Snail-nosed and glassy-eyed

It has been long enough since the last post that I've been asked whether I've given up blogging. I certainly don't mean to; I have just been a little crippled by anxiety for the past month, and in this state of mind one is more impatient than appreciative of the internet. (I suppose I could have posted about the books I've read, but I'm reluctant to do so as (a) I'd just be exposing my ignorance, (b) I have a terrible reviewing voice; I tend to PRONOUNCE on things in the worst undergraduate way, and such posts are painful to reread. I was recently skimming Lowell's critical prose and it struck me as stylistically very bad -- though clever and observant beyond anything I could aspire to -- for utterly familiar reasons. The judicial stance is dangerous for anyone who finds it appealing, and the only easy way out of this pass is never to write with primarily evaluative intent.)

(I will note, in passing, this remark by Brad Leithauser about Cheever and Lowell, which I think contains a dangerous implication:

We learn that one character’s “sense of these aspects of privacy was scrupulous and immutable” and that another’s “imagination remained resilient and fertile.” The high-flown adjective pair was for Cheever what the incongruous adjective triplet (“orange, bland, ambassadorial”) was to Robert Lowell: an opportunity to record a legible signature in an extremely confined space.

It is true that grammatical templates like this can be effective when used well; that one becomes better with practice at filling them in effectively; and that this eventual richness can compensate for the dangers of self-parody. Phrases like "flabby, bald, lobotomized" suggest that a one-track mind is not always a bad thing. But to appreciate mannerisms just for being mannerisms, to praise writers for the sameness of their special effects -- as Leithauser seems to -- is indulgent in ways that make my flesh creep; perhaps it is an error everyone falls into with favorite writers -- Auden, in my case -- but it is an error for all that.)

A few linked pairs of pictures and quotes:

Snout 1 (via Jenny Davidson):

Snout 2, an almost-ouroboros ("the great sea serpent" it seems):

Self-involved hawk 2 (see also): 

Passage 1a (from Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows):

When we reached Edinburgh I awoke, feeling warm and babyish and contented, and the pain was so much less that I could hop with joy as we went along Princes Street, because of the splendor of the castle high on its rock over the trough of the green gardens, all the majesty of the city that lives more masterfully among its hills than Rome itself. But when I said, "Isn't it beautiful? Isn't it beautiful?" Mamma made no answer. 

Passage 1b (Beckett, "The End"):

The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.

Passages 2 (via Calista):

Plath, the cadaver-room poem: "in their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and glow"; out-of-context Lowell [i.e., "For the Union Dead"]: "once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass"

Hawkishness

An ouroboros? (From the excellent Fairy-wren tumblr -- see also.)

This week has been unpleasantly stressful -- partly a matter of bad luck; construction workers have been wandering in and out of my office all week "changing the windows," my desk is covered in plastic sheeting -- but at least it should all end on Saturday when I leave for Boston. I hope to be back on the grid mid-week-ish...

Corkscrewing, cheesiness

Back after a very pleasant trip to NYC and Princeton -- my spirits survived my body's weak attempts to depress them with a cold. Highlights included gin and marmalade (!), and a crawl through the Met, where I was particularly struck by these two pictures. (Unfortunately I missed the Edward Gorey exhibit at Columbia...) The workshop was great too -- I wish I hadn't let my old physics blog fall into such utter desuetude; I would have had material for it... I mean to get back to a more normal blogging schedule, but disruptions associated with moving and paper-completion are likely to persist for another few weeks.

A smattering of links:

1. Illustrations from a 1925 Japanese edition of Aesop.

2. David Crystal on Dickens's language (parts 1, 2, and 3). Part 3 is especially good I think; esp. the precursors of Chuzzlewit, and this bit from Oliver Twist, which I do not remember at all (having read the book only as a child):

Mrs Mann: How comes he to have any name at all, then?
Bumble: I inwented it.
Mrs Mann: You, Mr. Bumble!
Bumble: I, Mrs. Mann. We name our fondlings in alphabetical order. The last was a S,- Swubble, I named him. This was a T,- Twist, I named him. The next one as comes will be Unwin, and the next Vilkins. I have got names ready made to the end of the alphabet, and all the way through it again, when we come to Z.
Mrs Mann: Why, you're quite a literary character, sir! 

For Swubble cf. "swabbling." And the list of words that might have been coined by Dickens has some remarkable entries...

3. Mary Beard recently alluded to the duck's ditty in Wind in the Willows; I'd forgotten about it, was happy to be reminded, and was thoroughly cheered up to find that "Up tails all" is an old folk song to which the lyrics have apparently been lost (?), although the refrain survives in allusions by Jonson, Herrick, and Vanbrugh:

Ras. The Matter?—why, Uptails All's the Matter... My Lady has Cuckolded my Master.

"A sadder hue then the powder of Venice glass"

Sorry about the nonexistent blogging lately; I have been slightly more active on tumblr, but a combination of post-thesis work and lassitude and the thought of a few substantive posts I've been putting off writing have combined to keep things very quiet. (A rule of thumb is that quotes offered w/o comment go there unless they are about Coleridge's drug use.) This is not a substantive post, just a few snippets of early modern science. First, I stumbled upon a piece on the "solar microscope" ca. 1816; the list it ends with is particularly worthwhile if one likes lists:

Another good bit (apart from the food-related one) is on the breeding habits of lice:

And the crystallization of salts reminded me of the bit in Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica on whether all crystals are forms of ice. I am not sure anyone will find this bit as charming as I did, but it is of lexicographical interest ("the stillicidous dependencies of ice"!), and then solidity-the-concept is one of my very oldest obsessions (I even wrote a dreadful term paper my freshman year on Locke and solidity...):

Pliny is positive in this Opinion: Crystallus fit gelu vehementius concreto: [...] Neither doth there any thing properly conglaciate but water, or watery humidity; for the determination of quick-silver is properly fixation, that of milk coagulation, and that of oyl and unctuous bodies, only incrassation [...]

[...] Ice although it seemeth as transparent and compact as Crystal, yet is it short in either; for its atoms are not concreted into continuity, which doth diminish its translucency; it is also full of spumes and bubbles, which may abate its gravity. And therefore waters frozen in Pans, and open Glasses, after their dissolution do commonly leave a froth and spume upon them, which are caused by the airy parts diffused in the congealable mixture which uniting themselves and finding no passage at the surface, do elevate the mass, and make the liquor take up a greater place then before: as may be observed in Glasses filled with water, which being frozen, will seem to swell above the brim.

[...] As for colour, although Crystal in his pellucid body seems to have none at all, yet in its reduction into powder, it hath a vail and shadow of blew; and in its courser pieces, is of a sadder hue then the powder of Venice glass; and this complexion it will maintain although it long endure the fire. [...]

that continuity of parts is the cause of perspicuity, it is made perspicuous by two ways of experiment. That is, either in effecting transparency in those bodies which were not so before, or at least far short of the additional degree: So Snow becomes transparent upon liquation, so Horns and Bodies resolvable into continued parts or gelly. The like is observable in oyled paper, wherein the interstitial divisions being continuated by the accession of oyl, it becometh more transparent, and admits the visible rayes with less umbrosity. Or else the same is effected by rendering those bodies opacous, which were before pellucid and perspicuous.

So Glass which was before diaphanous, being by powder reduced into multiplicity of superficies, becomes an opacous body, and will not transmit the light. So it is in Crystal powdered, and so it is also before; for if it be made hot in a crucible, and presently projected upon water, it will grow dim, and abate its diaphanity; for the water entering the body, begets a division of parts, and a termination of Atoms united before unto continuity.

The ground of this Opinion might be, first the conclusions of some men from experience; for as much as Crystal is found sometimes in rocks, and in some places not much unlike the stirrious^[14] or stillicidious dependencies of Ice. Which notwithstanding may happen either in places which have been forsaken or left bare by the earth, or may be petrifications, or Mineral indurations, like other gemms, proceeding from percolations of the earth disposed unto such concretions.

"Sand / Is grand / But oyster / Is moister"

From the larder, a newly unearthed poem by Housman, concerning oysters and cucumbers. (Previous local coverage of Housman here.) Naturally the juxtaposition of Housman and moisture brings up that Auden sonnet:

Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust,
Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer;
Food was his public love, his private lust
Something to do with violence and the poor. 

Also new to me: A.D. Hope's response to the Auden sonnet. And I am reminded that I recently stumbled upon this astoundingly bad translation of Aeschylus ("with nurture-milk it sucked the clotted blood"!). (Connection is via Housman parody that Calista pointed me to upon being sent the Aesch.)

Some unrelated linkage: Leigh Hunt's wonderful apostrophe to a fish (and the fish's response); Alice James's self-description of her body as a "mildewed toadstool".

After some grief, the defense has been scheduled! Key outstanding task now -- other than various admin. horrors -- is to write the introduction. Given how heavily my research depends on "reducing to previously solved problems," this is a delicate task; one cannot, as in papers, simply point to the appropriate references, but a detailed introduction to all the relevant ideas would entail unimaginable bloat...

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. 

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.")

"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."

1Q66 and All That

Charles Baxter reviews Murakami's 1Q84 (NYRB):

the locale also includes two moons, miniature angels or demons (it is hard to tell which they are) referred to as “Little People,” ghosts knocking on the door demanding payment, insemination-by-proxy, and air chrysalises: cocoons created by the Little People in which pod-like human replicas, referred to as dohta, are hatched. 1Q84 is a marathon novel. (Murakami himself is a marathon runner and has said that “most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day.”)

But the Little People are "absolutely mystifying. It is as if the Seven Dwarfs had gradually made their presence known and their powers understood in a novel by James T. Farrell." I'm not sure I want to read this novel. (I've read very little Murakami, but have a vaguely favorable impression of what I've read -- read 2.2 novels in succession in 2009, then forgot my copy of Norwegian Wood between the sheets in a hotel room in Vannes, and never returned to his work.)

In other news, the Lethem-Wood plot has thickened, with James Wood responding to comments at the Millions -- I recommend Ctrl-F -- disconcertingly, Wood refers to himself in the third person and then seems surprised when other commenters refer to him as "'James Wood'". (Back-story: Lethem recently wrote a content-free whinge at the LARB (naturally) about a supposedly dishonest/elitist review by Wood ca. 2003; this got more coverage than it deserved because everyone likes to bait Wood.) I haven't read the comments, there are too many of them, but I am indebted to the (as-of-now) very last one, by "Edmond Caldwell," for a phrase -- revanchist domestication -- that accurately if uncharitably describes my approach to the more experimental stuff I like.

(Re post title see here.)

Of mice and shoes

1. from Marianne Moore, "Silence":

Self reliant like the cat 
that takes its prey to privacy,

the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth --

they sometimes enjoy solitude,

and can be robbed of speech

by speech which has delighted them.

2. "Mice" in A.J. Snijders's Very Short Animal Stories (trans. Lydia Davis, in Asymptote):

A mouse inside a shoe is not a primal fear, not a trauma, but I do pay attention, all the same. It's because of the open roofs. I have a house with three tile roofs. They used to be haylofts, they were not timbered, the wind had to be allowed to blow through freely, against the heat and damp. Time and objectives change, I timbered one roof, gas was installed, the electricity went underground, drainage pipes were laid, but the mice stayed. The house is in the fields, there are mice everywhere. [...] Yesterday in a forgotten cupboard I found two pairs of shoes. I recognized them, old, but still useable. First I hold them by the tips, and I shake them—to be absolutely sure, I even poke them with a little piece of wood. Then I put them on; once my feet are inside them, I feel ten years younger, but that doesn't help, I'm still thinking about the oil, the energy, the mice, the people and the water.

---

I have a Google-reader-shaped hole in my heart, now that their latest shitty "update" has excised not only the social features but the "share with note" feature I used to make clippings. For now I've made a new tumblr that should serve some of the same purposes (via GReader's "send to" feature), but it is more work and doesn't work nearly as well. The malign Google+, which is cannibalizing all of Google's other "social" features in a futile attempt to compete with Facebook, is apparently to blame... I fear for the future of Google chat.

"He is na dog, he is a lam"

1. A house made entirely of vintage books (appropriately I got this from Random House's twitter feed):

2. From Sally Mapstone's LRB review of an edition of William Dunbar's poems:

Scots were not popular in late medieval Oxford. Two fellows of Merton came up before the college authorities in 1497 after a fracas in which one had accused the other of being a Scot. The perpetrator, William Ireland, was warned not to issue such an infamy against anyone else.

This stereotype was new to me:

The first of a pair of punning poems on James Dog, an officer in the Queen’s wardrobe, persistently declares, ‘Madame, ye heff a dangerous dog,’ and the second then just as assiduously corrects that statement: ‘He is na dog, he is a lam.’ [...] Unravelling the nature of Dunbar’s relationship with the Queen is even trickier because of Margaret’s appalling posthumous reputation among Scottish historians, in which the familiar stereotypes of the unstable, sexually malleable, meddling English female have played far too straightforward a part.

(The reviewed edition -- which I had checked out for much of college -- is notable partly for ordering the poems alphabetically by first line. This is actually what led me to the review: I was reminded by the abstract of Jenny Davidson's ABCs of the novel event (which I would definitely attend if I were in NYC) of alphabetical order as one obvious alternative to chronological order...)

3. Courtesy of Calista, a magnificent bit of scatological verse (John Oldham, "Upon the author of a play call'd Sodom"):

Vile Sot! who clapt with Poetry art sick,
And void'st Corruption, like a Shanker'd Prick.
Like Ulcers, thy impostum'd Addle Brains,
Drop out in Matter, which thy Paper stains:
Whence nauseous Rhymes, by filthy Births proceed,
As Maggots, in some T---rd, ingendring breed.
Thy Muse has got the Flow'rs, and they ascend,
As in some Green-sick Girl, at upper end.
Sure Nature made, or meant at least t'have don't,
Thy Tongue a Clytoris, thy Mouth a C---t:
How well a Dildoe, wou'd that place become,
To gag it up, and make't for ever dumb? 
[...]
Or (if I may ordain a Fate more fit)
For such foul, nasty, Excrements of Wit,
May they condemn'd to th'publick Jakes, be lent,
For me I'd fear the Piles, in vengeance sent
Shou'd I with them prophane my Fundament)
There bugger wiping Porters, when they shite,
And so thy Book it self, turn Sodomite.

See also: Language Log on excrement as metaphor; it is only a minor stretch to read LL's name in a scatological sense.

Parallel passages

(Admin note: last night the archives of some Brazilian politics blog posted to this blog's rss feed. Hopefully this is a one-off glitch; this post is meant in part to see if it is; if this persists I shall either have to learn Portuguese or move the blog to Wordpress. Sorry about the inadvertent spamming.)

I.

a. John McPhee on New Orleans ("Atchafalaya"):

Every drop of rain that falls on New Orleans evaporates or is pumped out. Its removal lowers the water table and accelerates the city’s subsidence. ... A child jumping up and down on such a lawn can cause the earth to move under another child, on the far side of the lawn.

Many houses are built on slabs that firmly rest on pilings. As the turf around a house gradually subsides, the slab seems to rise. Where the driveway was once flush with the floor of the carport, a bump appears. The front walk sags like a hammock. The sidewalk sags. The bump up to the carport, growing, becomes high enough to knock the front wheels out of alignment. Sakrete appears, like putty beside a windowpane, to ease the bump. The property sinks another foot. The house stays where it is, on its slab and pilings. A ramp is built to get the car into the carport. The ramp rises three feet. But the yard, before long, has subsided four. The carport becomes a porch, with hanging plants and steep wooden steps. A carport that is not firmly anchored may dangle from the side of a house like a third of a drop-leaf table. Under the house, daylight appears. You can see under the slab and out the other side. More landfill or more concrete is packed around the edges to hide the ugly scene. A gas main, broken by the settling earth, leaks below the slab. The sealed cavity fills with gas. The house blows sky high.

b. Steven Shapin on corpses:

The corpse begins its dissolution into evil-smelling liquids and gases soon after death, and depending on temperature, moisture and other conditions, the stench becomes inescapable within two or three days. (The ‘worms’ – as the schoolyard song has it – really do begin to ‘crawl in and out’, bacteria, bugs and their larvae aiding in decomposition.) The release of gases – including hydrogen sulphide, methane and ammonia – makes the corpse bloat, and the pressure build-up can cause liquid to ooze out of the body’s orifices. Before we’re dust, we’re a cheesy mud. Sometimes the mud blows up: ‘Gas pressure is capable of bursting the thoracic or abdominal cavities,’ Cantor writes. ‘Before embalming was common, sealed coffins sometimes exploded’ because of it. There is a story that the corpse of Elizabeth I – retained for more than a month before burial – blew up, shattering the wooden coffin and lead sarcophagus in which it was being kept.

II.

a. R.D. Laing, "Conversations with Children"

b. Jen Campbell, conversations with customers:

Customer: Do you have brown eyes? *peers over at me*
Me: Yes, I do.
Customer: My mother told me never to trust anyone with brown eyes.
Me: You have brown eyes.
Customer: .......... 

Person: Hi, I'm looking for a Mr. Patrick.
Me: No one of that name works here, sorry.
Person: But does he live here?
Me:... no one lives here; we're a bookshop.
Person: Are you sure?

The two cultures of snowclonology

It is clear that the number of riffs on C.P. Snow's Two Cultures essay -- Timothy Gowers on "the two cultures of mathematics," Peter Norvig on "the two cultures of statistical learning," Zadie Smith on the "two cultures of novel-writing" (well OK it wasn't titled that but it should have been), Language Log on the "two cultures of interruption research" and so on -- is sufficient to make "the two cultures of X" a Snowclone in both obvious senses. It is time, therefore, for snowclonology to have two cultures. What should these be? Perhaps there should be one culture that primarily collects and mocks snowclones, and another that studies the underlying grammar -- if that's the right term -- of each snowclone, such as, e.g., the observation that in a two-cultures essay it is always the second culture that the author ends up advocating for?

(PS how many words do the Eskimos have for C.P. Snow?)

Post retrieval

The internet ate a couple of posts; here they are:

Tab-closing synergies

from The Glass-Bottom Blog by Sarang

If you're going to buy this:

[The Mammoth Book of Special Ops Romance]

you might want to carry it about in this:

 

Former link via Alyssa Rosenberg guest-blogging at Yglesias; she notes that SEAL romances are much like ordinary ones except that "the sex is more likely to be 'implacable.'" (See also: Light reading, plenty more fish.) This Amazon review has helpful summaries of the stories in the Mammoth book ("Lipstick Spy School - A gorgeous assassin intends to take out the hunky instructor of a fantasy spy school for women"). Regrettably there are no seals in Animal Farm but it's possible that they just operated very secretively.

Glass-bottom bungalows

from The Glass-Bottom Blog by Sarang

This blog being what it is, one pretty much has to link to this article on over-water bungalows in the soon-to-be-underwater Maldives and elsewhere (CNN via Wade DeG.):

CNN caption: "Many overwater bungalows, like this one in Cayo Espanto, Belize, feature glass panes in the floor."

Tab-closing synergies

If you're going to buy this:

[The Mammoth Book of Special Ops Romance]

you might want to carry it about in this:

 

Former link via Alyssa Rosenberg guest-blogging at Yglesias; she notes that SEAL romances are much like ordinary ones except that "the sex is more likely to be 'implacable.'" (See also: Light reading, plenty more fish.) This Amazon review has helpful summaries of the stories in the Mammoth book ("Lipstick Spy School - A gorgeous assassin intends to take out the hunky instructor of a fantasy spy school for women"). Regrettably there are no seals in Animal Farm but it's possible that they just operated very secretively.

Glass-bottom bungalows

This blog being what it is, one pretty much has to link to this article on over-water bungalows in the soon-to-be-underwater Maldives and elsewhere (CNN via Wade DeG.):

CNN caption: "Many overwater bungalows, like this one in Cayo Espanto, Belize, feature glass panes in the floor."

Kindle: first and second impressions

I finally got around to ordering a Kindle last weekend; it arrived yesterday and I've been playing with it compulsively, mostly downloading free stuff (the most awesome thing about the kindle is all the free pre-1900 ebooks). Today my inbox looks like this:

I had resisted the idea of getting a Kindle because: (1) I'm by nature a late adopter, I like letting other people find the bugs. (2) Anything sufficiently technical or obscure (including all physics monographs and most contemporary poetry, even Heaney) is unavailable on the Kindle; the Kindle store is in some ways more like Borders than like Amazon. (3) Most of my reading comes from the university library anyway. (4) There is something unappealing [straight face] about taking electrical appliances to bed.[/straight face] However, (a) the Kindle is really cheap now and I had some gift certificate money just sitting in my Amazon account; (b) I travel a fair bit and always pick the most inappropriate in-flight reading, and besides my laptop has terrible battery life and is worthless as a portable pdf reader; (c) one sometimes needs instant gratification!

A few impressions:

1. The size of the thing is a little odd, too large for one's pockets but it feels a little daft to use one's backpack to cart it around. It is probably just the right size for a certain species of women's handbag but there is no unisex/male equivalent. (Maybe the Paris Review stoat bag?) So far I have been using a plastic bag from the college bookstore. Perhaps the larger-screen v. is more sensible, though as I said on twitter, buyer's remorse is the most enduring human emotion after Schadenfreude.

2. Screen size aside, the display is great. To test this I read an entire book -- Bertrand Russell's account of his visit to the USSR ca. 1920 -- in one go; it was pretty gentle on the eyes. The device -- at least the small v. -- is light enough to be comfortable to read in bed, and is perhaps easier to read one-handed than a book.

3. Elif Batuman's article on buying books drunk is an excellent user's guide to the Kindle. (See also here; the link is to Grobstein's new tumblr.) I did in fact end up downloading The Anatomy of Melancholy and Fanny Hill and a myriad free samples. The Kindle is basically worth the price as a delivery mechanism for Project Gutenberg texts, if one is into that kind of thing.

4. The poetry selection is dismal, and a lot of the free poetry e-texts are missing linebreaks. It is perhaps worthwhile to pony up the 99 cents for a cleaned-up text should one exist... For instance, I found a nice text of Pound that has the Sextus Propertius versions -- really my favorite thing of his -- formatted as in print versions. (I also downloaded a Latin text of Propertius, which was of course without linebreaks. Which is fitting as so were the Latin texts.)

5. It is much better to shop on one's laptop than on the Kindle.

6. As a pdf reader the Kindle leaves much to be desired. The basic problem is that the screen is too small for letter-sized documents and scrolling is primitive, you seem to only be able to move one entire screen in any direction, which is exasperating. For all-text pdfs I believe the "convert to Kindle" feature works OK but for the physics literature it emphatically does not. It is unfortunate that you can't zoom except in 50% increments, so there's no obvious way to optimize the magnification and you always have to reckon with unnecessary whitespace or a truncated page. For Phys. Rev. or Nature a tolerable solution is to turn the page sideways and increase the contrast.

6'. Another thing to note is that the Kindle is slow qua computer, and has a lot of trouble w/ pdfs w/ large images.

7. Some things I've been meaning to read for a while and that I downloaded last night (all free): Edmund Gosse's Father and Son, Daniel Deronda, Nicholas Nickleby, Education Sentimentale, Tacitus's Histories, Coleridge's Biographia Literaria.

Addendum 8. The Kindle now has an experimental web browser; it is really about as good as one can expect of what is a Firefox clone, given that the Kindle technology doesn't allow rapid page refreshing.

A study of reading habits

Google reader screenshot, initially noted for "3,333" and "63,963":

The fact that I process my feeds at a basically flat rate through the day is a little at odds with my subjective sense that I do most of my reading in the mornings. It's possible that the statistics are missing an important qualitative distinction between teaser-viewing and actual reading. But I'm also more severely internet-addicted than I like to admit. For some reason I very strongly associate my desk with procrastination (a point that a photograph would buttress if I had a camera)... it is easier to be productive anywhere else.

(The 7-8 pm spike of mostly unread articles is the arxiv dump.)

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.