"To rise in froth or white fcum"

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.

Closing tabs

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. 

Iceberg-tipping

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]

The large plastic duck at the end of the universe

Earlier today I was looking for a list of plays with abnormally large casts, which led me to this website, and thence to a story about Florentijn Hofman's giant plastic ducks (25 m high) on the Loire. I'd never heard of these but smaller variants have apparently been launched in Osaka, Auckland, and other cities. (Portland with its drawbridges would seem especially appropriate...)

Truffles and ambergris

From this Wikipedia article on truffle extraction (I was charmed by the table of differences between truffle hogs and truffle dogs), I was led on to an article on truffle vodka and thence to this piece by Nicholas Coldicott in the Japan Times on great/horrific infusions of various kinds:

There are, as I write, bottles of homemade pepper vodka, perilla vodka and wasabi vodka on my coffee table. There's a hops vodka and a banana vodka on top of my fridge. There's a butter vodka in the fridge, a black truffle vodka on the sideboard and an ambergrease vodka on top of my wine cellar, but we'll come to that later. My infusion mentor has been Hiroshi Tsuchiya of vodka bar Bloody Doll in Ginza. [...] Once you accept soy sauce as a viable drink flavor, the possibilities are vast. I drafted a list of infusion ideas with a vodkaphile friend. It began fairly sensibly with a list of Japanese citrus fruits, but as the e-mails bounced to and fro, they became more imaginative. Leather, I suggested. Wild boar, said Tom, or how about caramel popcorn? What if I took all the ingredients pictured on the side of a Bombay Sapphire bottle and infused them in vodka? How about sarsaparilla, Marmite, agave, tofu, Champagne, cacao or smoke?

(My friend Jeremy and I tried to make hop-infused vodka last year; there were multiple attempts none of which was a success. It tasted either exactly like vodka or impossibly bitter -- and I am quite fond of bitter beers. It is possible that one needs a high-end vodka to pick up the hops before they become overpowering. An odd consequence of the entire experiment was that it spoiled a few beers, like Bell's Two-hearted Ale, that I used to like a lot.)

Coldicott goes on to write about the final frontier, viz. ambergris infusions (adding ambergris-infused vodka to expensive Japanese whiskey "boosted the oriental character of the drink"). It is interesting to compare his take on ambergris:

Though it sounds like something a mechanic wipes from his hands after a long day, ambergrease is far more revolting: it's the vomited bile of a sperm whale. When the big mammal eats something that disagrees with him, his gut excretes the bile. When he's sick or scared, he purges. By all accounts, ambergrease leaves its host as a foul-smelling gloop but dries into a rock with an aroma not unlike musk. In the past, it was prescribed as an invigorative cordial or a fertility aid. These days, only posh perfumers and incense makers use the substance.

with Melville's (in what, as far as I can tell, is the only fart joke in Moby Dick):

Stubb was beginning to look disappointed, especially as the horrible nosegay increased, when suddenly from out the very heart of this plague, there stole a faint stream of perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells without being absorbed by it [...] he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese; very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with your thumb; it is of a hue between yellow and ash color. And this, good friends, is ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist. Some six handfulls were obtained [...] Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and by others the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering three or four boat loads of Brandreth's pills, and then running out of harm's way, as laborers do in blasting rocks. 

According to the OED, a character in one of Charles Sedley's (Restoration) plays vows to breakfast on "new laid eggs, ambergrease and gravy."

The blubber doughnut

Moby Dick, Ch. 65:

certain Englishmen, who long ago were accidentally left in Greenland by a whaling vessel--that these men actually lived for several months on the mouldy scraps of whales which had been left ashore after trying out the blubber. Among the Dutch whalemen these scraps are called "fritters"; which, indeed, they greatly resemble, being brown and crisp, and smelling something like old Amsterdam housewives' dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when fresh. They have such an eatable look that the most self-denying stranger can hardly keep his hands off.

Re "oly-cooks" or "oilcakes" (an old Dutch term for doughnut) see this previous post on the appalling doughnut taco. Melville continues:

[the sperm whale] is the great prize ox of the sea, too fat to be delicately good. Look at his hump, which would be as fine eating as the buffalo's (which is esteemed a rare dish), were it not such a solid pyramid of fat. But the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that is; like the transparent, half-jellied, white meat of a cocoanut in the third month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a substitute for butter. Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into some other substance, and then partaking of it. In the long try watches of the night it is a common thing for the seamen to dip their ship-biscuit into the huge oil-pots and let them fry there awhile. Many a good supper have I thus made.

I must have been thirteen or so the last time I read the book, and must have skimmed over everything not directly related to the plot. Which is to say, essentially everything.

The Snark as Christ-figure

An endearing thing about Auden's book on Romanticism, The Enchafed Flood, is that it treats Carroll and Lear on par with the more "serious" Romantics; this leads to many odd felicities. E.g., here's Auden talking about ships as communities:

a ship can represent [...] the civitas terrena, created by self-love, inherited and repeated, into which all men since Adam are born, yet where they have never totally lost their knowledge of and longing for the Civitas Dei and the Law of Love. From this arise absurd contradictions [...]

Then he quotes Melville, from Pierre, on the contradictions:

Bacon's brains were mere watchmaker's brains; but Christ was a chronometer... And the reason why His teachings seemed folly to the Jews, was because he carried Heaven's time in Jerusalem, while the Jews carried Jerusalem time there... as the China watches are right as to China, so the Greenwich chronometers must be wrong as to China. Besides, of what use to the Chinaman would a Greenwich chronometer, keeping Greenwich time, be? Were he thereby to regulate his daily actions, he would be guilty of all manner of absurdities: -- going to bed at noon, say, when his neighbors would be sitting down to dinner.* [...] with inferior beings, the absolute effort to live in this world according to the strict letter of the chronometricals is, somehow, apt to involve those inferior beings eventually in strange, unique follies and sins, unimagined before.

This earns the following footnote:

*cf. the snark

Its habit of getting up late you'll agree
That it carries too far when I say
That it frequently breakfasts at five-o-clock tea
And dines on the following day.

The book, which I haven't finished yet, is extraordinarily helpful as a guide to Auden's Kierkegaard-and-Whitehead phase in the 1940s (esp. the long poems, esp. The Sea and the Mirror, in which Alonso's song is very lightly processed Whitehead -- I also vaguely wonder if Auden saw any parallels between Alfred North Whitehead and Moby Dick (also white and northern and of considerable stature)). I'd been meaning to post about Auden's recycling of Alonso's advice to Ferdinand in the Tempest adaptation (1945) in his intro to the Portable Greek Reader (1948) but the scale of reuse is actually more formidable, as the same set of images is expanded into an entire lecture in the Flood (1949).

I am pretty sure this has been done to death in the literature, but a benefit of being an amateur is that there's no opportunity cost to reinventing the wheel.

(PS see here for previous notes on sleeping habits.)

Yeats and the sea-horse

I was looking for a Yeats concordance online to see if he had done much with sea-horses (of which more below), but found Peter Ure's old review of a Yeats concordance [Rev. Eng. Stud. XVI, 221 (1965)] :

The golden smithies of the Emperor, Yeats might disapprovingly have noted, could not have contrived anything remotely resembling this volume, from which we can learn that he used Emperor twice, smithy five, and golden sixty-four times. Yeats has been chosen as the second poet (the first was Arnold) to submit his vocabulary to the IBM 704 Electronic Data Processing Machine at Cornell. An impressive compilation is the result: a total of 10,666 words (the text used being the Variorum edition), recorded with an accuracy utterly out of reach of the nonelectronic scholar. One can ramble about in it discovering all sorts of facts, such as the numbers of 'savage or noxious animals', as Mr. Parrish puts it, of birds of prey, of 'circus animals', of goats and monkeys (four of the former, only one of the latter). Perhaps the first temptation that it offers to its user is of a rather simple-minded kind: there are no demons in Yeats's verse after 1892 (14 of the 16 are in The Wanderings of Oisin), nor does dim occur after 1913; moon is nearly twice as frequent as sun, and king as queen; dream and its derivatives occupies three pages; there are six and a half pages of old and only two of young; shame occurs five times and glory twenty-eight; Coole and die have twice as many entries as, respectively, Sligo and live; England has two entries, Greece five, and Ireland thirty-nine; Oxford and Cambridge do not occur at all, but Liverpool gains a toe-hold.

How far we've come -- I ended up running Ctrl-F on the Project Gutenberg text (one has always to remember that this is case-sensitive) and finding out that sea-horses only occur in the poem that I was originally thinking of, "High Talk":

PROCESSIONS that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye.
What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high,
And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher,
Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.

Because piebald ponies, led bears, caged lions, make but poor shows,
Because children demand Daddy-long-legs upon his timber toes,
Because women in the upper storeys demand a face at the pane,
That patching old heels they may shriek, I take to chisel and plane.

Malachi Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run wild,
From collar to collar, from stilt to stilt, from father to child.

All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all.  A barnacle goose
Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks loose;
I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on;
Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn. 

This is a very late poem that was written at about the same time as the "Circus animals' desertion," which also mentions "stilted boys." The narrator here is one of the deserting circus animals I suppose. The poem has stuck with me because of the sestet (it is a sonnet of sorts); the stilts bit is fine but the sea-horse image really comes out of nowhere as far as I can tell -- presumably the point is that sea-horses, qua photosensitive force of nature, can go back out of the light unlike Malachi; that life in the modern era is hard and mostly inglorious work, and that this is so partly because of the "broken hierarchies" (of which more in a later post) that connected life with art with death; there must also an underworld aspect to all of this (the primary sea-creatures in Yeats being dolphins, but of course Neptune was both a sea-god and a horse-god), which was what I was trying to get at from the concordance. But in the event the sea-horses seem to be a one-off and probably have to be taken on their own terms.

Iceland spar as "mythical sunstone"?

Via Matt P, Nature News has a story about some Swedish scientists who think the Vikings might have used light-polarizing crystals like Iceland spar to estimate the location of the sun on overcast days. Apparently there's a bit in one of the sagas where a character Olaf "grabbed a sunstone, looked at the sky and saw from where the light came, from which he guessed the position of the invisible Sun." So maybe Olaf had a block of calcite in his Viking-precursor-forerunner-of-the-pocket:

Scattering by air molecules in the atmosphere causes sunlight to become polarized, with the line of polarization tangential to circles centred on the Sun. So Ramskou argued that by holding a crystal such as calcite up to the sky and rotating it to check the direction of polarization of the light passing through it, the Vikings could have deduced the position of the Sun, even when it was hidden behind clouds or fog, or was just beneath the horizon.

The obvious -- and probably fatal -- objection is that there's no real evidence the Vikings actually had sunstones; the sagas are not reliable on this sort of issue. But this story sounds pretty plausible to me; looking at the sky through bits of transparent stuff is the sort of thing one would do.