1Q66 and All That

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.)

"Unjoynt that bittern!" Etc.

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.

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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.)

"Working both sides of the ontic street"

James Wood, writing about the invention of hell:

Paul etherealises Jesus’ Messianism. Paul also believed in an imminent Last Judgment, but for him resurrection would be not national but individual, and it would involve physical and spiritual immortality. We shall be resurrected as bodies, but as uncorrupted, renewed bodies, free of sinful flesh: spiritual bodies. This optimistic fudge – Paul working both sides of the ontic street – was not new; the Egyptians had practised mummification in order to keep the corpse from decaying, so that it could be reunited with its soul in the afterlife. Paul’s dark novelty was to argue backwards from the death and resurrection of Jesus: we have been saved from death by Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection; therefore we must all have been cursed to death long before Jesus’ decisive intervention; therefore we have all been sinners from Adam: ‘For as in Adam all die, even in Christ shall all be made alive.’ As Casey argues, this bolting of the Saviour God onto the Messiah idea makes Christianity very different from Judaism or Islam.

If true this is a pretty fascinating bit of intellectual history. Wood's essay (or the book under review) has the virtue of taking the Pelagian heresy seriously, or at least of admitting the stakes. Personally I feel that most of what is worthwhile and interesting in Christianity derives from the Pauline-Augustinian-Calvinist belief in the basic and irredeemable depravity of humans; this has the effect, as Wood notes, of trivializing morality; but another way to construe this is that the Pauline account carries the implicit moral that Orwell saw in Lear:

"Give away your lands if you want to, but don't expect to gain happiness by doing so. Probably you won't gain happiness. If you live for others, you must live FOR OTHERS, and not as a roundabout way of getting an advantage for yourself." 

This is what Ronald Dworkin called the "austere view" in his recent NYRB essay on morality-informed ethics/ethics-informed morality, and I would be drawn to it even if he didn't call it that. (It is easy to persuade me to hold views advertised as "austere" or "bleak" or "comfortless.") By contrast the Pelagian view conduces far too well to the smug and self-righteous tendencies of most people. Wood uses the word "stolid," which is exactly right: it's a suburban right-wing sort of view, on which people can pat themselves on the back for paying their taxes and doing the right thing by their families and having normal-and-healthy emotions and preferences -- and judge others for their failure to match up.

This dispute has very little to do with religion: I often feel, arguing against the latest normative inference from evolutionary biology, that I'm rehashing Augustine vs. Pelagius. The majority opinion is obviously always going to be Pelagian, but I think the Pauline gloss -- in its fierce and possibly accidental egalitarianism -- is less separable from the other elements of left-wing tendency in Christianity than Wood is willing to acknowledge. Consider George Herbert's "Redemption":

knowing his great birth,

    Sought him accordingly in great resorts;

    In cities, theaters, gardens, parks, and courts;

At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth

         

    Of thieves and murderers; there I him espied,

    Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.

On the Pelagian account of Christianity this would be purely eccentric behavior: the deserving poor, yeah, why not, but thieves and murderers? Of course it doesn't follow from everyone deserving hellfire that anyone should actually suffer it.

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Also in this LRB, and also gated, is this excellent passage by Steven Shapin on corpses:

The corpse begins its dissolution into evil-smelling liquids and gases soon after death, and depending on temperature, moisture and other conditions, the stench becomes inescapable within two or three days. (The ‘worms’ – as the schoolyard song has it – really do begin to ‘crawl in and out’, bacteria, bugs and their larvae aiding in decomposition.) The release of gases – including hydrogen sulphide, methane and ammonia – makes the corpse bloat, and the pressure build-up can cause liquid to ooze out of the body’s orifices. Before we’re dust, we’re a cheesy mud. Sometimes the mud blows up: ‘Gas pressure is capable of bursting the thoracic or abdominal cavities,’ Cantor writes. ‘Before embalming was common, sealed coffins sometimes exploded’ because of it. There is a story that the corpse of Elizabeth I – retained for more than a month before burial – blew up, shattering the wooden coffin and lead sarcophagus in which it was being kept.  

Shapin mentions the rather hilarious euphemism "cremains," which I think I had heard before but had forgotten.