Charging like a tusked brute, gnawing like a bear

1. Flannery O'Connor on "Living with a peacock". If, like me, you had forgotten about O'Connor somewhat, this is a useful reminder of how good she is. It is hard to know what to excerpt but here is one bit:

Frequently the cock combines the lifting of his tail with the raising of his voice. He appears to receive through his feet some shock from the center of the earth, which travels upward through him and is released: Eee-ooo-ii! Eee-­ooo-ii! To the melancholy this sound is melancholy and to the hysterical it is hysterical. To me it has always sounded like a cheer for an invisible parade.

Also, here is the video of the v. young O'Connor and the backward-walking chicken. (Via Sean Costello.) Here is a stunningly ugly bird that is not a peachicken but will do:

And finally, in the spirit of "parallel passages," compare Flannery O'Connor's peacock description to Geoffrey Hill's ("his fulgent cloak a gathering of the dark" &c. Oh, and also (postultimately?), there is Robert Lowell on her face, "formless at times, then very strong and young and right."

2. "Anatiferous trees" in Browne. I really should find a copy of Pseudodoxia and read it through.

3. "Deep in clear lake / The lolling bridegroom, beautiful, there."

4. "Forest Service may blow up frozen cows" (via clusterflock, I suspect).

5. Amy Clampitt's poem "Thermopylae," which was new to me, and where the post title is from.

(I found the Clampitt while looking around -- unsuccessfully -- in her work for chapter epigraphs for the thesis, which was dispatched earlier today to the committee.)

"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"):

Ipsophagy

From the bear section of "Flaubert's Bestiary," in F's Parrot by Julian Barnes:

From the chef to Their Majesties of Prussia Dumas obtained a recipe for bear's paws, Moscow style. Buy the paws skinned. Wash, salt, and marinade for three days. Casserole with bacon and vegetables for seven or eight hours; drain, wipe, sprinkle with pepper, and turn in melted lard. Roll in breadcrumbs and grill for half an hour. Serve with a piquant sauce and two spoonfuls of redcurrant jelly.

It is not known whether Flaubear ever ate his namesake. He ate dromedary in Damascus in 1850. It seems a reasonable guess that if he had eaten bear he would have commented on such ipsophagy. 

From a fascinating LRB piece (prob. gated) on the medicinal properties attributed to human remains:

[Richard Sugg] makes disturbing revelations about the eagerness of the English to see the numerous bodies littering the war-torn countryside of Stuart Ireland as ‘a reservoir of profitable corpse materials’ – especially the usnea moss that grew on unburied skulls. As his account of the popularity of skull moss indicates, Sugg’s interest in corpse medicine reaches well beyond mumia to inspect all those strange concoctions of human tissue and waste favoured by early modern pharmacology: blood, ground skulls, crushed brains and human fat, not to mention ‘hair, nails, lice, sperm, saliva, milk, sweat, tapeworms, stones, urine and excrement’, ingredients which suggest that the potions contrived by the Earl of Rochester in his notorious impersonation of a quack – as Dr Bendo – may not have had the purely satiric intention usually attributed to them. By the same token, Sugg’s vivid accounts of epilepsy sufferers rushing to consume the blood gushing from the bodies of executed felons gives an unexpectedly literal twist to Hamlet’s ‘now could I drink hot blood.’

The health-giving virtues widely attributed to such sanguinary draughts suggest, he writes, ‘an uncertain but intriguing link with the most successful demon of postmodern culture, the vampire’. This is a connection Sugg follows through the prescriptions of the 18th-century Irish clergyman and amateur physician John Keogh, whom he calls ‘the cannibal priest’, to Bram Stoker. As well as mummy for green wounds, distillation of brains for epilepsy, and pulverised heart for apoplexy, Keogh recommended warm blood as a tonic for the falling sickness. In folk-belief Keogh’s prowess seems to have endowed the blood of all his descendants with mysterious properties, so that in 1883 William George Black recorded that Dubliners regarded Keogh blood as a proven remedy for the toothache, while an acquaintance claimed to know of a Belfast Keogh ‘whose flesh had actually been punctured scores of times to procure his blood’. Black does not explain to what use the dour bloodsuckers of Ulster might have put his vital fluid, but such rumours may have provided additional inspiration for the Dublin-born Bram Stoker.

Flaubert, of course, was epileptic, and is also reported to have said that "People are like food."

Two recent poems that are worth reading but have nothing to do with ipsophagy: "The World's Arm" by Brenda Shaughnessy and "Not Beyond All Conjecture" by John Ashbery.

Futures in bear-pits

1. Wikipedia on Ned Alleyn, found (circuitously) via "Alleyn on the right":

He went into business with Philip Henslowe, his father-in-law, and eventually became wealthy. He became part owner in Henslowe's ventures, and in the end sole proprietor of several profitable playhouses, bear-pits and brothels. Among these were the Rose Theatre at Bankside, the Paris Garden and the Fortune Theatre on Finsbury Fields. The Fortune was built for Alleyn and Henslowe in 1600, the year after the rival Globe Theatre was completed south of the river, by the same contractor Peter Street, but was square rather than round;^[9] it was occupied by the Admiral's Men, of which Alleyn was the head.

He filled, too, in conjunction with Henslowe, the post of "master of the king's games of bears, bulls and dogs." On some occasions he directed the sport in person, and John Stow in his Chronicles gives an account of how Alleyn baited a lion before James I at the Tower of London.

2. Via the indispensable seventydys, an old James Wood review of V.S. Pritchett:

He died earlier this year, but he had disappeared while still alive into a vague posterity. He had become cloudily venerable. [...] In 19th-century Russian fiction, especially in Gogol and Chekhov, he found characters who float on the cushions of their own fantasies--people whose most intense relations are not with others but with themselves.

[...] He Russianized English character, finding a kind of Russian madness or instability in what appeared to be mere English eccentricity. (Eccentricity, he once wrote, is "practical madness.") In mild disguise himself, he was alert to the broken disguises of others. "The Fall" (1936) is typical. In a drab provincial hotel, a group of accountants is meeting for its annual dinner. One of them, Charles Peacock, would be a nonentity were it not for his famous brother, who is a movie star. Peacock has a trick, which is that he can mimic perfectly his brother's celebrated stage fall. Early in the evening, Peacock performs this trick a few times to the strained amusement of his colleagues. But he gets drunk, and persists, accosting complete strangers. Each time he falls, he stays a little longer on the ground. By the end of the evening, he is alone in the hotel's ballroom, falling again and again. The pathos of the story flows from Pritchett's determination to see things simultaneously from outside and inside Peacock's head. We see how boring and foolish Peacock has become, but the story makes us stay with him when all the guests have left. We are always on Peacock's side, and at the end we join him on the carpet with his toppled yearnings.

Re floating on cushions, cf. Pritchett describing Mr Beluncle: "his face was bland, heavy in jowl, formless and kind, resting on a second chin like a bottom on an air cushion." Wood remarks elsewhere in the review re poet-critics broadly understood that "All of them have a certain competitive proximity to the writers they discuss, a competition registered verbally. The writer-critic is always showing a little plumage." (I suppose 1998 was before Wood wrote his novel?)

3. Michael Atiyah on doing mathematics (quoted in Gowers, "Two cultures of mathematics"):

MINIO: How do you select a problem to study?
ATIYAH: I think that presupposes an answer. I don't think that's the way I work at all. Some people may sit back and say, \I want to solve this problem" and they sit down and say, \How do I solve this problem?" I don't. I just move around in the mathematical waters, thinking about things, being curious, interested, talking to people, stirring up ideas; things emerge and I follow them up. Or I see something which connects up with something else I know about, and I try to put them together and things develop. I have practically never started o with any idea of what I'm going to be doing or where it's going to go. I'm interested in mathematics; I talk, I learn, I discuss and then interesting questions simply emerge. I have never started off with a particular goal, except the goal of understanding mathematics.

(Relevant b'se of future-work-related pondering re why I should care about what I do.)

Caching out

Tab proliferation is one of the banes of my existence. Another is a tendency to overconsume caffeine, which exacerbates tab proliferation. This is not an exhaustive list.

1. English vs. American bears. English bears are less assertive, more abused, etc. My take on this is that the English are clearly right. Bears are intrinsically (a) short-sighted, (b) cute, (c) sporadically vicious. As I once wrote, they "live on strawberries and honey except for the occasional killing spree." Winnie the Pooh with a mild psychopathic streak would be an excellent caricature of an actual bear. Care bears have nothing, really, to do with bears. They might as well be care cougars.

2. For some reason I have Andrew Sullivan's "Why I blog" open:

As you read a log, you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages—the opposite of a book. As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one, it seems—and is—more truthful. Logs, in this sense, were a form of human self-correction. They amended for hindsight, for the ways in which human beings order and tidy and construct the story of their lives as they look back on them. Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending. So they have plot as well as dramatic irony—the reader will know the ending before the writer did. 

3. Geoffrey Hill: "I write / to astonish myself." I've always thought of "astonish" as deriving from "turn to stone" but the OED tells me this is probably wrong (the word is as likely as not to have come from Latin "extonare" which has to do with loud noises -- tones -- rather than stones).

4. Meteorite contamination is hard to avoid.

5. This paper about what should count as a "mechanism" in the philosophy of science is a excellent example of that field's decline into scholasticism.

6. I remember having a conversation a couple of days ago about the bases on which people are likely to discriminate against others in the future. My view is that they're likely to find something. Chesterton's essay "On lying in bed" captures the dynamic I had in mind quite well (I have very little sympathy with C's politics but much more with his attitude toward the future -- I share his dislike of fastidiousness about little things while also extending this dislike to fastidiousness about big things):

The tone now commonly taken toward the practice of lying in bed is hypocritical and unhealthy. Of all the marks of modernity that seem to mean a kind of decadence, there is none more menacing and dangerous that the exaltation of very small and secondary matters of conduct at the expense of very great and primary ones, at the expense of eternal ties and tragic human morality. If there is one thing worse that the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals. Thus it is considered more withering to accuse a man of bad taste than of bad ethics. [...] Especially this is so in matters of hygiene; notably such matters as lying in bed. Instead of being regarded, as it ought to be, as a matter of personal convenience and adjustment, it has come to be regarded by many as if it were a part of essential morals to get up early in the morning. It is upon the whole part of practical wisdom; but there is nothing good about it or bad about its opposite.

Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.