Crotchets

I have a nagging sense that I'm missing an important link; but I should post these while I still have them open:

1. I am intrigued by this book on midwifery in the seventeenth century ("with much "strugling [sic], halings, and enforcements" midwifes would attempt to pull babies out before labour had even begun, and a hooked stick, or "crotchet", was used in the place of forceps.") And of course I am tickled by the article's author being named Alison Flood.

2. Amazing fruit and vegetable skulls (via Jenny Davidson):

3. Dan Chiasson, reviewing Frederick Seidel, says something perceptive:

Seidel learned a lot about libido and its excruciations from John Berryman, the original “phallus-man.” The Berryman/Seidel predicament is as follows: to be a straight man is to want to have sex all the time; to want to have sex all the time is to be a buffoon; to be a buffoon is to occupy an amusing, though limited, point of view. The imagination, which ranges over all points of view and samples the full panoply of human appetites, finds the salivating buffoon it is tethered to pitiful, or sickening, or dangerous, or doomed. This makes self-caricature—the buffoon seen from the point of view of the imagination—the central mode in both Berryman’s and Seidel’s poems.

(I have been on a bit of a Seidel kick lately, I unearthed a Collected while packing & discarding books. I'd always known and admired "Poem by the bridge at Ten-Shin" but there is much more in that vein in the rest of his recent work.)

4. I liked the Deborah Eisenberg story in the new NYRB very much. (Here is an essentially random passage.)

5. This story about the Rushdie video game has done the rounds but I should still link to it; it hardly needs to be commented on.

Tab-letting

1. An amazing headline from the new NYRB (screenshot because I do not trust them not to change it):

2. Also in this issue is a story by Deborah Eisenberg (someone I've always meant to read...) that I enjoyed the first 70% or so of. This bit of writing struck me as esp. interesting:

The girl went over to a rack on the other side of the room, and started moving the hangers as Vivian herself was continuing to do. She was wearing the shabbiest possible coat, an old, bedraggled fur thing of the sort that was to be found in junk shops at the time for a few pounds. The fur was hanging off, disgustingly, in chunks, as if she had been flayed.

The clicking of the hangers along the racks continued on both sides of the room, slowly and rhythmically, as if two clocks were each pedantically asserting different hypotheses.

Part of what is interesting is that the two consecutive paragraphs, each ending with the same kind of simile, go well together.

3. Reading Gosse's Father and Son, which was OK and had some interesting details but is not on the whole esp. recommended, I came upon the word "febrifugal" -- of obvious meaning, of course, but nevertheless a little striking. But on closer inspection it appears to have been a pedantic counter for a generic Victorian idea, e.g. here's Ruskin as per the OED:

Geometry seems to have acted as a febrifuge.

Ugh, yes, cold mathematics vs. teh passionz! [I thoroughly detest Ruskin, going by what little I have read of his. (Which is naturally not much.) Other than H.G. Wells and to some extent Shelley there is no other canonical author to whom I am quite as hostile.]

4. Speaking of Wells, I enjoyed Colin Burrow's piece about him in the LRB (via Zach Sachs, possibly gated).