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. 

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.

Snippets

0. As a programming note, regular programming is back, as there's no imminent travel and won't be for a month or two.

1. Frances Cornford, "The Visit":

There is a bed-time sadness in this place
That seemed ahead so promising and sweet,
Almost like music calling us from home;

But now the staircase does not need our feet,
The drawer is ignorant of my brush and comb
The mirror quite indifferent to your face.

(I have always been vaguely fond of Cornford and of good Edwardian writing more generally -- Edward Thomas for example. Fleur Adcock brilliantly characterizes Cornford and her ilk as the "more ladylike" poets of the period; it is worth realizing that this description is not in itself an insult.)

2. from Yves Bonnefoy, "The Tomb of Paul Verlaine":

Humble, out of simple pride, he agreed
To be for others just a mirror
Whose tarnished silver would filter the sky.

Let them see that the sky was in him
At its reddest through the evening leaves
As the pigeons’ cooing darkens. 

Via the indispensable seventydys on twitter.

3. Yet another argument in favor of booze (MetaFilter, via D. Avid):

More commonly known as rat lungworm, Angiostrongylus cantonensis is widespread in Southeast Asia and Africa. A growing problem is the spread of this parasite by the giant African land snail. Rat lungworm is known to cause disease in humans, but previously was confined mostly to those who had consumed a Thai dish called koi-hoi containing raw snail meat. Lovers of raw snails need not despair however, a study shows that ingesting alcohol along with your snails lowers the number of viable parasites.

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. 

Parallel passages: English riots edition

Glen Newey, "To Hell in a Looted Shopping Trolley":

The weather here this week has been typical of the Scottish summer. No one feels like rioting when it’s pissing down with rain.


Lewis Namier famously described 18th-century British politics as ‘aristocracy tempered by rioting’. In fact riots often combine the form of radical protest with reactionary content. The Gordon Riots that erupted in the early summer of 1780 after the partial repeal of the 1698 Popery Act led to an orgy of looting not of moveable property, but of gin (though that isn’t where the name comes from). The riots drew on long-simmering resentment against excise duties on liquor. Horace Walpole remarked that more people had been killed by drink than by musket-ball, as the mob rifled gin-palaces for free booze; at one point a fire in the Fleet was unwittingly fuelled when it was doused with gin instead of water. One of the rioters’ targets was the old Clink prison. That was part of the medieval ‘manor’ or liberty of Southwark, an area so free of city jurisdiction that the bishop, whose manor it was, used it to run bear-baiting shows and a brothel.

Jon Day, "In Hackney":

A young woman with a red bandana tied round her head carried a green recycling box filled with bottles to throw. ... A man carrying a charred rocking horse ran up and clowned around for the phalanx of photographers and cameramen that stood between the riot police and a large group of teenagers. ... Someone threw a Molotov cocktail, but it went out in flight. An off-licence was broken into and people formed a reasonably orderly queue, emerging with bottles of spirits, cartons of cigarettes and boxes of lottery scratch cards, which they smashed open on the curb.

(Both from the LRB Blog, which has a great deal of excellent coverage.) Perhaps it is inappropriate to blog about this issue in a purely frivolous way, but I have read virtually no interesting analysis, & have little to say other than what is obviously implied by my general political outlook.

Unrelated link -- or related only through the non-etymology of Gordon's! -- a list of words for which the first OED quotation is from 1925: incl. arachnophobia, chewy, Comintern, cuppa, electron volt, enhat (i.e. provide with a hat), Kleenex, Leica, knitwear, makeover, neurosurgeon, nudnik, oncologist, paraphilia, recycle, shamus, sousaphone, superstar, Tootsie roll, Trotskyism, and zipper.

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]

Tomonaga and the bottle

From Freeman Dyson's new NYRB piece on Feynman:

Feynman had looked forward to meeting Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, the Japanese physicist who shared the Nobel Prize with him. Tomonaga had independently made some of the same discoveries as Feynman, five years earlier, in the total isolation of wartime Japan. [...] Feynman and Tomonaga shared three outstanding qualities: emotional toughness, intellectual integrity, and a robust sense of humor.

To Feynman’s dismay, Tomonaga failed to appear in Stockholm. The Ottaviani-Myrick book has Tomonaga explaining what happened:

Although I sent a letter saying that I would be “pleased to attend,” I loathed the thought of going, thinking that the cold would be severe, as the ceremony was to be held in December, and that the inevitable formalities would be tiresome. After I was named a Nobel Prize awardee, many people came to visit, bringing liquor. I had barrels of it. One day, my father’s younger brother, who loved whiskey, happened to stop by and we both began drinking gleefully. We drank a little too much, and then, seizing the opportunity that my wife had gone out shopping, I entered the bathroom to take a bath. There I slipped and fell down, breaking six of my ribs… It was a piece of good luck in that unhappy incident.

After Tomonaga recovered from his injuries, he was invited to England to receive another high honor requiring a formal meeting with royalty. This time he did not slip in the bathtub. He duly appeared at Buckingham Palace to shake hands with the English Queen. The Queen did not know that he had failed to travel to Stockholm. She innocently asked him whether he had enjoyed his meeting with the King of Sweden. Tomonaga was totally flummoxed. He could not bring himself to confess to the Queen that he had got drunk and broken his ribs. He said that he had enjoyed his conversation with the King very much. He remarked afterward that for the rest of his life he would be carrying a double burden of guilt, first for getting drunk, and second for telling a lie to the Queen of England.

Dyson is on paper the obvious choice for a piece about Feynman; as usual there's a lot of recycling, but with an interesting twist. In an old NYRB review of a previous Feynman book, Dyson had categorized Feynman with Einstein and Hawking as physicists who have become "Wise Men" to the public. In the new iteration of this remark, Feynman has provisionally been dropped from the list, the Wise Men are "superstars," but the point is spelled out nicely:

Lesser lights such as Carl Sagan and Neil Tyson and Richard Dawkins have a big public following, but they are not in the same class as Einstein and Hawking. Sagan, Tyson, and Dawkins have fans who understand their message and are excited by their science. Einstein and Hawking have fans who understand almost nothing about science and are excited by their personalities.

(A point worth making is that Einstein and Hawking would arguably have been substantially less revered if they stood for something in the public mind that the public cared about -- evolution, say, or whether the universe had a beginning. Being a polemical figure reduces one's stature. The closest thing to Hawking in recent news was Grisha Perelman, but as a mathematician he is somehow too peripheral. To become the relevant kind of cultural figure one needs to be cartoonish and nonthreatening. Though arguably physics has never been threatening.)

---

A bit of news today that will please many physicists: the journal Physical Review Letters (the Berkeley of the physics publishing hierarchy; the most prestigious journal that also publishes a lot of articles) has switched from a 4-page limit to a word count limit. Objectively this is reasonable and frankly somewhat belated; I believe (or at least hope) that the journals also intend to make articles available as single-column HTML files, it is extremely annoying to read two-column text on a laptop. I have mixed feelings about the new limits: I had just begun to get the hang of maximizing the number of words you could cram into 4pp. by rewriting each paragraph so as to have it end at the end of a line.

All roads lead to the temperance literature

Elephantine readers! I had an irritating free-food experience today. On my way to work this morning I nearly walked into a sign somewhere saying there would be free food at noon. Naturally I went back at noon for the free food, to find nothing but sesame sticks, lukewarm lemonade, and cupcakes next to a sign saying "LET THEM EAT CAKE" -- funny at some level but very disruptive. The advertising was horribly misleading, I think: free food at noon is a technical term that means lunch, not snacks and definitely not cake. 

When I IM'ed CWA to vent about this she responded with a "no free lunch" joke, which led to my poking around in Google n-grams for "free lunch" and coming upon the free lunch chapter in Substitutes for the Saloon (which, as you no doubt remember, I had previously blogged about):

The free lunch is free only in the sense that when a
man has bought a drink, he is not charged for eating. [...] 
The quality of these lunches varies a good deal. Where 
the competition is not great, or where the license is 
high, the free lunch is not so attractive. In Boston, 
New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia the ordinary 
saloons certainly do not serve a very abundant or a 
very appetizing free lunch. Usually this lunch is cold. 
Where a hot lunch is found, it will almost always con- 
sist of soup with bread. The cold lunch is generally 
made up of the following articles : Bread, crackers, 
and wafers ; cheese, bologna sausage, wienerwurst, cold 
eggs, sliced tomatoes, cold meats, salads, pickles and 
other relishes. The demand is commonly for something 
sour or salt. The consumption of pickles, salt meats, 
sauerkraut, and potato salad runs far ahead of anything 
else. The drinking man's stomach seems to crave the 
acid. A workingman does not need to eat very heart- 
ily of the free lunch in order to appease his hunger. 
A slice or two of bread, a few pickles, and a small 
piece of meat with the beer is all that many of them 
eat at noontime. The meagre lunch which many of 
the saloons in our Eastern cities afford is perfectly 
adequate to the needs of a great majority of drinkers.

(It goes on to talk about various things, including racial attitudes toward free lunches in the early years of Jim Crow.)

2.. There was a Language Log post this morning about chemists' (and materials scientists') use of "imbibe" in a "causative" sense -- e.g., "Mixtures of lutidine and water imbibed in porous Vycor" or "[some people] made their composite by imbibing nanoporous gold (pictured) with an electrolyte" -- which turns out to have been the way Chaucer used the word. As Liberman notes,

it seems that the historical progression was exactly the reverse of what I expected: first the causative subject-causes-object-to-take-in-liquid, then the metaphorical sense of drinking in ideas, and last the simple subject-takes-in-liquid. Go figure.

This talk of "imbibing" led me to search for the relevant medieval Latin song, which naturally took me to Alcohol in History (written by a theologian, also most probably part of Calista's original list), which has the following folk etymology for honeymoon:

Mead was also a favorite drink among the ancient Germans, and according to Henderson, it was customary to drink it for thirty days after a marriage. Hence, probably the familiar expression, the Honey-moon.

Regrettably, very folk. OED seems to have no etymological note at all, but the Online Etymology Dictionary has this to say:

1540s, hony moone, but probably much older, "indefinite period of tenderness and pleasure experienced by a newly wed couple," from honey in reference to the new marriage's sweetness, and moon in reference to how long it would probably last, or from the changing aspect of the moon: no sooner full than it begins to wane. French has cognate lune de miel, but German version is flitterwochen (pl.), from flitter "tinsel" + wochen "week." In figurative use from 1570s. Specific sense of "post-wedding holiday" attested from c.1800; as a verb in this sense from 1821.

So the German for honeymoon isn't even cognate... again, this is perhaps an unexpected usage history, as the specific use is centuries later than the figurative one.

Of earls and ales

The Orkney Brewery does a beer called the Skull Splitter, named after sometime Earl of Orkney Thorfinn Hausakljufr (the last name is literally "head-cleaver" I think). But in some ways a more obvious Orcadian earl to name a beer after is Sigurd the Stout. (There are recursive possibilities here: "Sigurd the Stout" the stout, etc.)

Looking up S. the S., I came upon an article about Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye, who "was born with the image of the ouroboros, a snake or dragon biting its own tail, encircling the pupil of his left eye." As far as I can tell, however, the snake served no literary purpose.

The Mechanics of Alcoholism ca. 1880

Orwell has an admirable plot summary of George Gissing's novel The Odd Women:

An elderly spinster crowns a useless life by taking to drink; a pretty young girl marries a man old enough to be her father; a struggling schoolmaster puts off marrying his sweetheart until both of them are middle-aged and withered; a good-natured man is nagged to death by his wife; an exceptionally intelligent, spirited man misses his chance to make an adventurous marriage and relapses into futility; in each case the ultimate reason for the disaster lies in obeying the accepted social code, or in not having enough money to circumvent it.

I thought the novel was good in the best traditional way -- skilfully constructed so as to be both reasonably panoramic and reasonably unified, and populated with many entirely plausible characters. (The prologue-like first chapter is by far the worst thing about it: it has a misleading air of the programmatic and tract-like.) It is also, as Orwell says, very much a product of its time, and contains much interesting historical information. I was fascinated by this bit about the mechanics of taking-to-drink:

Having locked her door, Virginia made certain preparations which had nothing to do with natural repose. From the cupboard she brought out a little spirit-kettle, and put water to boil. Then from a more private repository were produced a bottle of gin and a sugar-basin, which, together with a tumbler and spoon, found a place on a little table drawn up within reach of the chair where she was going to sit. On the same table lay a novel procured this afternoon from the library. Whilst the water was boiling, Virginia made a slight change of dress, conducive to bodily ease. Finally, having mixed a glass of gin and water—one-third only of the diluent—she sat down with one of her frequent sighs and began to enjoy the evening.

Her bottle was all but empty; she would finish it to-night, and in the morning, as her custom was, take it back to the grocer's in her little hand-bag. How convenient that this kind of thing could be purchased at the grocer's! In the beginning she had chiefly made use of railway refreshment rooms. Only on rare occasions did she enter a public-house, and always with the bitterest sense of degradation. To sit comfortably at home, the bottle beside her, and a novel on her lap, was an avoidance of the worst shame attaching to this vice; she went to bed, and in the morning—ah, the morning brought its punishment, but she incurred no risk of being detected.

Brandy had first of all been her drink, as is generally the case with women of the educated class. There are so many plausible excuses for taking a drop of brandy. But it cost too much. Whisky she had tried, and did not like. Finally she had recourse to gin, which was palatable and very cheap. The name, debased by such foul associations, still confused her when she uttered it; as a rule, she wrote it down in a list of groceries which she handed over the counter. 

Here is a description of the relevant character before she takes to drink:

Virginia (about thirty-three) had also an unhealthy look, but the poverty, or vitiation, of her blood manifested itself in less unsightly forms. One saw that she had been comely, and from certain points of view her countenance still had a grace, a sweetness, all the more noticeable because of its threatened extinction. For she was rapidly ageing; her lax lips grew laxer, with emphasis of a characteristic one would rather not have perceived there; her eyes sank into deeper hollows; wrinkles extended their network; the flesh of her neck wore away. Her tall meagre body did not seem strong enough to hold itself upright. 

And after:

A disagreeable redness tinged her eyelids and the lower part of her nose; her mouth was growing coarse and lax, the under-lip hanging a little; she smiled with a shrinking, apologetic shyness only seen in people who have done something to be ashamed of—smiled even when she was endeavouring to look sorrowful; and her glance was furtive.

There are many such descriptions of faces and heads, almost always interesting. One of the best, I think, is the picture of the heroine, as seen by the "exceptionally intelligent, spirited man" who avoids her in the end out of a sort of moral laziness:

...her calm consciousness that she had not a beautiful face. No, it was not beautiful; yet even at the first meeting it did not repel him. Studying her features, he saw how fine was their expression. The prominent forehead, with its little unevenness that meant brains; the straight eyebrows, strongly marked, with deep vertical furrows generally drawn between them; the chestnut-brown eyes, with long lashes; the high-bridged nose, thin and delicate; the intellectual lips, a protrusion of the lower one, though very slight, marking itself when he caught her profile; the big, strong chin; the shapely neck—why, after all, it was a kind of beauty. The head might have been sculptured with fine effect. And she had a well-built frame. He observed her strong wrists, with exquisite vein-tracings on the pure white. Probably her constitution was very sound; she had good teeth, and a healthy brownish complexion.

"The foetus needs the application of considerable propelling force"

Centrifuging babies (Marc Abrahams in the Guardian):

Inspired by elephants, a New York City couple designed an electro-mechanical device that accelerates the process. The method is simple: the pregnant woman is strapped on to a circular table; the table is then rotated at high speed. [...] The design includes some 125 basic components, including bolts, brakes, wing nuts, a massive concrete floor slab, a vari-speed vertical gear motor, a speed reducer, more wing nuts, sheaves, stretchers, shafts, thigh members, a butt plate, aluminium ballast water boxes, more wing nuts, pillow clamps, a girdle member, and some additional wing nuts.

On the topic of vaguely absurd-sounding lists, here is another one from Cobbett (in Rural Rides):

let us see what would be the consumption of one family; let it be a family of five persons; a man, wife, and three children, one child big enough to work, one big enough to eat heartily, and one a baby; and this is a pretty fair average of the state of people in the country. Such a family would want 5lb. of bread a day; they would want a pound of mutton a day; they would want two pounds of bacon a day; they would want, on an average, winter and summer, a gallon and a half of beer a day; for I mean that they should live without the aid of the eastern or the western slave-drivers.

A rather pleasant life! (Even if you note that "bacon" -- as becomes clear from context -- is being used as a generic term for cured pig-meat.) 

"A black Irish beer that disappears in the course of the creative process"

Brodsky describes the daily routines of Auden, with whom he briefly stayed in Austria (I assume in Kirchstetten though the article doesn't specify) after being kicked out of the USSR:

W. H. Auden drinks his first martini dry at 7:30 in the morning, after which he sorts his mail and reads the paper, marking the occasion with a mix of sherry and scotch. After this he has breakfast, which can consist of anything so long as it’s accompanied by the local dry pink and white, I don’t remember in which order. At this point he sets to work. Probably because he uses a ballpoint pen, he keeps on the desk next to him, instead of an inkwell, a bottle or can of Guinness, which is a black Irish beer that disappears in the course of the creative process. At around 1 o’clock he has lunch. Depending on the menu, this lunch is decorated by this or that rooster’s tail, or cocktail. After lunch, a nap, which is, I think, the only dry point of the day.

This is from a New Yorker profile of Brodsky (who apparently wasn't gay; for some reason I had always assumed he was). There are some vaguely pleasant renderings of Brodsky's poems; I must say that, although he has technically been fortunate in his translators (Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, ...), they have tended to overdo the house-training; I've never managed to get a handle on the idiosyncrasy (in the Fowlerian sense) of Brodsky's work. 

Cf. Lydia Davis on Auden's sleeping habits.

"Alwayes foaming, or drivelling"

From Dainty Ballerina, a 17th century description of the "nature and character of a drunkard," notable for the hilariously anticlimactic way it ends:

A Gentleman of worth, rising to make water, could finde no fitter place to do it in than the chimney; where, being a few live embers, he fell downe, and not being able to rise againe, had his belly puckerd together like a sachell before the Chamberlaine could come to helpe him. Whereupon, being in great torture, he dranke twenty two double jugs of beer, and so died, roaring and crying that he was damned. Some fall down dead as a dore naile. Some againe fall into the water, and are drowned, as is commonly seene. Some fall and batter their faces, bruise their bodies, breake their armes, their legs, and many breake their necks in the very act of drunkennesse. Others are wounded, beaten, and many times murdered, as often times they stab and murder others.

The drunkard commonly hath a swollen and inflamed face beset with goodly jowles; swimming, running, glaring, goggle eyes, bleared and red; a mouth nasty with offensive fumes, alwayes foaming, or drivelling; a feverish body; a sicke and giddy braine; a mind dispersed; a boyling stomacke; rotten teeth; stinking breath; a drumming eare; a palsied hand; gouty, staggering legs, that would go, but cannot; a drawling, stammering, tongue, clamped to the roofe and gumms; (not to speake of his odious gestures, lothsome nastinesse, or beastly behaviour, his belching, hickups, vomitings, ridiculous postures, and how easily he is knocked down).

Re drowning while shitfaced: I am reminded of this horrifying story about the epidemic of drowning in Russia during last year's heatwave.

"A Wail from the Drunkard's Hovel"

Friend and sometime Beowulf classmate Calista was kind enough to provide

a few titles from the twenty or thirty feet of late-19th-c prohibitionist books. I capitalize because they all do, though in gilt.

ILLUSTRIOUS ABSTAINERS
DRUNKEN COMPORTMENT
BACCHUS DETHRONED
KING ALCOHOL DETHRONED
BIBLE TEMPERANCE IS NOT TOTAL ABSTINENCE
SUBSTITUTES FOR THE SALON (I suppose this isn't a reverse of the standard saloon/salon mistake)
SIX NIGHTS WITH THE WASHINGTONIANS, AND OTHER TEMPERANCE TALES
THE MEANING OF THE TERM "WHISKY" (it's >1000 pages long)
THE COLD-WATER-MAN; or, a Pocket Companion for the Temperate (by Doctor Springwater of North America)
GRAPPLING WITH THE MONSTER: The Curse and the Cure of Strong Drink
FINAL DRIVE ON BOOZE
IF NOT THE SALOON, WHAT?
A FRIENDLY ADMONITION TO THE DRINKERS OF BRANDY
THE FOUNDATION OF DEATH
THE ENFORCEMENT OF LIQUOR LAWS: A Necessary Protection to the Indians.
A DISCOURSE ON THE BOTTLE
The WAR OF FOUR THOUSAND YEARS; being a connected history of the various efforts made to suppress the vice of intemperance in all ages of the world; from the foundation of the class of Nazarites, by Moses, to the institution of the order of the Sons of temperance, inclusive; with a full account of the origin, progress, and present prospects of the latter institution.
A SOBER ACT OF PARLIAMENT
STRONG DRINK (I can't describe how wonderfully decadent the cover for this is: a very deep sapphire with the sexiest and most gilted typeface to come out of 1900
THE TRUE PATH;  OR GOSPEL OF TEMPERANCE
PUBLIC HOUSES; OR, THE MISERIES OF INTEMPERANCE
TALKS ON TEMPERANCE, THE FOUNTAIN OF TEMPERANCE, A TEXT BOOK OF TRUE TEMPERANCE etc
a whole bunch of "Anti-Bacchus" prize-winning essays
The Life and Times of THE LATE DEMON RUM (I'm fairly sure this was mis-shelved and is actually a boozy retrospective; but wish it were straightforward)
WINNING THE FIGHT AGAINST DRINK
INTEMPERANCE: THE IDOLATRY OF BRITAIN
SHALL I DRINK?

"A Discourse on the Bottle" is a pleasantly ambiguous title. And as she points out, "there is an essay to be written, some time, about the beards of these men."