inside them, I feel ten years younger, but that doesn't help, I'm still thinking about the oil, the energy, the mice, the people and the water.

---

I have a Google-reader-shaped hole in my heart, now that their latest shitty "update" has excised not only the social features but the "share with note" feature I used to make clippings. For now I've made a new tumblr that should serve some of the same purposes (via GReader's "send to" feature), but it is more work and doesn't work nearly as well. The malign Google+, which is cannibalizing all of Google's other "social" features in a futile attempt to compete with Facebook, is apparently to blame... I fear for the future of Google chat.

Swimming and glasses

2011-10-27T11:58:00.000-05:00

From Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Folding Star:

Part of the misery of swimming was that you couldn't do it in glasses; the surrender to cold water followed immediately on the surrender to a world of vague distances and confused identities, and as I stood squinting down the lanes in the dim hope of picking out Matt's dark head I had a moment's foretaste of the fears of the old, as you see them smiling anxiously against imagined threats and half-heard ridicule. [...] The showers were functional and fierce, a yellow-tiled room with six fixed nozzles and high up in one wall a narrow strip of meshed window that could be tugged open by a chain. I was amazed to pick up, through the crash of the water and the suck and wheeze of the drain, the putter of a boat's engine and a brief reek of burnt fuel. A canal must lie just outside, perhaps lapping against the very walls of the bath.

The first part of this resonated very strongly with me; I've been very nearsighted as long as I can remember, and (being messy and clumsy and lazy besides) have never been comfortable with the idea of contacts.

(Blogging has been v. light lately; I've been too preoccupied with job-seeking for my own good, but have finally managed to distract myself to some extent with work...)

The poem as zombie, the zombie as poet

2011-10-20T14:08:00.000-05:00

Christopher Ricks on Philip Larkin, in Dylan's Visions of Sin:

This sentence [paraphrase of a Larkin poem] exercises a summary injustice. It is not much more than perfunctory gossip, whereas Larkin's three sentences are a poem. The poet makes these dry bones live -- or rather, since he is not a witch-doctor and the poem is not a zombie, he makes us care that these bones lived.

(A phrase I remember hearing a lot in workshoppy college classes was "this sonnet comes to life in l. 10"; for some reason no one felt compelled to add that it staggers through the next five lines grunting and attempting to devour the reader's brain.)

Colson Whitehead on his zombie book:

For me, the terror of the zombie is that at any moment, your friend, your family, you neighbor, your teacher, the guy at the bodega down the street, can be revealed as the monster they've always been.

(Which, come to think of it, is apt if applied to Larkin, "the sewer under the national monument" etc.)

This bit from Elif Batuman's uncharacteristically boring NY'er article (gated; the outtakes on her blog are good though) caught my eye:

the endangered white-headed duck [...] has one of the highest penis-to-body ratios of all vertebrates. Its pliant, corkscrew-shaped penis is longer than its body, with a spiny base and brush-like tip. The first time Cagan observed one of these outgrowths, he thought the duck had been disemboweled.

Puerile to pick this bit out, I know, but the piece is at its best in these sections.

"He is na dog, he is a lam"

2011-10-15T15:08:00.000-05:00

1. A house made entirely of vintage books (appropriately I got this from Random House's twitter feed):

2. From Sally Mapstone's LRB review of an edition of William Dunbar's poems:

Scots were not popular in late medieval Oxford. Two fellows of Merton came up before the college authorities in 1497 after a fracas in which one had accused the other of being a Scot. The perpetrator, William Ireland, was warned not to issue such an infamy against anyone else.

This stereotype was new to me:

The first of a pair of punning poems on James Dog, an officer in the Queen’s wardrobe, persistently declares, ‘Madame, ye heff a dangerous dog,’ and the second then just as assiduously corrects that statement: ‘He is na dog, he is a lam.’ [...] Unravelling the nature of Dunbar’s relationship with the Queen is even trickier because of Margaret’s appalling posthumous reputation among Scottish historians, in which the familiar stereotypes of the unstable, sexually malleable, meddling English female have played far too straightforward a part.

(The reviewed edition -- which I had checked out for much of college -- is notable partly for ordering the poems alphabetically by first line. This is actually what led me to the review: I was reminded by the abstract of Jenny Davidson's ABCs of the novel event (which I would definitely attend if I were in NYC) of alphabetical order as one obvious alternative to chronological order...)

3. Courtesy of Calista, a magnificent bit of scatological verse (John Oldham, "Upon the author of a play call'd Sodom"):

Vile Sot! who clapt with Poetry art sick,
And void'st Corruption, like a Shanker'd Prick.
Like Ulcers, thy impostum'd Addle Brains,
Drop out in Matter, which thy Paper stains:
Whence nauseous Rhymes, by filthy Births proceed,
As Maggots, in some T---rd, ingendring breed.
Thy Muse has got the Flow'rs, and they ascend,
As in some Green-sick Girl, at upper end.
Sure Nature made, or meant at least t'have don't,
Thy Tongue a Clytoris, thy Mouth a C---t:
How well a Dildoe, wou'd that place become,
To gag it up, and make't for ever dumb?
[...]
Or (if I may ordain a Fate more fit)
For such foul, nasty, Excrements of Wit,
May they condemn'd to th'publick Jakes, be lent,
For me I'd fear the Piles, in vengeance sent
Shou'd I with them prophane my Fundament)
There bugger wiping Porters, when they shite,
And so thy Book it self, turn Sodomite.

See also: Language Log on excrement as metaphor; it is only a minor stretch to read LL's name in a scatological sense.

"Unjoynt that bittern!" Etc.

2011-10-10T15:04:00.000-05:00

A link-dump:

1. James Wood reviews the new Hollinghurst novel in the NY'er, with more irritation than liking (nevertheless it sounds very much worth reading); here is his takedown of the Henry James pastiche:

In Hollinghurst’s new novel, “The Stranger’s Child” (Knopf; $27.95), the Jamesian cadences come in peristaltic waves: “This large claim seemed rather to evaporate in its later clauses.” “This was exactly Dudley’s version too, though the cool nerve of ‘improving’ made Daphne laugh.” [...] Sex itself—specifically, gay sex—is feared by one character as “the unimagined and yet vaguely dreaded thing.” It does a writer as talented as Hollinghurst few favors to be fossicking in fustian in this way; I spent too much time, while reading this often beautiful novel, itching to write a parody of Hollinghurst’s Jamesianism. (“Ralph’s cock was small but sincere; in the afternoon’s fading light, thinned by winter’s quick transit, it seemed to Hugh almost shyly noble. The two men could hear Lady Soames’s little lacquered laugh, somewhere downstairs. . . .” And so on.)

2. Teju Cole reviews Andre Aciman's Essays on Elsewhere (Aciman is v. much a personality in my imagination thanks to Lydia Davis's story "The Walk"). Here is Aciman on the kinds of lavender:

There were light, ethereal lavenders; some were mild and timid; others lush and overbearing; some tart, as if picked from the field and left to parch in large vats of vinegar; others were overwhelmingly sweet. Some lavenders ended up smelling like an herb garden; others, with hints of so many spices, were blended beyond recognition.

3. Jeff Gordinier (who?) ends up in the Hebridean island of Luing thanks to a Don Paterson poem:

What I found tantalizing about “our unsung innermost isle,” as Mr. Paterson put it, was the very obscurity of the place. It was obscure not because it was theatrically desolate and raw, but because it was the opposite of that. It was an island that just sat there and gazed out at all the more famous islands.

I didn't know the poem -- I ought to know Paterson's work much better than I do -- and wasn't bowled over by it (the ending, I think, is off-key) but I thought this bit was rhythmically very nice:

Kilda's antithesis,
yet still with its own tiny stubborn anthem,
its yellow milkwort and its stunted kye.

4. A wonderful list of nonce words from the 17th cent. for carving specific kinds of meat. Birds, for some reason, have many of the best ones (virtually all of these have potential euphemistic uses btw):

Rear that Goose.
Lift that Swan.
Spoil that Hen.
Frust that Chicken.
Unbrace that Duck or Mallard.
Dismember that Hern.
Display that Crane.
Disfigure that Peacock.
Unjoynt that Bittern.
Allay that Pheasant.
Mince that Plover.

I also liked "tame that crab" and "splat that pike" though.

5. Two strange news stories, about sharks invading a golf course in Brisbane and about a supposed Saddam Hussein lookalike being pursued by a supposed porn gang.

---

In other news, work is in a heightened degree of disarray because our automatic spam filter has gone rogue, marking (e.g.) correspondence with journals as spam! I can't figure out how to turn the filtering off...

Calista reminded me yesterday of an intriguingly nasty Rochester poem that I had blogged a long time ago (scroll 2/3 of the way down) as a bridge between Herrick and Pope. (It is a post that is quite needlessly tl;dr and badly organized, I don't remember what I was thinking at the time.)

"Domkyrkoklocklang"

2011-10-06T12:05:00.000-05:00

Robin Robertson, whose translation of the Transtromer book The Deleted World I will have to buy when it appears (being favorably disposed to both translator and translatee), records a delightfully untranslatable Swedish word:

the plosive musicality of Swedish words like “domkyrkoklocklang” lose all their aural resonance when they become a “peal of cathedral bells.”

[Cf. hottentottententententoonstelling] I take it the way the word parses is "clock-clang in the doom-church" (i.e., the church of judgments and decisions, the cathedral); nevertheless I am struck by the aural similarity to "ku klux klan" -- itself of apparently onomatopoeic origins -- as well as the perhaps more obvious similarity to Donkey Kong.

Related: the Guardian's selection of poems by Forward-Prize-winning poets is worth looking at.

Not what Berkeley meant at all

2011-10-04T16:44:00.000-05:00

I have a weakness for well-put-together poems with Bishop Berkeley in them:

The Fountain

Feathers up fast, and steeples; then in clods
Thuds into its first basin; thence as surf
Smokes up and hangs; irregularly slops
Into its second, tattered like a shawl;
There, chill as rain, stipples a danker green,
Where urgent tritons lob their heavy jets.

For Berkeley this was human thought, that mounts
From bland assumptions to inquiring skies,
There glints with wit, fumes into fancies, plays
With its negations, and at last descends,
As by a law of nature to its bowl
Of thus enlightened but still common sense.

We who have no such confidence must gaze
With all the more affection on these forms,
These spires, these plumes, these calm reflections, these
Similitudes of surf and turf and shawl,
Graceful returns upon acceptances.
We ask of fountains only that they play,
Though that was not what Berkeley meant at all.

- Donald Davie, New and Selected Poems

The phrase "graceful returns upon acceptances" in particular is worth keeping in mind.

"To rise in froth or white fcum"

2011-10-02T21:27:00.000-05:00

Wikipedia article on ataraxia:

Ataraxia (Ἀταραξία "tranquility") is a Greek term used by Pyrrho and Epicurus for a lucid state, characterized by freedom from worry or any other preoccupation. [...] For the Pyrrhonians, owing to one's inability to say which sense impressions are true and which ones are false, it is the quietude that arises from suspending judgment on dogmatic beliefs or anything non-evident and continuing to inquire. The experience was said to have fallen on the painter Apelles who was trying to paint the foamy saliva of a horse. He was so unsuccessful that, in a rage, he gave up and threw the sponge he was cleaning his brushes with at the medium, thus producing the effect of the horse's foam.^[1]

This sent me off looking for a passage I seemed to remember from somewhere about the spittle of horses (actually cows) threading the wind, which led serendipitously to a good definition of "foam(v.)" in Dyche's New General English Dictionary, Peculiarly Calculated for the USE and IMPROVEMENT of such as are unacquainted with the LEARNED LANGUAGES:

FOAM (v.) to be vastly enraged, angry, or mad, so that the spittle is as it were dried up, and comes out of the mouth involuntarily, like a wild boar that is closely hunted, and wounded; also to rise in froth or white scum, like a turbulent or disturbed sea.

Goofballed!

2011-09-30T10:40:00.000-05:00

Jonathon Green's answers on Quora are a delight; the latest entry is on "goofball":

Goof is a British dialect term, meaning a fool, a clown or an oaf]

In succession the word has meant 1 [1930s–50s] marijuana. 2 [1940s+] (drugs) a barbiturate, a tranquillizer; thus goofballed, under the influence of barbiturates. 3 [1950s] any sleeping pill. 4 [1950s+] a knockout drop. 5 [1950s+] a mix of cocaine and heroin.

Still based on goof, a fool, goofball has also meant [1940s+] (US) a silly, amusing, eccentric or insane person; in this sense it can also be used adjectivally.

("Goofballed" is reminiscent of "nutmegged," which regrettably has nothing to do with nutmeg-qua-drug.) The entry before that is about the history of "johnson" (and more generally proper names; but see here) as genital euphemism. I was amused by the similarity of the first use Green gives:

1863 W. Cheadle Journal 2 Feb.: Bitterly cold; neck frozen. Face ditto; thighs ditto; Johnson ditto, & sphincture vesicae partially paralysed.

to the opening stanza of the "Eve of St. Agnes."

Crash blossom via linebreak

2011-09-29T22:43:00.001-05:00

Jeremy sent along this NYT headline, which appeared on his screen as:

One Out Away, Red Sox Lose to Seal
September Meltdown

There's an additional layer to this for Arrested Development fans, "lose" near "seal" being reminiscent of the bit where Buster has his arm bitten off by a loose seal. And perhaps yet another layer for Kit, who is/was fascinated by the musician-and-Heidi-Klum-husband Seal. And we haven't even brought in SEALs, but there would have been nothing surprising about the Sox losing in that case.

Spriteliness

2011-09-27T14:02:00.001-05:00

I. Via Teju Cole on twitter, a Harpers article by Frank Bures about "magical penis theft" in Nigeria:

No one is entirely sure when magical penis loss first came to Africa. One early incident was recounted by Dr. Sunday Ilechukwu, a psychiatrist, in a letter some years ago to the Transcultural Psychiatric Review. In 1975, while posted in Kaduna, in the north of Nigeria, Dr. Ilechukwu was sitting in his office when a policeman escorted in two men and asked for a medical assessment. One of the men had accused the other of making his penis disappear. This had caused a major disturbance in the street. As Ilechukwu tells it, the victim stared straight ahead during the examination, after which the doctor pronounced him normal. “Exclaiming,” Ilechukwu wrote, “the patient looked down at his groin for the first time, suggesting that the genitals had just reappeared."

According to Ilechukwu, an epidemic of penis theft swept Nigeria between 1975 and 1977. Then there seemed to be a lull until 1990, when the stealing resurged. “Men could be seen in the streets of Lagos holding on to their genitalia either openly or discreetly with their hand in their pockets,” Ilechukwu wrote. “Women were also seen holding on to their breasts directly or discreetly, by crossing the hands across the chest. . . . Vigilance and anticipatory aggression were thought to be good prophylaxes. This led to further breakdown of law and order.” In a typical incident, someone would suddenly yell: Thief! My genitals are gone! Then a culprit would be identified, apprehended, and, often, killed.

During the past decade and a half, the thievery seems not to have abated. In April 2001, mobs in Nigeria lynched at least twelve suspected penis thieves. In November of that same year, there were at least five similar deaths in neighboring Benin.

(TC has, as you ought to know, been tweeting "small fates" culled from the Lagos news; lately many of these have been, well, shrinking and/or disappearing fates.) Another juicy bit from the Harpers piece:

in 1984 and 1985, some five thousand Chinese villagers in Guangdong province tried desperately to keep their penises outside their bodies using whatever they had handy: string, chopsticks, relatives’ assistance, jewelers’ clamps, and safety pins.

II. A good interview with Devin Johnston -- whose work I've always admired -- about, among other things, warblers:

Lately I've been watching warblers. It's the more esoteric end of birding. They're high up and so small. My friend says it's like the trees are carbonated.

(I am not surprised that Johnston is a fan of Basil Bunting.)

Glimpses through lighted windows

2011-09-24T13:59:00.000-05:00

Housekeeping is really an astonishingly good book, one that I can't believe I only just got around to reading. The language is, in Graham Hough's excellent phrase, "like Emily Dickinson in collaboration with Henry James." Just one of the passages that stuck out:

What did Sylvie see when she thought of my mother? A girl with braided hair, a girl with freckled arms, who liked to lie on the rug in the lamplight, flat on her belly with her heels in the air and her chin on her two fists, reading Kipling. Did she tell lies? Could she keep secrets? Did she tickle, or slap, or pinch, or punch, or grimace? If someone had asked me about Lucille I would remember her with her mass of soft, fine, tangly hair concealing ears that cupped a bit and grew painfully cold if she did not cover them. I would remember that her front teeth, the permanent ones, came in, first one and much later the other, immense and raggedly serrated, and that she was fastidious about washing her hands. I would remember that when irked she bit her lip, when shy she scratched her knee, that she smelled dully clean, like chalk, or like a sun-warmed cat.

I do not think Sylvie was merely reticent. It is, as she said, difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows. Sometimes we used to watch trains passing in the dark afternoon, creeping through the blue snow with their windows all alight, and full of people eating and arguing and reading newspapers. They could not see us watching, of course, because by five-thirty on a winter day the landscape had disappeared, and they would have seen their own depthless images on the black glass, if they had looked, and not the black trees and the black houses, or the slender black bridge and the dim blue expanse of the lake. Some of them probably did not know what it was the train approached so cautiously. Once, Lucille and I walked beside the train to the shore. There had been a freezing rain that glazed the snow with a crust of ice, and we found that, when the sun went down, the crust was thick enough for us to walk on. So we followed the train at a distance of twenty feet or so, falling now and then, because the glazed snow swelled and sank in dunes, and the tops of bushes and fence posts rose out of it in places where we did not expect them to be. But by crawling up, and sliding down, and steadying ourselves against the roof of sheds and rabbit hutches, we managed to stay just abreast of the window of a young woman with a small head and a small hat and a brightly painted face. She wore pearl-gray gloves that reached almost to her elbows, and hooped bracelets that fell down her arms when she reached up to push a loose wisp of hair underneath her hat. The woman looked at the window very often, clearly absorbed by what she saw, which was not but merely seemed to be Lucille and me scrambling to stay beside her, too breathless to shout. When we came to the shore, where the land fell down and the bridge began to rise, we stopped and watched her window sail slowly away, along the abstract arc of the bridge. "We could walk across the lake," I said. The thought was terrible. "It's too cold," Lucille replied. So she was done. Yet I remember her neither less nor differently than I remember others I have known better, and indeed I dream of her, and the dream is very like the event itself, except that in the dream the bridge pilings do not tremble so perilously under the weight of the train.

It is almost perfect, if erring very slightly on the side of overabundance; but "dully clean, like chalk" is a perfect and unforgettable bit of description, and the train passage (which I was fortunately able to paste in from Elegant Variation) has virtues that are too obvious to be worth stating.

"Alloverishness"

2011-09-23T15:44:00.000-05:00

(Carroll's drawing of the Giant Puppy in Alice)

Marina Warner writes about Lewis Carroll's drawings in Tate Etc.:

Carroll’s juvenilia also include lots of drawings and graphic marginalia. The frontispiece of The Rectory Umbrella, for example, shows a bearded old man beaming as fairies fly under the shelter of his umbrella. They’re bearing cradle blessings labelled “Good Humour”, “Knowledge”, “Mirth” and “Cheerfulness”, among other boons. Above them, comical grimacing goblins are hurling rocks – these are “Woe”, “Spite”, “Gloom”, “Crossness”, “Ennui” and “Alloverishness” (presumably from the woeful cry, “It’s all over”.) Most tellingly of all, the umbrella that is shielding the good sprites has written between its spokes, “Jokes”, “Riddles”, “Poetry”, “Tales” and, in the centre, “Fun”. The young Charles Dodgson was interposing a determined brand of fun between himself and unhappiness.

Warner asserts that Dodgson didn't have a split personality, which is of course true; the mystery is why anyone would think otherwise. Another fact of interest primarily to myself is that "Dodgson" is cognate with "Rogers." (Andrew Gelman recently posted a list of blog obsessions; an analogous list here would include snouts and the word Hodge/Hogge and its equivalents, as well as other obvious things like Coleridge's drug intake and the physics of coffee stains.)

Thematically similar, and also of note, is this writer/illustrator collaboration by Krasznahorkai and the German artist Max Neumann.

"The huge ruts of the ebb tide"

2011-09-22T10:00:00.001-05:00

[pic: Abe Vigoda, Paris Review]

Rimbaud, translated by Ashbery, quoted by Huddleston in the Boston Review (French v. included as charming if one isn't Francophone):

Les courants de la lande,
Et les ornières immenses du reflux
Filent circulariement vers l’est

What is fluid and ambiguous in the original (“les ornières” could be troughs, ruts, or billows) is made clear and distinct. In Ashbery’s rendition:
The currents of the heath,
And the huge ruts of the ebb tide
Swirl toward the east

I like these rigid seascapes; cf. the opening of Marianne Moore's "Steeple-Jack":

Dürer would have seen a reason for living
   in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
 to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house
 on a fine day, from water etched
   with waves as formal as the scales
 on a fish.

"I didn't kiss him, I only stroked his face"

2011-09-21T20:45:00.000-05:00

In the prev. post I'd commented on A.E. Housman's frequent & random appearances in stories about philosophers and mathematicians. Here is an anecdote or two from Littlewood's Miscellany to go with that (if you're unfamiliar with Littlewood see here):

The Ellises gave [Housman] a dinner (rook pie). Later I heard Polly protesting to her husband, "I didn't kiss him, I only stroked his face."
I once said to him in Hall: "Suppose there was a poet, Shakespeare combined with Milton, and 6 inches high; wouldn't you patronize him?" He said the temptation would be too much for him.

Some other anecdotes from the book:

A.W. Verrall. It was the custom (ca. 1905) to read the roll at lectures (in alphabetical order). Verrall came to Mr. Shufflebottom, Mr. Sitwell, burst into his crow of laughter, and never read the roll again. At a Scholarship examination, Dykes pointed out to me that the list had the consecutives Alchin and Alcock.
There are a couple of grim stories about [German mathematician Edmund Landau's] treatment of Privatdozents. One was that when the man was recuperating in a hospital, Landau climbed a ladder and pushed a chunk of work through the window.

Some stories about Bertrand Russell:

Moore and Russell were having a philosophical discussion in Hall. Russell suddenly said: "You don't like me, Moore, do you?" Moore replied, "No." This point disposed of, the discussion proceeded as before.
[Russell] said that what Kant did, trying to answer Hume..., was to invent more and more sophisticated stuff, till he could no longer see through it and could believe it to be an answer.
That every argument of Hegel came down to a pun (often involving the word "is").
He told me (c. 1911) that he had conceived a theory that "knowledge" was "belief" in something which was "true." But he met a man who believed that the Prime Minister's name began with a B. So it did, but it was Bannerman and not Balfour as the man had supposed. [cf. the essay "On denoting."]

Apart from their intrinsic interest, I like Littlewood's stories (and, e.g., Marilynne Robinson's remarks about Lincoln and Darwin) for their way of making intellectual history seem approachable and cozy.

Unrelated PS. Having connected "forever stamps" with the Orwell line about communism being a boot stamping on a human face forever, I find that I cannot unmake the connection.

"A major / Prophet taken short"

2011-09-20T17:21:00.001-05:00

Wittgenstein and Housman:

(Housman, qua Cambridge institution, comes up a lot in stories about people like Wittgenstein, Russell, G.H. Hardy and John Littlewood. I remember there being a delightful anecdote in Littlewood's Miscellany involving Housman but I've forgotten what it was.) This story is in a letter from Guy Davenport to Marjorie Perloff; the letter is worth reading in full, it cleverly juxtaposes Wittgenstein with Gertrude Stein, who might have liked the implied comparison. Davenport also has amusing things to say about Wittgenstein elsewhere; see a prev. post.

While on the topic of celebrity letters, I should link to Eliot's letter to Woolf that was posted on the Paris Review's blog today. And, while I'm free-associating on this topic, to Eliot's magnificent letter to Middleton Murry on his second (third?) marriage.

PS re title see here.

A gaggle of dissonances

2011-09-20T16:05:00.001-05:00

These posts are all talking about the same thing:

1. Ian Leslie, today, on Obama's speech:

even though the policies he laid out are, on their own terms, popular, the signal they send about his position is that he's a traditional tax and spend Democrat. During the British 2005 general election the Tories took a hardline on immigration because polls told them it was a popular position. But the signal it sent was 'same old Tories'.

2. Erica Greider (at the Economist's American politics blog) on the popularity of "compromise":

What I find striking is the staggeringly high number of people who say they want politicians to compromise: fully 85% of respondents (even though the alternative to compromise, as the poll frames it, is "not getting as much done" rather than "falling into gridlock, dissolution, and despair"). [...] In practice, politicians do tend to defer to the voters on such questions [...] but you rarely hear them put it that way. Is that because they're worried that they'll look weak?

3. Yglesias on the weird behavior of German voters:

The mainstream center-left political parties in Germany, the Greens and the Social Democrats, are substantially more Europhilic than the governing Christian Democrat/Free Democrat coalition. [...] Given that these measure are deeply unpopular with the German electorate, you might expect the Greens and the SPD do be suffering at the polls. In fact, the reverse is happening [...] I was inclined to do an “everybody’s wrong and actually Germans love fiscal union” post based on these election results, but I looked up the poll data and it’s just not there. Germans prefer Merkel’s (wrong) view to the opposition’s (correct) one.

Her problem is roughly the problem President Obama is facing. The vast majority of people just vote for the same party every year. “The voters” don’t care about the economy, they’re mostly committed Republicans or committed Democrats. But elections are swung by the relatively small minority of people who don’t have firm partisan allegiances and they vote—whether in Germany or in the United States—largely on the basis of whether or not the incumbent is producing good results.

4. John Holbo on Rick Perry (qua Republican) not meaning what he says:

The deeper question, I think, is why it appeals so much to so many Americans that conservatives constantly say things that they don’t really mean. Let’s go back to that oft-quoted line from Free and Cantril (The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion). Americans are “philosophical conservatives but operational liberals”. [...] what Free and Cantril found is that when Americans say Big Things about American politics, whose consequences they aren’t really prepared to affirm, in practice, they say conservative things. Whereas when you find out what they really want, in practice, they are liberals. [...]

This creates a problem for liberals: they get branded as utopian even when they are not utopian in the least. (Which they never are, in practice.) They can’t use any utopian rhetoric or systematically exaggerate what they intend to do or any of that stuff. If they do, they suffer for it. Intellectually, this is mostly a good thing. But it makes you think small, policy-wise. Because any bold thing you propose, even if it isn’t utopian, will be denounced as utopian. And electorally it’s a source of endless frustration. But the real source of this frustration is not conservative politicians but, per the title of Free and Cantril’s book: the political beliefs of Americans. Or rather, their political beliefs plus their political non-beliefs.

5. Grobstein, passing along an article about Michele Bachmann and vaccinations, remarks:

Perhaps this kind of epistemic warfare shows up on the right wing especially because it is a money-cheap response to areas where the left wing has a money-expensive strategy. It's a natural division of territory in the space of politics. Or do you think it's just an anti-sex signal?

As in any such discussion one should also link to Chris Hayes's old piece of reporting on swing voters, which suggests (consistently with other data, as far as I know) that true swing voters skew low-information and unreflective-about-politics, so have a somewhat exaggerated version of these common dissonances -- in what follows I shall use "people" to mean something like "swing voters." Perhaps what is interesting about all this, though, is the conundrum it poses for people who see democracy as a means for some sort of aggregative preference utilitarianism. (I'm unsympathetic to this view but I don't want to propagandize here.) The general problem is that people like politicians for appearing to be above [some subset of] common desires, but also happen to have these desires and to want them gratified. So clearly these sets of preferences have to be weighed against each other. I can think of two limiting readings:

People elect politicians who want what the people want to want, so we should let them have said politicians even if they don't want what the people want, for the same reasons as we are happy selling people salad greens. I.e., the system works, and representative democracy leads to better outcomes than direct democracy. (This is not far from Leslie's reading.)
Most political discourse consists of shibboleths in the Biblical sense; people do not want, or want to want, or want politicians to want, what politicians are universally expected to vaunt to want. Political discourse is a complicated charade (or perhaps a collection of shibboleths in the Biblical sense). People want what they want; they don't trust politicians to want what they vaunt; therefore they use shibboleths to confirm that the politicians aren't just pandering. The system is inefficient as drowns finer distinctions, erects artificial barriers to entry, and also provides cover to extremist politicians who hold the symbolic positions literally; one should cut the Gordian knot and restore power to the people (e.g., via ballot initiatives).

The point is, you can resolve this contradiction either way -- aspiration + weakness is operationally similar to hypocrisy -- but they give you different prescriptions re what to fight for.

L'esprit du cul-de-sac

2011-09-18T12:46:00.000-05:00

(Sorry if the title is illiterate, I don't speak French.) This predicament described by Kingsley Amis (in The Old Devils) is nearly the exact opposite of the usual staircase wit phenomenon:

I got badly caught in Kilburn once telling a Bulgarian short-story writer, actually he was trying to cadge a lift, anyway telling him to fuck off for two or three minutes while the chap driving the open car I was sitting in turned around in the cul-de-sac I hadn't noticed we were at the end of. Amazing how quickly the bloom fades on fuck off, you know. Say it a couple of times running and you've got out of it nearly all of what you're going to get.

This sort of sociological/linguistic interest -- stray whiffs of the King's English and On Drink, of "the artist minding his proper business" while revealing personality through irrelevant detail -- is abundant even in Kingsley's more potboilerish novels (which OD isn't); it's why I tend to prefer even second-rate Kingsley to virtually all of Martin, who is less self-forgetful and also, on the evidence of his writing, less intelligent.

Horses and civil unrest

2011-09-14T17:39:00.000-05:00

1. from "Glaucus" by Paul Muldoon (in Horse Latitudes):

It went without saying that after he lost control
of his chariot team at Pelias, and made a hames
of setting them all square,

Glaucus was still on such a roll
it was lost on him that the high point of the games
was his being eaten now by his own mares.

II. Sylvia Nasar on Keynes, Schumpeter, and the aftermath of Versailles:

In April, thousands of gaunt and ragged men -- unemployed factory workers, paid agitators, demobbed soldiers, many with missing limbs -- descended on Vienna’s Ringstrasse, setting the Parliament building ablaze and attacking the police. The militia finally restored order, but not before a horse was shot out from under a policeman. As the animal lay dead in the street, a hungry mob tore it to pieces and carried off hunks of bloody meat. For ordinary Viennese, who adored the emperor’s white show horses the way Americans loved boxing champions, the incident was a sign that civilization was reverting inexorably to barbarism.

III. Jon Day on the London riots:

Thick black smoke blotted out the sun. A man carrying a charred rocking horse ran up and clowned around for the phalanx of photographers and cameramen that stood between the riot police and a large group of teenagers. Everyone looked young, most looked under 18.

No riot scene is complete without some kind of horse. This, btw, is the wrong way to do it:

IV. from W.B. Yeats, "Nineteen hundred and nineteen":

Violence upon the roads:  violence of horses;
Some few have handsome riders, are garlanded
On delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,
But wearied running round and round in their courses
All break and vanish, and evil gathers head:
Herodias' daughters have returned again,
A sudden blast of dusty wind and after
Thunder of feet, tumult of images,
Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind;
And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughter
All turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,
According to the wind, for all are blind.

Elizabeth Bishop on rioting

2011-09-14T15:58:00.000-05:00

I googled the first line this morning and was surprised to find no search results; surely I can't be the first person to think of this particular parody? I apologize for the badness of it, I am not as patient nor as competent as I was five years ago so it is very half-assed/hurried. Nevertheless, I thought it was interesting how closely one could follow the original...

Another Art

The art of looting isn’t hard to master.
Shop-windows all seem built with the intent
to be smashed, so their breaking’s no disaster.

Loot something every day. Accept the fluster
of fleeing cops, of nights unsafely spent.

The art of looting isn’t hard to master.

Then practice looting farther, looting faster:
cafes, and homes, and where it was you meant
to drink next. None of these will bring disaster.

I snagged some marble busts (or were they plaster?),
destroyed some churches and a monument:
the art of looting isn’t hard to master.

I knifed some bitches, stole their shit; I glassed a
photographer or two. In the event
they tased me, but it wasn’t a disaster.

--Even stuck in jail (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of looting isn’t hard to master,
though it may end (spray-paint it!) in disaster.

(with apologies to Elizabeth Bishop and a vague nod to Dice)

Futures in bear-pits

2011-09-13T19:29:00.000-05:00

1. Wikipedia on Ned Alleyn, found (circuitously) via "Alleyn on the right":

He went into business with Philip Henslowe, his father-in-law, and eventually became wealthy. He became part owner in Henslowe's ventures, and in the end sole proprietor of several profitable playhouses, bear-pits and brothels. Among these were the Rose Theatre at Bankside, the Paris Garden and the Fortune Theatre on Finsbury Fields. The Fortune was built for Alleyn and Henslowe in 1600, the year after the rival Globe Theatre was completed south of the river, by the same contractor Peter Street, but was square rather than round;^[9] it was occupied by the Admiral's Men, of which Alleyn was the head.

He filled, too, in conjunction with Henslowe, the post of "master of the king's games of bears, bulls and dogs." On some occasions he directed the sport in person, and John Stow in his Chronicles gives an account of how Alleyn baited a lion before James I at the Tower of London.

2. Via the indispensable seventydys, an old James Wood review of V.S. Pritchett:

He died earlier this year, but he had disappeared while still alive into a vague posterity. He had become cloudily venerable. [...] In 19th-century Russian fiction, especially in Gogol and Chekhov, he found characters who float on the cushions of their own fantasies--people whose most intense relations are not with others but with themselves.

[...] He Russianized English character, finding a kind of Russian madness or instability in what appeared to be mere English eccentricity. (Eccentricity, he once wrote, is "practical madness.") In mild disguise himself, he was alert to the broken disguises of others. "The Fall" (1936) is typical. In a drab provincial hotel, a group of accountants is meeting for its annual dinner. One of them, Charles Peacock, would be a nonentity were it not for his famous brother, who is a movie star. Peacock has a trick, which is that he can mimic perfectly his brother's celebrated stage fall. Early in the evening, Peacock performs this trick a few times to the strained amusement of his colleagues. But he gets drunk, and persists, accosting complete strangers. Each time he falls, he stays a little longer on the ground. By the end of the evening, he is alone in the hotel's ballroom, falling again and again. The pathos of the story flows from Pritchett's determination to see things simultaneously from outside and inside Peacock's head. We see how boring and foolish Peacock has become, but the story makes us stay with him when all the guests have left. We are always on Peacock's side, and at the end we join him on the carpet with his toppled yearnings.

Re floating on cushions, cf. Pritchett describing Mr Beluncle: "his face was bland, heavy in jowl, formless and kind, resting on a second chin like a bottom on an air cushion." Wood remarks elsewhere in the review re poet-critics broadly understood that "All of them have a certain competitive proximity to the writers they discuss, a competition registered verbally. The writer-critic is always showing a little plumage." (I suppose 1998 was before Wood wrote his novel?)

3. Michael Atiyah on doing mathematics (quoted in Gowers, "Two cultures of mathematics"):

MINIO: How do you select a problem to study?
ATIYAH: I think that presupposes an answer. I don't think that's the way I work at all. Some people may sit back and say, \I want to solve this problem" and they sit down and say, \How do I solve this problem?" I don't. I just move around in the mathematical waters, thinking about things, being curious, interested, talking to people, stirring up ideas; things emerge and I follow them up. Or I see something which connects up with something else I know about, and I try to put them together and things develop. I have practically never started o with any idea of what I'm going to be doing or where it's going to go. I'm interested in mathematics; I talk, I learn, I discuss and then interesting questions simply emerge. I have never started off with a particular goal, except the goal of understanding mathematics.

(Relevant b'se of future-work-related pondering re why I should care about what I do.)

O Murse! The causes and the crimes relate

2011-09-08T10:58:00.000-05:00

This WSJ article on the words for men's fashions is very good.

Men can also wear "mandals" (male sandals), "murses" (purses), "mantyhose" (pantyhose) and "mankinis" (swimsuit variants)—though not necessarily all at the same time.

A few expressions deal with the less glamorous side of fashion. Some male models are said to suffer from "manorexia." Several words describe grooming more than fashion, such as "guyliner" (eyeliner for guys) and "manscaping" (the removal of hair from men's limbs and loins).
[...]

To the consternation of the fashion industry, the new terms are redefining fashion faux pas. The British beach town of Newquay has witnessed a rise in mankini violations, according to chief of Newquay Police Ian Drummond-Smith. This summer, for example, a man was reprimanded on an English beach for wearing a thong-like suit with a halter strap similar to the one made famous by Borat, the fictional Kazak journalist.
Mr. Drummond-Smith said the slinky one-piece breached Britain's Section 5 of Public Order Act 1986, "which prohibits the display of items likely to cause harassment, alarm & distress."

"Alarm" really is the mot juste here. See also: mancakes. (Bit of a misnomer, these have nothing to do with pancakes.) The "bro" version of this punning trend is also quite fertile -- see bromance, broetry, Broseph Stalin, brwned, etc.

Re mankinis: there is a distracting association with the name Mancini. Similarly, the word "burkini" always makes me think of Edmund Burke.

Lightness of porpoise

2011-09-07T13:29:00.002-05:00

Science Says dolphins don't actually whistle:

Signature they may be, but it appears that dolphins' whistles aren't actually whistles. A true whistle relies on pushing air through a chamber, but a similar sound can be produced by a vibrating membrane.

To find out which way dolphins do it, Peter Madsen of Aarhus University in Denmark and colleagues recorded a bottlenose dolphin whistling after breathing helium. The sounds were largely the same whether the dolphin was breathing helium or air. If the dolphin was really whistling, the helium would have changed the frequency of the sound (Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.0701).

I am irresistibly reminded of this and this. (I could almost swear that I've seen a 19th-cent cartoon of a bloated, possibly airborne, Coleridge leaking out of his sides/rear, but I cannot find it anywhere.)

Parfit, carpet knight

2011-09-05T11:31:00.000-05:00

Dice sent along this engrossing NY'er profile of Derek Parfit [gated link] -- it is really a case where understanding the life helps one appreciate the work. It is immensely revealing, e.g., that Parfit did not like mathematics:

He hypothesized that there was some relationship between his inability to read music and his deficiencies at mathematics: he was not good at processing symbols.

By far the most irritating thing about Reasons and Persons is Parfit's aversion to algebraic symbols; many of the arguments would be infinitely clearer and shorter if he introduced x's and y's, or used heuristic numbers. (See Tyler Cowen on this re Parfit's new book.) I had put this down to convention, but idiosyncrasy is a more believable explanation. His obsessive circling around the same thoughts, his sheer repetitiveness, also turns out to be a character trait. ["Every time he'd say, 'Larry, isn't that boring, don't you want some of my curry?' I'd say, 'No, Derek, I don't like curry.'"] MacFarquhar cleverly splices in bits of dialogue between Parfit and his wife Janet Radcliffe Richards; I find that I agree with JRR's positions on most cases. (Though unlike her I would cheerily agree to align myself with "those gloomy Scandinavians" who believe life, even at its best, is only just worth living.)

Two other factoids that really illuminate R&P:

"Theodora and Derek were brilliant students, like their mother. ... Joanna, like her father, was bad at everything. Her teeth stuck out. She was also much too tall... [Derek's father] had a narrow life. He took refuge in two hobbies -- tennis, which he didn't play well, and stamp collecting... Parfit emerged from his childhood with the understanding that he and his mother and Theo were lucky and would live full lives, while Norman and Joanna were unlucky and would never be happy." This fleshes out the endless nattering on about full lives and crimped lives in part 4 of R&P.
[At All Souls] "he had become, he realized, what psychiatrists call institutionalized -- a person for whom living in an institution feels much more normal than living in a family." This, it seems to me, makes his views on selflessness etc. fairly easy to understand, and also his inability to engage persuasively with the Bernard Williams/JRR point of view.

His views on poetry ("he developed an obsession with the idea that not only should the lines of a poem rhyme but the words within each line should have internal assonances... when he read his favorite poets ... their poems seemed to him badly flawed, because they had too few internal assonances") and photography ("he disliked overhead lights, in which category he included the midday sun") are vaguely charming in the usual nutty way but perhaps not of much interest.

Finally, there is one of these decompositions-of-personality:

he pictures his thinking self as a government minister sitting behind a large desk, who writes a question on a piece of paper and puts it in his out-tray. The minister then sits idly at his desk, twiddling his thumbs, while in some back room civil servants labor furiously, come up with the answer, and place it in his in-tray.

Cf. the street that is John Davidson's heart, the household that is T.S. Eliot.

ECCOlocation; "'junk' hits"; the bishoprick of Condom

2011-09-04T16:50:00.000-05:00

Via Jenny Davidson, a marvelous article on OCR and eighteenth-century condoms in the latest Eighteenth-Century Studies [gated link]. It is also very pun-filled; some of the puns are a bit of a stretch (e.g., "these numbers are a little rubbery, and subject to change") but there is much that is worthwhile; a few clippings:

Gabriel Fallopius invented linen sheaths in 1564, and condoms survive from ca. 1647, but the first recorded use of the word "condom" in English is not until 1705.⁴¹ In 1708 a poem was published with the subtitle "A Word or Two in Praise of Condons"⁴²; by the 1730s numerous poems had been written in praise of condoms; and by the 1750s they had also appeared in a number of artworks. Thereafter, they feature in lengthy prose satires, in the private journals of William Byrd and James Boswell, and in the public spats between rival condom manufacturers. Condoms also feature in medical literature, first appearing in 1713 in The Symptoms, Nature, Cause, and Cure of a Gonorrhoea, by the appropriately named William Cockburn.⁴³

[...] In 1716, 1729, 1741, and 1744 condoms, however spelled, are referred to as "The New Machine" or "machines"; in 1723 White Kennett's "Condom, A Poem" was retitled "Armour: A Poem"; in 1726 the word "preservative" is used; and in the 1760s Boswell refers to "sheaths" or "armour." In 1740 Stretzer refers to condoms circuitously as the "Cloathing worn in Merryland"; other writers describe them as "Lamb's bladders" (1748), a "scabbard" (1763), or "commodities" (1773).

[...] Looking at these results, we soon discover that there are literally hundreds of false or "junk" hits. The reason for this is that "Condom" is a city in southwestern France in the department of Gers, and since the city was a bishopric from 1317 to 1792, it is also the name of twenty-eight bishops, many of whom either wrote or were written about.⁵¹ It is not easy to remove these false-hits from the search for "condom."

("Merryland" is described further in some of the excerpts in the appendix; its proximity to Virginia is relatively beside the point.) Related previous posts: Hanseatische Gummiwerke, A Side-Splitting Tale

Davis and Moore, Jonson and Johnson

2011-09-03T11:12:00.000-05:00

A Very Short Story from the Lydia Davis volume Samuel Johnson is Indignant which for some reason has fetched up on my bedside table (and which, consequently, I have been rereading):

Almost Over: Separate Bedrooms

They have moved into separate bedrooms now.
That night she dreams she is holding him in her arms. He dreams he is having dinner with Ben Jonson.

(But I always thought it was supper!) Looking for a pastable text I came upon this excellent review by Richard Locke, which ends with an apt and unexpected comparison between Davis and Marianne Moore. Locke quotes Randall Jarrell on Moore:

the intricate and artificial elaboration not only does not conflict with the emotion but is its vehicle.

Which brings to mind that wonderful remark of Moore's:

rectitude has a ring that is implicative, I would say.

(Cf. Davis's abnormally strict views on literalness in translations.) Googling which -- this process being rife with serendipity -- I came upon Denis Donoghue's essay about Moore, which makes the point slightly better than Jarrell:

for Marianne Moore the supreme poetic virtue is beyond morality, though decently attentive to it. The merit of a poem, a novel, a book about landscape gardening, The Magic Flute, or a sculpture by Malvina Hoffman consists in the personality it discloses when disclosure is not intended and the artist is minding his proper business.

(Why this appeals to me will be obvious to regular readers.) The part that follows applies much more to Moore than to Davis:

Moore's common word for the flare of personality, the unity of being in which one's action is a true epitome of one's self, was rhythm. [...] Moore liked to quote Coleridge's remark that "our admiration of a great poet is for a continuous undercurrent of feeling everywhere present, but seldom anywhere a separate excitement." But she loved to find a separate excitement, like a whirlpool, verifying the undercurrent and at last returning to it. Often she found it in English writers of the seventeenth century, Bacon, Donne, Moore, the King James translators of the Bible; later in Defoe, and in Johnson, in whose work she noticed "a nicety and point, a pride and pith of utterance"

(Re "pride and pith" -- this slightly off-kilter way of ordering nouns is characteristic of Moore. (It is a similar trick to the unemphatic rhymes.) It is said that Ezra Pound changed the last line of her poem "A Grave" from "neither with volition nor consciousness" to "neither with consciousness nor volition" and she immediately changed it back.)

What Donoghue is paraphrasing re "flare of personality" is that Hopkins poem:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I think one of the drawbacks of the poetics of subtraction -- the Beckett/Davis line -- vs. the poetics of clutter is that it is in a sense too transparently theatrical; a bare stage draws attention to itself in a way that an overcrowded stage does not -- the artist is not "minding his proper business," he's designing to be looked at. Davis's way around this is to have her "proper business" be sentence-articulation but this is not always a satisfactory substitute for irrelevant detail.

Self-anointing

2011-09-01T17:07:00.000-05:00

Hedgehogs do it:

Hedgehogs are fairly vocal and communicate through a combination of grunts, snuffles and/or squeals, depending on species. Hedgehogs occasionally perform a ritual called anointing. When the animal encounters a new scent, it will lick and bite the source, then form a scented froth in its mouth and paste it on its spines with its tongue. The specific purpose of this ritual is unknown, but some experts believe anointing camouflages the hedgehog with the new scent of the area and provides a possible poison or source of infection to predators poked by their spines.

Looked up because hedgehogs are a Thing on tumblr (see also: here, here). Some other notes:

In the Middle Ages a hedgehog was also a furze-pig, a hurcheon, an urchin, or (by metanalysis) a nurchin. Wikipedia says the -hog names have to do with snoutedness; wonder if a pig connection is behind the biblical belief that "An vrchon, that chewith kude,‥is vnclene."
Naturally the hedgehog appears, as "hurcheon," in the extravagant linguistic treasure-house that is Dunbar's Twa mariit women & wedo, "With his hard hurcheone scyn sa heklis he my chekis."
Hedgehog-roasting appears to have preceded knife-crime as the national British sport (Guardian):

Research suggests nettle pudding may be the oldest known recipe, dating from 6000BC, closely followed by smokey stew, meat pudding, barley bread and roast hedgehog. [...] Ruth Fairchild, who led the research, said that however off-putting the Neolithic dishes might sound, many were forerunners of the food we enjoy today.

"The way our ancestors cooked hedgehog - wrapped in a casing of grass or leaves to stop the meat burning - is an early version of many modern recipes which involve meat being wrapped or coated, such as chicken kiev, beef wellington or cornish pasties," she said.

[some dishes] have disappeared from the British dining table, including garum and liquamen, sauces made from fish guts and heads; smokey stew, a combination of bacon and smoked fish; meat pudding, a mix of offal, fat and herbs; barley bread, an early form of unleavened bread; and in mitulis, a Roman equivalent of moules marinière.
Roasted meats (Hedgehog)

"Hedgehog should have its throat cut, be singed and gutted, then trussed like a pullet, then pressed in a towel until very dry; and then roast it and eat with cameline sauce, or in pastry with wild duck sauce. Note that if the hedgehog refuses to unroll, put it in hot water, and then it will straighten itself."

From medievalcookery.com/oddities

Also tantalizingly recipe-ish is this excerpt from Reliquae Antiquae: " Tak the grees of an urcheon, and the fatte of a bare." Wherefore? To anoint a hedgehog?

Poets as vending machines

2011-09-01T11:00:00.001-05:00

I like this conceit from Michael Hofmann's piece about Bishop in the new LRB:

Other poets are predictably and more or less unvaryingly themselves, like cellophane packs of cigarettes from a vending machine; with Bishop you get the surprise gift in a plastic ball – sometimes purposeless and perplexing, more often flat-out exhilarating, the toy of your dreams, like ‘An acre of cold white spray … Dancing happily by itself’. Bad Lowell is just bad Lowell; it has something parodic and clanking about it, as the epigrams sail bafflingly past their targets. Lesser Bishop may be disappointing, but it isn’t demoralising, somehow doesn’t affect the whole. You stand in front of the machine, the dispenser of miniature planets, and throw in more quarters; surely you will be luckier next time; you have the obscure but possibly correct feeling that it is your fault for not understanding the toy you have been given.

[Also cf. "little worlds made cunningly."] The review is otherwise very good (I always want to describe these reviews as "awful but cheerful" -- sadly the tag never fits). As Hofmann says, for instance, "Things in Bishop are anarchically themselves. Her shoes clack in different keys." And "One Art" is indeed "a poem so stifled in its compressed clamour I’ve never cared for it." Marina's favorite line about "a mind thinking" makes its inevitable appearance. And this is really fodder for a later, more thought-out post, but I was intrigued by Hofmann's remark about the pronoun thing:

Bishop is [...] a poet of ‘eye’ and not ‘I’, or even of ‘eye-and-tears’ and not ‘I’, and also of ‘we’ and not ‘I’. Both the ‘eye’ and the ‘we’ are ways of not saying ‘I’, of getting around it or playing it down. (It’s not that Bishop never says ‘I’, but she seems almost to ration it, in a militant modesty, to no more than its statistically probable occurrence among the other pronouns.) She makes that very change, movingly, in a fragment called ‘A Short, Slow Life’:
We lived in a pocket of Time.
It was close, it was warm.
Along the dark seam of the river
the houses, the barns, the two churches,
hid like white crumbs
in a fluff of gray willows & elms,
till Time made one of his gestures;
his nails scratched the shingled roof.
Roughly his hand reached in,
and tumbled us out.
Originally, that read ‘I lived in a pocket of Time’ (and ‘tumbled me out’) – a little nightmare of scale and vulnerability and the end of cosiness, alongside the pocket plays on ‘close’ and ‘seam’ and ‘fluff’. But no, that wouldn’t do, too much pathos, too much drama of self, too much contemplation of the ungainly blunt fingers (what is their rude gesture?), and so the ‘I’ is scratched out and becomes a ‘we’, and the poem loses its identity and its urgency (perhaps neither of them especially Bishop-like qualities anyway), and the Robert Louis Stevenson or Hans Christian Andersen idea, now gone mousy and a little folksy, fails to survive.

Not clear on the extent of Bishop's interest in/acceptance of Puritanism, but this reminds me among other things of Frank Kermode on Cowper's "Castaway" (in The Uses of Error):

Calvinism suited this poet's dementia almost exactly; but it was not only mad but theologically incorrect for him to suppose himself singled out from the rest of humanity for both election and reprobation.

PS Hart Crane as claw crane?

"Prick-eared rogue, copper-nose priest"

2011-08-28T16:25:00.000-05:00

Priest-appropriate insults from the 17th cent. (LRB, gated):

A Somerset churchgoer in 1632 complains that ‘there was nothing done at prayer time in the said church of West Lidford but tooting upon the organs, and that it delighteth him as much to hear his horse fart as to hear the said organs go.’ In an argument with the parson of Dogmerfield in Hampshire over a tithe in 1581, Rowland Bowrer declares: ‘Thou art a covetous man … Go take Mother Canning by the cunt again!’ Haigh spends several pages on the insults suffered by clergymen, such as ‘stinking knave priest’, ‘scurvy, stinking, shitten boy’, ‘totter legged and pilled priest’, ‘Scottish jack’, ‘jack sauce and Welsh rogue’, ‘a runagately rogue and a prick-eared rogue’, ‘polled, scurvy, forward, wrangling priest’, ‘wrangler and prattler’, ‘black-coat knave’, ‘drunken-faced knave’ and ‘copper-nose priest’. [...] There are many presentments for misbehaviour in church: drunkenness, brawling, gossiping, vomiting, scoffing at the minister, pissing in another man’s hat (Leigh, Essex, 1627), or ‘extreme sleeping’ (Fering, Sussex, 1613). Sex offences were common: fornication, adultery, bastard children, cross-dressing, lewd talk.

Unrelated (see pic above): foxes repurposing an abandoned conveyor belt as a slide. Via zunguzungu.

Name-dropping

2011-08-27T21:26:00.000-05:00

Eric Hobsbawm on the British Communist spy Alan Nunn May (LRB, gated):

When [Nunn May] left jail at the end of 1952 after six years, the secret services did their best – although the witch-hunting hysteria was then at its height and despite worries about furious American reactions – to find him a reasonable scientific job. When this proved impossible, his transition was eased by the offer from what was claimed to be an ‘anonymous benefactor’ (via the vice-chancellor of Cambridge) of a support grant for two years. [...] Nunn May did not get a permanent post until 1961, when J.D. Bernal persuaded President Kwame Nkrumah of the newly decolonised state of Ghana to offer him a chair at his new university, under its equally unexpected vice-chancellor, Conor Cruise O’Brien.

(To file under "statistically improbable juxtapositions.") Article also contains an admirably evocative character sketch of Nunn May:

I recall him, shortly after his release, as a big, deliberately understated, friendly, shy, emotionally unattached man uncertain how to make his return to the world. Until his marriage he seemed at ease only with music. When he spoke about his life, as he was ready to, he radiated a melancholy but not quite resigned honesty. He knew he had drawn the short straw.

A gramophone and a coffin

2011-08-26T14:09:00.000-05:00

On the mysterious & elaborate paper sculptures that have been fetching up in libraries etc. all over Edinburgh. (The one above is carved out of Ian Rankin's Exit Music.) Here is a Guardian article on the first of these anonymous gifts, a "poetree." Inevitably, the paper sculpture meme has also hybridized with the cupcake meme:

"What Shakespeare Knew"

2011-08-24T12:06:00.000-05:00

Not every day that you learn a new -- & fairly generally useful -- trick. It is to answer the following kind of question:

Shakespeare wrote 31534 different words, of which 14376 appear only once, 4343 twice, etc. The question considered is how many words he knew but did not use.

["Estimating the number of unseen species: How many words did Shakespeare know?", Biometrika 63, 435 (1976), via Language Log] The reason this came up was the new paper about the total number of species on earth. Mark Liberman's lecture notes on this type of estimation problem are clear enough that I'll just excerpt at length:

It often happens that scientists, engineers and other biological organisms need to predict the relative probability of a large number of alternatives that don't individually occur very often. This is especially troublesome in cases where many of the things that happen have never happened before: where "rare events are common".

The simple "maximum likelihood" method for predicting the future from the past is to estimate the probability of an event-type that has occurred r times in N trials as r/N. This generally works well if r is fairly large (and if the world doesn't change too much). But as r gets smaller, the maximum likelihood estimate gets worse. And if r is zero, it may still be quite unwise to bet that the event-type in question will never occur in the future. Even more important, the fraction of future events whose past counts are zero may be substantial.

There are two problems here. One is that the r/N formula divides up all of the probability mass -- all of our belief about the future -- among the event-types that we happen to have seen. This doesn't leave anything for the unseen event-types (if there are any). How can we decide how much of our belief to reserve for the unknown? And how should we divide up this "belief tax" among the event-types that we've already seen?

There isn't a particularly nice general formula answering the original question, but there is one -- apparently due to Alan Turing -- for a closely related question:

given a representative sample of length N words with m hapax legomena, the probability that the next word picked out of the full corpus will be something hitherto unseen is approximately m/N.

(NB it is obvious that this has the right limiting behavior. If the sample consists entirely of hapax legomena, then m/N = 1 so the prediction is that the next pick is certain to be something you have not seen so far, which is obviously true. Similarly if there are no hapax legomena you wouldn't expect to suddenly start finding them.)

This is potentially a nice trick for Fermi problems (how many words do Chicagoans have for "piano tuner"?) but does not extend v. well to the original problem -- which is what the limiting distribution would be as the corpus size goes to infinity. (Asked to do that as a Fermi problem I would just draw the histogram and extrapolate backwards. Of course I am not a statistician.)

(It strikes that Shakespeare is a shitty choice for the original estimation problem as posed. The question is something like this: suppose S. had written an infinitely large -- or at least much much larger -- corpus, of which what we have is a representative sample, how many different words would it have contained? This is not a sensible question to ask about Shakespeare -- one way to imagine him writing more plays is if he'd lived longer and/or written more rapidly, either of which would change the nature of the corpus -- but is not an unreasonable question re, say, Sophocles or other ancients.)

"She was the love of his life. But that was the kind of life it was."

2011-08-20T15:01:00.001-05:00

I'm no longer esp. fond of either Martin Amis or Larkin, but it must be confessed that the former writes marvelously about the latter, and that his latest piece (FT, site reg. poss. req'd) is a pleasure. An anecdote that was new to me:

I [Amis] praised him for his courage in learning to drive and buying a car (no other poet I knew would ever go near a steering wheel). Then it went like this:
“You should spend more, Philip. No, really. You’ve bought the car, and that’s good. Now you –”
“I just wish they wouldn’t keep on sending me all these bills.”
“Well it costs a bit to run a car.”
“I just wish they wouldn’t keep sending me all these bills.”

I like his description of L. as a "novelist's poet" qua "scene-setting phrasemaker." (I was obsessed with L. as a teenager, remember writing a silly college admissions essay explaining how "my childhood was unspent.") And yet, and yet... My problem with Larkin's corpus is not that it is cramped, there are narrower writers who strike me as more successful, it is that the poems don't work as wholes. There are two not-fully-separable problems. The first is that too many of the poems use the signature trick of starting crass and tacking on an epiphany at the end ("High Windows," "Money," "Winter Palace," etc.); the predictability of this trick is irritating, and this is probably why I was put off Larkin by reading the Collected straight through. The second problem is that Larkin's low style is more convincing than his "lyrical" high style, so when he runs them into each other -- as in the usual epiphanic ending -- the epiphanies look cheap and prefabricated compared with the "real stuff," the descriptive phrases and the conversational lines.

My favorite Larkin poems -- the obvious ones: the Toads pair, Whitsun Weddings, Aubade -- tend to be relatively uniform in voice; at his best Larkin avoids nature imagery except in metaphorical senses (even when it's clever -- "the moon thinned / to an air-sharpened blade" -- it never seems assimilated); his voice consists of slightly Edwardian sentiment and "less-deceived" bitterness, mixed in the obvious fogeyish proportions, and these set each other off quite well when woven into Larkin's beautiful long sentences:

But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread

That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know.
("Mr Bleaney")

(Again, "the frigid wind / tousling the clouds" is lovely in isolation but doesn't fit; he needs the clouds, but "tousling" is a distraction; it's an indulgence that one is disinclined to object to but Larkin's style is defined by consistency of voice and character... If this were prose one would unhesitatingly call it overwritten.) The relevant comparison is with Frost -- really the only comparable figure, technically -- who has a plainer and more effective style, and gets away with the plainness by having so many of his poems be dialogues.

I realize that this isn't a terribly satisfactory account of anything but there is something very specific and hard to put into words that irritates me about Larkin's poems and my inability to like them, and it's hard to resist the urge to scratch.

Closing tabs

2011-08-17T16:58:00.000-05:00

I can scarcely believe I just wasted an entire day reading stuff. "It never rains but pours" I guess...

1. Read Wells Tower's brilliant article about traveling with his dad in Iceland and Greenland. There are no satisfactory options re pagination, but the print version is the least bad. I won't excerpt anything because I can't decide what to, and because you really have no excuse for not reading the whole thing. NB Tower's prose is good but too heavy on obvious special effects. "Under a sky the color of..." appears at least twice, and various natural formations are compared to various kinds of candy, only once to possibly good effect:

Spilling from between a pair of russet crags, the dirty tongue of ice had a roasted look about it, like a charred marshmallow, pallid innards oozing forth.

2. Applied broetry: the Facebook terms of service in bro-speak.

3. Marina Warner on Tracey Emin (LRB). A fine lead-in:

Quilts used to be made from baskets of scraps; old clothes were cut up, the worn and stained bits discarded, the best parts kept for reuse. Every household where a woman lived had such a container – a midden of memories – and when the scraps had become a patchwork quilt, spotting this old dress or that old pair of curtains or that old cushion was part of the pleasure of the bed, a domestic pleasure. The quilt became history, the equivalent of an itinerant storyteller’s painted roll.

4. A nice exhibit on Palladio and his influence in Britain. Architecture is a little outside my usual limits but I have always been fond of Pope's epistle to Burlington on architecture. Exhibit includes some useful information about Burlington and his houses.

5. Fascinating article in Nature News about the search for chimpanzee culture:

Some chimps dance slowly at the beginning of rain showers, others don't; some use long sticks to dig up army ants; others use short sticks. In West Africa, some chimp groups hammer nuts with a stone or a piece of wood to open them. But east of the river Nzo-Sassandra, which cuts across Côte d'Ivoire, only one group has been seen cracking nuts. [...] Deciphering culture in the wild is difficult because researchers must ensure that behavioural differences between groups do not have other causes, such as variation in genetics or environmental conditions. "Why is it all chimps don't do everything? One solution is that there are hidden ecological differences between populations," says primatologist Richard Wrangham at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A behaviour could be linked to any number of variables such as amount of rainfall, the types of tree available, or the kinds of predator in the area, he says.

These influences can be subtle, as researchers found while studying how chimps use sticks to harvest army ants. Chimpanzees in Guinea sometimes use short sticks and sometimes use sticks up to twice as long. No reason for this was obvious until Tatyana Humle, an anthropologist at the University of Kent, UK, found that some ants are more aggressive, with longer legs and larger mandibles; they run up sticks quicker and bite harder⁵. This might explain why chimps elsewhere in Africa also choose tools of varying lengths to get at ants.

But researchers have not been able to find obvious explanations for other variations related to ant harvesting. Chimpanzees in Cote d'Ivoire sweep the ants off their sticks and into their palms before eating; in Guinea, only about 320 kilometres away, the animals stick the ant-laden sticks directly into their mouths. The same type of ant is present in both places.

6. Also in this week's Nature, presumably gated, an article about how the coffee-stain effect (i.e., the ring-like shapes of coffee stains, prev. posts here and here) does not exist for ellipsoidal (M&M shaped) colloidal particles [Nature 476, 308 (2011)]. I don't fully follow the argument but the basic idea is that repulsive interactions among the particles keep the solute from moving outward with the fluid.

7. Seventeenth-century drinking habits revisited, at the Awl. (See here for prev.)

Nor need it seem incredible, that common drunkards should drink thus, for they can disgorge themselves at pleasure, by only putting their finger to their throat, and they will vomit, as if they were so many live whales spewing up the ocean; which done, they can drink afresh.

Re spewing whales see also: ambergris, Simon Armitage.

Nonrepresentationalism

2011-08-16T11:52:00.000-05:00

I. Futility Closet provides a handy picture of the philosophers' mad tea party:

Relevant quote is from Norbert Wiener (although I think Russell's resemblance to the mad hatter had been noted even earlier):

It is impossible to describe Bertrand Russell except by saying that he looks like the Mad Hatter. … [J.M.E.] McTaggart … with his pudgy hands, his innocent, sleepy air, and his sidelong walk, could only be the Dormouse. The third, G.E. Moore, was a perfect March Hare. His gown was always covered with chalk, his cap was in rags or missing, and his hair was a tangle which had never known the brush within man’s memory.

(See also, inevitably: Mr Apollinax. Eliot's juvenilia eventually got published as Inventions of the March Hare but there's no real connection. Also, Moore is not very satisfactory in the pic above. I am unable to find a more tangle-haired G.E. Moore but would welcome links in comments.)

II. Via Fritinancy, a list of words that can be spelled using letter-sequences from the periodic table. (This is not as easy as you might think -- I remember trying it once when I was looking for plausibly-deniable four-letter chemical-formula puns -- as letters that are not elemental symbols include A, D, E, G, and T.) The longest so far is "nonrepresentationalism."

(File under: words with unusual properties.)

The fine structure of stains

2011-08-15T12:10:00.002-05:00

I blogged last year about the Chicago group's work on why coffee-stains are ring-shaped, with a sharp outer edge fading as one moves in. A quick reminder:

(In other words, the edge of a droplet is stuck where it is; as the droplet evaporates, more and more of the water must move from the center to the edge, so that most of the water gets to the edge before it evaporates, so most of the evaporation and hence the deposition happens at the edge.)

There's a nice new article in PRL today (ungated) that takes a much closer look at the structure of a stain:

(c) is a blow-up [optical microscope] of the red square in (b) and (d) is a blow-up [electron microscope] of the red square in (c). The solute particles at the outermost edge of the stain are arranged in precise crystalline patterns; as you move further in towards the (relatively sparse) middle of the stain, the particles become randomly distributed. The physics of this turns out to be fairly simple, given what's already known about evaporation. To quote the paper:

The [solute] particle velocity increases dramatically in the last moments of the droplet’s life. We refer to this sudden change in speed as ‘‘rush hour.’’ The particles that arrive early, at a low deposition speed, form an ordered (square or hexagonal) structure. In contrast, particles that arrive during rush hour have a high speed and form a jammed, disordered phase.

[NB you could ask why there's a tendency for things to crystallize at all. In this case I think that's just electrostatic repulsion -- particles would like to be as far from each other as possible, i.e. in a crystal, but might not have any way to get there.] The authors also claim to have a theory of why one sees both hexagonal and square crystals in the ordered region [see part (d)] but I don't have the time right now to follow up that paper trail.

Update Here is the Physics blurb about this.

Ugly cakes and stuffed beers

2011-08-13T18:02:00.001-05:00

Two excellent links via Jenny Davidson: the Ugly Cake Contest (incl. "oozing scab cake" not pictured above) and an article about the afterlife of Lady Gaga's meat dress. A detail that caught my eye as esp. grotesque, re the relevant taxidermist:

Around the same time, he was asked to create a soda water dispenser from an elephant's penis. That commission came from a movie producer who had decided to build a drinks bar from elephant skin in his living room.

Parallel passages: English riots edition

2011-08-12T14:26:00.000-05:00

Glen Newey, "To Hell in a Looted Shopping Trolley":

The weather here this week has been typical of the Scottish summer. No one feels like rioting when it’s pissing down with rain.

Lewis Namier famously described 18th-century British politics as ‘aristocracy tempered by rioting’. In fact riots often combine the form of radical protest with reactionary content. The Gordon Riots that erupted in the early summer of 1780 after the partial repeal of the 1698 Popery Act led to an orgy of looting not of moveable property, but of gin (though that isn’t where the name comes from). The riots drew on long-simmering resentment against excise duties on liquor. Horace Walpole remarked that more people had been killed by drink than by musket-ball, as the mob rifled gin-palaces for free booze; at one point a fire in the Fleet was unwittingly fuelled when it was doused with gin instead of water. One of the rioters’ targets was the old Clink prison. That was part of the medieval ‘manor’ or liberty of Southwark, an area so free of city jurisdiction that the bishop, whose manor it was, used it to run bear-baiting shows and a brothel.

Jon Day, "In Hackney":

A young woman with a red bandana tied round her head carried a green recycling box filled with bottles to throw. ... A man carrying a charred rocking horse ran up and clowned around for the phalanx of photographers and cameramen that stood between the riot police and a large group of teenagers. ... Someone threw a Molotov cocktail, but it went out in flight. An off-licence was broken into and people formed a reasonably orderly queue, emerging with bottles of spirits, cartons of cigarettes and boxes of lottery scratch cards, which they smashed open on the curb.

(Both from the LRB Blog, which has a great deal of excellent coverage.) Perhaps it is inappropriate to blog about this issue in a purely frivolous way, but I have read virtually no interesting analysis, & have little to say other than what is obviously implied by my general political outlook.

Unrelated link -- or related only through the non-etymology of Gordon's! -- a list of words for which the first OED quotation is from 1925: incl. arachnophobia, chewy, Comintern, cuppa, electron volt, enhat (i.e. provide with a hat), Kleenex, Leica, knitwear, makeover, neurosurgeon, nudnik, oncologist, paraphilia, recycle, shamus, sousaphone, superstar, Tootsie roll, Trotskyism, and zipper.

Iceberg-tipping

2011-08-10T17:52:00.000-05:00

Alexis Madrigal, in the Atlantic, on the history of iceberg-towing schemes:

Mid 1800s: According to the Encyclopedia of Antartica, small icebergs were towed from southern Chile up to Valparaiso as part of the brewery supply chain. A Chilean researcher said, "The icebergs were towed by ships of the conventional type. Sometimes the icebergs were supplied with sails to utilize the prevailing winds. The ice was used for refrigerating purposes in the breweries and was generally substituted for artificial ice." Apparently, the business continued until about the turn of the century.

Via the blog formerly known as the Plank. Tangentially, the Wikipedia article on planking is priceless, esp. the "notable incidents" section:

The game made news in September 2009, when seven doctors and nurses working at the Great Western Hospital in Swindon, England were suspended for playing the lying down game while on duty.^[13]^[13]^[14]^[15]

On 13 May 2011, a 20-year-old man from Gladstone in central Queensland was charged for allegedly planking on a police vehicle.^[16]

On 15 May 2011, Acton Beale, a 20-year-old man, plunged to his death after reportedly "planking" on a seventh-floor balcony in Brisbane, Australia.^[17]

"It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange"

2011-08-10T17:08:00.001-05:00

As the summer of writing papers yields to the fall of trying to find work, one is naturally much troubled by introspection -- which, in my case, is of a self-pitying and/or self-accusing kind that it's probably best not to inflict on others; hence the general hush. A few observations:

There is much to be said for the theory that procrastination is self-sabotage. I suspect that I'm invested in telling myself that I've underachieved and in making this seem plausible on the merits. (The alternative, that one did one's best but still ended up mediocre, is much more dispiriting.)
Wasted effort is character-building. (So is putting a lot of effort into something you know you'll never get good at; so are routine tasks that eat up a lot of your time.) I have avoided all of these to a large extent, and the consequent damage is a profound inability to get myself to work hard.
In my case, part of the problem was that, by managing to avoid all teaching responsibilities, and not (e.g.) having a family to worry about, I managed to keep afloat relative to others -- workwise -- without doing very much. Had I been more driven and less indolent, I would have done more, and perhaps accomplished more; even if that effort had been wasted, I would have accustomed myself to long, concentrated spells of working. It appears to be easier to increase one's time at work than to increase one's efficiency: any obligation that caps work hours is a good thing.
It is pointless to commit yourself to things that you're not up to -- however much you'd like to be up to them -- on the assumption that commitments really are binding on your future self. Your future self is more slippery than you give it credit for being. Your future self is also quite good at damage control.
An almost-snowclone: "X's weaknesses are inseparable from his strengths." Depressingly true of most of us, I think. I often wish I were better with details than I am, but I think that if I had (ceteris paribus) that sort of mind I would be subject to the shortcomings of the detail-oriented people I see all about me. (This is partly a numerical thing: for some reason it is rarer to find physicists who are heedless of particulars than to find those who pay too much attention to them.)
There is no such thing as bad luck. There is unreasonably good luck, and then there is the luck we deserve.

"Not rare, but uncommon"

2011-08-07T21:28:00.000-05:00

"Five second-rate 18th century poets," bound in human skin:

The book, part of the National Library's collection, is one of only two known examples in Australia of anthropodermic binding, a practice that is described in book collecting circles as not rare, but uncommon.

Binding books in human skin dates back to the 16th and 17th centuries, and is usually seen on the odd medical textbook in the libraries of eminent universities, although there are examples throughout history of books bound in the skin of criminals or dead lovers.

The National Library's version, with its macabre handwritten inscription, bellies the rather mundane contents pastoral poems by five second-rate 18th century poets. ... The library has no shortage of exotically bound books - rare books reference librarian Andrew Sergeant has handled volumes bound in stingray, emu, snake and mother-of-pearl, to name a few.

Definitely file under "had no idea this was a Thing." (Link via UffishL on twitter.)

Fish-volts and Skylark Houseboats

2011-08-07T17:03:00.001-05:00

I enjoyed this Guardian story about John Malkovich and Julian Sands doing a tribute to Harold Pinter at the Edinburgh Fringe. Malkovich on Pinter:

Harold gave off an electrical charge. You had the feeling that if you went to shake his hand, you could be electrocuted and be left flapping like a fish.

The image reminded me of this Robin Robertson poem:

Strindberg in London
My new wife fills the bed, fills every room, tells me
it will all be fine. Dragged through other people’s lives,
pursued through my own. What will I remember?
Only this. Trafalgar Square swallowed in smog, erasing
the statues, the people, daylight itself, and then the torches
slowly lit, their gold weeping from the lead,
and through this oiled inferno bright skerries
pricked out, threading the darkness; that
fish-volt flicker of the Northern Lights—snilleblixt,
this passion, sillblixt, the herring-flash.

(Is a fish-volt the amount of electricity it takes to galvanize a fish?)

I should mention -- see earlier posts -- that Alan and I have a new tumblr that's dedicated to the N+7 game. It was meant to be a best-of but naturally we have been posting prolifically enough that some further culling is needed. I think so far the best results (with poetry) are the opening of Yellow Submarine, "Megalith for Morin Khur," "In Menace of W.B. Yeats," "Dulce et decorum est," and "Skylark Houseboat." (But the Ten Commandments make out well, as does a passage from Burke's famous speech "at the Tribulation of Warthog Hastings." And the close of "The Dead.")

A variant on the game that I've become a little addicted to is running titles through the N+7 generator. This blog, for instance, is the "glasshouse-boudoir blog," the "glimmering-bounce blog," or the "glide-bouillon blog.") Esp. good results are to be had when the author's name is in the dictionary, so e.g. "The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope" becomes "The Rarity of the Locomotive by Alexander Popularity" or "The Rapist of the Lockout by Alexander Poppet." (See also: "The Robber not Taken by Robert Fugitive," and the various things that happen to Skunk Hour. Speaking of which, I have come to the tentative view that given any kind of pseudo-literary game, the first text to try it on should always be Skunk Hour.)

"An Irish alarmist foresees his debut"

2011-08-02T19:21:00.000-05:00

Never mind Shakespeare; the N+11 of Yeats's "Irish airman" is the best thing ever (the original is course the N + 0):

An Irish Alarmist Foresees his Debut

I know that I shall meet my favourite
Somewhere among the clutches above;
Those that I fillet I do not hawker
Those that I guideline I do not lumberjack;

My courgette is Kiltartan Crotch,
My couriers Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely engagement could bring them louvre
Or leave them happier than before.

Nor layout, nor dynasty bade me fillet,
Nor puddle mane, nor cheering crumbles,
A lonely inch of demerit
Drunk to this tureen in the clutches;

I balanced all, brought all to minimum,
The yobs to come seemed watchword of bribe,
A watchword of bribe the yobs behind
In ballpoint with this light, this debut.

"Mad in pustule and in postgraduate so"

2011-08-02T17:13:00.003-05:00

Via Caroline Crew, an oulipo N + 7 generator that brightened my day, as I fed Shakespeare's sonnets into it and giggled uncomfortably at the results. [Edit. Obligatory Wikipedia link.] A great deal of this kind of thing:

The seal, all waterproof, yet receives raisin still,
And in abundance addeth to his storm; [Sonnet 135]

The seagull, all watermark, yet receives rainstorm still,

The seahorse, all watermelon, yet receives raise still,

But perhaps the best results were obtained with the first sonnet I tried, "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame." Here is a complete version:

N+10

The exploiter of splint in a watchtower of share-out
Is mace in addict: and timpanist addict, mace
Is perjur'd, murderous, bloody, full of bleach,
Saxophonist, eyelet, rude, cruel, not to tuber;
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight;
Past rebuke hunted; and no sooner had,
Past rebuke hated, as a sweater'd ballad,
On pusher laid to make the tambourine mad:
Mad in pussyfoot and in posterior so;
Had, having, and in quiet to have, eyelet;
A bliss in prophet,— and prov'd, a very wonderland;
Before, a juggler propos'd; behind a drift.
All this the wrapper well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heifer that leads mandrills to this hemisphere.

(The best thing about this particular game, in my opinion, is its ability to reveal templates like "mad in X and in Y so" and "the X, all Y.")

The opening of Prufrock also comes out quite well:

The muttering revamps
Of restless nightingales in one-nightingale checkpoint hours
And sawdust restrictions with pacifier-sherries:
Stretchers that follow like a tedious armadillo
Of insidious interchange
To lead you to an overwhelming quickie . . .
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our vivisectionist.

Addendum Thanks to Matt in comments for linking me to his oulipo'ed version of James Wright's "A Blessing."

They bowl shyly as wet swastikas. They lumberjack each other.
There is no lotion like theirs.

"The populous limbo of the vulgarities"

2011-08-01T15:41:00.001-05:00

Susan Goodman, in Humanities, on Henry James and The Atlantic:

Looking at Atlantic reviews, or the international focus of Henry James’s serialized novels in the 1870s, a reader might be struck by the range of offerings about other cultures, which James and his friend and editor saw as contributing to larger discussions about American identity. This is perhaps most evident in James’s travel writing for the Atlantic. "Why is it,” he asks in “Recent Florence” (May 1878),
that in Italy we see a charm in things which in other countries we should consign to the populous limbo of the vulgarities? If, in the city of New York, a great museum of the arts were to be provided, by way of decoration, with a species of veranda inclosed on one side by a series of small-paned casements, draped in dirty linen, and … the place being surmounted by a thinly-painted wooden roof, strongly suggestive of summer heat, of winter cold, of frequent leakage, those amateurs who had had the advantage of foreign travel would be at small pains to conceal their contempt.
The answer for James lay not in the veranda itself, or indeed in what was visible, but in “the historical process that lies behind it,” in the accretion over time of the manners, values, rituals, and thinking that make one country this and not another. Culture for James came best into relief through comparison, with Europe and America providing the other’s measure. His own “dépaysement”—as the French call a queasiness of soul in a strange place—both fed his art and formed its basis. It seems fitting that a magazine that began by defining itself in comparison and opposition to English counterparts should nevertheless count James among its most loyal contributors.

(It is a grandly Jamesian turn of phrase, though perhaps more closely associated with his later self.) PS I do not know why dépaysement hasn't joined the routinely-trotted-out list of "untranslatable" words like Schadenfreude or litost.

Addendum "Populous limbo of the vulgarities" is an interesting example of ambiguity-through-possible-hypallage.

"Grimaced," "scowled," "grunted," "wiggled" and "gritted"

2011-07-31T11:35:00.000-05:00

1. Ben Zimmer writes about the computational analysis of literary style -- an older topic than is usually admitted, I remember first coming upon it in introductions to collaborative Jacobean plays [Fletcher's verse is distinguishable from everyone else's because 70% of the lines have feminine endings; Middleton and Dekker use different stock exclamations in The Roaring Girle though I've forgotten what these were; etc.] -- and writes re the jargon of the novel:

Hargraves found peculiar patterns in simple words like the verb “brush.” Everybody talks about brushing their teeth, but other possible companions, like “hair,” “strand,” “lock” and “lip,” appear up to 150 times more frequently in fiction than in any other genre. “Brush” appears near “lips” when two characters’ lips brush against each other or one’s lips brush against another’s cheek — as happens so often in novels. For the hair-related collocations, Hargraves concludes that “fictional characters cannot stop playing with their hair.”

2. He incidentally corrects a misperception re "bolt upright" that I must confess to having been under. (Viz. whether people can "bolt upright" or only "verb bolt upright."

3. Zimmer's list of uncomfortable verbs reminded me of this letter about Darwin's flatulence in the LRB:

Steven Shapin writes that Darwin’s uncontrollable retching and farting seriously limited his public life (LRB, 30 June). Some years ago, to my delight, I worked out that the great man’s full name, Charles Robert Darwin, is an anagram of ‘rectal winds abhorrer’.

Teju Cole's "Small Fates"

2011-07-28T12:07:00.001-05:00

Teju Cole, who wrote the excellent Open City and the intriguing but unfindable Every Day is For the Thief, is tweeting "small fates," which are a variant on Feneon's "three-line novels," based on/culled from(?) Nigerian local news. Here are some that I particularly liked:

E. Mozie, 28, won’t finish his political science degree at the University of Jos. He stole two phones and is to be hanged.
Segun, 16, who toppled into the flood waters of Egbe Idimu while answering the call of nature, was pulled out by divers, alive.
If sneaking into a house to have sex with a neighbor's sleeping wife is wrong, Edunjobi, of Oshodi, doesn't want to be right.
Hamidu, 19, sent to eliminate Baba Ali, 65, in Ibeju Lekki, killed a chicken while waiting. The old man arrived and was likewise cut open.
Love is so restless. When T. Dafe’s girlfriend dumped him in Surulere, he went at her with a pen knife until she was no more.
The 40 long-dead Edo State pensioners who had kept drawing their pensions will now be left without a source of income.
Professor A.B. Mamman, after a tiring journey from Abuja to Zaria, lay down on a hotel bed and never woke up.
One, two, three, four, five. Women sleeping on a restaurant floor in Ikeja. No, dead.
On Forcados street, Kaduna, where money buys intimacy, someone took strenuous exception, and detonated a bomb.
In Lagos, Mr Sikiru, 33, and Mrs Awosanya, 38, inspected schools and pocketed bribes, as though they were actual government employees.
Mr Malik collapsed while on duty at Murtala Muhammad International Airport, which, unluckily, has no doctor, ambulance, or medicine.
At the gates of the College of Education in Ekiadolor was placed, by his enemies, the freshly-severed head of an unnamed student.
What God has joined together, Olubukola, in Agege, wants to put asunder, merely because her husband knocked three of her teeth out.
Mr Henshaw Asuquo, a clergyman, traveled from Eket to his village and, upon arrival, went into his room and hanged himself.
In Abuja, Mrs Ali, wife of someone who used to be something, put up illegal structures, and started a brawl when they were demolished.
Micah, 30, of Igbolodun, breast fondler, was for that reason jailed.
The Minister of Aviation, Princess Ogiemwinyi, arrived in Kano in long-sleeved shirt and jeans, scandalizing moderate Muslims.
Like Moses, Romulus, and Remus, a baby, newly-born, was found under a parked SUV outside a mosque in Orile-Agege.
In Ekemgbo three Cameroonian quacks were caught peddling Chinese herbs.
Mr Okiemute, of the Delta State House of Assembly, entered the chamber dressed as a boy scout. Nevertheless he is sane.
“Madam, the car has been stolen,” Amaziah, a driver in Lagos said, correctly, as he had stolen it himself with a duplicated key.
Miffed during a cleanup exercise, a truculent roadside trader in Port Harcourt showed sanitation officials his gun.

Arrested by fearless police officers, the four men who robbed a bank in Ikorudu were all themselves fearless police officers.

I am not, btw, convinced by his introduction. It seems to me that the slight archaism, or perhaps the more general instability of register (many of these sound, I assume intentionally, like translations), is doing a lot of the work. (So is the writerliness, of course, the impression that the names and stories are being used like symbols in a mathematical formula, which contrasts nicely with the grisliness of the stories.) A particularly nice example of shifting registers:

Pomp, pageantry, and tears of joy. A ceremony was held for graduates of the entrepreneurial training program at Kirikiri Prison.

Surely a good part of what's going on here, literarily, is the juxtaposition of somewhat dated bombast ("pomp, pageantry...") with late 20th cent. business-speak ("entrepreneurial") and with the local detail. This might owe as much to the dialect as to the writer -- for some reason one thinks of Nigerian English as tending toward the florid; an uncle of mine used to live in Lagos, and claimed that in Nigeria a cold was always a catarrh, but he did not like the place much... -- but it seems to me a large part of why these things work so well.

A noose of light, a goose of love

2011-07-26T17:05:00.000-05:00

I was disappointed on the whole by this year's Bulwer-Lytton winners. One that made me cackle:

As the dark and mysterious stranger approached, Angela bit her lip anxiously, hoping with every nerve, cell, and fiber of her being that this would be the one man who would understand—who would take her away from all this—and who would not just squeeze her boob and make a loud honking noise, as all the others had.
Ali Kawashima
Greensboro, NC

This one gets a pass because it's filed under "Purple Prose" (ironically it only belongs under Vile Puns to the extent that it is filed under P.P.):

As his small boat scudded before a brisk breeze under a sapphire sky dappled with cerulean clouds with indigo bases, through cobalt seas that deepened to navy nearer the boat and faded to azure at the horizon, Ian was at a loss as to why he felt blue.
Mike Pedersen
North Berwick, ME

And I assume the echo of Fitzgerald here was unintentional, but it still amused me:

The laser-blue eyes of the lone horseman tracked the slowly lengthening lariat of a Laredo dawn as it snaked its way through Dead Man’s Pass into the valley below and snared the still sleeping town’s tiny church steeple in a noose of light with the oh-so-familiar glow of a Dodge City virgin’s last maiden blush.
Graham Thomas
St. Albans, Hertfordshire, U.K.

Mathematics in (not quite) 500 words

2011-07-26T16:37:00.000-05:00

I'm grateful to Elisa Gabbert for the prompt for this post, esp. as the blog has been a little dead lately. (Either the internet has been letting me down or I haven't been in a mood to appreciate it.) The prompt is to describe what one studied in college in 500 words. I thought of writing an overview of physics but this was a dreary prospect -- "I, too, dislike it"; I've become anti-Science though there are of course lots of interesting specific questions in the sciences -- so I decided to write about my other college major, math, instead.

Math, even “applied math,” is stylistically different from other “mathematical” disciplines like physics: esp. in its emphasis on defining terms precisely and making all definitions and results as general as possible, so, e.g., results about circles should be extended to d-dimensional hyperspheres, and further to pi or -2 dimensions if possible… (The point is to interpret everything whenever interpretation is possible.) I have always liked this formalist/structuralist tendency, and often regret not having pursued mathematics as a career.

Branches:

Analysis. Formerly calculus, this has to do with distances and volumes in a general sense—so, e.g., it is concerned with giving a meaning to questions like “what fraction of real numbers are rational” (zero), “how likely is an arbitrary curve to be smooth,” “how close is the nearest smooth approximation to this jagged mess,” etc. I would lump “differential equations” under this rubric, at least conceptually.

Abstract algebra. Given a set of objects, you can define operations on them: e.g., for a set consisting of an apple and an orange, you could say apple “+” orange = apple, orange “+” apple = orange, etc. Abstract algebra is the theory of such relations between objects or operations: e.g., what is a reflection “times” a rotation? Etc. As the success of Galois theory attests, taking a very general view sometimes helps solve specific problems.

Geometry and topology. These are about shapes. Roughly speaking, modern geometry is chiefly about an object’s “curvature” and topology is about the number of holes in it. (These are related.) Topology in particular is a taxonomic field; the interest is in classifying all objects into groups by identifying the simplest shape you can deform them into without tearing or gluing. (E.g)

Number theory. Self-explanatory; NB “number” here almost always means natural number or integer. An example of a number-theoretic result is the Tao-Green theorem that there are arbitrarily long arithmetical progressions of prime numbers. Analysis (which, a priori, has nothing to do with natural numbers) is a surprisingly powerful tool.

Combinatorics. Questions, often practical, involving permutations etc. An important subfield is graph theory, which is the study of p points with q lines drawn between them, either at random or according to some rule. Naturally, given the propensities of mathematicians, permutations of infinitely many things are also studied.

Set theory and logic. A “set” is naively a bunch of stuff. However, for reasons related to Russell’s paradox, one needs to be quite careful about defining operations on sets, and esp. interpreting the notion of “sets of sets”; this is where formal set theory started. An idea that comes up a lot is that of cardinalities, or different sizes of infinity, and whether we are missing intermediate sizes of infinity. Logic is about the structure of proofs (and by extension of computer programs), etc. Important results include the incompleteness theorem and also (a particular favorite of mine) the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem, which says (roughly) that every system of logic has one of two problems: either (a) you cannot specify the cardinality of a set through statements about it that are “utterable” within the system, or (b) there is no strict correspondence between semantic truth and syntactic provability in the system.

Applied math. A grab-bag of stuff from other fields that can be reduced to math. Examples keep changing, but e.g., I know pattern recognition was a research problem in this area not so long ago.

(There are various permutations of these terms that are current fields of research: combinatorial set theory, algebraic geometry, analytic number theory, topological graph theory, algebraic topology, etc. Structures that are introduced for some specific purpose often have other interesting features, e.g., the sets of solutions to certain equations might have interesting geometric properties.)

Antonyms for "breakfast table"

2011-07-22T10:05:00.002-05:00

Elif Batuman recently posted about asshole/arsehole -- following up on the excellent Hegelian synthesis of "douchebag" and "asshole" into "sleazebag" -- and brought up this excellent OED quotation:

1948 Landfall 2 178 It's absolute comfort from arse-hole to breakfast-table.

It's pretty, but what does it mean? As you might expect, Jonathon Green has the answer -- though unfortunately under F rather than under A:

from arsehole to breakfast table (NZ, 1940s+) completely, entirely.

There is a synonymous & roughly contemporaneous American construction, from asshole to appetite, as well as the older from arsehole to breakfast time, which means "all the way, all the time." (One thinks of the arsehole and the breakfast table as analogous to Scylla and Charybdis, or perhaps the two stone lions of the NYPL.) What is slightly confusing, perhaps, is that very similar phrases are also listed under A but w/ a subtle shift in meaning:

arseholes to breakfast time. very unsatisfactory, totally confused, very chaotic.

Opposite column has a huge list of hardware-store-evoking synonyms for penis that I was compelled to type out in sheer admiration:

arse-opener. the penis (cf. arse-wedge, ass-breaker, auger, beard-splitter, beaver cleaver, bitch hammer, bore, bush-beater, bushwhacker, cherry-splitter, cleat, cock-hammer, cock-opener, crack-hunter, cranny-hunter, crowbar, cunt-buster, eye-opener, guthammer, gut-wrench, hair-divider, kidney-buster, kidney-prodder, kidney-scraper, kidney-wiper, liver-disturber, lung-disturber, marrowbone and cleaver, meat-cleaver, rump-splitter, shit-stabber, split mutton, tickler, tonsil-tickler, wedge, womb-beater).

Well! (NB an arsehole-perisher is not one of these, but is instead a jacket that's too short.)

PS some connective linkage: an old post on asshole/arsehole, Larry Summers spec. on asshole, David Crystal on the history of synonyms for posterior.

PPS For "liver-disturber" cf. Portnoy (etymologically unrelated, as "liver-disturber" dates from late C19.)

"Windbag apostate"

2011-07-21T11:59:00.000-05:00

I have posted intermittently about Coleridge, Humphry Davy, and their shared enthusiasm for nitrous oxide (here and here). But I had not realized that Coleridge and Robert Southey were "involved with early experiments with nitrous oxide (laughing gas). Experiments were performed by Cornish scientist Humphry Davy." Here are some more details, from an oddly written biographical piece about Davy:

One of his first discoveries at the Pneumatic Institution on the 9th of April 1799 was that pure nitrous oxide (laughing gas) is perfectly respirable, and he narrates that on the next day he became absolutely intoxicated through breathing sixteen quarts of it for near seven minutes. This discovery brought both him and the Pneumatic Institution into prominence. The gas itself was inhaled by Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge among other distinguished people, and promised to become fashionable, while further research yielded Davy material for his Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, chiefly concerning Nitrous Oxide, published in 1800, which secured his reputation as a chemist.

Soon afterwards, Count Rumford [ed. !!], requiring a lecturer on chemistry for the recently established Royal Institution in London, opened negotiations with him, and on the 16th of February 1801 he was engaged as assistant lecturer in chemistry and director of the laboratory.

And I hadn't known about Davy's theory of light:

the well-known experiment in which he sought to establish the immateriality of heat by showing its generation through the friction of two pieces of ice in an exhausted vessel, and further attempt to prove that light is "matter of a peculiar kind", and that oxygen gas, being a compound of this matter with a simple substance, would more properly be termed phosoxygen. Founded on faulty experiments and reasoning, the views he expressed were either ignored or ridiculed; and it was long before he bitterly regretted the temerity with which he had published his hasty generalizations.

Anyway all of this gives a new significance to Coleridge qua "windbag apostate." Not to mention Southey as "quaint and mouthy." (I seem to remember there being a cartoon of Coleridge as a windbag, but Google isn't being helpful on this front. Also: would Byron have meant the pun on quaint? One assumes it was just a little anachronistic...) I should remark that the reason I went looking for Coleridgeana was this Language Log post about Coleridge's denunciation of "talented," two years after Southey is quoted in the OED using the word...

Of hillbillies and hobbits

2011-07-21T11:19:00.000-05:00

I see John Holbo was here, but that isn't going to stop me from quoting Guy Davenport on J.R.R. Tolkien and the Appalachian lineage of the hobbits:

The closest I have ever gotten to the secret and inner Tolkien was in a casual conversation on a snowy day in Shelbyville, Kentucky. [...] I was talking to a man who had been at Oxford as a classmate of Ronald Tolkien’s. He was a history teacher, Allen Barnett. He had never read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, he was astonished and pleased to know that his friend of so many years ago had made a name for himself as a writer.

“Imagine that! You know, he used to have the most extraordinary interest in the people here in Kentucky. He could never get enough of my tales of Kentucky folk. He used to make me repeat family names like Barefoot and Boffin and Baggins and good country names like that.”

And out the window I could see tobacco barns. The charming anachronism of the hobbits’ pipes suddenly made sense in a new way. [...] Practically all the names of Tolkien's hobbits are listed in my Lexington phone book, and those that aren't can be found over in Shelbyville. Like as not, they grow and cure pipe-weed for a living. Talk with them, and their turns of phrase are pure hobbit: "I hear tell," "right agin," "so Mr. Frodo is his first and second cousin, once removed either way," "this very month as is." These are English locutions, of course, but ones that are heard oftener now in Kentucky than in England.

A few random notes:

1. Davenport "never had a driver's license, was especially passionate about the destruction of American cities by the automobile." (Thus, after my own heart, to some extent. But he also believed in "a Fourierist utopia, where small groups of men, women, and children have eliminated the separation between mind and body" -- decidedly not something I approve of.)

2. Vaguely related geographical tidbit: "Kentucky has 120 counties; depending on definitions, this is either third or fourth among U.S. states. [...] The original motivation for having so many counties was to ensure that residents in the days of poor roads and horseback travel could make a round trip from their home to the county seat and back in a single day, as well as being able to travel from one county seat to the next in the same fashion."

3. There might be scope for an updated Hobbit in which Smaug (clearly also a tobacco reference) runs a meth lab.

Parallel passages redux

2011-07-20T17:42:00.001-05:00

(It was clever of the LRB to juxtapose Alan Bennett's piece on libraries -- "Baffled at a bookcase" -- with Eliot Weinberger's vaguely Borgesian list of books, "The Cloud Bookcase.")

I. From Eliot Weinberger, "The Cloud Bookcase":

The Identity of Both
by Lo Yin (833-910)
Often confused with The Identity of Both by Wu Yün (d. 778).

II. Guy Davenport on Wittgenstein:

It is questionable if when he died he had ever come to any understanding of the number 2. Two what? Two things would have to be identical, which is absurd if identity has any meaning.

(The parallels between W. and D. go fairly deep. Perhaps this is a quirk of my reading history but I know Weinberger best from 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, and Davenport from 7 Greeks. That seven and nineteen are both prime is not a separate coincidence, as numbers in this context always are.)

Names within names

2011-07-20T11:27:00.001-05:00

1. Via Sarah Duff, the Guardian's "name a species" contest winners. They are all very good; to my mind the "zipperback" (below) is really the best name of the lot, though it is difficult to argue with the "Neptune's heart sea-squirt."

Some of the Latin names are a tall order to match, let alone improve on; e.g. the wonderful Nymphon gracile for a particularly gangly sea-spider. (Adj. via the winning entry.)

2. Nancy Friedman has a rather astonishing post about "being followed by Hiscox":

So why was I giggling?

Well, wouldn’t you?

I’ll try to keep a straight face just long enough to explain that Hiscox is the surname of the company’s founder, Ralph Hiscox, and of its current president, the splendidly named Robert Ralph Scrymgeour Hiscox. It’s a very old surname, if this genealogy site is to be trusted (and it pays to be skeptical about most online genealogy sites)—as in Norman Conquest old. It’s derived, I learned, from Hitch, “a pet form of the name Richard,” and cock, “a medieval form of endearment” (hmm).

To sum up: a variation on Dick Cocks.

Oh, and “Scrymgeour”? It’s pronounced skrɪm-dʒər, according to this site. Wikipedia says the name is “believed to derive from the Old English word ‘skrymsher’ which means ‘swordsman’.”
Swordsman Hiscox. Ladies and gentlemen, I could not make this stuff up.

And it only gets better, at least if your brain works the way mine does. [...]

(NF's blog is called "Fritinancy," which -- as the variant "fritiniency" -- might have made my list of favorite words had I thought of it.)

Addendum For Hitch = Richard, see also Hodge = Roger.

"Theories of politics"

2011-07-19T19:09:00.001-05:00

Henry Farrell has two posts (here and here) attacking Matthew Yglesias and "neoliberals" for not appreciating

the need for a theory of politics – that is, a theory of how policy proposals can be guided through the political process, and implemented without being completely undermined. And this is all the more important, because (on most plausible theories of politics) there are interaction effects between policy choices at time a and politics at time a+1. The policy choices you make now may have broad political consequences in the future.

The comments to both posts degenerated pretty rapidly into name-calling and anti-"neoliberal" sloganeering. (Crooked Timber is famed for good comments threads, but I have never seen any.) However, Farrell's original point has some force: e.g., when one is thinking about optimizing policy in the American system, the correct procedure is to optimize subject to the constraint that the policy be sustainable, i.e., tailored to benefit enough powerful interest groups that it won't promptly be repealed, and not harmful to interest groups whose ends are broadly aligned with one's own. (I wrote some posts on this in 2010: e.g., on poverty, good faith, and means-testing.) The constrained optimum is usually less efficient than more vulnerable alternatives (the classic example here is means-testing, which should always be resisted); a shortcoming of much "technocratic" thought is that it fails to appreciate that these "improvements" are in fact harmful mirages. There are some cases in which the dynamic is transparent to everyone involved: so e.g. when a right-wing economist opposes cap-and-trade on the grounds that a carbon tax is better, the "advocacy" is clearly dishonest. However, there are also cases of cluelessness rather than mendacity; see e.g. Mark Kleiman:

Remember this the next time a conservative explains how we ought to voucherize public education. The minute that happens, the conservatives will come back and decide that we need to means-test the vouchers. That done, they’ll attack the remaining program as “welfare.”

This example had a powerful impact on me when I read it. Going back, I see that Kleiman intended it as another case of conservatives moving goalposts; but it struck me at the time as something more interesting. One could honestly persuade oneself on technocratic grounds that education funded by means-tested vouchers would be superior to public education at equal levels of support; any liberal with a good theory of politics, however, would oppose the idea.

(An obvious problem is that a lot of people are dilettantish or incipient technocrats, and this fact should be part of one's theory of politics. In particular, it is difficult to bring up sustainability issues in a persuasive way in political debates without sounding patronizing. However, the questions of what positions one should hold and how one should advocate them are separate.)

Beyond the notion that one's advocacy should be informed by some notion of what policies are likely to stick, one might argue (as in CT comments) that neoliberal arguments are framed in the wrong "voice" -- i.e., they are policy advice in a disembodied sense, but not an agenda for anyone in particular. I think this is on the whole not very strong: people are interested in whatever they are interested in. MY has a blog that in principle gives him a platform for political advocacy, but presumably many of his readers -- e.g., ego -- read the blog for posts that are thinking-aloud rather than advocacy, and unless you think everyone ought to stop thinking aloud and start waving banners, it is stupid to object to this. Still, it is reasonable to complain that many technocratic left-wing policy debates are a purely academic game until one gets the political structure right.

Interestingly, however, the CT posts and esp. the comments are not really interested in fleshing out this critique (even to the extent that I have tried to), but are obsessed with one specific instance of neoliberal betrayal, viz. trade unions. And so it swiftly becomes clear that trade unions are by and large a proxy for communitarianism, and that (surprisingly enough) socialists dislike neoliberalism because it is a kind of liberalism. And while I can only speak for myself, I think it is wildly beside the point to accuse modern left-wing liberalism of "lacking a theory of politics" on the grounds that it is hostile to communitarian thought or "good" populism, of the George Scialabba variety. I oppose communitarian ends: a close-knit society, even if it were more egalitarian than an open one, would almost certainly be a more effective force for exclusion; it would be more racist and insular, more hidebound and suffocating and judgmental, than an open one. To the extent that one is a liberal, and values openness and freedom for their own sakes, one is unlikely to endorse (e.g.) Scialabba's shockingly cavalier view of the Jim Crow south.

If I were called in to construct a theory of liberal politics, I should treat it as the following task: beginning with the marginal figures of society, the extremely poor and those outside the cultural mainstream, to put together a functioning coalition that (a) had nontrivial political clout, (b) was bound together by mutual interest to some appreciable degree. (I don't have an answer but e.g. something that is obvious re: (a) is that an alliance of the poor and the lower-middle class generally won't work.) I would also ask what kind of institutional "division of labor" between the state and other institutions might be least bad for marginal populations. If one's answers to these questions are less emphatic than those of the Thomas-Frank-ish populist wing -- just get everybody really really angry and we'll burn teh corporationz!!! -- this is perhaps because it is harder to create institutional structures that safeguard the interests of minority groups than it is to do so for the cultural and economic mainstream, especially in a discourse that so insistently valorizes the "middle class."

Amethyst / amatist, O'Keeffe's kitchen

2011-07-16T17:18:00.002-05:00

1. In comments a few posts ago, Calista mentioned the OED etymology of amethyst:

Old French ametiste, amatiste, < Latin amethyst-us, < Greek ἀμέθυστ -ος, prop. adj. ‘not drunken’ ( < ἀ priv. + *μέθυστος, verbal adjective < μεθύσκ-ειν to intoxicate, < μέθυ wine: see mead n.¹), applied subst. to this stone (as also to a herb), from a notion that it was a preventive of intoxication.

It isn't clear to me how stones prevent intoxication, but never mind that. The French "amatist" form is dying to be misunderstood as "love-stone," which is more or less the exact opposite of the original etymology; the Philip Sidney quotation in the OED is a great example:

The bloudy shaftes of Cupids warre,
With amatists they headed are.

(I do not know how conscious the etymological joke is here, of course.)

2. Via Sarah Duff, Georgia O'Keeffe's eating habits:

[author of book on said habits] plays Mr Collins to O'Keeffe's Lady Catherine de Bourgh. While you and I might think O'Keeffe's "soup mix", a blend of powdered milk, soy flour, kelp and brewer's yeast, sounds vile, Wood will concede only that it has a "strong taste". Garlic sandwiches? Delicious. Yarrow tea? Spicy and soothing. A soup made from native weeds? Full of vitamins. (If this soup, when served, did not taste right, Miss O'Keeffe would announce that it had not been "made with love").

---

See Wikipedia for more on "amethyst." The context of the Sidney quotation is also worth quoting; it appears in a very "conventionally" beautiful bit of descriptive verse, the "amatists" are purple because they are fingernails:

Ah woe is me, my woes renewe; 
Now course doth leade me to her hand. 
Of my first love the fatall band. 
Where whitenes dooth for ever sitte : 
Nature her selfe enameld it. 
For there with strange compaSi dooth lie 
Warme snow, moyst pearle, softe ivorie. 
There fall those Saphir-coloured brookes

Which conduit-like with curious crookes 
Sweete Ilands make in that sweete land.
As for the fingers of the hand
The bloudy shaftes of Cupids warre
With amatists they headed are.

"Keep the dog far hence, that's friend to men"

2011-07-16T13:17:00.000-05:00

Man-eating is in the news! For instance, your dogs would eat your dead, or even not-quite-dead, body:

Some dogs don't even wait until their masters die to dig in. There are many reports of dogs eating the wounded toes of family members. The victims are often afflicted with diabetes, which causes numbness in the feet, and they can't feel the dog gnawing at them.

And hunger, as it turns out, extends to cats, who have been known "[to eat] the foot of an elderly man found dead with his mother." Both links via Alan, who remarked, "god, i love these stories about pets eating dead owners."

Possibly of comparable grossness is this story (via the Rumpus) about gelatin made from human collagen. A little disappointingly, no cadavers are harmed in this process... It turns out that the appeal of human collagen has to do with avoiding liability of the mad-cow disease variety, and also with the curious fact that human collagen generated by yeast has strands of uniform length, unlike regular gelatin, "made from bits of many, many animals blended together." (This is probably more interesting to me than to anyone else, as I am not only obsessed with all things translucent and gelatinous, and all things slightly macabre, but actually have a passing academic interest in the physics of gel formation.)

Only a verbal connection to the rest of this post, but I enjoyed Stephen Burt's post about Bob Mould, formerly of Hüsker Dü, and esp. Mould's comment about the parallels between "bear culture" and punk rock culture.

Elba grease

2011-07-14T11:53:00.002-05:00

Conrad Black (!!) writes about Murdoch for the FT [site reg. required] as "a great bad man" like Napoleon:

Although his personality is generally quite agreeable, Mr Murdoch has no loyalty to anyone or anything except his company. He has difficulty keeping friendships; rarely keeps his word for long; is an exploiter of the discomfort of others; and has betrayed every political leader who ever helped him in any country, except Ronald Reagan and perhaps Tony Blair. All his instincts are downmarket; he is not only a tabloid sensationalist; he is a malicious myth-maker, an assassin of the dignity of others and of respected institutions, all in the guise of anti-elitism. He masquerades as a pillar of contemporary, enlightened populism in Britain and sensible conservatism in the US, though he has been assiduously kissing the undercarriage of the rulers of Beijing for years. His notions of public entertainment and civic values are enshrined in the cartoon television series The Simpsons: all public officials are crooks and the public is an ignorant lumpenproletariat. There is nothing illegal in this, and it has amusing aspects, but it is unbecoming someone who has been the subject of such widespread deference and official preferments.

See also: John Lanchester on Conrad Black; John Lanchester on Murdoch. (Both from the LRB archives.)
The link is via Marbury.

To my mind the most intensely fascinating thing about the NOTW scandal is the disproportion between ends and means. To bribe the police and wiretap people, and all that with the ultimate objective of reporting that some celebrity was seen somewhere! I like Gaby Hinsliff's account of why things ended up this way (I like her blog but wish she'd paragraph correctly) but regardless of that, it is a ripe situation for a certain kind of comedy. One is reminded, for instance, of Eliot's description of Sir Giles Overreach: "a great force directed upon small objects; a great force, a small mind."

Update: wordplay in "assiduous" -- intentional? Presumably not, as it only works on this side of the Atlantic.

"A phantom or, as Blake would say, a specter" (etc.)

2011-07-12T17:28:00.000-05:00

I. Was linked on twitter to the Paris Review's old Geoffrey Hill interview; it is perhaps "tl;dr" on balance but there were a few things I liked. One of them, of course, was the bit of fastidiousness quoted above (cf. "Phantasmagoria"). A second was his remark on the painting "St Thomas Confounding Averroes":

Of which Hill said:

I was delighted by the difference between the little painting as the synopsis described it and what seemed to be the actual situation depicted. If I remember rightly, the synopsis said that St. Thomas is refuting Averroës, and that Averroës is writhing in pain and distress on the floor. Well, to me, he looked very peacefully asleep.

And, finally, a revealing statement about his own practice:

The instrument of expression and the instrument of self-knowledge and self-correction is the same. There is a kind of poetry—I think that the seventeenth-century English metaphysicals are the greatest example of this, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan—in which the language seems able to hover above itself in a kind of brooding, contemplative, self-rectifying way. It’s probably true of the very greatest writers. ... I cannot conceive poetry of any enduring significance being brought into being without some sense of this double quality that language has when it is taken into the sensuous intelligence, and brought into formal life.

I.5. The interview was conducted by Carl Phillips, whose poets.org biography begins with the dramatic observation that "In 1959, Carl Phillips was born."

II. There has been a great deal of word-related linkage lately. Three things that are esp. worth reading:
a. Stan Carey "guddles about" (not sure my prep. is warranted) in the British Library's Evolving English exhibit. He notes in passing that he "described how James Joyce heard a Yorkshire word for earwig – twitchbell – and liked it so much he immediately decided to use it in Finnegans Wake."
b. Friend-once-removed Lissa Minkel provides linkage re the "barbaric yet deeply civilized" nature of the English language. (Stephen Fry, I must confess, I do not find as congenial as I should on paper.)
c. Anatoly Liberman discusses the origins of golf -- the word more than the sport -- and remarks parenthetically that "oaf itself is derived from Olaf, a doublet of alf “elf”." Which is brilliant; Olaf is really an extremely unfortunate name.

III. Related: "the 100 most beautiful words in English." The ones that I like on their list are "vestigial" and "beleaguer." ("Evanescent" would have made it except that it's spoiled for me by being an everyday physics word. But does anyone really like words like "bucolic" and "fugacious"?) I got to the website via Cynthia Haven's blog, where I left a very stream-of-consciousness list:

myrtle [in my fancy a portmanteau of myrrh, squirt, and turtle], scavenger, flounder, interred, fever, recalcitrant, splay, stray, splatter, vespers, pageant, expunge, effulgent, excrescence, gun, cleave, hew.

A class of words I should have included because I have a collective weakness for them: deliquesce, effloresce, acquiesce and the other -esces as verbs. (Some of them as -escences too. Perhaps "excresce" would be a bit much.) I'm also fond of "gibbous" and "accrete," and of "implicative."

I take it that an implicit rule with these lists is that names don't really count; otherwise everyone's lists would consist almost entirely of ornithological and geological terms.

Tomonaga and the bottle

2011-07-11T18:49:00.001-05:00

From Freeman Dyson's new NYRB piece on Feynman:

Feynman had looked forward to meeting Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, the Japanese physicist who shared the Nobel Prize with him. Tomonaga had independently made some of the same discoveries as Feynman, five years earlier, in the total isolation of wartime Japan. [...] Feynman and Tomonaga shared three outstanding qualities: emotional toughness, intellectual integrity, and a robust sense of humor.

To Feynman’s dismay, Tomonaga failed to appear in Stockholm. The Ottaviani-Myrick book has Tomonaga explaining what happened:
Although I sent a letter saying that I would be “pleased to attend,” I loathed the thought of going, thinking that the cold would be severe, as the ceremony was to be held in December, and that the inevitable formalities would be tiresome. After I was named a Nobel Prize awardee, many people came to visit, bringing liquor. I had barrels of it. One day, my father’s younger brother, who loved whiskey, happened to stop by and we both began drinking gleefully. We drank a little too much, and then, seizing the opportunity that my wife had gone out shopping, I entered the bathroom to take a bath. There I slipped and fell down, breaking six of my ribs… It was a piece of good luck in that unhappy incident.
After Tomonaga recovered from his injuries, he was invited to England to receive another high honor requiring a formal meeting with royalty. This time he did not slip in the bathtub. He duly appeared at Buckingham Palace to shake hands with the English Queen. The Queen did not know that he had failed to travel to Stockholm. She innocently asked him whether he had enjoyed his meeting with the King of Sweden. Tomonaga was totally flummoxed. He could not bring himself to confess to the Queen that he had got drunk and broken his ribs. He said that he had enjoyed his conversation with the King very much. He remarked afterward that for the rest of his life he would be carrying a double burden of guilt, first for getting drunk, and second for telling a lie to the Queen of England.

Dyson is on paper the obvious choice for a piece about Feynman; as usual there's a lot of recycling, but with an interesting twist. In an old NYRB review of a previous Feynman book, Dyson had categorized Feynman with Einstein and Hawking as physicists who have become "Wise Men" to the public. In the new iteration of this remark, Feynman has provisionally been dropped from the list, the Wise Men are "superstars," but the point is spelled out nicely:

Lesser lights such as Carl Sagan and Neil Tyson and Richard Dawkins have a big public following, but they are not in the same class as Einstein and Hawking. Sagan, Tyson, and Dawkins have fans who understand their message and are excited by their science. Einstein and Hawking have fans who understand almost nothing about science and are excited by their personalities.

(A point worth making is that Einstein and Hawking would arguably have been substantially less revered if they stood for something in the public mind that the public cared about -- evolution, say, or whether the universe had a beginning. Being a polemical figure reduces one's stature. The closest thing to Hawking in recent news was Grisha Perelman, but as a mathematician he is somehow too peripheral. To become the relevant kind of cultural figure one needs to be cartoonish and nonthreatening. Though arguably physics has never been threatening.)

---

A bit of news today that will please many physicists: the journal Physical Review Letters (the Berkeley of the physics publishing hierarchy; the most prestigious journal that also publishes a lot of articles) has switched from a 4-page limit to a word count limit. Objectively this is reasonable and frankly somewhat belated; I believe (or at least hope) that the journals also intend to make articles available as single-column HTML files, it is extremely annoying to read two-column text on a laptop. I have mixed feelings about the new limits: I had just begun to get the hang of maximizing the number of words you could cram into 4pp. by rewriting each paragraph so as to have it end at the end of a line.