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

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.)

"They must be read in order as they lie"

1. Lydia Davis reviews Ashbery's new version of Rimbaud (NYT). I admire Davis's stories and can see how her sensibility informs her theory of translation, but the theory itself is pointlessly austere, and I cannot see that the lines she particularly admires in Ashbery's translation are unusually good. (She doesn't say that in one of the lines she quotes, "Let someone finally rent me this tomb, whited with quicklime," the prosody -- dactylic hexameter -- and the punning antithesis on quick/tomb probably had as much to do with the choice as the KJV.)

2. While on the topic of translation, a passage from Dryden's preface to his translation of the Aeneid. (I went through an obscurely motivated obsession with Dryden a few years ago; could not bring myself to read very many of the plays but read all the poems and prefaces. There is a lot of appealingly specific nuts-and-bolts talk, as well as chutzpah, in his critical writing.)

What [Virgil] says of the Sibyl's prophecies may be as properly applied to every word of his--they must be read in order as they lie; the least breath discomposes them, and somewhat of their divinity is lost. [...] 

I have shunned the caesura as much as possibly I could; for wherever that is used, it gives a roughness to the verse, of which we can have little need in a language which is overstocked with consonants. Such is not the Latin where the vowels and consonants are mixed in proportion to each other; yet Virgil judged the vowels to have somewhat of an over-balance, and therefore tempers their sweetness with caesuras. ... On the other side, for the reason already named, it is all we can do to give sufficient sweetness to our language; we must not only choose our words for elegance, but for sound--to perform which a mastery in the language is required; the poet must have a magazine of words, and have the art to manage his few vowels to the best advantage, that they may go the farther. [...]


You may please also to observe that there is not, to the best of my remembrance, one vowel gaping on another for want of a caesura in this whole poem. But where a vowel ends a word the next begins either with a consonant or what is its equivalent; for our w and h aspirate, and our diphthongs, are plainly such. The greatest latitude I take is in the letter y when it concludes a word and the first syllable of the next begins with a vowel. Neither need I have called this a latitude, which is only an explanation of this general rule--that no vowel can be cut off before another when we cannot sink the pronunciation of it, as he, she, me, I, &c. [...]

I am sure there are few who make verses have observed the sweetness of these two lines in "Cooper's Hill" -

"Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;
Strong without rage; without o'erflowing, full" -

and there are yet fewer who can find the reason of that sweetness. I have given it to some of my friends in conversation, and they have allowed the criticism to be just. But since the evil of false quantities is difficult to be cured in any modern language; since the French and the Italians, as well as we, are yet ignorant what feet are to be used in heroic poetry; since I have not strictly observed those rules myself which I can teach others; since I pretend to no dictatorship among my fellow-poets; since, if I should instruct some of them to make well-running verses, they want genius to give them strength as well as sweetness; and, above all, since your lordship has advised me not to publish that little which I know, I look on your counsel as your command, which I shall observe inviolably till you shall please to revoke it and leave me at liberty to make my thoughts public. [...] Spenser has also given me the boldness to make use sometimes of his Alexandrine line, which we call, though improperly, the Pindaric, because Mr. Cowley has often employed it in his odes. It adds a certain majesty to the verse when it is used with judgment, and stops the sense from overflowing into another line. [...]

The want of genius, of which I have accused the French, is laid to their charge by one of their own great authors, though I have forgotten his name, and where I read it.

"Finishing a book ... is a race against the clock of the next pandemic"

From James Shapiro's review [LRB, gated] of Plague Writing in Early Modern England:

Shakespeare’s most explicit evocation of plague and its symptoms, weirdly, appears in an extended metaphor in Love’s Labour’s Lost, written around 1595. In the final scene the witty young lover Berowne, bantering with Rosaline, tells her that his three friends are stricken with love for her friends. He teasingly urges her to ‘Write, “Lord have mercy on us” on those three./They are infected; in their hearts it lies;/They have the plague, and caught it of your eyes.’ He then adds that Rosaline herself is unknowingly plague-stricken: ‘You are not free,/For the Lord’s tokens on you do I see.’ It’s hard to decide what’s more disturbing about the exchange: the casual joking about spotting ‘the Lord’s tokens’ on her skin – as close to a death warrant as you could get – or the joke about inscribing the warning ‘Lord have mercy on me’ on the infected.

There couldn’t have been many in the playhouse unaware of what Berowne’s words signified. Elizabethan authorities required plague-infested houses to be sealed, with their inhabitants – infected along with healthy – inside. To warn passers-by that it was a plague-infested dwelling, a red cross was either nailed to or painted on the door and a printed bill was hung above on which was written ‘Lord Have Mercy on Us.’ Survivors of the plague that two years earlier had killed more than 10,000 Londoners would have been agonisingly familiar with those words. How could Shakespeare or anybody in the audience think this funny? It’s the sort of thing that reminds us how little we know about what it was like to live back then, how unfathomable and alien Shakespeare and his world can seem.

The rest of the review is quite entertaining; the fact that it's a hatchet job only becomes apparent halfway through. Gilman (the title of this post is a quote) sounds appealingly unhinged. There are some factoids I should have known but didn't: e.g., that on account of the plague, "from 1603 to 1610 public playhouses were probably closed two-thirds of the time." One major oversight: in his list of dramatic references to the plague (meant to show that there weren't any, really) Shapiro misses the most obvious and vivid, from Epicoene ("he" is the sound-averse Morose):

O, i' the Queens time, he was wont to go out of Town every Saturday at ten a Clock, or on Holy-day Eves. But now, by reason of the sickness, the perpetuity of ringing has made him devise a Room, with double Walls, and treble Cielings; the Windows close shut and calk'd: and there he lives by Candlelight.

This passage is about as direct as, e.g., the prologue to the Decameron. More generally I don't think there is anything particularly alien about gallows humor in love songs; it is uncharacteristic of early Shakespeare, but 1595 is not that far from Donne's love song with "a bracelet of bright hair about the bone." (Tangentially: much is lost when spellings are modernized; "ghest" is so much better than "guest" in this context.)

A few further notes. (1) 16th and 17th cent. writing about the plague -- such as it is -- and about death in general is I think best understood as essentially medieval. Most of the power of medieval writing comes from its pervasive consciousness of death; the passing bells outside the tavern, the shifting silences immediately underneath the revelry, and the courage in being able to revel at all. See, e.g., the Pardoner's Tale:

Thise riotoures thre of whiche I telle, 
Longe erst er prime rong of any belle, 
Were set hem in a tauerne to drynke,

And as they sat, they herde a belle clynke
Biforn a cors, was caried to his graue. 
That oon of hem gan callen to his knaue: 
“Go bet,” quod he, “and axe redily 
What cors is this that passeth heer forby; 
And looke that thou reporte his name weel.”
“Sire”, quod this boy, “it nedeth neuer-a-deel; 
It was me toold er ye cam heer two houres. 
He was, pardee, an old felawe of youres,
And sodaynly he was yslayn tonyght, 
Fordronke, as he sat on his bench vpright. 
Ther cam a privee theef men clepeth Deeth, 
That in this contree al the peple sleeth,
And with his spere he smoot his herte atwo,
And wente his wey withouten wordes mo.
He hath a thousand slayn this pestilence. 

(2) It is interesting that Gilman settled on Jonson as plague-writer-in-chief, because the best-known poetic response to the AIDS epidemic, Thom Gunn's Man with Night Sweats, is openly Jonsonian. (See the Isherwood elegy for instance.) I had always thought of the Jonson angle and the AIDS angle as merely a happy coincidence -- Gunn being a formally restless poet in the same way as Lowell -- but there's probably more to be said about this. Jonson is a poet I initially dismissed as boring but his plain style is really a very distinctive and beautiful thing, which is also just right for situations when you want to speak indirectly about something powerful without hamming it up either in the obvious way or the significant-silence way.


(3) Speaking of which, cf. Peter Howarth on R.S. Thomas (in the LRB archives):

His pared-down lines no longer sound as though he were slicing away all self-deceit; those famous line-breaks now seem more like theatrical pauses, halting mid-sentence to let the echo reverberate round his empty church.

(4) Re the plague, I think Empson noted somewhere that the ending of the famous Nashe poem about the plague says the same thing in three strikingly different registers:

Mount we unto the sky;
I am sick, I must die—
Lord have mercy on us.

But I hadn't realized -- what now seems obvious -- that the last line would in its context have evoked chiefly a civic rather than a religious register.

Snippets, connections

1. From Dainty Ballerina, an account of the wedding of James I's daughter Elizabeth. A lot of "white Satten," much "Pearle and Golde," and more than a whiff of Spenserian influence:

Upon her head a crowne of refined golde, made imperiall by the Pearles and Dyamonds thereupon placed, which were so thicke beset that they stood like shining pinnacles.  Upon her amber coloured haire, hanging plaited down over her shoulders to her Waste, betweene every plaight Gold spangles, Pearles, Riche stones, and Diamonds, and many Diamonds of inestimable value embroidered upon her sleeves, which dazzled and amazed the eyes of the beholders.

2. A crash blossom, of sorts, in an old issue of the Daily Illini left in the men's room: "Anti-gay bullying victim remembered at vigil." The sense is obvious upon reflection -- this is about one of those teenage suicides last year -- but the natural way to read the headline is as if the victim were anti-gay: "All those PC bullies!"

3. I quoted Randall Jarrell on Auden yesterday: "Auden [...] lies back in himself as if he were an unmade bed." This strongly reminded me of something but I couldn't, at the time, quite place it; it's Catullus 31:

O quid solutis est beatius curis,
cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino
labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum,
desideratoque acquiescimus lecto?

("O what is happier than when, all cares resolved, the mind puts down its burden, and we come exhausted with the labor of travel to our home, and rest on the longed-for bed?") This passage has an amusingly high density of false friends. I've always loved the idea of acquiescing in one's bed -- it is precisely what one fails to do a lot of the time -- and Jarrell's line uses the same association in reverse.


4. In case you missed the addendum to the sloth/sleuth post, "sleuth" appears to come from the same Norse root as "slot." A sleuth is originally a slot, or groove, or trail, left by an animal, then becomes an elliptic term for a tracking dog or sleuth-hound, and finally the sleuth-hound becomes a detective by metaphoric extension. I am frustratingly unable to come up with the right technical term for this device, but there must be something more precise than "metaphor."

Balloons, drowning, iridescence, and pastoral

The Germans must have a word for the pleasure one gets from this kind of thing:

There is a very famous Heaney poem on precisely this conceit:

Lightenings viii

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'

The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

One should distinguish this effect from the subtly different one in Auden's line about an island being "a lake turned inside out" or Thom Gunn's image of a gas poker as a "backwards flute." There is nothing odd about the pleasure one gets from negatives that look like something quite different from the original photograph; this is just "wit" of the usual kind. There is a lot of local wit in the New Yorker cartoon (one is reminded, e.g., of the Piranha brothers, though these fish are evidently not piranhas) and the Heaney poem leans very heavily on its last line, but I think there's something intrinsically appealing about the situation. I'm reminded of Empson's reading of Donne as a Copernican:

if you take the world not as the universe but as this planet it becomes something one might conceivably get outside but which it would be absurd to try to get outside; there are more than one of them, but each creature is right in giving an absurd importance to his own.

This is from the Pastoral book, and the "move" of creating a set of precise set of correspondences between the everyday world and some entirely foreign world is like pastoral (the chapter on "Marvell's Garden" goes on about this, "the mind, that ocean where each kind / doth straight its own resemblance find" etc.) -- but the suffocation motif is important, I think, and emphasizes the sense that people are limited, trapped in some particular element... Anthropomorphizing the fish (or alien) serves a double purpose as it allows the reader to see the situation from both points of view at once; it's an acceptance of one's limitations from a point of view that evades the limitations by not being fixed, and this is satisfying for the same obscure reason that the verbal ambiguities are. 

Like the ambiguities, this doubleness of perspective is necessary because perception, like language, is not polyphonic, and can only achieve polyphony through instability. I've always felt that a better term than "ambiguity" for what Empson meant is iridescence. (D.H. Lawrence was here first: "how boring, how small Shakespeare's characters are! / But the language so lovely, like the dyes from gas-tar.") Why one finds this appealing is a little obscure to me, but at least it's a familiar mystery rather than a new one.

The Auntie-novel

You should read Colm Toibin's new LRB essay on "the importance of aunts" in the C19 novel. As it doesn't excerpt well I'll try to summarize Toibin's argument. He begins with the question of why heroines tend to be -- either actually or in effect -- motherless, why "the novel is a form for orphans." Toibin's answer is that this is structural:

Mothers get in the way in fiction: they take up space that is better occupied by indecision, by hope, by the slow growth of a personality, and – as the novel itself develops – by the idea of solitude. It becomes important to the novel that its key scenes should occur when the heroine is alone, with no one to protect her, no one to confide in, no possibility of advice.

Aunts are useful because they are surrogate mothers who can be introduced and removed at will, and also because the niece-aunt relation is partly volitional. This brings Toibin to a discussion of aunts and mothers in Jane Austen's novels, commenting briefly on the good and bad aunts in P&P and then turning to the role of Lady Bertram -- the indolent woman who fosters the heroine in Mansfield Park -- and what the character is for [my emphases]:

A novel is a pattern and it is our job to notice how the textures were woven and the tones put in place. [...] It is a release of certain energies and a dramatisation of how these energies might be controlled and given shape. Characters in fiction are determined by the pattern, and they determine the pattern in turn.

Lady Bertram in this context is easy to read; her role in the pattern of Mansfield Park is obvious. She is not good, she performs no good or kind act that matters; nor is she bad, since she performs no bad act that matters either. But she is there in the book, in the house, in the family. Fanny has already lost one mother, who has effectively given her away. Aunt Norris plays the role of the wicked aunt who appears now and then. Lady Bertram has four children of her own, and with the arrival of Fanny, she effectively acquires a fifth. Austen now has a problem. If she makes Lady Bertram merely unpleasant, Fanny will have to respond to her unpleasantness in scene after scene, because Lady Bertram is, unusually, an aunt in residence rather than an aunt who comes and goes. This will then become the story of the book: a simple story of cruelty and resistance to cruelty. And if Lady Bertram is actively cruel to Fanny, how will she treat her own children? If she treats them with kindness, then the intensity of their agency will be diluted and dissolved. If she is cruel to them too, then the singleness of Fanny, her solitude as a force in the book, will not emerge.

It would really make sense to kill Lady Bertram, or to have her not be there, allow her to be one of those unmentioned mothers in fiction, an unpalpable absence. But in that case, Fanny wouldn’t join her household [...] So Austen has to have Lady Bertram be there and not there at the very same time; she has to give her characteristics which are essentially neutral. [...] it must have been tempting to allow her to have some role, to be silly or irritating or amusing like Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. But Austen has the ingenious idea of making the sofa, rather than the household, the realm over which Lady Bertram reigns, and making sleep, or half-sleep, her dynamic. She is too sleepy to care.

This is the heart of the essay, and I find its nuts/bolts approach to literary analysis extremely refreshing. It is the sort of thing one wishes one had thought of. Toibin's overall defense of Mansfield Park is less compelling. ("She has a way of noticing and registering which has nothing to do with virtue, but everything to do with the novel’s pattern." Maybe, but this doesn't mean she isn't a bore. Toibin doesn't explain why Fanny couldn't have been made interesting, and in general his is a theory of aunts rather than nieces... An argument he hints at but doesn't make is that Fanny is dull to parallel Lady Bertram's dullness; this parallel is unlikely to occur to th reader, though.)

Toibin doesn't say much about Austen's other novels, which also contain aunts and quasi-aunts (Lady Russell in Persuasion, and Mr. Knightley is an aunt of sorts). Instead he returns briefly to the idea of aunts as plot device ("one of the other purposes of aunts is that they allow for dramatic entrances and departures. All through the 19th century, aunts breach the peace and lighten the load."), and then turns to Henry James as a later stage in the development of the aunt, viz. as the point at which a pattern has been established and can be subverted for effect -- for instance, the scene in The Portrait of a Lady where the heroine discovers that her husband and surrogate aunt are lovers. This is obvious, I think, but serves as an interesting confirmation of the existence of a tradition of aunts. Then he turns to The Ambassadors, which again has a sexually active aunt, and delivers the things-clicking-into-place paragraph:

And so once more James has sexualised an aunt. It is as though Henry Crawford had come to Mansfield Park in search of Lady Bertram rather than Fanny; or Mr Darcy was found in the countryside in his shirt-sleeves with none other than Mrs Bennet; or Mr Bingley was found in a carriage with Lady Catherine de Bourgh. In other words, James took what was necessary for a novel in his time to have power and weight – the replacement of the mother by the aunt – and then saw what was possible [...]

(In other words HJ invented the cougar.) And then, having run out of things to say about aunts, he turns to another aspect of the tension between the Victorian novel and the family, which is the presence of single men who are not looking for wives. This leads him, via bad-husband/oppressed-wife/single-man triangles in Trollope and George Eliot, to the character of the clever, generous, and manipulative invalid Ralph Touchett in The Portrait of a Lady. (Perhaps naturally for Toibin, all roads lead to Henry James.) What James does with the disruptive single man is, interestingly, the opposite of what he does with the aunt -- he desexualizes Touchett -- though what he gets out of this is a little unclear. (I think Touchett's illness is best understood as a necessary distinguishing feature, given that the book abounds in attractive single men; it also accounts for his death.)

So aunts are: (a) givers of advice etc., (b) excuses for the characters to be away from their parents when important things happen, (c) diverting. (They can be more than one of the above.) Mothers, if present, must be diminished like Mrs. Bennet. The novel must happen on neutral ground; plausibility, however, forbids a young woman of the appropriate social class from being alone, so the aunt is structurally necessary (b), and, like a spandrel, can accommodate additional decorative purposes (a, c). It's amusing to think of the structure of a novel as being constrained, almost overdetermined, by the stories you must exclude and the sympathies you must prevent from developing. A few further thoughts:

• The queens in the two Alice books are aunts of a kind; they serve purposes (a) and (c). But purpose (b) doesn't exist: the aunt is an end rather than a means. On the other hand, the witch in Rapunzel is mostly (b). In general Toibin doesn't talk about aunts-as-witches, but there is an obvious similarity. One would suppose that, while (b) is somewhat specific to Victorian social structure, (a) and (c) are more durable archetypes.
• Nor does Toibin talk about Dickens, and Betsey Trotwood in particular. Orwell notes, in his essay on Dickens, the importance of "that recurrent Dickens figure, the good rich man [...] who ‘trots’ to and fro, raising his employees’ wages, patting children on the head, getting debtors out of jail and in general, acting the fairy godmother." These figures imply a safety net for the hero/ine. One of the stories that have to be excluded is the precariousness of the individual's position in 19th cent. England; a coming-of-age novel, with its implicit individualism, must avoid this if it isn't to be a primarily social novel; sympathetic aunts are a way of heading off certain questions.
• The afterlife of aunts in comic literature -- from Lady Bracknell to Wodehouse's Aunts aren't Gentlemen -- is another interesting adaptation of the template. Their demise in serious literature naturally has to do with the social changes that made it natural for single women to live apart from their parents. Where have functions (a) and (c) migrated, though?

Peregrine pickles, comic crits, Johnsoniana

1. Charmingly my trip to Virginia this Wed. will coincide with the tail end of an area-wide two-day snowstorm. I'm flying out of O'Hare which can only make things worse... though getting to O'Hare might in fact be the greater challenge. In a sensible world, one might expect the trains to be less affected than the buses, but Amtrak in the Midwest is always unreliable.

1'. At least the "wintry mix," which started about half an hour ago, has been snow rather than ice so far. Update Nope it's ice pellets now.

2. Via Mary Roach on twitter, a new blog of note: Comic Crits does comic-strip book reviews that are -- so far at least -- quite good.

2'. John Bonner, the Comic Critic, is from Marblehead, MA. This place name is, I suspect, associated with why I always misremember a line from Lowell's "Quaker Graveyard" poem as "light / flashed from his marble head and matted feet."

3. In the early days of The Economist's language blog, Johnson, the founding members realized that there was, well, an ambiguity in the title. The blog has tended to live up to its ambiguous title, with "deniable" dick jokes being a recurring theme that you have to be a regular reader to pick up on. Often they're pretty sly; for instance, you might not have realized that today's post titled "astronomically inadequate" was one of these if you hadn't been paying attention.

4. There is a literary device, which I associate with "Arrested Development" and Gail Collins's columns, in which a detail that had seemed accidental, or a throwaway joke, is suddenly revealed to be an essential part of the plot. Buster getting maimed by a loose seal is I think the defining example of this genre, which for want of a better term I call the "loose seal." With Kenner's monograph on rhyme at the back of one's mind, one is tempted to think of this as being analogous to a comic rhyme of the "vacancy/they can see" kind, but this analogy breaks down because you know exactly when the rhyme is going to happen with its attendant satisfying click. In the loose seal, something that you didn't expect to click into place suddenly does so. I believe this is a comic analogue of a Virgilian/Proustian effect that Kenner discusses:

Virgil’s little local intricacies of sound seem akin to rhymes the moment after we have heard them. Having had no reason to expect a consonance, we notice it just when it has gone by. This effect […] is used so discreetly it whets no special appetite for itself; in our experience of the Aeneid it lies always in the immediate past, as indeed for Virgil all good things tend to do.
There is something Proustian in this gratification for which there is no craving, perceived only when it is over. Milton himself when he composed Lycidas meant that we should enjoy the expectation of rhymes without ever knowing when they were going to occur.