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. 

"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.

"Unjoynt that bittern!" Etc.

A link-dump:

1. James Wood reviews the new Hollinghurst novel in the NY'er, with more irritation than liking (nevertheless it sounds very much worth reading); here is his takedown of the Henry James pastiche:

In Hollinghurst’s new novel, “The Stranger’s Child” (Knopf; $27.95), the Jamesian cadences come in peristaltic waves: “This large claim seemed rather to evaporate in its later clauses.” “This was exactly Dudley’s version too, though the cool nerve of ‘improving’ made Daphne laugh.” [...] Sex itself—specifically, gay sex—is feared by one character as “the unimagined and yet vaguely dreaded thing.” It does a writer as talented as Hollinghurst few favors to be fossicking in fustian in this way; I spent too much time, while reading this often beautiful novel, itching to write a parody of Hollinghurst’s Jamesianism. (“Ralph’s cock was small but sincere; in the afternoon’s fading light, thinned by winter’s quick transit, it seemed to Hugh almost shyly noble. The two men could hear Lady Soames’s little lacquered laugh, somewhere downstairs. . . .” And so on.)

2. Teju Cole reviews Andre Aciman's Essays on Elsewhere (Aciman is v. much a personality in my imagination thanks to Lydia Davis's story "The Walk"). Here is Aciman on the kinds of lavender:

There were light, ethereal lavenders; some were mild and timid; others lush and overbearing; some tart, as if picked from the field and left to parch in large vats of vinegar; others were overwhelmingly sweet. Some lavenders ended up smelling like an herb garden; others, with hints of so many spices, were blended beyond recognition.

3. Jeff Gordinier (who?) ends up in the Hebridean island of Luing thanks to a Don Paterson poem:

What I found tantalizing about “our unsung innermost isle,” as Mr. Paterson put it, was the very obscurity of the place. It was obscure not because it was theatrically desolate and raw, but because it was the opposite of that. It was an island that just sat there and gazed out at all the more famous islands.

I didn't know the poem -- I ought to know Paterson's work much better than I do -- and wasn't bowled over by it (the ending, I think, is off-key) but I thought this bit was rhythmically very nice:

Kilda's antithesis,
yet still with its own tiny stubborn anthem,
its yellow milkwort and its stunted kye.

4. A wonderful list of nonce words from the 17th cent. for carving specific kinds of meat. Birds, for some reason, have many of the best ones (virtually all of these have potential euphemistic uses btw):

Rear that Goose.
Lift that Swan.
Spoil that Hen.
Frust that Chicken.
Unbrace that Duck or Mallard.
Dismember that Hern.
Display that Crane.
Disfigure that Peacock.
Unjoynt that Bittern.
Allay that Pheasant.
Mince that Plover.

I also liked "tame that crab" and "splat that pike" though.

5. Two strange news stories, about sharks invading a golf course in Brisbane and about a supposed Saddam Hussein lookalike being pursued by a supposed porn gang.

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In other news, work is in a heightened degree of disarray because our automatic spam filter has gone rogue, marking (e.g.) correspondence with journals as spam! I can't figure out how to turn the filtering off...

Calista reminded me yesterday of an intriguingly nasty Rochester poem that I had blogged a long time ago (scroll 2/3 of the way down) as a bridge between Herrick and Pope. (It is a post that is quite needlessly tl;dr and badly organized, I don't remember what I was thinking at the time.)

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.)

ECCOlocation; "'junk' hits"; the bishoprick of Condom

Via Jenny Davidson, a marvelous article on OCR and eighteenth-century condoms in the latest Eighteenth-Century Studies [gated link]. It is also very pun-filled; some of the puns are a bit of a stretch (e.g., "these numbers are a little rubbery, and subject to change") but there is much that is worthwhile; a few clippings:

Gabriel Fallopius invented linen sheaths in 1564, and condoms survive from ca. 1647, but the first recorded use of the word "condom" in English is not until 1705.⁴¹ In 1708 a poem was published with the subtitle "A Word or Two in Praise of Condons"⁴²; by the 1730s numerous poems had been written in praise of condoms; and by the 1750s they had also appeared in a number of artworks. Thereafter, they feature in lengthy prose satires, in the private journals of William Byrd and James Boswell, and in the public spats between rival condom manufacturers. Condoms also feature in medical literature, first appearing in 1713 in The Symptoms, Nature, Cause, and Cure of a Gonorrhoea, by the appropriately named William Cockburn.⁴³

[...] In 1716, 1729, 1741, and 1744 condoms, however spelled, are referred to as "The New Machine" or "machines"; in 1723 White Kennett's "Condom, A Poem" was retitled "Armour: A Poem"; in 1726 the word "preservative" is used; and in the 1760s Boswell refers to "sheaths" or "armour." In 1740 Stretzer refers to condoms circuitously as the "Cloathing worn in Merryland"; other writers describe them as "Lamb's bladders" (1748), a "scabbard" (1763), or "commodities" (1773).

[...] Looking at these results, we soon discover that there are literally hundreds of false or "junk" hits. The reason for this is that "Condom" is a city in southwestern France in the department of Gers, and since the city was a bishopric from 1317 to 1792, it is also the name of twenty-eight bishops, many of whom either wrote or were written about.⁵¹ It is not easy to remove these false-hits from the search for "condom."

("Merryland" is described further in some of the excerpts in the appendix; its proximity to Virginia is relatively beside the point.) Related previous posts: Hanseatische Gummiwerke, A Side-Splitting Tale

"Prick-eared rogue, copper-nose priest"

Priest-appropriate insults from the 17th cent. (LRB, gated):

A Somerset churchgoer in 1632 complains that ‘there was nothing done at prayer time in the said church of West Lidford but tooting upon the organs, and that it delighteth him as much to hear his horse fart as to hear the said organs go.’ In an argument with the parson of Dogmerfield in Hampshire over a tithe in 1581, Rowland Bowrer declares: ‘Thou art a covetous man … Go take Mother Canning by the cunt again!’ Haigh spends several pages on the insults suffered by clergymen, such as ‘stinking knave priest’, ‘scurvy, stinking, shitten boy’, ‘totter legged and pilled priest’, ‘Scottish jack’, ‘jack sauce and Welsh rogue’, ‘a runagately rogue and a prick-eared rogue’, ‘polled, scurvy, forward, wrangling priest’, ‘wrangler and prattler’, ‘black-coat knave’, ‘drunken-faced knave’ and ‘copper-nose priest’. [...] There are many presentments for misbehaviour in church: drunkenness, brawling, gossiping, vomiting, scoffing at the minister, pissing in another man’s hat (Leigh, Essex, 1627), or ‘extreme sleeping’ (Fering, Sussex, 1613). Sex offences were common: fornication, adultery, bastard children, cross-dressing, lewd talk.

Unrelated (see pic above): foxes repurposing an abandoned conveyor belt as a slide. Via zunguzungu.

Wardrop, snowdrop, raindrop

John Holbo's post about Walter Ong made me think of "Lycidas":

But O the heavy change, now thou art gon,
Now thou art gon, and never must return!
Thee Shepherd, thee the Woods, and desert Caves,
With wilde Thyme and the gadding Vine o'regrown, [ 40 ]
And all their echoes mourn.
The Willows, and the Hazle Copses green,
Shall now no more be seen,
Fanning their joyous Leaves to thy soft layes.
As killing as the Canker to the Rose, [ 45 ]
Or Taint-worm to the weanling Herds that graze,
Or Frost to Flowers, that their gay wardrop wear,
When first the White thorn blows;
Such, Lycidas, thy loss to Shepherds ear. 

I find these lines, and others in the poem, thoroughly magical, and the conventional explanation has to do with sound, but I have never heard the lines read aloud in a way that brings out their beauty. (I don't know if "Lycidas" has been set to music with any success, not too well-informed re lieder...) Perhaps this is just because we have lost the habit of reading out loud; one allows oneself much more of a lilt in the privacy of one's head; nevertheless, it is curious that Milton and Tennyson, the greatest pure musicians in English verse, were both unusually bookish. Verbal beauty is always influenced by meaning, one might even say that verbal beauty is always the iridescence of an impression that is perceived as hybrid. So when Ong says:

A literate person, asked to think of the word ‘nevertheless’, will normally (and I strongly suspect always) have some image, at least vague, of the spelled-out word and be quite unable ever to think of the word ‘nevertheless’ for, let us say, 60 seconds without adverting to any lettering but only to the sound.

This seems like a profoundly irrelevant thought experiment; it is difficult to think of the word "Nevertheless" -- or "What are Years" -- without plunging into one's hoard of associations and coming up with the Marianne Moore poem for instance -- and if one achieved the difficult meditative feat of imagining the word in isolation for a minute this feat would be so far from one's normal mental processes as to divulge no useful information.

But in the end I am less interested in what Ong has to say than in the word "wardrop," a variant spelling of "wardrobe" that was probably substituted for the 1638 edition's "wardrobe" to shorten the last syllable, to drag in (not too fancifully) in an association with "snowdrop," and (a little more fancifully) to prompt the metanalysis of the word as "war-drop" rather than "ward-robe." It is such a dramatic improvement of the line, and given the screwiness of spelling at the time I wonder if Milton first came upon the possibility of "wardrop" after he'd written the poem...

And I'm free-associating at this point, but "war-drop" made me think of other "-drops" in the arsenal of implausible weaponry, e.g., Ted Hughes's "Snowdrop":

Now is the globe shrunk tight
Round the mouse’s dulled wintering heart.
Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass,
Move through an outer darkness
Not in their right minds,
With the other deaths. She, too, pursues her ends,
Brutal as the stars of this month,
Her pale head heavy as metal.

(one of those poems there isn't a whole lot to say about) and of Hardy's raindrop in "During Wind and Rain" -- one of the few Hardy poems I like, perhaps because it has none of his vile compound verbs; you should follow the link and read the rest of it; the last line, though memorable, is in my view an overdone special effect, but the stanza form is very effective, and I think the first stanza might be my very favorite thing in Hardy:

They sing their dearest songs—
He, she, all of them—yea,
Treble and tenor and bass.
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face...
Ah, no; the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!

[...] 

 
They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them—aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs...
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the raindrop plows.

"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.

Three Lists from the LRB

Ordered by brevity:

1. Neal Ascherson on the "intelligent, leftish" types who went on delegations to China in the 1950s:

Weird as abroad often turned out to be, they were determined to find it familiar, recognisable, lovable. This must be the explanation for the funniest element in Wright’s story: everywhere was just like England, if you looked hard enough.

Stanley Spencer explained to Zhou that China was like Cookham. The Ming Tombs reminded him of the village of Wangford, where he had married his first wife. Morgan Phillips found that Beijing was much like Bedford. The physician Derrick James noted that Prague, visited on the way to Beijing, resembled Maidstone. Hugh Casson compared Moscow to Manchester a hundred years earlier; the great scientist Joseph Needham mystifyingly thought that Kunming was a bit like the vicarage at Duxford near Cambridge; the artist Paul Hogarth wrote that travelling from Beijing to Shanghai was much the same as going from Sheffield to Manchester. More perilously, the delegates tried to demystify the Chinese present by equating it with brave bits of the English past. The rural co-operatives were like the Rochdale Pioneers, the People’s Liberation Army was like Cromwell’s Roundheads.

2. Keith Thomas, reviewing a book about holy places in 17th century England:

In the 17th century the parson-poet George Herbert lamented that it was very difficult to get country folk to see God’s hand in the workings of nature. They thought that crops grew because of their own efforts, not divine providence. They knew the landscape around them in intimate detail but, for them, its associations were primarily connected with their own labours and those of their predecessors. [...] Topographical traditions were not just about saints and monks. More usually, they related to kings and queens, armies and battles, or folk heroes like Robin Hood, Guy of Warwick and, above all, King Arthur, to whom, according to the Elizabethan historian William Camden, ‘the common sort ascribe whatever is ancient or strange’. Cairns, cromlechs and barrows were believed to be memorials to ancient princes or tombs of great men slain in battle, usually against the Danes. Ruins were indiscriminatingly regarded as the work of Oliver Cromwell.

(Btw the pun on "reformation" has rarely been used so well as in the title of this book, The Reformation of the Landscape. I do not know if there is a specific term for this trick of using the direct, etymological sense of a compound word that has drifted away in meaning -- a sort of exposing of the etymological joints, as in the popular example "at-one-ment.")

3. Terry Eagleton on the Dublin theatrical scene:

In the years when the Gate and the Abbey were the two main theatres in Dublin, the former was run by a gay couple while the latter was noted for staging traditional Irish plays. The theatres were known as Sodom and Begorrah.