The executive sublime

Francis Spufford, in I may be some time: Ice and the English imagination (best title + subtitle ever), quotes Burke on sublimity (I have never read Burke and absolutely must):

Chuse a day on which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have; appoint the most favourite actors; spare no cost upon the scenes and decorations; unite the greatest efforts of poetry, painting and music; and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of the real sympathy.

He goes on to quote Richard Payne Knight on Burke's views of sublimity (which seem, at least in broad outline, to be conventional enough nowadays that the point of the joke is self-evident):

If . . . [Burke] had walked up St. James’s street without his breeches, it would have occasioned great and universal astonishment; and if he had, at the same time, carried a loaded blunderbuss in his hands, the astonishment would have been mixed with no small portion of terror: but I do not believe that the united effects of these two powerful passions would have produced any sentiment or sensation approaching the sublime, even in the breasts of those who had the strongest sense of self-preservation, and the quickest sensibility of danger.

I found this quote in an essay by Eve Tushnet, who goes on to ask, "From the Burkean point of view, of course the gun-toting underpants man couldn’t be sublime. But what if the author of this scene weren’t Edmund Burke, but Flannery O’Connor? What if the unclad man was not a deranged Burke wielding a blunderbuss, but an ecstatic Francis enraptured by Christ?" (Here again -- and reading Spufford one is consistently struck by this -- we are in Auden country; see esp. chapter(s) on Don Quixote in the Dyer's Hand.) See also: the case of the six-year-old girl with the character of Churchill.

Tushnet has an interesting blog; see, in particular, the Dostoevsky drinking game.

Finally, I enjoyed Theo Tait's review of the new Lanchester novel. In particular, his praise of Mr Phillips -- "an inspired daydream about sex, statistics and the strangeness of ordinary London life" -- is spot-on; Mr. P was the novel that got me interested in Lanchester in the first place; if the chapter that made it to the New Yorker is representative, the new book is almost certainly as drab as he says it is. Tait's comments on the Large Contemporary Novel are sensible:

There is a constant clamour for novelists to "take on big contemporary questions", as a recent Guardian opinion piece put it – to leave the Hampstead dinner parties and the safe historical settings behind, and write the Novel For Our Times. Actually, these books get written all the time, from Margaret Drabble's schematic portraits of the 1970s to Jonathan Coe's of the 1980s and Blake Morrison or Richard T Kelly's uneven sagas of the New Labour years, right up to the recent flood of credit crunch literature. The problem is that they're not usually very good, for quite straightforward reasons: creating and managing a large, varied and realistic cast of characters is very hard for an individual novelist to do, particularly now that society is so diverse. When working outside their own experience, novelists tend to fall back on recycled journalism, contrivance and cartoon.

I agree with these assessments, but the general question is more puzzling than Tait makes it out to be. My sense has always been that the people who try to write Large Contemporary Novels are bad at characterization anyway; it would fit most of the data to say these novels are bad because the wrong people are writing them. The question is not why novels like Middlemarch are so rare nowadays, but why novels like Pickwick are: characters needn't be lifelike to be alive, or rounded to be memorable. Where are the Micawbers and Miss Havishams of the 21st century?

"Like bacon in the chimney"

More snoutage, this time from dolphin chapter in Pseudodoxia Epidemica:

Regarding storms, recall the cardinal in Webster who "lifts up's nose, like a foul porpoise before a storm"

(Quote courtesy of Calista)

Herring-hog and helegug

Regular readers might remember previous posts about snouts, esp. this one. (Quick summary is that a porpoise is a pork-fish.) Today, while trying to establish the age of the term "puffer fish" on OED, I learned some more hoggish synonyms for "the common porpoise":

1. Puffer (3c.) Quot. from 1911: Porpoise (Phocæna communis).—A cetacean found on the north Atlantic and north Pacific coasts, ascending rivers. It is known as ‘harbor porpoise’, ‘herring-hog’, ‘puffer’, [etc.].

2. Puffing pig. chiefly US. Quot. from 2004: Harbour porpoises are sometimes called the puffing pig as the creatures can be heard making puffing noises from the shoreline as they take a breath on the surface.

3. Puff-pig. Newfoundland, obs. the common porpoise. Quot. from 1861: At the mention of the puff-pig, the local name for the common porpoise, we indulged ourselves in a childish laugh.

There is also a puff-shark:

puff-shark. now rare, the swell shark, Cephaloscyllium ventriosum. Quot. from SciAm, 1902: The curious puff shark uttered a deep grunt when it was taken from the water.

Also discovered, as part of this excursion, some obsolete synonyms for puffin:

(1678) The Bird called Coulterneb at the Farn Islands, Puffin in North-Wales, in South-Wales Gulden-head, Bottle-nose, and Helegug, at Scarburgh Mullet, in Cornwal Pope.

Tales and Tayles; ideas of ordure

I have been bad about closing tabs -- have also been meaning to do some posts that involve writing rather than linking, but this term has been overwhelming. NB I'll be in Boston next week for the APS meeting. Anyway here are some links:

1. 30 photos of a Chinese sex toy factory (via clusterflock)

2. Harold Bloom reminisces about Auden (birthday today, as was DFW's apparently):

The poet arrived in a frayed, buttonless overcoat, which my wife insisted on mending. His luggage was an attaché case containing a large bottle of gin, a small one of vermouth, a plastic drinking cup, and a sheaf of poems. After being supplied with ice, he requested that I remind him of the amount of his reading fee. A thousand dollars had been the agreed sum, a respectable honorarium more than forty years ago. He shook his head and said that as a prima donna he could not perform, despite the prior arrangement. Charmed by this, I phoned the college master--a good friend--who cursed heartily but doubled the sum when I assured him that the poet was as obdurate as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. Informed of this yielding, Auden smiled sweetly and was benign and brilliant at dinner, then at the reading, and as he went to bed after we got home.

(A few addenda: i. I should really have a separate tag for this sort of Auden post as opposed to the posts that quote him. ii. A good source for more stories of this kind, seen from a glancing angle, is the Lowell-Bishop correspondence. iii. Bloom is not fond of Auden's work, but has always seemed to me a pretty good judge of the relative merits of different Auden poems; in particular, he correctly rates Letter to Lord Byron and the limestone poem as among A's best. (Re which, see also Anthony Hecht.))

3. From the lardr, animal-specific terms for tails and excrement (unearthed by Calista):

THe tayle of Harte, Bucke, Rowe, or any other Deare, is to be called the Syngle. The Tayle of a Goate, is plain∣ly called his Tayle. The tayle of a Bore, is to be termed his wreath. The tayle of an Hare and Conney, is called their Skut. The tayle of a Foxe is called his Bush, or (as some vse to say) his hollywater sprinkle. The tayle of a Wolfe is to be called his Stearne. Of the rest I haue not read.
and

The termes proper for the ordure and naturall excrements of chaces.

IT is a thing highly obserued and not here to be omitted, that the ordure of euery beaste of chace & Uenerie hath his proper terme. The reason is, by cause theyr ordure and excrements are one principall marke whereby we know the place of their feede, and their estate. So that a Huntesman in talke or makyng of his reportes shall be often constreyned to rehearse the same. Of an Harte therfore, and of all Deare the ordure is called Fewmets or Fewmishing: Of a Gote, and of an Hare the Crotising or Crot∣tels: Of a Bore the Lesses: Of a Foxe, and all other vermine, The Fyaunts: Of an Otter the Spraynts. And I haue neyther readde nor heard what it is termed of a Wolfe or a Beare: neyther is it greatly materiall.

See also: animal-specific verbs for slicing-up. 

"Cankles and haunch"

I have been somewhat sloppy of late about reading Poetry Daily but fortunately did not miss this gem:

Sex Rubenesque

Hailey Leithauser 

 

           Unleash the excess!
     Bring me cleavage and rumpage,
one heftable breast, then another,
     a buttock untrussed
and rhapsodic for humpage.
     Begin the maneuvers,

  purge girdles and covers; undress
    each strumpet of frumpage
  that revolts a fat lover. Release the noblesse,
the cankles and haunch, trot out the lumpage—
            Deliver the flesh!

 ---
Naturally delighted to find a contemporary poet so precisely to my taste. Among other good poems of Leithauser's that I have dug up are: "The Old Woman Gets Drunk with the Moon", "O, She Says", "Frostbite", "UFOs", "Was you ever bit by a dead bee?", and "Guidelines: Writing the Sonnet." (Some of these are perhaps a little too much like Kay Ryan -- "Tiger Shark" absolutely is -- but there are worse things.) There isn't, as far as I can tell, a book of any kind out yet, but I hope there will soon be one.

---
While I'm at it, I should link to the (very slightly related) youtube clip of MacNeice reading "Bagpipe Music."

Frightening inaction

An assortment of quotes with links attached:

1. Michel Houellebecq on blogging (I should like to declare him entirely mistaken, but he is not):

You can always microblog, Houellebecq had told him [...]; but to launch yourself into the writing of a blog post you have to wait for all of that to become compact and irrefutable. You have to wait for the appearance of an authentic core of necessity. You never decide to write a blog post, he had added; a blog post, according to him, was like a block of concrete that had decided to set, and the blogger’s freedom to act was limited to the fact of being there, and of waiting in frightening inaction, for the process to start by itself.

2. Auden on songs/"words-for-music" (linked site is not without interest -- HT Conor Leahy!):

The song ... is, of all kinds of poetry, the one in which the formal verbal elements play the greatest role.... In the world of the song, one might say, the important relationship between the inhabitants is not any community of concern or action so much as family kinship. The satisfaction I get from reading a poem by Campion, for example, is similar to the satisfaction I get from studying a well worked out genealogical tree. (A wet afternoon could be pleasantly spent developing this analogy. Starting with the notion that masculine rhymes represent brothers, feminine rhymes sisters, refrains identical twins, one could ask what verbal relationship would be equivalent to a second cousin once removed. From there one could go on to consider what discords correspond to marriage within the prohibited degrees, e.g., to marrying one's deceased wife's sister.)

3. Jay Rayner, on adventurous cooking (HT Sarah Duff):

Modern techniques are great. They’re brilliant. If you want to cook my steak by banging it round the Large Hadron Collider, be my guest. Dehydrate my pig cheeks. Spherify my nuts. But only do so if the result tastes nicer.

4. Graffiti from Pompeii:

Herculaneum (on the exterior wall of a house); 10619: Apollinaris, the doctor of the emperor Titus, defecated well here 

5. On relocating detective stories from Portsmouth to Le Havre:

There is no translation for "mush" (a Pompey term of affection), "scrote" (the opposite) or "scummer" (anyone from Southampton). Can the city be exported? "I was intrigued by the move to Le Havre," said Hurley. "But they have done a good job. What holds true for Portsmouth also holds true for Le Havre. There are similarities: neither city is fashionable, they are both at the end of the railway line, relatively uncursed by money. Sharp-elbowed places, robust." Could you move other English detectives – Morse to Rouen, say, or Rebus to Marseille? "Rebus, maybe yes. But I'm not sure about Morse. You can't get away from those dreaming spires."

6. Much to like in this review of Dickens's letters (via Light Reading). I particularly liked

the pile of clean spittoons in the corner of a country inn “looking like a collection of petrified three-cornered hats”

(In Ulysses, Joyce has "a hogo you could hang your hat on" and also "what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack.")

Niceties of expression

Very late getting around to this, but I read the new Hollinghurst book some time ago and have been meaning to post about it. I would recommend it, although it is one of his weaker books, I think, partly because the plot is so unworkable. (In the second half of the novel, the protagonist -- or rather the character that provides the point-of-view -- is a nondescript bank clerk who is obsessed for no clear reason with a half-forgotten WW1-era poet, "Cecil Valance"; clerk quits his job to write scandalous biography of Valance, after bank manager turns out to be married to Valance's niece/daughter who plays duets with a gay schoolteacher -- teaching at a school located in what was formerly the Valance mansion, now modernized -- who of course then sleeps with bank clerk. There is a coda in which we are told that all characters ended up tenured or modestly famous.)

Besides, the bank-clerk protag. is an incongruous mouth for Hollinghurst to put words into, e.g., "he was touched for a moment by a sense of the inseparable poverty and consistency of English life" (yeah right). Previous novels might have had unpleasant protags but at least they were all meant to be clever.

Nevertheless the writing is brilliant; I particularly liked "Paul woke to the sound of a tolling bell, with a hangover that felt much worse for the comfortless strangeness of Greg Hudson's room" and the phrase "sleek unanswerable jets." James Wood objected to the echoes of Henry James, which I didn't mind, although I was amused by this passage, which could have come straight out of The American Scene:

here the bracket clock whirred and then hectically struck eleven [...] Other clocks (and now she could hear the grandfather in the hall chime in belatedly) showed a more respectful attitude to telling the hour. They struck, all through the house, like attentive servants. Not so that old brass bully the drawing-room clock, which banged it out as fast as it could. "Life is short!" it shouted. "Get on with it before I strike again!"

(There is also a passage about the expected apparatus of a bathroom "intruding" through all the junk stored in it that I cannot find online and will type in anon.)

Other notes:

• Others have said this but it is almost impossible to write a country-house scene -- even if it's not really a country-house -- revolving around the confusions of a precocious girl without evoking Atonement.
• The second section, "Revel," was very good in a way that perhaps invites terms like "magisterial" and "virtuosity" too insistently. I thought it was the best thing in the book, and it gains extra points for apposite use of Skeltonics. The delightfully unpleasant Dudley Valance is a memorable character.
• H.'s female characters are all composed of the same few attributes -- spirited, perceptive, vaguely unstable, given to drink -- and differ primarily in how unstable and how old they are. The very old ones drink especially heavily. But it is a versatile formula: the old woman's part is done brilliantly in the later sections of this book.
• H. is overly fond of embedded texts. They're always defensible/necessary but I've never liked them. In the Swimming-Pool Library he needed the diary for historical perspective; here he needs it because multiple characters are writers. I esp. cringed at "Love comes not always in by the front door" (in a poem recited by "Valance").
• I simply do not think H. is versatile enough as a writer to succeed with a protagonist who is partly an object of satire (the bank clerk). Whenever there is a convincing descent into his consciousness the man is very drunk.
• Daniel Mendelsohn appears to have objected to H's use of Jewish characters (claiming H. is given to use of anti-Semitic tropes) both here and in Line of Beauty. I have not read the article, which is gated; however I was reminded of a truly anti-Semitic poem by Larkin that touches on many of the same themes as the Hollinghurst book -- search for "Balokowsky."

Finally, see also: James Wood, Christopher Tayler, Jenny Davidson, Emma Brockes.

A slabbed-down mass of tabbage

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

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"

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

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"

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!"

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

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"

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

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"

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"

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"

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

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"

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)

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

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"

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

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.]