Spufford, Auden, Iceland, Food

I just discovered that Francis Spufford had written a "Letter to Wystan Auden" (pastiching L. to L. Byron). I guess I knew about the influence of Auden on Spufford -- Auden's fingerprints are all over the fairytale parts of The Child that Books Built, and Spufford even casually uses the phrase "the sexy airs of summer" somewhere -- but I am still delighted by the fact of the existence of this poem, it is the sort of object the universe might have concocted specifically for my sake. Unfortunately, the poem itself -- though it "adumbrates" various themes that resurface in the ice book and the books book -- is a little blah; rhyme royal doesn't go well with a villainous looseness of numbers. But here is the bit where he talks about the genesis of the ice book -- it rings very true; these are exactly the sorts of reasons why I've found the idea of novel-writing impossibly daunting:

I’m sure that if I tried to write a novel
    The cast party I held would be a flop.
I’d be the wallflower, or I’d simply grovel,
    And all the characters would never stop
    Gesticulating. An aged peer would try to hop;
A dour divine would Charleston; close to tears,
The strong and silent one would play on others’ fears.

A catastrophic prospect. Wiser, you will agree,
    To first try something rather smaller,
Requiring of these skills a less complete degree.
    That way my judgment may grow slowly taller,
    And I’ll learn how to entertain a caller –
Not one that I invented – someone real and dead
Whose passions need to be interpreted.

[...] I’d like to say that searching for my subject
    Was an exhausting task that lasted years;
I’d like to say that weary, pure and abject
    I brought myself close to the brink of tears,
    Burdened by severe stylistic cares.
It’s unfortunate for me that from my crib
I’ve not been capable of such a fib.

The truth’s just this: I knew exactly what
    I hoped to do to educate my heart.
I’ve been fascinated by each human jot
    Of POLAR EXPLORATION from the start,
    And wondered how on earth to tease apart
The knots their souls are tied in (reef or bowline)
Who think the good life’s found above the snowline.

The classic polar expedition’s personnel
    Were capable, Edwardian and intense;
Good sports; good diary-keepers; fit as hell;
    Trained by their education to think tents
    Were the natural sites for virtuous events.
Yet these solid types made journeys that involved
Odder qualities than toughness or resolve.

I see them walking, always in a line,
    Pursuing an abstraction through the snow;
Above (thanks to refraction) six suns shine
    And wrap them round in whiteness as they go,
    Skin blackened, feet wrecked, agonisedly slow.
But it isn’t meteorology, or nature’s wild trompe l’oeil,
That can explain their journal entries, indicating joy.

If I’m to understand at all, I need a way
    Of obtaining for my book a steady fix
On emotions that you don’t meet every day –
    The atavistic ones, the muscly ethics
    You tried to grasp yourself, ascending F6.
It’s especially hard to find out what they mean
Because the censorship of laughter intervenes:

(It might also be worthwhile to compare this with Donald Davie's "Remembering the Thirties.")

While I'm on this topic let me quote a bit from Letters from Iceland that I rediscovered today:

Dried fish is a staple food in Iceland. This should be shredded with the fingers and eaten with butter. It varies in toughness. The tougher kind tastes like toenails, and the softer kind like the skin off the soles of one's feet.

Pearls-for-eyes redux

Francis Spufford, I may be some time:

The ice had preserved John Torrington, John Hartnell, and William Braine as yellowed revenants from 1846. Their lips had drawn back from their teeth, and their eyes, oysters of water-ice when the coffins were first opened, proved to have sunk back beneath the lids [...] the preserving ice does something curious to history. It does not distinguish between the recent dead and the remote dead; all are glazed over alike.

I am returning to this book after a week's travel, exigencies of packing for which have left me with a number of half-read books that I must now try to finish.

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. 

"Its exceedingly appropriate etymology"

An OED etymological note (for "gun") of no slight magnificence:

With regard to the ultimate etymology, a suggestion has been made by Prof. Skeat that Middle English gunne may represent a hypocoristic form of a Scandinavian female name compounded with Gunn-. This conjecture receives a strong confirmation from the fact (communicated to us by Mr. W. H. Stevenson) that an account of munitions at Windsor Castle in 1330-1 (Exchequer Accts. Q.R. Bundle 18, no. 34, Pub. Rec. Office) mentions ‘una magna balista de cornu quae vocatur Domina Gunilda’. There are other instances of the practice of bestowing female personal names on engines of war; but there was no distinguished lady named Gunilda (= Old Norse Gunnhild-r; spelt Gunnild in Havelok) in the 14th cent., and it seems highly probable that this use of the name may have come down from Scandinavian times, when its exceedingly appropriate etymology would be understood (both gunn-r and hild-r mean ‘war’). If Gunnhildr, as is likely, was a name frequently given to ballistæ and the like, it would naturally, on the introduction of gunpowder, be given also to cannon. Indeed, there is some appearance of evidence that an explosive engine was actually called by this name many years before the earliest recorded instance of the use of gunpowder in warfare. The ‘song against the retinues of the great people’ in Pol. Songs (Camden) 237, which must have been written in the reign of Edward II, contains the following passage 

The gedelynges were gedered
Of gonnylde gnoste;
Palefreiours ant pages,
Ant boyes with boste,
Alle weren y-haht
Of an horse þoste’. 

The correct translation of this passage, which has hitherto been unexplained, seems to be as follows < ‘The lackeys were gathered out of Gunnild's spark [Old English gnást: see gnast n.]; the grooms and pages, the varlets with their boasting, all were hatched of a horse's dung’. According to analogy, the regular ‘pet-name’ in Old Norse for Gunnhild-r would be *Gunna, which would give Gunne in Middle English; Rietz Sv. dial.-lex., mentions Gunne as a female Christian name still surviving in Swedish country districts. (In Iceland Gunna is now common, but it is taken to stand for Guðrún.) 

The other suggestions that have been made as to the origin of the word are obviously unsatisfactory. The assumed Old French *mangonne, of which gonne has been supposed to be a shortening, is wrongly inferred < mangonneaumangonel n., and is not philologically possible, unless as a back-formation. The French gonne, large cask, does not occur before the 16th cent., and is regarded by Littré as adopted from the English gun. The conjecture that Middle English gunne is of echoic origin perhaps involves no impossibility, but it has no positive support, and little intrinsic probability.

NB "thoste" is defined as "dung, excrement, a turd"; can't find "gedelynges" though (obv. no connection w/ Gatling!).

Update As Alan tweeted in response to this post, "Wat Skeat shoots again!"

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.

Ice blink

 Photo by Sara Wheeler, Slate

There was a brief period, between the Russian visa debacle and the other horrors of 2006, when I meant to go to Spitsbergen on the Watson. This is presumably what it would have been like:

Puffins, pink-footed geese, long-tailed ducks, ivory gulls, dunlins, king eiders, sanderlings, and red-throated divers shrieked and squawked around lime-stained fissures. It was startling to see species familiar in dowdy British winter coats resplendent in summer plumage. Gray phalaropes in Arctic carmine, snow buntings transformed from dusty slate into dazzling black and white, golden plovers with refulgent breast feathers.

I'd never heard of "ice blink":

Big wind-sock-shaped clouds hung in the sky below a layer of cirrostratus. Richard lay down to photograph ribs of driftwood. I picked among beluga tusks and rusted barrel hoops in the yard-high ice foot, a weak and unstable wall of ice and snow left on the shore when the winter sea ice broke up. We looked out for bears and listened to small waves slap the pebbles. Out in the open sea at the end of the fjord, a dazzling stripe on the underside of distant clouds mapped the sea ice. In a polar phenomenon called ice blink, clouds are lit from underneath by sunlight reflected up from a patch of pack ice in a contrasting dark area of water. When Nansen first came upon ice blink, he wrote, "I felt instinctively that I stood on the threshold of a new world."

The article also mentions the wild fluctuations in the numbers of barnacle geese in Spitsbergen; perhaps because the ecosystems are both younger and more sensitive, this appears to be a recurring theme. I remember hearing in Shetland five years ago that the population of fulmars had grown to almost dangerous levels.