Scratching-posts

More from Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature:

Certainly some people are natural recluses, but--leaving aside the difficulty of finding out whether they are actually pleased with their lives--they do seem somewhat abnormal. I am not criticizing them, but pointing out that they can hardly provide an escape for the rest of us from the dilemma endemic to a social species; awful though other people may be, most of the activities that we really care about must involve them. Solitude is necessary for many parts of our life, but it cannot be the climate of the whole. Nor do we need other people merely as scratching-posts, means to the adjusting of our own states of consciousness. Our nature demands for its fulfillment ends to aim at which lie outside ourselves

Long-range hybrids

At the FT, Robin Lane Fox on the life and legacy of Linnaeus.

A little help from my friends

At the Guardian, Jonathan Lethem on the life of pop music:

The Fifth Beatle in particular haunted me like a ghost of crime, a Ross MacDonald investigation, where the façade of a life in the present peels away to expose the wild truths of the past, the impostures - some of them brave, some shameful - on which our contemporary reality was founded.

Who was "Murray the K"? What was payola? Do you mean to tell me that someone had to be paid to play rock'n'roll on the radio, that something unfair occurred, that the music has bought its way into our hearts? The idea of payola was in itself easy to conflate with the idea of "the hook", or the "irresistible hit record", or "Beatlemania", the sense that pop was a kind of trick, a perverse revenge against the banality of daily life dreamed up collectively by 10 or 15 delta bluesmen and a million or 100 million screaming 14-year-old girls. Maybe if a killer hook was like a bullet or a drug or a virus, we all lived in a world permanently drugged or psychedelically sick with fever, or dead and dreaming, like characters in a Philip K Dick novel.

If so, I was grateful to live on the drugged, feverish or dead side of the historical trauma. On the side of conspiracy theories stood Sutcliffe, Best, Epstein, Voorman, Preston - this sequence of suspects who were also victims, seeming to indict the magic circle of four heroes of some wrongdoing or at least misrepresentation. But these "Fifth Beatles" also seemed to confirm the four in their status as iconic survivors - probably no one else deserved to be a Beatle, that might be the answer. And Bob Dylan, as Jimi Hendrix apparently knew, was your grandmother - full of gravelly authority and punitive conscience, nowhere near as fun, but titanically arresting - he was your grandmother in a wolf's costume, for certain.

But soon enough I, too, was engaged in a kind of game of reverent scepticism, a weird pursuit of exposing the flimsiness of the cartoon world I loved, as if testing its authority. I remember the day I learned Ringo's drumming was "bad". So bad Paul had done some of it for him. Then - I recall it as if it was the very next thing I learned, like geometry leading to algebra - I read somewhere the beautiful thought that Ringo's role was to be our surrogate in the band, the Beatle who was also a fan of the Beatles, in awe of the "real ones" from the nearest possible proximity. So maybe there was no Fifth Beatle, maybe there wasn't even a fourth! It was somehow inevitable to note next that George was given a free ride in the other songwriters' wake (yet you also could sense he was stunted or thwarted or cheated).

John explained bitterly that he wrote the hook to "Taxman", George's "best" song, just as Ray Davies was quick to note he helped his brother with "Death of a Clown", Dave Davies's greatest hit. So the sham notion of a "democracy of talent" within these great groups, with its analogous utopian implications for collective action, could dissolve into sour cynicism: the presiding genius probably could have done just as well with any other supporting cast. Or, paradoxically, the reverse: the urge to pronounce the solo careers so thin and cheesy that the magic was proven to be in the lucky conjunction of a bunch of ordinary blokes, raised temporarily above their station as much by history and our love as by any personal agency; if the Beatles didn't exist we'd have had to invent them, and perhaps we did. Maybe the search for the Fifth Beatle was always destined to end, like the list of Time magazine's Person of the Year, with the conclusion that the Fifth Beatle is YOU. For evidence, one only needs to listen to The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. Here was music to ride like a froth of sea foam atop a tsunami wave of adulation and yearning for, well, itself. What were little-girl-screams if not the essential heart of the Beatles' true sound, the human voice in a karaoke track consisting of the band itself? Getting by with a little help from my friends indeed.

Webworms

An amazing and quite melodramatic article at the Times about a web growing across several acres of a state park in Texas:

The telluric screw, or chemical patience

Thinking about unorthodox schemes of literary organization--dipping into Primo Levi's The Periodic Table (one of only a handful of books I believe everybody should read)--then into Paul Strathern's Mendeleev's Dream. The periodic table is a thing of extraordinary beauty--makes me think fondly of high-school chemistry, which was strangely boring and appealing at the same time--here is Mendeleev's original chart:

Quarantine island

A beautifully gruesome photo, from National Geographic via Nico, of a mass plague grave on Lazaretto Vecchio:

Dancer scorn

Rebecca Milzoff interviews Nico Muhly and choreographer Benjamin Millepied about the ballet they've collaborated on for ABT. I must say that this gives a very misleading impression of Nico's manner of speaking--there's something almost hostile about transcribing the incidental "like"s! As a "like"- and "you know?"- and "no?"-user myself, I flinch slightly in sympathy...

By special request

More Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes:

Incapable of making himself convincing to himself, yet it is the very conviction of others which in his eyes makes them into creatures of theater and fascinates him. He asks the actor to show him a convinced body, rather than a true passion. Here perhaps is the best theater he has ever seen: in the Belgian dining car, certain employees (customs officer, policemen) were sitting at a corner table; they ate their meal with so much appetite, comfort, and care (choosing the spices, the pieces, the appropriate tableware, preferring at a knowing glance the steak to the insipid chicken), with manners so perfectly applied to the food (carefully scraping off their fish the suspect cream sauce, tapping their yogurt in order to remove the seal, scratching their cheese instead of peeling it, using their fruit knife as if it were a scalpel), that the whole Cook service was subverted: they were eating the same things as we were, but it was not the same menu. Everything had changed, from one end of the car to the other, by the single effect of a conviction (relation of the body not to passion or to the soul but to pleasure, to bliss).

Five eggs or 5 American people dollars

Phil Nugent on Katrina.

There still hasn't been an arrest in our dear lost friend Helen's murder, but it sounds as though there's a chance things might get shaken up a little over the next month and cast up some new information. Oprah's doing a show on Katrina and New Orleans this afternoon, including a crime segment that will feature Helen's story. And there also will be pieces on 48 Hours and America's Most Wanted sometime in September.

(Here was Phil's essay about Helen at the High Hat--required reading...)

I think about Helen very often--most recently the other night on the subway as I gazed at an elderly woman wearing a very, very brightly colored top covered with dozens of little appliqued chickens! Helen was often known as Chicken, and she had a peculiar fondness for these much-maligned birds, which she believed made the ideal pets (along with cats and pigs)...

A page from the memorial 'zine put together by some of Helen's friends:
Oh dear, now I have made myself weep...

Et si je n'avais pas lu . . . ~ And if I hadn't read . . .

Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes (trans. Richard Howard):

And if I hadn't read Hegel, or La Princesse de Clèves, or Lévi-Strauss on Les Chats, or l'Anti-Œdipe?--The book which I haven't read and which is frequently told to me even before I have time to read it (which is perhaps the reason I don't read it): this book exists to the same degree as the other: it has its intelligibility, its memorability, its mode of action. Have we not enough freedom to receive a text without the letter?

(Repression: not to have read Hegel would be an exorbitant defect for a philosophy teacher, for a Marxist intellectual, for a Bataille specialist. But for me? Where do my reading duties begin?)

Interesting use of the conditional tense there--rather like Austen's "perhaps," I'd say...

I have not read Hegel!

Extracurricular

I am afraid I have been grumbling a lot here recently along the "Nothing good can happen until I do my work" lines--but as a lesson that this is not true, I received a delightful e-mail a few days ago from a person who knows me well....

The text:

Jenny - a UK edition of the new Dick Francis (really written by Felix, his name's now on the cover!) just arrived. If you've not ordered a copy already then this one can be yours. Let me know....

And I had NOT ordered one (or indeed even known one was coming) and it DID become mine, and I have just finished reading it, and I am happy...

(The name Dick Francis appears comically frequently at Light Reading... See, for instance, item number six on this list.)

In a sense, you read these novels for the faint hint of the flavor the author's books gave you when he was in his heyday--if you have never read Dick Francis, you are perhaps (hmmm, strictly speaking that should read "undoubtedly"--but I have been borrowing a habit from Austen's narrators of using "perhaps" as a polite but steely way of asserting a true thing!) better off with one of the classic early ones. For real Dick Francisish pleasure, I read Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels; and for sublime-what-Dick-Francis-would-be-if-his-brain-was-taken-over- by-the-best-novelist-of-all-time, it's definitely Peter Temple. And yet really the thought of a new Dick Francis novel makes me smile! Here's the Amazon link for it, it's called Dead Heat--and I am certainly going to pass this copy on to my mother, because (a) she was such a good sport, she let me skip school for the day when I was in seventh grade so that I could go and get a book signed by Dick Francis during his appearance at a store in downtown Philadelphia (as per that list item I linked to above) and (b) the love interest in this one is a viola player, as is my mom--and the parts about music are COMICAL!

Writing maxims

Barthes on maxims:

An aphoristic tone hangs about this book (we, one, always). Now the maxim is compromised in an essentialist notion of human nature, it is linked to classical ideology: it is the most arrogant (often the stupidest) of the forms of language. Why then not reject it? The reason is, as always, emotive: I write maxims (or I sketch their movement) in order to reassure myself: when some disturbance arises, I attenuate it by confiding myself to a fixity which exceeds my powers: "Actually, it's always like that": and the maxim is born. The maxim is a sort of sentence-name, and to name is to pacify. Moreover, this too is a maxim: it attenuates my fear of seeking extravagance by writing maxims

Aphorism as joke (one that I wish I had written myself, only I have no gift for jokes, though I can write funny sentences--but they are funny because of surprise, momentum, hyperbole, not because of the structural things that make jokes work), from Roger Smith's essay "The Language of Human Nature" (in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains): "Quoting references to human nature in the eighteenth century is a bit like quoting references to God in the Bible."

I have a longstanding fascination with aphorisms--I love reading them (La Rochefoucauld, Blake, Wittgenstein, Kafka, etc.)--and I am interested in what it takes to write them. A long time ago when I was first teaching I had a funny writing exercise I gave my students which involved reading a lot of different kinds of aphorism and then asking them to write ones of their own, in different styles--the results were both amusing and fascinating--I do think that literature classes might make more use of learning about forms from the inside out, as it were...

("As it were" is a highly aphoristic verbal signal!)

And because I cannot resist

(though Ed has already blogged it--thanks, Ed, Jane, etc. etc.): a lovely and only slightly tragic story about four orphaned baby hedgehogs.

Aliens having sex

My friend Wendy (whose blog is a lovely mix of mostly swimming- and animal-related observations, all in the most gorgeous understated prose) got a new camera recently and has since been just outdoing herself with pictures of what's going on in her garden. Today's is my favorite so far (here's the blog post it goes with):

A panic boredom

From Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard:

The rib chop

I am in love this summer all over again with Roland Barthes. S/Z was the first book of his I read, and one of the first books of literary theory in general I ever read, too: I was sleeping over at my friend S.'s house, we were in high school (it was her stepmother's book, I believe she had done a master's degree in literature), and I am afraid I did something I must have done often before and would (will) certainly do again, which is ignore the obligations of guestdom and vanish into a book as though I were at home!

But I'm delving into his stuff again this summer as I think about what kind of a book I want this current academic one to be, and just went to the library in search of a passage that I remember Wayne Koestenbaum holding up for the students in his Daily Themes lecture class at Yale as though it were the repository of all writerly and bodily wisdom. Which I indeed think it might be....

Anyway, I think I'm going to have a slew of Barthes posts this week, but here's the passage I wanted, from Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes (the translation is Richard Howard's):

La côtelette ~ The rib chop

Here is what I did with my body one day:

At Leysin, in 1945, in order to perform an extrapleural pneumothorax operation, a piece of one of my ribs was removed, and subsequently given back to me, quite formally, wrapped up in a piece of medical gauze (the physicians, who were Swiss, as it happened, thereby professed that my body belongs to me, in whatever dismembered state they restored it to me: I am the owner of my bones, in life as in death). For a long time I kept this fragment of myself in a drawer, a kind of body penis analogous to the end of a rib chop, not knowing quite what to do with it, not daring to get rid of it lest I do some harm to my person, though it was utterly useless to me shut up in a desk among such "precious" objects as old keys, a schoolboy report card, my grandmother B.'s mother-of-pearl dance program and pink taffeta card case. And then, one day, realizing that the function of any drawer is to ease, to acclimate the death of objects by causing them to pass through a sort of pious site, a dusty chapel where, in the guise of keeping them alive, we allow them a decent interval of dim agony, but not going so far as to dare cast this bit of myself into the common refuse bin of my building, I flung the rib chop and its gauze from my balcony, as if I were romantically scattering my own ashes, into the rue Servandoni, where some dog would come and sniff them out.

The plot thickens

From John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693):

We must not hope wholly to change their Original Tempers, nor make the Gay Pensive and Grave, nor the Melancholy Sportive, without spoiling them. God has stampt certain Characters upon Mens Minds, which, like their Shapes, may perhaps be a little mended; but can hardly be totally alter’d, and transform’d into the contrary.

...

These native Propensities, these prevalencies of Constitution, are not to be cured by Rules, or a direct Contest; especially those of them that are the humbler and meaner sort, which proceed from fear, and lowness of Spirit; though with Art they may be much mended, and turned to good purposes. But this, be sure, after all is done, the Byass will always hang on that side, that Nature first placed it: And if you carefully observe the Characters of his Mind, now in the first Scenes of his Life, you will ever after be able to judge which way his Thoughts lean, and what he aims at, even hereafter, when, as he grows up, the Plot thickens, and he puts on several Shapes to act it.

Tarn-swimming

Tim Adams at the Observer on Robert Macfarlane--hmm, this guy's books sound extremely interesting, better take a look--and his next one is going to involve retracing Sebald's East Anglian walks--but of course the book recommendation that caught my eye and had me fiendishly opening another window and getting the library call number (I am getting this ASAP!) is in the following:

Macfarlane's mentor in these nuances of 'fierce looking' was Roger Deakin, author of the marvellous swimmers' tour of Britain, Waterlog, and the recently published Wildwood; Deakin died at 63 of cancer last year and Macfarlane is one of his literary executors. For four or five years before his death the pair were rooted friends; Macfarlane was a regular visitor to Deakin's Suffolk farm, where the woods came up to the door and beyond, and Deakin would come and give the odd digressive seminar to Macfarlane's Cambridge students. Some of the wildest walks and nights under stars described in Macfarlane's book were in Deakin's company, and some of the best writing is in elegy to his friend, the great tarn-swimmer and woodsman. His voice breaks just a bit now when he talks about him, a year on: 'A lot of this book was born out of a sense of play,' he says. 'What I always found with Roger was an almost childlike sense of adventure, like something out of Just William.'

The sense of play is underrated, I feel; for me, that's the thing that keeps me bothering with all of this business, the point about play is that it is both immensely high-stakes and also very light-hearted. That's th e spirit I read and write and teach in--in fact though it will seem an incongruous word I have to say that my main association with classrooms is that they are a place where I can rather frolic!

Getting back to the self

My former student Paul Morton interviews Thomas Mallon at Bookslut. (Hmmm, I must confess that I am especially delighted to see Paul invoking the charismatic and sexually alluring heroes of Restoration and eighteenth-century comedies! Lots of good stuff here...)

Mary tells Fuller at some point that she doesn’t think any woman could approve, in their heart, of male-male love. This is one of the interesting things about historical novels. You get to study how the mores of sex changes so dramatically from one generation to the next. You couldn’t imagine someone like Mary saying something like that today.

If she were to use such a line like that today, either a fictional character or a person you met, you would disapprove of her and you would be right to disapprove of her. But she’s struggling with this in the ’50s and I think it would be unnatural for her to be so ahead of her time. Surely, there were people who were. But I didn’t want to make her prematurely pro-gay -- you know, what’s that famous phrase about people in the ’30s, “prematurely anti-fascist” -- prematurely pro-gay, because I thought it would be…

It would be a sign of insanity.

She would cease to exist to me as a realistic character.

Contemporary music

Alan Cane at the FT on a quirk of bird behavior:

Researchers in the US have found that female white-crowned sparrows reject males whose songs are out of date. Elizabeth Derryberry, a behavioural ecologist at Duke University, played female white-crowned sparrows a selection of male songs, some from 1979 and others from 2003. The birds solicited more mates from among the more recent recordings.

The recordings were of equal quality, and none of the birds tested had ever encountered in real life any of the males recorded. The newer songs were slower and lower in pitch than the older recordings, reported New Scientist.

Male birds also responded differently to the new and old songs, showing more aggressive behaviour when played the more contemporary songs. Ecologists believe that songbirds may change their songs to raise mating barriers to rival birds, producing the changes in song that the researchers observed.

Exciting vegetables

Paul Collins contemplates the first round of a "world's most boring book title" contest.

Heredity does not go as far as this

It has been fascinating as I revise this book manuscript to see the extraneous parts falling away and the true story emerging as I cut. Have you ever watched someone getting a haircut? A certain kind of haircut: imagine very long shaggy locks of hair, perhaps rather luxuriant but just too much of it, being trimmed into a very much more shapely sleek bob--all it takes is a couple strokes of the shears and two or three long locks falling away for the shape (startlingly, suddenly) to begin to emerge...

So I took the whole book to pieces and put it back together and then went ruthlessly through to see if I was really telling some kind of a story from start to finish, and it was amazing how many "locks" there were that still needed shearing away. What's strange is that it wasn't until so late in the process (I hope this book is really almost finished, at least for now!) that I could see the bones underneath.

I have abandoned my former chapter structure altogether, and I think I cut things from every chapter, but I have cut much more from the chapters on elocution and on culture than from the chapters that huddled round the more (as it were--the term is anachronistic, "biology" wasn't coined until the nineteenth century) biological material.

Here are a few paragraphs, then, that I have now entirely done away with from the book, and yet I like them enough in themselves to offer them up here on the blog...

By 1800, anxieties about regional differences in speaking had to some extent given way to ones about class, and writers attentive to questions of pronunciation increasingly targeted “cockney” rather than northern accents for the most passionate castigation, as in John Gibson Lockhart’s notorious 1817 attack on Leigh Hunt, John Keats and the “Cockney School of Poetry.” “All the great poets of our country have been men of some rank in society, and there is no vulgarity in any of their writings,” writes Lockhart; “but Mr Hunt cannot utter a dedication, or even a note, without betraying the Shibboleth of low birth and low habits. He is the ideal of a Cockney Poet.”

British novelists would become increasingly attuned to the sociolinguistic verisimilitude of representations of speech over the course of the nineteenth century, as when Gissing criticizes Dickens’ failure to take account of “the effects of conditions upon character” in making Oliver Twist (brought up in a workhouse) “as remarkable for purity of mind as for accuracy of grammar”: “Granted that Oliver was of gentle blood,” Gissing says, “heredity does not go as far as this.” The historical irony is that many features of the “cockney rhymes” so contemptuously singled out in Keats’s writings by Lockhart and later nineteenth-century commentators (laud-lord, vista-sister, Cytherea-ear) would become defining features of twentieth-century Received Pronunciation (RP), also known as BBC English, perhaps the country’s most generally admired dialect in the years following World War Two.

The promise that one might reinvent oneself by paying for a course of lectures in elocution would remain both alluring and problematic. Early twentieth-century England represented the culmination of the eighteenth-century social and cultural trend of equating social privilege with the right accent, a fact that had inconvenient repercussions for foreign-language productions of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, first staged in 1913 (Shaw wrote in a shorthand fragment that the play’s Swedish translator was stymied “by the fact, astounding to a Londoner, that in Stockholm all classes speak the same language”). Henry Higgins the elocutionist makes an excellent living in “an age of upstarts”: “Men begin in Kentish Town with £80 a year, and end in Park Lane with a hundred thousand,” he says. “They want to drop Kentish Town; but they give themselves away every time they open their mouths.” In a bet with a fellow linguist, Higgins takes on the job of transforming Eliza Doolittle from a flower-girl whose “kerbstone English . . . will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days” to “a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party”: “I could even get her a place as a lady’s maid or shop assistant, which requires better English,” he comments.

In some ways, Eliza is extraordinarily malleable. Higgins says of her, “She has a quick ear; and she’s been easier to teach than my middle-class pupils because she’s had to learn a complete new language. She talks English almost as you talk French.” But Higgins displays a failure of imagination when it comes to the real-world consequences of his willingness to break down social boundaries, no matter how unreasonable such boundaries are allowed to be. Like Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Higgins simply can’t see the destructive side of his attempt to reinvent and perfect another human being, and Shaw’s play has an unhappy ending, unlike the sunnier Lerner and Loewe adaptation My Fair Lady (1956 [stage], 1964 [film]). The damage results through the confluence of Eliza’s desire to improve herself, Higgins’ desire to test his powers and a social system that promises mobility only at a very high cost, a fact highlighted in Shaw’s depiction of Eliza’s father Alfred, a literary descendant of the “educated dustman” who originated on the variety stage and in the popular satirical prints of 1820s and 1830s London as a way of critiquing the so-called “March of Progress.” Alfred Doolittle’s peace of mind is permanently destroyed when Higgins inducts him into middle-class morality by way of his thoughtless recommendation of Doolittle to an American millionaire as England’s “most original moralist.” The upshot (in Doolittle’s mournful account) is that in order to “reckonize and respect merit in every class of life, however humble,” the millionaire leaves Doolitte three thousand pounds a year, provided he agrees to lecture to the Wannafeller Moral Reform League, thereby forever sundering Doolittle from what Shaw depicts as the amoral and thoroughly enjoyable idyll of undeserving poverty.

On perfectibility

From Malthus's witheringly sarcastic Essay on Population:

I am told that it is a maxim among the improvers of cattle, that you may breed to any degree of nicety you please, and they found this maxim upon another, which is, that some of the offspring will possess the desirable qualities of the parents in a greater degree. In the famous Leicestershire breed of sheep, the object is to procure them with small heads and small legs. Proceeding upon these breeding maxims, it is evident, that we might go on till the heads and legs were evanescent quantities; but this is so palpable an absurdity, that we may be quite sure that the premises are not just, and that there really is a limit, though we cannot see it, or say exactly where it is. In this case, the point of the greatest degree of improvement, or the smallest size of the head and legs, may be said to be undefined, but this is very different from unlimited, or from indefinite, in Mr. Condorcet’s acceptation of the term. Though I may not be able, in the present instance, to mark the limit, at which further improvement will stop, I can very easily mention a point at which it will not arrive. I should not scruple to assert, that were the breeding to continue for ever, the head and legs of these sheep would never be so small as the head and legs of a rat.

It cannot be true, therefore, that among animals, some of the offspring will possess the desirable qualities of the parents in a greater degree; or that animals are indefinitely perfectible.

...

It does not . . . seem impossible, that by an attention to breed, a certain degree of improvement, similar to that among animals, might take place among men. Whether intellect could be communicated may be a matter of doubt: but size, strength, beauty, complexion, and perhaps even longevity are in a degree transmissible. The error does not seem to lie, in supposing a small degree of improvement possible, but in not discriminating between a small improvement, the limit of which is undefined, and an improvement really unlimited. As the human race however could not be improved in this way, without condemning all the bad specimens to celibacy, it is not probable, that an attention to breed should ever become general; indeed, I know of no well-directed attempts of the kind, except in the ancient family of the Bickerstaffs, who are said to have been very successful in whitening the skins, and increasing the height of their race by prudent marriages, particularly by that very judicious cross with Maud, the milk-maid, by which some capital defects in the constitutions of the family were corrected.

Wonderful Englishes

Ian McMillan reviews Dohra Ahmad's anthology Rotten English, which sounds quite wonderful.

"The goal is to use as much chainsaw as possible"

Matt and Ted Lee in the Times magazine on the new ice sculptures.(Photo by Ben Stechschulte for the Times.)

Here's the Okamoto Studio website. I have a minor obsession with ice--I mean, almost everyone loves ice, this is nothing special about me--but my imagination is extremely stirred by northern landscapes, and the sequel to The Explosionist is loosely based on my particularly favorite Hans Christian Andersen story "The Snow Queen".

The two places I extremely want to go to: the Ice Hotel in Swedish Lapland (only the Canadian one might be easier to get to and also Jenny Diski explains why the actual ice hotel is rather evil in her quite wonderful book On Trying To Keep Still so I think I need a non-branded ice hotel experience--I desperately, desperately want to check out the whole reindeer thing) and the Harbin Ice Festival.

Here's a good Wikipedia article on ice hotels with a lot of links.

Bonfire of the brands

Neil Boorman on brand addiction and his decision to live brand-free:

It is a miserable business indeed, logging each of my lovely, branded possessions for imminent destruction. I find unworn clothes, still in their bags, price tags attached, stuffed behind boxes and furniture (classic symptom of a shopaholic). No one knows I have these things but me; I could easily stash them away for use in the brighter, branded future, when this insane project comes to an end. But what would be the point?

This is a taste of the branded items to be destroyed:

14 Ralph Lauren shirts: £910

2 YSL T-shirts: £150

2 Judy Blame T-shirts: £200

3 Lacoste polo shirts: £150

2 Vivienne Westwood shirts: £200

3 Siv Stoldal tops: £210

3 Nike T-shirts: £150

1 Kappa T-shirt: £40

1 Diadora track top: £40

2 Kilgour shirts: £240

2 Bernhard Willhelm sweatshirts: £300

That's just the tops - then there's the jeans, the jumpers, suits, coats, shoes, belts, caps and jewellery, luggage, a few bits of "name" furniture, electrical gadgets, cosmetics, household cleaners. The total cost? £21,115.

Hmmm--I wonder whether he has read Pattern Recognition...

The anti-war position

I saw a truly awful play last night, Charles Mee's Iphigenia 2.0. A cheap and unimaginative updating of Euripides, with none of the interest or complexity of the original. It's a pity, too, because the set's quite lovely--but as soon as the actor playing Agamemnon strode up to the front of the stage and started delivering an extremely talky and abstract monologue about politics, my heart sank--the writing's awful, the acting's pretty weak (due to bad direction, I felt, rather than lack of talent, it's a promising group), and the whole adaptation is muddled and ill-thought-through.

Mee doesn't seem to have intellectually figured out what he wanted to do--the Bush parallel is insisted upon very heavy-handedly, down to blond-Texas-style-party-girl daughter-casting, and yet the basic premise of the Euripides play (which I must reread, it's been too long...) does not really clearly have anything to do with Bush, this is hardly a man having inner torment or being torn as to whether or not to sacrifice his own child or whatever!

I spent most of the (mercifully brief) play trying to find a comfortable position to sit in that wouldn't make my leg muscles more sore than they were already and entertaining myself thinking of scathing observations to put on the blog.

(I was also sitting next to a fellow with a very rustly plastic bag, most annoying; it was one of the more incongruous book-spottings I've seen recently, BTW, he was a late-middle-aged man there with a woman who I presume was his wife, not at all untypical theatergoers, and yet up until the very minute the house lights went down he was absolutely glued--as I used to be glued when I was a child, prompting my brothers at dinnertime to chorus "No reading at the table!" or "Mom, Jenny's reading at the table again!"--one of Christine Feehan's Carpathian vampire novels...)

By the end, though, I had decided that it was punishment enough for these poor actors to have to be prancing around stage (in many cases half-naked) and that I would refrain from savaging the production as it seemed to deserve....

A heavenly dinner afterwards, at what is surely one of the very nicest restaurants in New York. It's unusual partly because while the food and the service are both at a very high standard, it's significantly more casual than most of the top-end places you go to round here, which is very nice. They don't make a big deal about seating you without a reservation, and the food is simply the loveliest imaginable thing, light enough and nutritious enough to be not horrendously different from eating a normal meal and yet the Platonic perfection of whatever thing it is you're eating. The restaurant is Esca: I had grilled Portuguese anchovies with capers to start, then a divine hunk of seared tuna with a panzanella salad that had one or two bite-sized pieces of about six different heirloom tomato varieties, then sorbet for dessert (and this is the most delicious sorbet imaginable--flavors different every night, last night it was blackberry-plum, blueberry and--most deliciously--white nectarine, with a cookie that is basically pure crisped-in-a-waffley-Dutch-type-fashion butter). They bring a little plate of petits-four at the end and I always think, "Oh, we are not really going to eat all of those," and then the next thing you know they are gone... Delicious!

Your voluptuous spaniel

Maniacal Friday-afternoon blogging...

Half of this I'm keeping, but the second half proves irrelevant, so I will preserve it here instead, to enable ruthless manuscript-cutting...

The first quotation is Charles Bonnet writing to the Italian physiologist Lazzaro Spallanzani, in the version published in the collection of Spallanzani’s writings that appeared in English in 1784:

You are not in possession of a sure and easy way of ascertaining what species can procreate together; and the experiments you propose attempting next spring, by putting your voluptuous spaniel in the company of cats and rabbits, promise not so far as those which you will make, by introducing the semen of this spaniel into the uterus of a doe-rabbit and a she-cat, and on the other hand, by introducing the semen of the male rabbit and cat into the uterus of a bitch. You hold in your hand a precious clue, which will guide you to the most important and unexpected discoveries. I know not, whether what you have now discovered, may not one day be applied in the human species to purposes we little think of, and of which the consequences will not be trivial. You conceive my meaning: however that may be, I consider the mystery of fecundation as nearly cleared up. What remains principally to be discovered, is the formation of the mule, and what occasions the different marks of resemblance between children and their parents.

I am sorry to say that Spallanzani did not succeed in bringing about the dog-cat hybrid he hoped for, but he retained his conviction that the experiments themselves were worthwhile:

Should any one of my injections prove prolific, and should the young partake, both in form and manners, of the female which conceived them, and the male that furnished the seed, I fancied, that the most singular mules, and such as had never been before seen, would now be produced. With respect to manners, two most opposite natures would be kneaded together and be confounded; the one, that of an animal susceptible of education, full of courage, abilities, and sentiment, all ardour, all affection, all obedience to his master; the other, that of an animal in internal qualities, far inferior, by instinct intractable, abhorring all subjection, faithless to its owner, affectionate only through interest, and born with an irreconcileable enmity to the former. Nor would the nature of these two animals engrafted together, be less different in a physical point of view[.]

Bonus link: the great eighteenth-century naturalist Buffon on the cat:

The cat is an unfaithful domestic, and kept only from the necessity we find of opposing him to other domestics still more incommodious, and which cannot be hunted; for we value not those people, who, being fond of all brutes, foolishly keep cats for their amusement. Though these animals, when young, are frolicksome and beautiful, they possess, at the same time, an innate malice, and perverse disposition, which increase as they grow up, and which education learns them to conceal, but not to subdue. From determined robbers, the best education can only convert them into flattering thieves; for they have the same address, subtlety, and desire of plunder. Like thieves, they know how to conceal their steps and their designs, to watch opportunities, to catch the proper moment for laying hold of their prey, to fly from punishment, and to remain at a distance till solicited to return. They easily assume the habits of society, but never acquire its manners; for they have only the appearance of attachment or friendship. This disingenuity of character is betrayed by the obliquity of their movements, and the duplicity of their eyes. They never look their best benefactor in the face; but, either from distrust or falseness, they approach him by windings, in order to procure caresses, in which they have no other pleasure than what arises from flattering those who bestow them.

The dictates of reason

Two quotations from Jonathan Swift, just to cheer you up for the day...

On population:

Encouraging marriage as all wise nations did, is an appendix to the Maxim of people the riches of a Nation; we ought to discourage it. The wretches we see with children.

On propagation:

Although reason were intended by providence to govern our passions, yet it seems that, in two points of the greatest moment to the being and continuance of the world, God hath intended our passions to prevail over reason. The first is, the propagation of our species, since no wise man ever married from the dictates of reason. The other is, the love of life, which, from the dictates of reason, every man would despise, and wish it at an end, or that it never had a beginning.

The rational and the desiring part

Jennie Erdal at the FT on various matters:

Some months ago I interviewed Margaret Atwood on the subject of poetry. She has a theory that poems come from a different part of the brain – the part that is in charge of melancholy. Atwood believes that if you were to write nothing but poetry, you might easily just feed that melancholy, and find yourself going down a long dark tunnel with no exit. The Door, her new collection of poems, is pretty dark, but when asked about this last week in a crowded tent at Edinburgh, she revealed her playful, ironic Atwoodian persona. All writers possess a fundamental optimism, she said. “To think first of all that you can start a book; then to believe you can finish it; find a publisher; persuade people to buy it; read it; and review it – well, I rest my case.”

(NB I do not agree with Erdal's earlier observations about Plato's Republic, I read it again not too long ago in Tom Griffith's excellent translation and found it extremely delightful and really very funny indeed...)

Get a Sight of the naked Body

One motif in the book I'm finishing concerns parallels between humans and horses, especially as they apply to questions of eugenic import. I've got a lot of really quite bizarre and interesting material, but one of my favorite passages comes from a rather demented book by Timothy Nourse, A Discourse Upon the Nature and Faculties of Man (1686):

Drifting into the mannequin

Sandra Blakeslee at the Times on a new study about the out-of-body experience:

The out-of-body experiments were conducted by two research groups using slightly different methods intended to expand the so-called rubber hand illusion.

In that illusion, people hide one hand in their lap and look at a rubber hand set on a table in front of them. As a researcher strokes the real hand and the rubber hand simultaneously with a stick, people have the vivid sense that the rubber hand is their own. When the rubber hand is whacked with a hammer, they wince and sometimes cry out.

The illusion shows that body parts can be “separated” from the whole body by manipulating a mismatch between touch and vision. That is, when a person’s brain sees the fake hand being stroked and feels the same sensation, the sense of being touched is misattributed to the fake.

The new experiments were designed to create a whole-body illusion with similar manipulations.

In Switzerland, Dr. Olaf Blanke, a neuroscientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, asked people to don virtual-reality goggles while standing in an empty room. A camera projected an image of each person taken from the back and displayed that image as if it were six feet in front of the subject, who thus saw an illusory image of himself.

Then Dr. Blanke stroked each person’s back for one minute with a stick while simultaneously projecting the image of the stick onto the illusory body.

When the strokes were synchronous, people reported the sensation of being momentarily within the illusory body. When the strokes were not synchronous, the illusion did not occur.

In another variation, Dr. Blanke projected a “rubber body” — a cheap mannequin bought on eBay and dressed in the same clothes as the subject — into the virtual-reality goggles. With synchronous strokes of the stick, people’s sense of self drifted into the mannequin.

The book that really stunned me around this sort of topic was V. S. Ramachandran's excellent Phantoms in the Brain (co-authored, I now remember, with Blakeslee). Another book recommendation, on an associated topic: Matt Ruff's wonderful Set This House In Order: A Romance of Souls.

Waifs, stray, orphans

The final (for now) installment, at Nextbook, of Marco Roth's memoir about his father. There's some desperately good writing here:

Given what I knew, his decision to keep his disease a secret from all but his two most trusted colleagues and his immediate family seemed strange. It was 1988, a time when the growing AIDS-awareness movement needed "innocent victims," that false category, to show that the disease was more than "God's punishment on drug addicts and homosexuals"—in the infamous phrase my father attributed to televangelist Pat Robertson. My father had not been quiet about humanitarian politics or his belief that biology was beyond good and evil. Only a few years earlier, he'd joined a group of doctors and musicians protesting the use of torture by US-supported regimes worldwide in their "dirty wars" against the Left. He'd visited torture victims in Danish hospitals and signed petitions. But now, facing a near-certain slow death, he suddenly developed a terror of softer forms of persecution: being forced to abandon his laboratory research, being hounded by rumors that would destroy his peace of mind; he feared, too, for how I would be treated at school and what my mother would have to hear from supposedly well-meaning friends. While still alive, he would donate his body to science, participating in a host of clinical trials for the antiretroviral drugs that, eventually, with reduced side effects, would make AIDS a treatable, albeit chronic, disease among those who could afford them. He would not, however, become a spectacle or a spokesperson. Privacy mattered more to him than the cause of "enlightenment" he'd spent much of his intellectual and public life defending.

So great was the power of this secret that I still feel a twinge of betrayal whenever I mention my father's illness in conversation. Also a great relief, followed quickly by something worse. For many years I'd only told a handful of people, mainly psychiatrists. It was my talisman, the sign of trust, as though by telling someone I gave them a special power over me, to wound or heal. I never knew how they would react. My nervousness would grow as the moment of truth approached, especially around women I've loved. Would I become, in that moment of revelation, a figure to be pitied rather than admired, an object for compassion instead of passion? Waifs, strays, and orphans are Dickensian tastes that mostly went out with my grandmother's generation. My father was right in a way to want me to stay dumb. What chances did I have in my girls-just-want-to-have-fun generation if I didn't keep things to myself? And what adolescent enjoys compacts of mutual pity? My first girlfriend sent me off to college health services for an AIDS test. Maybe she'd have asked anyone the same—testing your "partner" was practically part of the liberal arts curriculum in the early 90s—but I took it personally. "I haven't slept with my father," I told her, "or anyone else." "Do it for me," she said, and I did.

The Makepeace Institute of Integrated Dragon Studies

Shana Cohen has just informed me of a most exciting piece of literary news--Robin McKinley has a new novel called Dragonhaven coming out very shortly! Here's the publisher's website--mmm, this is now officially the book I most want to read in the world... anyone who can get me a copy in advance of the official publication date on Sept. 20 will earn extreme gratitude!

(If you have not read Sunshine, you are massively missing out, it is in my opinion pretty much the perfect light reading--I have read it at least three or four times, maybe more, and it was only published in 2003, so I do not even have the excuse of limited childhood book supply! All of McKinley's novels induce in me the need to reread compulsively, there is something uniquely delightful about her prose style and the nature of her imagination; I especially like what she does with those female main characters, and she writes so well about animals, too...)

The smell of napalm in the morning

It's not available online, but John Lahr has an interesting profile of Ian McKellen in this week's New Yorker:

McKellen's obsessive focus makes him a dangerous actor. "He likes the smell of napalm in the morning," the director Sir Richard Eyre said. He has a habit of inventing virtuoso challenges for his characters. While playing Richard III, for instance, with a withered arm, he stripped off his uniform to present himself bare-chested to Lady Anne. "In the soliloquy afterward, one-handed he had to dress himself, do all his buttons up, plus a clasp, take a cigarette out of his case and light it, and appear the perfect military man by the end," Eyre, who directed the 1990 Royal National Theatre production, said. "It was the apotheosis of technical virtuosity married to character." In Martin Sherman's "Bent" (1979), a play about the treatment of homosexuals in Nazi Germany, McKellen's character was forced by S.S. guards to beat his boyfriend to death and have sex with a dead girl to "prove" that he wasn't homosexual. "He did something that was phenomenal," Sherman said of McKellen's interpretation. "He was sitting there, and he defecated. It was very subtle--but you saw in his body the spasm, which is what a person does in a period of such shock. It was one of the most stunning things I've ever seen." Sherman continued, "After a month, he didn't do it any longer, because he was on to something else in the scene that he thought made it even more honest."

I saw that National Theatre production of "Richard III"--actually I would have to say I thought the film was better than the stage version...

Of course because I am an idiot I did not think of trying in time to get tickets to BAM, and now all of the Lear performances and all of the Seagull ones with McKellen are sold out! I am foiled!

Actually I have seen "The Seagull" several times also, once with Vanessa Redgrave in London c. 1985, and the other was the Central Park production with an excessively star-studded cast: both times I felt sorry for the poor actress--in the second case I believe it was Natalie Portman--who had to actually utter the words "I am a seagull," it is one of those speeches (rather like "My kingdom for a horse," come to think of it--a line handled very well in McKellen's film adaptation) which basically cannot be spoken these days with a straight face...

Aliens

At the TLS, John Fanshawe reviews Roger Lovegrove's Silent Fields: The long decline of a nation's wildlife:

Underlining Lovegrove’s book is a patient study of parish records. (Scotland is excluded from the analysis, and has a separate chapter devoted to killing there, including a section on the “wanton slaughter by English ‘sportsmen’ in the nineteenth century”.) Writing in 1768, Robert Smith described stoats as “prone to wanton killing”, and in the Cornish coastal parish of Morwenstow, Thomas Trumble specialized in killing these remarkable little mammals, taking thirty-four in 1694. Amazingly, gamekeepers on the Elveden Estate in Suffolk accounted for 8,883 in the decade beginning 1920. Numbers like these pepper Silent Fields and are a constant source of surprise. From Elspeth Veale’s seminal 1966 study, The English Fur Trade, emerges parallel evidence of excess killing in pursuit of regal finery. Henry VIII passed a final sumptuary Act in 1532 – the same year as his vermin law – regulating a hierarchy of who could wear which fur. Not that he stinted on his own account, using 350 (albeit imported) sable skins to line a single satin gown in 1530. Even this pales by comparison with his forebear Henry IV, whose “splendid robe-of-nine garments was made from 12,000 squirrel and 80 ermines”.

And here's an interesting bit about rabbits:

Rabbits have become pests comparatively recently, swapping places with species like wild cat and pine marten – current red-list causes célèbres. Introduced to Britain by the Normans, knowledge of rabbits’ reproductive capacities meant that their warrens were first confined to offshore islands (another demonstration of changing times, given the massive efforts now dedicated to eradicating “aliens” like cats, hedgehogs and rats from many of those same islands). As land-based warrens were established, often by monastic communities, rabbits dispersed and colonized with predictable success.

Very Watership Down, eh? (Goodness, some of those covers are inappropriate. I loved that book when I was a kid, I read it again and again, but it's very dark--almost all I remember of it now are the violent fight scenes and also the really chilling episode where the main rabbits temporarily take refuge with the sinister other rabbits who have developed art and culture in exchange for letting themselves be snared, it had a very horror-story feel to me at the time--I wonder what I would think now? Must take a look and see...)

Backyard astronomy

This story about the introduction of Google Sky makes me imagine heated back-room argument at the New York Times about whether the term "mash-up" is acceptable usage...

(It was a terrible affliction to the paper's sense of decorum a few years ago--and a comical benefit to the eye-rolling reader--when two books called On Bullshit and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City were both demanding frequent attention--a lot of locutions of the "Mr. Flynn, the author of a book whose full title cannot be printed in a family newspaper" sort. Oh, I wish they would just get with the modern world! This is coy rather than decorous...)

The lovely alphabet

Eric Ormsby at the Sun on the first English dictionary, published by Robert Cawdrey in 1604 and newly introduced by John Simpson:

Some of his entries are surprising. "Sacriledge" is defined as "church robbing, the stealing of holy things," rather than as "profanation." Is there a sly gibe here at his ecclesiastical overlords? Other entries mystify. He includes "boate," glossed simply as "ship," and yet this old English word can hardly have been obscure. Latinate words are given a literal sense, which was standard practice in Elizabethan England. "Preposterous" is glossed not as "absurd" but as "disorder, forward, topsiteruie, setting the cart before the horse, as we use to say," and this reflects the word's original meaning. There are some lovely lost words, such as "gibbocitie" ("crookedness") or "gargarise" ("to wash the mouth") and some delightful old spellings, as in "gnible" ("to bite").

This is a gnarled, rude, fierce old dictionary and utterly without "calliditie" ("craftiness, or deceit"). It may not provide much "clavicordes" ("mirth") and it certainly "maffles" ("stammers"), but it also "inchaunts"("bewitches"). It shows the raw stuff out of which Shakespeare and Cawdrey's other contemporaries of genius fashioned their more sublime flights. In his Puritan soul, Cawdrey would have considered these mere "blatterings" ("vaine babblings"), but his rough alphabet formed the bedrock on which they rode.

Anyone who likes dictionaries and has never seenthe episode of Blackadder featuring Johnson's dictionary, by the way, has a treat in store--I find it so funny that every time I've watched it I am literally weeping with laughter...

Alphabet talk

I could not resist the barrage of media attention--did it strike anyone other than me that this book has just been unrelentingly reviewed?!?--and so I obtained a copy of Spook Country and rather devoured it.

I was uneasily conscious during the first third or so of it perhaps not quite living up to my impossibly high expectations, that Gibson style strikes me as slightly mannered when I first encounter it, but then I found myself in the rhythm of it and really quite mesmerized. The lightness of his touch is remarkable, what he does with the language just gets me: the plot itself feels fairly familiar, though familiar partly because Gibson imagined this world before it came fully into existence, the tropes and characters are also fairly familiar, and yet when it's working right it's just magically good.

The best way to describe the experience of reading it, I think, is to say that it's what magical action movies with a technology theme and a hint of metaphyics should be but aren't: this has that strange aura that's more commonly associated with film than with novels, and in the best possible way. In particular, there's an action sequence set in and around Union Square that is quite wonderful (hmm, in a slightly earlier scene at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine I got distracted by the fact of the aftermath of the fire there not being acknowledged, that huge open space was all boarded up into corridors last time I was there, like the awful warren of renovations beneath King's Cross Station--novelist's prerogative says you can have alternate-world variants, but I wondered whether this was deliberate or not...); the novel follows three different characters, all appealing in their way, but the most alluring is the Chinese-Cuban boy called Tito with his backtucks and his mysterious "protocol" or systema and his ineffable gods the Guerreros. Beautiful stuff.

Anyway, here's a bit of language that especially caught my attention. It's a description of a landscape I've passed often on the train, never without being struck by it, and Gibson puts this into a rather amazing string of words, nothing consequential but a glimpse of the pleasures this book offers along the way:

There were ghosts in the Civil War trees, past Philadelphia.

Earlier the track had passed near streets of tiny row houses, in neighborhoods where poverty seemed to have been as efficient as the neutron bomb was said to be. Streets as denuded of population as their windows were of glass. The houses themselves seemed to belong less to another time than to another country; Belfast perhaps, after some sectarian biological attack. The shells of Japanese cars in the streets, belly down on bare rims.

Bonus link: Gibson talks to Deborah Solomon in the New York Times Magazine. The sentence "It was a pre-Heimlich restaurant" strikes me as very characteristic, I like that--mordant's the word...

Gazing upwards, as it were

Sometimes all it takes is a single word for me to know something's blog-suitable. Herewith, Rebecca Mead at the New Yorker on the culinary adventures of Tom Parker Bowles:

Since 2001, Tom Parker Bowles has been the food writer at Tatler, the British society magazine. He is also the author of a new book, “The Year of Eating Dangerously,” in which he chronicles his global culinary adventures: fugu in Japan, ultra-hot sauces in New Mexico, ant-egg salad in Laos, dog soup in South Korea. “The thing about food writing is that there are only about fifteen adjectives you can use—‘delicious,’ ‘delectable,’ ‘unctuous’—so that is why I moved to the disgusting side,” Parker Bowles explained over lunch recently.

He had chosen to eat at Scott’s, a new restaurant in Mayfair that serves, among other traditional British dishes, a variation of stargazy pie, a Cornish delicacy in which the cooked heads of pilchards poke through the piecrust. British food is, in Parker Bowles’s view, wrongly maligned. “Potted shrimp, clotted cream, our scones and our baking—we have one of the richest food heritages in the world,” he said, through mouthfuls of smoked sardines with soft-boiled duck’s egg.

The word of course is stargazy...

Here's what the OED has to say:

1847 J. O. HALLIWELL Dict. Archaic & Provinc. Words II. 799/1 Starry-gazy-pie. A pie made of pilchards and leeks, the heads of the pilchards appearing through the crust as if they were studying the stars. Cornw. 1864 F. T. O'DONOGHUE St. Knighton's Keive: a Cornish Tale Gloss. 303 Star-a-gaze pie, a mackerel pie with the heads above the paste, gazing upwards, as it were. 1954 D. HARTLEY Food in England x. 246 Stargazey pies. These are properly made of pilchards... The cooks covered the body of the fishbut left the head sticking out. 1966 Punch 14 Sept. 385/1 To provide the dishes that one's forbears ateroast saddle of hare,..or stargazy pie, or syllabubwould be to proclaim oneself madly affected. 1970 A. PASCOE Cornish Recipes Old & New 30 (heading) Star~gazy pie. 1980 ABMR Feb. 75/1, I now believe that heavy cake, like starry-gazey pie, was originally made from pilchards.

I love how it is an adjectival back-formation from the already quite delightful (because hyphenated) verb star-gaze. One effect blogging has had on my prose style is to make me dangerously uninhibited about turning almost anything (even quite a long string of words) into an adjective....A good picture and a recipe from Ben Bush at the Food and Drink in London blog:

They were even using the word 'hermeneutic'!

Terry Castle has a very funny piece at the LRB. Hmmm, I wonder whether she is writing a full-length memoir, that would be excellent! The part about rubber stamps is especially good (Castle is traveling with her girlfriend and her mother in Santa Fe):

I get my first inkling that my daughterly snobisme (it sounds even worse in French) is about to be compromised when my mother spots the rubber-stamp store. We’ve been indecisive so far about what museum to do first; just then Stampa Fe floats into view. One of my mother’s polymer clay pals has said it’s great and she’s instantly psyched. Panting a bit, Blakey and I hoist her and chair up the stairs (it’s on an upper floor and there’s no elevator) and I wheel her in – unable to suppress my own rapidly growing excitement. For I too, I’m chagrined to confess, am a rubber-stamp addict. As Bugs Bunny might say: a weal wubber-stamp fweak. I’ve got hundreds at home; they’re taking over all the drawers in the work table in the spare room. Blakey rolls her eyes, sits down, pulls Richard Rorty out of her bag and prepares to wait for several hours.

I guess I left this part out earlier: that I’m as ‘arty’ as my old mum. Can’t help it: it’s a mutant gene, like homosexuality. And though I can neither draw nor paint I’m fairly good at working around my limitations. Like numerous five and six-year-olds – or Max Ernst and Hannah Höch, as we ‘creatives’ prefer to say – I do collage. Rubber stamps, along with scissors and glue and glossy pages ripped out from The World of Interiors, are an essential part of my praxis. (I have the art-world jargon down pat. Yeah, I work in mixed media. Gagosian’s doing my next show.) It has not escaped my notice that even in London at the very centre of the intellectual cosmos – the London Review Bookshop on Bury Place – there’s a rubber-stamp shop right next door. Titillating to admit, but as local surveillance cameras would no doubt corroborate, I have sometimes been seen to nip into Blade Rubber (‘the biggest range of stamps and accessories in London’) even before I go next door – Game Face on – to peruse the latest tomes on Stalinism or global economics.

What sorts of subject have I tackled? Blakey informs me that it is called ‘blog whoring’ to publicise one’s blog in print, so I won’t even mention Fevered Brain Productions, my digital art website. Oops, it popped out. Let’s just say I’m a neo-surrealist – a bit dark, a bit Goth, a bit grunge – a sort of lady Hans Bellmer. As a child I was enchanted by the Surrealists’ Exquisite Cadavers game – the one in which you make comic figures out of mismatched body parts. This love of the grotesque has never gone away: even today, I enjoy putting dog or cat heads on human bodies and vice versa. Always on the lookout for detached torsos, legs, feet, hands, eyeballs, lips etc – anything to dérégler the senses, if only a teeny bit.

In Stampa Fe my mother and I go on a mad bacchanalian spree. Piling stamp blocks into my basket, I am even less restrained, I’m sorry to say, than she is. (Given her eyesight problem and seated position she has to struggle and claw a bit to drag things down to her level.) I try to pretend that the stamps I’m grabbing up are ‘cool’ – that my choices express my highly evolved if not Firbankian sense of camp. Thus I eschew the ubiquitous Frida K; ditto anything with Day of the Dead skeletons on it. I avert my eyes from a stamp showing Georgia O’Keeffe in her jaunty gaucho hat. But somehow I end up with things just as bad: a Japanese carp; multiple images of the Virgin of Guadaloupe; a slightly dazed-looking cormorant; a sumo wrestler kicking one of his fat legs in the air; a woodcut style picture of little people with sombreros on putting loaves into a mudbaked Mexican oven. Despite a longstanding ban on rubber stamps (or coffee cups) with sayings on them – Cherish Life’s Moments, Happy Easter, You Make Me Smile – I succumb to A NEW THRILL FOR THE JADED. I’ll stamp the envelope with it when I send off my next property tax bill.

When we finish our sweep and I’m swaying groggily at the cash register – my mother slumped in her chair behind me like a satisfied pythoness – I’m forced to confront a terrible possibility: that Mavis and I may actually be more alike than I prefer to believe. (B. has sometimes intimated as much.) Even as the plastic machine regurgitates my Visa card with a malevolent whirr, I’m flooding with self-doubt. Whom am I kidding, after all? Is a lurching sumo wrestler in a loincloth really any less vulgar, aesthetically speaking, than my mother’s mermaids or kitty cats? Than a frog wearing a top hat? A poodle playing a tuba? An abyss seems to open up for a moment: I see, as if in Pisgah-vision, the appalling triteness of my sensibility. Forget Agnes Martin: I’m as banal and bourgeois as any of the hundreds of thousands of middle-aged ladies who do ‘scrapbooking’. (See Google for depressing lowdown on this new billion-dollar US leisure industry – the postmodern white-suburban-female equivalent of cyberporn.) And with my mother egging me on, just as she did when I was a child, I clearly can’t control myself. When B. finally comes to drag us away from the place we look like the survivors of a jungle plane crash who have had to resort to cannibalism to survive: the same foam-flecked lips, hollow cheeks and shifty, demented expressions.

And here are the visual aids....

3 painful hours and 32 dreadful minutes

I don't usually post here about particular students or indeed about people I know more generally, it's a privacy thing, but for some reason the month of August is a time of year when lots of former students check back in to tell me how they're doing, which is very nice. I have had various dinners and breakfasts and such and the agricultural image of reaping what you sow, though it is a terrible cliche, certainly comes to mind...

Tonight I'm having coffee with one of my very first Columbia students. Wei was in my first Literature Humanitiesclass, in the fall of 2000, and it has been very delightful ever since following his progress through the world. He's starting a PhD in history this fall, which is great, but he also at some point intervening fell in love with long-distance running, which is now an important thing we share.

So I thought I'd link again to his quite wonderful guest post about running the New York Marathon this past fall (scroll down, it's below some digressive thoughts of my own on running and eighteenth-century literature...).

Here are the last two paragraphs of the race report, which I especially love and which will make anyone who's ever run for quite a long time laugh in delighted sympathy:

3 painful hours and 32 dreadful minutes into the race, I entered the very last course of the battle, with one mile left to the race. My legs felt like they were being stitched up by strings. If I ran any faster, I might break the strings and tear my legs apart. My vision became blurry, losing concentration gradually. Every step I made caused me a great deal of agonizing sharp pain. It was too late to give up now. I had worked too hard to stop running! I had to finish the race even if I were to become incapacitated afterward. I slowly regained some energy as I saw a sign stated "100 yards to go". Fuel by my excitement, I ignored the pain and dashed through the finish line. I did it. I finished the marathon in 3 hours and 44 minutes with one month of training. It was a miracle. My therapist was skeptical that I could run a marathon with my bad ankle.

Training for the marathon has changed my life forever. This greatest physical feat made me humbled. I have a great respect for running and all serious runners. Some zealous runners might say running is fun. But I don't consider running fun. Fun doesn't involve with intense pain. Watching a movie, taking a stroll in the park, or reading a book is considered fun. Running is a discipline one has to master. It takes hours and hours of tedious stepping movements. It is painful! There isn't a real runner who hasn't had some kind of pain that is directly resulted from running. In that case, running is painful and boring! However, many runners like myself find satisfaction in running. Through running, I've learned a great deal about myself. I know how and when to push my limit. I stay with a healthy diet in order to enhance my performance. Running keeps me motivated, energetic, and confident. I know that every time I feel down, running will help clear my head. Running a marathon is the ultimate way to satisfy my life and quench my thirst for challenge. The conclusion of this marathon is the next chapter of my venture. I will run more and more as long as I can.

The trouble with lichen

A book I must read, Nicholas Money's Mr. Bloomfield's Orchard, described here by Burkhard Bilger in a piece on mushroom-hunters published last week in the New Yorker (not available online):

The kingdom of fungi is so vast and varied--it also includes yeasts, molds, and lichen--that early taxonomists labelled one of its branches "Chaos fungorum." One species eats granite; another grows in Antarctica, an inch or so every five hundred years; yet another thrives in a Chilean desert on a diet of fog. Fungal spores are so lightweight and compact that a single bracket fungus can release thirty billion of them a day. The air we breathe is thick with spores.

Given the opportunity of a weakened immune system, some fungi are more than happy to colonize our bodies. In "Mr. Bloomfield's Orchard," published in 2002, the mycologist Nicholas Money recalls seeing "photographs of ink-cap mushrooms growing in a patient's throat, a little bracket-forming basidiomycete in a gentleman's nose, dead babies covered in yeast, vaginal thrush gone wild, and a moldy penis that infected my nightmares for a month." In 1994, he adds, some teen-agers in Wisconsin had to be hospitalized after snorting puffball spores in the hope of hallucinating. The spores promptly lodged in their lungs.

All endowed widh speech

Quite a few of the passages I've been putting up here from the breeding book are things I'm cutting; this, I think, will stay, but I can't resist posting it in any case. There was actually a huge wave of interest in spelling reform in the late eighteenth century in Britain, but this particular passage is from the first volume of James Elphinston's Propriety Ascertained in her Picture; Or, Inglish Speech and Spelling Rendered Mutual Guides (London: Jon Walter, 1787):

FROM long and attentive discrimminacion ov livving speech, in dhe center ov Inglish purity: haz been at last completed a picture, hwich TRUITH can stamp widh dhe name ov INGLISH ORTHOGGRAPHY: dhat sacred depozzit, hware LONDON, in prime pollish, first sees hwat she says, and hwat dherfore she haz onely to’ prezerv; but hware dhoze, hoo cannot hear her, may also see it; and, confiding in a delinneacion so authenticated; may speedily imbibe in dhe remotest corners a purity, hwich Coarts doo not always bestow. Hwile all endowed widh speech, ar dhus interested in propriety; such members ov dhe Metroppolis, az hav had dhe good-fortune, (hweddher from dellicate edducacion, or from incorruptibel taste) ov keeping equally free from grocenes, and from affectacion; hav doutles a chance, if stil but a chance, for purity. But dhe distant hav no possibel chance, unless from repprezentacion. If dherfore a few cood, az non can, be sure ov edher acquiring or prezerving Propriety, widhout an attested Picture; widhout dhat Theory, strictly so called, hwich can alone emboddy livving Practice; indispensabel wood be such Picture or Theory, to’ dhe grait majorrity, even ov dhe Brittish Cappital.

Life stories

Paul Collins at Weekend Stubble on the problem of biography:

The longer I write biography, the more hesitant I become to use standard bio segues like "He was a broken man now." Broken to who?... To you? ... To him? Is he broken every minute of the day? The formulation is a specious one.

The living version

Luc Sante at the NYTBR on the new edition of Jack Kerouac's original manuscript version of On The Road, the first draft of which was typed in three weeks onto a single long scroll of paper (taped-together sheets of tracing paper--I love that stuff, haven't seen it since I was a kid, must get some and see what literary uses it might be put to--what I really wish I had, though, is a roll of the very old-fashioned stiff shiny toilet paper that my English grandfather insisted on having, it was a real curiosity!).

Some interesting reflections here on style:

Besides changing all the names (arguably necessary for legal reasons) and cutting or veiling the depictions of sex (very necessary in 1957), Kerouac altered the scroll to make it a novel mostly by garnishing it with sprigs and drizzles of literature. One of the most famous passages in the novel appears here — the ellipses are Kerouac’s — as “the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing ... but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night.” In the novel he inserts “mad to be saved,” while the roman candles become “fabulous” and they are “exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’ ” Concerned that he might not have sufficiently overegged the pudding, Kerouac then adds, “What did they call such young people in Goethe’s Germany?” None of this sort of eager-beaver poeticizing litters the scroll, which just keeps its head down and runs, and is all the more authentically literary thereby.

It's interesting, this question of whether material and/or style pull a writer in the direction of fiction or non-fiction. Certainly there is writing that only magically comes alive when it enters the fully fictional terrain. And yet I feel I more often read fiction that would perhaps better have been cast as memoir, with all its enabling particularities--"honesty" and "vividness" are of course literary effects, when we talk of a novel's truthfulness we are really speaking more of its style than of any necessary correspondence between what it asserts and what really happened in the world...

(Robert Polito said of Mary Karr's The Liars' Club--an amazingly well-written book, by the way, the language is quite magical--that she initially drafted much of the material as fiction, but that the voice and language only came alive once she reconceived the book as memoir. I am sure there are instances of the opposite, also, though I do not have any immediately to hand--but something like Rebecca West's recasting of heavily autobiographical material into The Fountain Overflows--my favorite novel of all time--would probably count, or the way someone like Dickens might sound excessively self-pitying or self-indulgent when writing about his actual childhood in a letter but transforms the material into something magical in David Copperfield.)

The innate human capacity for self-deception

Stuart Stevens has a wonderfully appealing piece in the Times about the lure of endurance sports. Really I am such a total novice that it is purely speculative, but for at least half of this piece (not so much the part where he wants to punch people!) he is totally taking the words out of my mouth, he explains the appeal of the whole business remarkably well, it is exactly what I think!

Hmmm ... interesting... I do not live in a part of the country where it would be practical to take up Nordic skiing, but as he says, really triathlon is the way to go:

Even though I was mediocre on my best days, my obsession with cross-country skiing gave me an entirely new perspective on life and self.

Then, when the season was over, I told myself it was time to grow up and get serious about pursuits worthy of an adult. Reluctantly, I moved on, working as a writer and as a political consultant, which, if nothing else, served as an outlet for my violent tendencies. But it didn’t take long to realize that my taste of the endurance life had created a hunger that normal life didn’t come close to satisfying.

Endurance sports brought order to my days. In an ever-confusing and chaotic world in which truth seems elusive, a serious training session or race made it inescapable. Truth, often ugly and disappointing but honest, was impossible to deny.

But as you get older and life becomes more complicated, it’s easy to start questioning the value of spending huge chunks of your days going in what amounts to glorified circles. One morning you wake up and it suddenly hits you — all the things you could be doing with an extra 15 to 25 hours a week. It’s an entirely rational epiphany and one that must, of course, be crushed immediately.

The key is to reassure yourself that what you are doing is perfectly normal and worthwhile and that it’s all those other people who clearly don’t understand the true meaning of life. I’m sure that’s how Jim Jones or David Koresh kept wavering disciples from leaving the cult — What are you, crazy? We have everything figured out. Here, drink some of this.

My personal garden of Gethsemane came after an encounter between my bike and a cement truck about a month before an Ironman race. Almost inevitably, I’d fallen into a triathlon stage, a near mandatory passage for someone like me — middle-aged, unaccomplished at any specific sport, afflicted with an equipment fetish and in desperate need of new ways to underperform. Why be good at one sport when you can be unimpressive at three?

The sheer joy of wild swimming

Sam Murphy at the FT on the renewed popularity of open-water swimming. I hereby make a vow that I am going to have as many outdoor swims as possible in 2008, I must go somewhere for a few days where I can do it a lot (Walden Pond!) and I must also find some way to do it regularly in New York. This isn't just a matter of triathlon obsession, it will be good for the soul...

When I was running along the Hudson the other morning, just at the point below 70th St. where I turn around because it is either the funny little landscaped bit and then homewards or else the slightly off-putting underpass bike path, I saw an older man who was poised quite statue-like at the barrier before the water. He was a rather peach-colored bronzey tone and from a distance I really did think he was either a kind of pylon of some sort or perhaps a statue--only as I got closer did I realize he was mostly naked, except for a tiny Speedo-type bathing suit, sort of leaning over the edge of the rail. I do not know what he intended, I think perhaps it is not really legally allowed to pop over the edge and go for a swim (and I wonder what he did with the rest of his clothes!), but I would like to think perhaps that was what he did anyway...

Cafe Society

Caryl Phillips at the Guardian on the genesis of the song "Strange Fruit".

Character flaws

John Baker asked me earlier this summer to contribute to a series he's posting on his blog about the phases involved in creating a text, and here are my thoughts. Hmmm--I fear I sound slightly awful, I remember writing this as a maniacal middle-of-the-night e-mail, it is rather horrifyingly resolute and opinionated! I sound excessively sure of myself...

Secret masterpieces

Oh, I must get a copy of Félix Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines, newly translated by Luc Sante for NYRB books: "Novels in Three Lines collects more than a thousand items that appeared anonymously in the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906—true stories of murder, mayhem, and everyday life presented with a ruthless economy that provokes laughter even as it shocks."

Here's the featured excerpt from Sante's introduction--sounds pretty amazing, eh?

Fénéon's three-line news items, considered as a single work, represent a crucial if hitherto overlooked milestone in the history of modernism.... They are the poems and novels he never otherwise wrote, or at least did not publish or preserve. They demonstrate in miniature his epigrammatic flair, his exquisite timing, his pinpoint precision of language, his exceedingly dry humor, his calculated effrontery, his tenderness and cruelty, his contained outrage. His politics, his aesthetics, his curiosity and sympathy are all on view, albeit applied with tweezers and delineated with a single-hair brush. And they depict the France of 1906 in its full breadth, on a canvas of reduced scale but proportionate vastness. They might be considered Fénéon's Human Comedy.

Temperamentally, I think I am unlikely to take to a literary form of great brevity, but I am hoping that one of these days I will come up with the perfect structural device for a project that can be measured in teaspoonfuls...

The lovely semi-colon

Helen DeWitt on the trials and tribulations of being a person who really cares about punctuation.

The testes of our Grandsire Adam

I first learned this many years ago, but it's kind of one of those lessons you have to learn again and again as a writer: things that are interesting in themselves but mostly irrelevant to the main story detract from the book as a whole if they are left in. So: cut.

(The slogan for this kind of work: easy come, easy go...)

In any case, here's another bit that's going to have to go from the book (though I am tempted to include the references as one long footnote, since the book titles themselves are so irresistible...):

A high-profile confrontation between two London doctors in the 1710s and 1720s over the powers of the maternal imagination reveals some surprising aspects of contemporary accounts of resemblance between parents and children. Daniel Turner was a London surgeon best known for his treatment of venereal disease and other diseases of the skin, James Blondel a physician who practiced in London after emigrating from France. In 1714, Turner published a treatise on diseases of the skin that included a relatively uncontroversial chapter on the power of the maternal imagination to mark the skin of the fetus. Then, in 1726, a woman named Mary Toft claimed to have given birth to seventeen rabbits in Godalming, Surrey. She became a celebrity before being exposed as a fraud and thrown into Bridewell. Following this episode, James Blondel wrote a scathing critique of the idea that the mother’s imagination produced deformities in children, one which Turner understood as a personal attack. Turner accordingly responded with a passionate defense of the doctrine of the imagination in which he contrasted the supposed absurdity of that doctrine with what he felt to be the very real absurdity of the theory of preformation, which was coming to dominate scientific accounts of generation. Turner claims that his own credulity is not

half so great, in believing the Causes here assign’d, to be the real ones of the several Appearances, . . . as it would be, should I go about to persuade myself or others, that the curtail’d Hand [a pregnant woman took fright at the sight of an amputee and later gave birth to a child missing a hand], or the Similitudes before observ’d, were many thousand Years ago thus mutilated in Eve’s Ovarium, or the Animalcules . . . thus disorder’d at the same time by some Accident in the Testes of our Grandsire Adam.

In response, Blondel heaps scorn on Turner’s belief in the literal truth of the story of Jacob and Laban’s sheep and calls for what modern scientists might call reproducible results if the theory is to be accepted: “Let Dr. Turner endeavour by pilled Rods, Pictures, Frights, or otherwise, to have a Breed of Cattel different in Colour from the Males and Females they come from, or to change the Fleece of the Lambs in Utero as his Will and Pleasure, from Black into White, or from White into Black, then if he has any Success; then, (and not before) I will be ready to own him in the Right and my self in the wrong,” he writes.

It becomes clear over the course of the book that Blondel opposes any advancement of the theory of maternal imagination at the expense of the theory of preformation to which he subscribes. Blondel’s own beliefs incline more towards the ovist position (associated with Harvey), in which all parts of the fetus already exist in the egg before conception and in which the male semen is nothing more than a kind of manure for the ovum, than to the animalculist version associated with Leeuwenhoek. Both versions of preformation assume that the parts exist before conception, and that imagination accordingly cannot “obliterate the Lineaments of the Foetus, which were preexistent to Conception, and subsisting, even since the Creation of the World.” Blondel’s assertion of preformation could hardly be stronger: “there’s no Child born, but the Lineaments of its Body have been somewhere from the first Creation, and in that somewhere liable to many Vicissitudes. The Opinion, which is now generally received, is, that the somewhere was in a primitive Ovum, which had several Ovula involved one within another,” he writes, adding that there is not one fetus currently in existence “but has been successively in the Ovary of Two Hundred and Fifty Persons at least.” In this account, preformation represents a striking scientific advance, a theory that explodes the now outdated model of the mother’s imagination as chief engine of resemblance.

I am too lazy to find a way to reproduce the references, since footnotes won't paste in from Microsoft Word, but here are the lovely titles of the primary sources I drew on for these paragraphs (I am in love with the word "gleets"!)--listing them in chronological order like this tells its own comical story of irritable controversy and mutual thwarting!:

Daniel Turner, De Morbis Cutaneis. A Treatise of Diseases Incident to the Skin (London: R. Bonwicke et al., 1714).

[James Blondel], The Strength of Imagination in Pregnant Women Examin’d: And the Opinion that Marks and Deformities In Children arise from thence, Demonstrated to be a Vulgar Error (1726; London: J. Peele, 1727).

Daniel Turner, A Discourse Concerning Gleets. Their Cause and Cure. . . . To which is added, A Defence of the 12th Chapter of the first Part of a Treatise de Morbis Cutaneis, in respect to the Spots and Marks impress’d upon the Skin of the Foetus, by the Force of the Mother’s Fancy: Containing some Remarks upon a Discourse lately printed and entituled, The Strength of Imagination in pregnant Women examin’d, & c. Whereby it is made plain, notwithstanding all the Objections therein, that the said Imagination in the Pregnant Woman, is capable of maiming, and does often both mutilate and mark the Foetus, or that the same, as he insinuates, is not a vulgar Error (London: John Clarke, 1729).

James Augustus Blondel, The Power of the Mother’s Imagination over the Foetus Examin’d. In Answer to Dr. Daniel Turner’s Book, Intitled A Defence of the XXIIth Chapter of the First Part of a Treatise, De Morbis Cutaneis (London: John Brotherton, 1729).

Daniel Turner, The Force of the Mother’s Imagination upon her Foetus in Utero, Still farther considered: In the Way of a Reply to Dr. Blondel’s last Book (London: J. Walthoe et al., 1730).

(I like that "Still farther considered"!)

J. H. Mauclerc, The Power of Imagination in Pregnant Women discussed: With an Address to the Ladies, on the Occasion (London: J. Robinson, 1740).

John Henry Mauclerc, Dr. Blondel confuted: or, The Ladies vindicated, With Regard to the Power of Imagination in Pregnant Women (London: M. Cooper, 1747).

[Isaac Bellet], Lettres sur le pouvoir de l’imagination des femmes enceintes. Où l’on combat le préjugé qui attribue à l’imagination des Meres le pouvoir d’imprimer sur le Corps des Enfans renfermés dans leur sein la figure des objets qui les attrapées (Paris: Frères Guerin, 1745).

And so it goes...

A limbic ecstasy

Tim Page has an extremely interesting piece in this week's New Yorker on life with Asperger's. The two things that induct him, so to speak, into a fuller human life are Emily Post's "Etiquette" and a radio broadcast of the prelude to "Das Rheingold":

The word that year was "psychedelic," and I had no idea what it meant, although I had gleaned that "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," Peter Max posters, certain novels by Hermann Hesse, and the whole city of San Francisco were awash in this new and magical quality. And then Wagner's depiction of the River Rhine started to play and a flowering drone filled my head; time was suspended, and I was transformed.

Much has been made of Wagner's harmonic restlessness--of the way that a work such as "Tristan und Isolde" led inexorably to the so-called "atonality" of Arnold Schoenberg and his myriad disciples. But what astonished me in "Das Rheingold," although I couldn't have stated it then, was the opposite quality: the opera's unprecedented harmonic stasis, the manner in which it explored the churning inner life of sustained chords, from the three amazing minutes of E-Flat Major that set the score in motion through the affirmation of the Gods, Valhalla, and the eternal D-Flat Major at the end.

This was music that one could dwell in, a sort of sonic weather. I loved its resistance to change, its protracted unfolding, its mantric sense of perpetual return. A large part of my career has been devoted to writing about music, and I date my first more or less mature criticism to the world premiere of another composition that shared some of these same qualities, Steve Reich's "Music For 18 Musicians," which I heard in New York, at the Town Hall, in April of 1976.

....

Today, I find myself wondering if I would have responded so profoundly to this starkly reiterative, rigidily patterned music had I not had Asperger's syndrome. This is not an aesthetic cop-out: I can make an intellectual case for minimalism, and I am hardly the only writer who has done so. But its initial appeal for me was purely visceral. As the Quakers might say, this music spoke to my condition. (I would later experience a similar, curiously mechanical limbic ecstasy upon a first encounter with "Last Year at Marienbad.")

They wanted something amazing in tile

The official Swim Lit post...

Kimberly Stevens has an amazing article about high-end swimming pools in the Times today. It reads almost like satire (it's the quotations that do it, let us all make a mental note to be very very careful what we say to the press! Stevens has a good ear for the absurd...):

Mr. Nagel said that most of his clients are interested in being “the envy of all their friends.” He is currently working on an all-marble pool in the shape of a dolphin — 60 feet from nose to tail — for the home of Ken and Georgia Chamitoff in Palmdale, Calif., which he estimates will cost nearly $300,000; the idea came from their 8-year-old daughter, Sophia. A hot tub will bubble by the dolphin’s head and a slide will drop down along the curve of its dorsal fin. “When you think you’ve heard it all, there’s always the client who comes up with something off the chart,” Mr. Nagel said.

“We didn’t want the typical tropical lagoon that everyone else has in the backyard,” Mrs. Chamitoff explained. “I think it was important to Ken that Sophia could talk about having a dolphin pool with her friends at school.”

Lou Downes, the owner of Downes Swimming Pool Company in Arlington Heights, Ill., which specializes in high-end pools, said some of the requests he gets are too outrageous to be realistic. “Everyone has this James Bond fantasy of swimming from the outdoor pool through a tunnel into the indoor pool,” he said. “We try to make everyone happy, but this just isn’t practical.”

For those clients, he recommends separate indoor and outdoor pools, like the ones he’s working on for a couple outside Chicago, with a koi pond visually linking the outdoor and indoor pools. The outdoor pool, which will have fiber-optically lighted and computer synchronized water jets, will cost about $1 million, Mr. Downes said; the whole project will be almost $2 million. “For me, high-end goes far beyond the price tag,” Mr. Downes said. “It’s more of a philosophy: It’s the blending of the finest materials and the most recent technology and a client who has a dream.”

The pictures will blow your mind--only of course one symptom of my swimming obsession is that all of these pools would be totally inappropriate for the kind of swimming I want to do, I need a grungy swimming pool with a good coach!

I cannot remember a summer when I've had so little light reading, it's pretty strange. I have read a few novels here and there, including Cecil Castellucci's Boy Proof (a non-guilty pleasure) and Stephenie Meyer's New Moon (definite guilty pleasure--Liesl Schillinger had a rather brilliant review in the NYTBR this past weekend that tactfully manages to get across why these books are at once quite trashy and rather irresistible).

My main guilty reading pleasure this summer, though, has been triathlon blogs, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that every waking hour is spent either thinking about the book I'm finishing or else either training for or thinking about training for future triathlons!

And I have been feeling the light reading fit coming on me rather strongly (this is where I have to just dementedly read a few books in a row as a break from normal life), and so I gave way to it--last week I maniacally requested a host of cycling- and swimming-related books from the blessed BorrowDirect, which is certainly one of the unequivocal goods in life (hmmm, these swimming books all seem to have come from the Princeton library, interesting...)--the swimming recommendations were from a great site called Timed Finals that Wendy tipped me off to. I had only read two of the five book recommendations, so it was clear what had to be done...

(NB in many respects cycling is a more obvious fit for literature than swimming, cycling has a demented hobbyist/cultural history element that leads to a high overlap between cyclists and writers, but perhaps there will be more swimmer-writers in future, that would be good!)

I am now immensely better-informed about swimming than I was previously, I think that for those who do know about it it will be hard to conceive my prior ignorance! I had never heard of Mark Spitz! And also a fog of confusion surrounded my apprehension of the mystery of why there are 25-yard pools, 25-meter pools and 50-meter pools, and more particularly why Columbia for instance does not have an Olympic i.e. 50-meter pool! Fascinating (the Mullen book is especially informative)....

Anyway, thoughts on the different books:

Michael Silver's Golden Girl: How Natalie Coughlin Fought Back, Challenged Conventional Wisdom, and Became America's Olympic Champion has both the strengths and the weaknesses of conventional sports writing. The book has some redundancies (chapters don't seem to have been edited for consistency, so that we are told the same facts again at the beginning of the next chapter without any acknowledgement that the information isn't new), the character studies are a bit pro forma and the narrative arc isn't perhaps quite as compelling as it needed to be--there is simply no way, for instance, to portray Coughlin as an underdog at the outset, though Silver tries to make her shoulder injury do this kind of work. On the other hand, it's a grippingly interesting portrait of collegiate swimming (total through-the-looking-glass effect for me--I know universities really well, and of course this whole world is a closed book to me--a closed book that's rapidly opening its pages, however, which I like...--but it is slightly horrifying to think about how little academics matter from this standpoint!), and Silver is particularly good at writing about Berkeley coach Teri McKeever's unusual coaching style. I think the best chapters in the book are the ones that describe stroke guru Milt Nelms' work with Coughlin, the theory and practice of McKeever's workouts and particularly Coughlin's own uncanny body-awareness and ability to incorporate feedback directly into her stroke. Very interesting stuff, very enjoyable read.

P. H. Mullen's Gold in the Water: The True Story of Ordinary Men and Their Extraordinary Dream of Olympic Glory is a considerably better book than Silver's (he's got a compelling narrative and also a gift for bringing characters to life that Silver simply doesn't have, though Silver has considerable strengths as a writer also), but marred by an awful melodramatic streak that made me crazy while I was reading it! It's such a gripping book, I think almost anybody would find it interesting (and it's immensely well-informed, I learned a huge amount from it about the history of swimming, collegiate and Olympic swimming, etc.), and yet that Hemingwayesque streak of glorification of struggle is disagreeable to me. I buy the arguments about sports and training and character, and yet it seems to me that some slightly more ordinary virtues are also important here, it need not always be a massive existential struggle coming to psychological climax! If I could have cut out the 10% of grandiosity here ("The liminal period is one of the only common experiences that exist in nearly all cultures and religions. . . before the rite of passage is completed, the participant exists in a disordered and marginalized space of confusion"; "When we die, we choose a moment to replay and relive for eternity" [hmm, that seems to me distinctly unlikely!]), and the 10% of slight awfulness, it would have been pretty much the perfect book; as it is, I cannot quite stomach passages like this one:

Competing women are far more intense than competing men. Men pound their chests, fight, and afterward shake hands because it's over. Women are complicated and sharp, like stilettos, and possess a veiled anger that only dies when they want it to.

It's the word "stilettos" that really drives me crazy there, it's the kind of detail that's highly polarizing, some might find it a really sensitive and effective and writerly word choice but it just makes me roll my eyes in horror at the sensibility, how cheap! However, that said, this really is a remarkably good book, I highly recommend it...

The last of three (I'm putting them in backwards order from how I read them, because of course you read the most alluring one first!) is quite wonderful. I couldn't put it down. It's Sherman Chavoor's The 50-meter Jungle: How Olympic Gold MEdal Swimmers are Made (co-authored with Bill Davidson and published in 1973). What a great book! Chavoor coached the great Olympic champion Mark Spitz, and this book is fascinating in its revelations about training and competing in 1960s America, but it's also remarkable for the effectiveness of the voice. Chavoor is brash but hugely sympathetic (not least in his reflections about the anti-Semitism and racism of American swimming in the 1960s). Lots of funny and interesting stuff here, but I will leave you only with the following--Chavoor's clearly enjoying himself being shocking here, even at the time this was highly counterintuitive, but it is in especially hilarious contrast to the nutritional recommendations you get in training manuals these days...
And now I will take myself off with my nice printed-out book manuscript to a location where I have no internet access to tempt me onto triathlon-related lines of inquiry...

Illegible to me

and yet I have a very strong and rather delighted feeling that this is my first glimpse of the cover of the Turkish edition of Heredity! Oh, and look, how absolutely thrilling!

Cartographers take a position

At the Times, Elisabetta Povoledo on an Italian company that makes custom globes:

For mapmakers like Nova Rico, geographic disputes are commonplace. For a Turkish customer, Cyprus is shown split in two, a division that Greek Cypriots do not recognize. On one globe, Chile is given parts of Antarctica that on another globe go to Argentina. And in much of the Arab world, Israel is nonexistent.

Something uncanny, too, about the illustration (don't globes remind you of glass eyes?!?):

Mercutio on the medlar

At the TLS, Peter Holland takes on the RSC Shakespeare edition in a wonderfully well-informed and thoughtful way, including some fascinating observations on stage directions.

(And Alastair Campbell's diaries clearly are a blessing to the people assigned to review them, Michael White's TLS piece is perhaps not quite as outrageous as John Lanchester's one for the LRB but very good nonetheless...)

The languid throwing of a line

(This post is part of the One Shot World Tour organized by Colleen Mondor--follow that link for other interviews with Australian writers. Through inattentiveness I only realized after the fact that the tour is oriented towards children's and young-adult authors--Peter Temple is not a young-adult writer--on the other hand I believe that the category is largely a function of publishers' needs rather than anything about the books themselves, and certainly like all the best books Temple's books should be read by everyone and will be edifying to people of all ages, David Copperfield for instance might be thought of as a young-adult novel...)

Peter Temple's one of those novelists whose language and imagination actually reshape your own experience of life in the world. His books have haunted me since I've read them (here's the anthology of past Light Reading rhapsodies), partly because I'd give up ten years of my life in order to be able to write prose this good.

A few links:

Here's another interview that concentrates more heavily on his Jack Irish books.

The first four books at this Amazon link are the novels of his available in the US, and frankly if you are a bit of a book-splurger and regardless of what genre of fiction you prefer to read (this is crime, conventionally speaking, though the books stand up to any of the requirements of so-called literary fiction) I defy you not to just buy them and feel like it's the best literary Amazon purchase you ever made. You can't go wrong starting with any of them, but the new one's The Broken Shore, and it has my highest recommendation, as indeed do all of his others.

In any case, Peter Temple kindly agreed to respond to a few questions. Here are his answers.

You have a ridiculously and blissfully perfect prose style. Tell me, would you say that in general you get this by grace or by works? Does it pretty much come out that way the first time, and is it comfortable or agonizing? Or do you edit a lot to get that quality, and is there a lot of invisible work that goes into it?

I can only imagine what it would be like to write well without effort. My writing is a process of rejection and amendment, of recasting and truncating, of despair tempered by mild elation.

In the years when I was trying to improve students’ prose, my mantra was that style was what remained when you had removed everything that delayed getting to the point. I got this from the hard men who taught me how to edit news stories. It doesn’t really apply to fiction, but it’s a good starting point. Being economical with words most of the time creates space for the occasional languid throwing of a line that snakes and hovers and falls.

Carpentry. Horse-racing. Australian Rules Football. Obviously you love these things--any further thoughts? For instance, on why carpentry is like writing, or on the novels of Dick Francis?

My father allowed me to hinder him when he made things. I thank him for that, as I hope my son will thank me. I wish I’d had a proper training as a cabinetmaker, but I came to it too late. There are similarities with writing. You need to learn how to use the tools. You need to forgive your failures and learn from them. You need to cultivate some aesthetic judgement – many skilled joiners make hideous objects.

I like horses and horse racing. The animals are beautiful, their nobility shames the often tawdry humans who surround them. I am a gambler too, so racing is a source of pleasure, smugness, pain, and chagrin. What else in life offers so much? Australian Rules football, that’s what. It’s a game of beauty, elegance and physical danger. Then there is the casual brutality and the bravery and the endurance. And I am speaking only of what it takes to be a fan.

You were born in South Africa. Would you consider writing a novel set there, and do you have any speculative remarks (assuming it does not horrify you to talk about future projects) as to what the book might look like? I'm especially curious about time period/setting--I would love to read a Peter Temple novel that had some points in common with "In the Evil Day"/"Identity Theory" only set in 1970s South Africa. (As a teenager, I had a passion for the novels of Robert Ludlum, and "The Bourne Identity" seems to me much his best--you've captured all the best things about that kind of book in yours...)

It is only in recent years that I’ve thought about writing a novel set in South Africa. Like many whites who left, I carry my guilt everywhere. The great distance that separates me from my young life only serves to magnify my memories of moral and physical cowardice and, what is perhaps worst, my callousness. Still, I’m drawn to attempt a book. If only I wasn’t drawn to doing so many other things.

Running from the rain

A fascinating post on Megan Jaegerman's news graphics at Edward Tufte's site. (Thanks to Paperpools for the link.)

Delightful things

I am quite delighted to learn from an idle-leafing-through of the New Yorker's goings-on-about-town section that the Moscow Cats Theatre is back this year for another season! Mmmm....

here's what I thought when I saw the show two years ago, I was having a partially self-imposed exile from New York in Cambridge, Mass., and when I first heard about the Moscow Cats Theatre's New York run I thought I would die if I didn't see it, fortunately I made it back to town in time to catch it...

I am so going to go and see it again this fall, that will really be something to look forward to (in general I have found myself recently in a too-familiar frame of mind, which involves the tiresome refrain at the back of my head of "Nothing good can happen until you do your work"--this is not strictly true, there have been things this summer I've actually looked forward to with pleasure, I was certainly looking forward to the half-marathon last weekend and I am also looking forward very much to a funny string of forthcoming Saturday-morning runs and races that are part of the newly formed Aspirational Sub-2:00 Club--we are determined to go below two hours on the half marathon, or die trying...--and I also have a trip in October that will be very thrilling, which is to a conference at St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin on Jonathan Swift, having never been to Dublin and being truly obsessed with Swift's writing it will be rather amazing to be actually talking about Swift in the place he lived in and worked at for many years--and I am hugely looking forward to doing triathlons next summer--but there is no doubt that the next, oh, fourteen months or so is going to be particularly grimly full of hard work and deadlines and stress!).

Anyway, here is a link with photos that wonderfully conjure up the show's demented charms--goodness, I love those cats, I am laughing just looking at those shots...

And here's the show's creator Yuri Kuklachev interviewed at the Village Voice by Rebecca Bengal.

On advancement

Bruce Robbins on narratives of upward mobility. This is the introduction to his new book Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State, which I await with great interest...

(Thanks to Bookforum for the link.)

Soul for knowledge

Claudia Dreifus interviews Gino Segre at the Times about his life as a physicist and his new book Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics.

Crab, crab, I can't eat crab

John Lanchester at the LRB on Alastair Campbell's diaries:

It is worth noticing how accurate Blair’s sense of the press-government relationship is: it makes you wonder, if he saw things so clearly, how on earth he could have put Campbell in charge. There is a structural problem with the government and the press; there is a historical problem with Labour and the press; so this was always going to be a tricky subject for Labour in office. Who to put in charge of this complex, delicate area? I know: let’s find our angriest, shoutiest, most tribal, most aggressive party loyalist. As Craig Brown joked in the Mail on Sunday, it is as if, instead of turning to Doctor Watson for advice, Sherlock Holmes had instead consulted the Hound of the Baskervilles. Campbell is a political journalist who, as part of a not-all-that-complex self-loathing, despises political journalists, a recovering drunk of the type that is angry with everybody all the time, a foul-mouthed natural bully who genuinely hated most of the people it was his job to deal with on a daily basis, and made no secret of it. ¡Olé! Sign him up!

Reading the Diaries, one has to remind oneself that in terms of Blair’s relations with the public, the book mostly covers the good years, when we more or less still believed him. You would never know that from reading Campbell. Right from the start he is boiling with rage. Barely a page passes without someone being called a twat, prat, cunt or wanker. He combines a remorselessly tribal and one-sided approach with a complete conviction about his own high moral purpose. All this adds up to his being, in the phrase of Charles Moore, ‘the most pointlessly combative person in human history’. At one point someone at the Downing Street switchboard, ‘at the end of a not untypical day’, makes the mistake of asking him how he is, and Campbell replies that he feels ‘both homicidal and suicidal’. He means it, too. All this makes his Diaries a strange read, because they are interesting, indeed fascinating, in many of their details, yet draining and demoralising in their cumulative effect. Reading this book is like standing listening to someone ranting and jabbing their finger in your chest, for hours, but saying something really interesting every ten minutes or so. As for the idea that relations with the press went horribly wrong – well, with a man who so hated the press in charge, how else could they possibly have gone?

And here's a particularly good bit (I almost am going to read this book myself...):

One of Campbell’s foci is ‘TB’s terrible sense of style, e.g. the awful pullover he wore on his walk with Bush and the dreadful creation he wore on the plane’. This becomes a running gag. ‘TB was wearing Nicole Farhi shoes, ludicrous-looking lilac-coloured pyjama-style trousers and a blue smock. After GB left, I said he looked like Austin Powers. He said you are the second person today who’s said that.’ The next day: ‘Up to see TB in the flat. Another Austin Powers moment. Yellow/green underpants and that was it. I said what a prat he looked. He said I was just jealous – how many prime ministers have got a body like this?’ There is a flirtatious edge to this. Martin Amis, in a piece reporting on Blair’s last weeks in office, also described himself flirting with Blair. Some men have that effect on other men; it’s not a gay thing exactly, but it’s not the opposite of a gay thing, and there is something faintly homoerotic about the governmental milieu described here, full of dark-haired men shouting at each other, TB and AC and PM and GB all coming to blows (Mandelson v. Campbell in the course of an argument about whether Blair should wear a tie), bursting into tears, having make-up heart-to-hearts, saying bitchy things about each other behind each others’ backs, and ruthlessly doing each other down while secretly knowing that they are mutually dependent. Anyone being sent to a girls’ boarding school would do well to prepare by reading The Blair Years. The cover photo is part of this, Blair looking up at Campbell with an expression of submissive yearning that verges on the pornographic.

The high line

My former student Ellen Bar is co-directing an extremely interesting-sounding film based on a relatively little-known Jerome Robbins ballet; Erica Orden describes the project in this piece for the New York Sun.

A rational or a stupid

No matter how old or jaded I get, I don't think I'm ever going to lose the shivery feeling of excitement that certain eighteenth-century texts elicit in me. I've just spent the evening rereading Defoe's Mere Nature Delineated, a series of observations on the human mind prompted by his observation of a feral child (taken up by people of fashion at the English court) known as Peter of Hanover.

The boy “gives us a View of mere Nature,” Defoe writes, posing the question of whether “his Soul being capable of Improvement, differs from us only in the Loss it has sustained under so long a deny’d Education”:

If that be his Case, he is then only to be considered as an Infant, and that he is just now in the mere State of Infancy and Childhood, with this Disadvantage, as above, That the Soul being left unpolished, and not able to shine, and having lost the Seasons in which it should have been taught and enur’d to its proper Functions, the Organs being grown firm and solid, without being put into a Capacity by due Exercise, are not so easily disposed for the necessary Motion and Application; and so the Difficulty will be the greater to bring it to work, and may not, in a long Time, if ever, be overcome.

If this be the Case it dictates the Necessity of early Education of Children, in whom, not the Soul only, but the organick Powers are, as a Lump of soft Wax, which is always ready to receive any Impression; but if harden’d, grow callous, and stubborn, and, like what we call Sealing-Wax, obstinately refuse the impression of the Seal, unless melted, and reduced by the Force of Fire; that is to say, Unless moulded and temper’d to Instruction, by Violence, Length of Time, and abundance of Difficulty.

Mere Nature receives the vivifying Influence in Generation, but requires the Help of Art to bring it to Perfection of living: The Soul is plac’d in the Body like a rough Diamond, which requires the Wheel and Knife, and all the other Arts of the Cutter, to shape it, and polish it, and bring it to shew the perfect Water of a true Brilliant. . . .

. . . . Education seems to me to be the only specific Remedy for all the Imperfections of Nature; that all the Difference in Souls, or the greatest Part at least, that is to say, between the Dull and the Bright, the Sensible and Insensible, the Active and the Indolent, the Capable and the Incapable, are owing to, and derive form this one Article: That the Man is a Rational, or a Stupid, just as he is handled by his Teachers.

I have been fascinated by feral children ever since (at a rather young age!) I read Harlan Lane's wonderful book The Wild Boy of Aveyron. The literature on feral children is copious--Michael Newton's recent book was a very good introduction to the topic, I thought--and here is the massive online resource for related matters.

I think the most interesting book I've read on the topic in the last few years, though, might be this 1942 volume titled Wolf-Children and Feral Man by the Reverend J.A.L. Singh and Professor Robert M. Zingg, complete with a preface by Bishop H. Pakenham-Walsh (who reflects that "Human vices see to have been as little inherited as human virtues, and this fact seems to me to have a very pertinent bearing on the consideration of what we mean by 'Original Sin'"). Here is a wikipedia entry on Amala and Kamala, the "Wolf Girls of Midnapore," raised by the Reverend Singh in his orphanage.

More Gibson

(He must be sick of saying the same things in response to the same questions, over and over again!)

But this is a good one: Tim Adams interviews Gibson at the Observer.

(Mmmm, I really want to read this book--I almost stopped at the bookstore and bought a copy earlier this afternoon, only my apartment is full already of desirable and unread books, and I had just picked up five swimming-and-cycling related works of more-or-less literature from the library. I think I will see if I actually reread Pattern Recognition first, which I believe I still have somewhere about the place--or maybe I pressed it upon somebody else?--and then get Spook Country if I cannot resist...)

Here are a few especially good bits:

Gibson can place the exact moment he first saw the future. It was when his father brought home a huge, wooden television set with a small, round screen and turned it on. Gibson would have been five. He knows the date because his father died that year, unexpectedly, and he moved with his mother from the port of Norfolk, Virginia, to a small mining town in the Appalachians where nothing had changed since his mother had grown up there. After that, turning on the television always made Gibson, an only child, feel like he was stuck in the past and with his face pressed up against modern life.

'In those early days of broadcast television, you were a little kid walking around and holding two realities at the same time in your head,' he says.

His other form of escape came from books. Gibson started to read science fiction in trade paperbacks from rotating wire racks. There were three racks in his town and he would spend his Saturday mornings walking between them looking for new titles. 'It was like being able to look through a little tube at a different place. Not the fictional places that these writers were describing so much, but the place that had the freedom that allowed these writers to write. Those books made me realise that existed somewhere.'

And again:

'You could say, in some ways technology and entertainment culture does not look that good from outside. I mean, if you looked at the internet objectively, sometimes you would think it was just a tsunami of filth, something you would not want anywhere near your children.'

It is though, he believes, an intimately human form of culture. 'I think that one of the things that sets us most thoroughly apart is the ability to preserve our individual memory. The information of the cave paintings becomes Borges's library, Borges's library becomes a laptop computer.' The internet is the shared memory of the species.

I wonder if Gibson, an inveterate blogger, thinks it possible to have human relationships in cyberspace that are as close as in the real world?

'If they are text-based, I would say yes. I have some friendships conducted almost entirely through email that are very intimate. I think we are getting to the point that a strange kind of relationship would be one where there was no virtual element. We are at that tipping point: how can you be friends with someone who is not online? In a couple of years, we will be no more disturbed by our relationship with virtual worlds than we are by our relationship with broadcast television.'

(Writing in this sense is a virtual technology--think of those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century letter-writers...)

The designing hand

Ed Holland lunches with Paul Muldoon for the FT. This is a good one...

The duration of now

Dennis Lim has a great interview with William Gibson at Salon:

I'd always been resistant to our cultural assumptions about science fiction -- that it's predictive and it's about the future. All science fiction is in one way or another about the moment in which it's written, even if the people who write it don't know that. My fourth, fifth and sixth novels were written in the early '90s but take place around 2007. Not only is it a world that now could never have happened but the characters, and this was a deliberate decision, act and talk like people from the '90s. I would always say, I could set one of these in the present and it wouldn't feel that different. I finally decided with "Pattern Recognition" to call myself on it and see if I could do it. It proved much harder and more disorienting than I had imagined it would be.

This interview gives me the best possible feeling (though unactable-upon just now), that yearning need to write a new novel myself to think some of this stuff through!

(Link courtesy of The Dizzies.)

On makeup

Race photos are I think almost universally unflattering, certainly there is not a single one from the half-marathon last weekend that I am actually going to pay money to get a copy of (maybe next time!), but just in case you're curious (I love seeing pictures of people I only know from their blogs, so I hope this will be excused!): this I think is the most flattering one (except that I look like I am standing still and just waving my arms around! hmmm... not sure what's up with that...); this one is from a slightly odd angle but at least I look like I'm running quite fast...

(I had a good author photo taken in June, but I am going to wait to unveil it till I've got the real author website thing going sometime this fall--the last one I had was quite nice only ever after when I had to e-mail it to someone I reproached myself for having economized--I was in a very broke stage of life when I had it taken--by not having the makeup also, you look at these photographs in large scale on your computer screen and every pore is visible, it's awful! Then you end up sending neurotic explanatory e-mails to whoever's getting the picture--it occurred to me after the last round of this, with my agent's assistant sometime this spring, that it would make an extremely funny premise for a little comic gift-book-type thing, like what you buy at a cash register--authors try and explain away their author photos--or hold on to more attractive but increasingly obsolete ones from ten years earlier--I feel certain that I am far from alone in feeling the need to accompany the picture with a sort of complicated explanation, though it is true I am more-than-averagely prone to writing excessively talkative and slightly demented stream-of-consciousness e-mails! This time I went all out and had the makeup done professionally by the person the photographer works with, which sort of filled me with horror--I had to scrub down immediately afterwards, I am not a stranger to lipstick and eyeliner and/or shadow but the last time I had makeup, like, all over my skin like that was when I used to do a lot of acting in college!--but the point of it is that when you look at the pictures it makes you look like a slightly improved version of your regular self... My brother M. came up to New York once a couple years ago for a sort of hybrid job interview/audition for that show Trading Spaces, the usual building-stuff-for-movies-and-TV work had been a bit slow and they'd put out a call for carpenters to audition--of course I am slightly biased, but I think any objective observer would also agree that M. is an unusually nice-looking and articulate fellow as well as an extremely talented and imaginative carpenter, he was a good candidate for this [he is going to be annoyed I have written about this on my blog! Sorry...]--I had just left keys downstairs for him, I had something else to do, and when I got home he very sheepishly apologized for getting makeup all over a towel in the bathroom, he had completely underrated the audition aspect of the thing because of course they plastered makeup all over him before doing a camera-test type thing, he was absolutely horrified! I was heartlessly amused--I think that on temperamental grounds, there are few jobs he would have hated more, it was fine that he didn't get it...)

Music therapy

Oliver Sacks's forthcoming Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain is a magical and haunting book; reading it just now has unsettled and saddened me, its tales of loss are so frequently devastating.

It's not a collection of essays, exactly, more like musings and case notes. But who would you rather be reading than Oliver Sacks? In my case, the answer is certainly "nobody," there is something so compelling about his humanistic intelligence and empathy and the curiosity that drives him to uncover little-known neurological phenomena and lay them out for his readers. And all in such beautiful prose...

(Sacks himself, though his sense of wonder is never abated, shows himself at various points in the book mourning, depressed or otherwise grieving for various kinds of loss, including the losses experienced by his neurological patients. He tells the story, for instance, of a disturbing musical dream he experienced in 1974, during a period of severe insomnia and heavy use of chloral hydrate. The dream continues into the waking state, and nothing Sacks does can dispel the music he continues to hear, which has "something deeply disturbing and unpleasant" about it. Unable to stop the "hateful hallucinatory music," he phones a friend and tells him about this music, songs in German, a language Sacks doesn't know. The friend asks Sacks to hum the songs. "I did so," Sacks writes, "and there was a long pause." The friend asks, "Have you abandoned some of your young patients? Or destroyed some of your literary children?" "Both," Sacks answers. "Yesterday. I resigned from the children's unit at the hospital where I have been working, and I burned a book of essays I had just written . . . How did you guess?" "Your mind is playing Mahler's Kindertotenlieder," says the friend, "his songs of mourning for the death of children." The mood of the book as a whole is dark, to an extent unprecedented, I think, in Sacks's earlier writings. This story for instance is left to speak for itself, and the style at points comes across as quite stark and deliberately elliptical, but with the kind of leavings-out that we associate with the "late style" of certain composers or novelists. Interesting...)

But I will leave you with one of very many magical details observed by Sacks, one with no aura of sadness about it:

The Finnish entomologist Olavi Sotavalta, an expert on the sounds of insects in flight, was greatly assisted in his studies by having absolute pitch--for the sound pitch of an insect in flight is produced by the frequency of its wingbeats. Not content with musical notation, Sotavalta was able to estimate very exact frequencies by ear. The sound pitch made by the moth Plusia gamma approximates a low F-sharp, but Sotavalta could estimate it more precisely as having a frequency of 46 cycles per second. Such an ability, of course, requires not only a remarkable ear, but a knowledge of the scales and frequencies with which pitch can be correlated.

(Oh, and I am glad to see Sacks praising Michael Chorost's excellent Rebuilt--but there are hundreds of fascinating and moving things here, I can see I am going to be buying a lot of copies of this one as presents...)

(Thanks to G. for the book.)

Tantalus for readers

Last week I spent some time dipping into Alberto Manguel's quite wonderful A History of Reading.

My only complaint about it is very unreasonable: because I have been thinking and reading about exactly these questions for pretty much my entire conscious life, Manguel's material is rather too familiar to me. On the bright side, he has saved me the trouble of writing this book myself, which is a very good thing!

Everyone who has a thing about reading should read this book, it's excellent; the passages that most caught my imagination come at the start of the conclusion, and are too long for me to transcribe, but print out these couple pages and I defy you not to want to procure a copy of this volume at your earliest convenience...

Curse all learning experiences

Nicola Griffith at Booksquare on the challenge of writing a series character (her third novel about Aud Torvingen has just been published):

The books are narrated by Aud in first person, which means the narrative tone and style has to change as Aud does.

It’s embarrassing to admit how long it took me to figure that out.

I was used to reading series books about people like Travis McGee and V.I. Warshawski, Spenser and Robicheaux; they stayed pretty much the same, book after book. They appeared to react to the same kinds of events with the same kind of action and emotion; the authors used the same kind of narrative structure, the same metaphors and vocabularies to tell their stories: the sandy-rumped girls, the cypress house with its gallery and bass jumping in the lake, how a guy with a size 16 neck can still cook. Over and over again.

I hadn’t set out to write a series character (I was halfway through The Blue Place before I understood the novel was merely the first act of the play that was Aud); I’d never really considered how it might be to write more than one book from first person. I wasn’t ready. So when I sat down to write Stay in the same bullet-train, cold-edged, urban-metaphored style as The Blue Place, I was shocked that it wouldn’t work. Aud was not only in a different geographic and emotional place, she persisted in seeing and responding differently. I kept writing then throwing away chapters, and then one day, duh, it hit me: change the metaphor systems, change the focal length, change the expectations. That is, change the voice. Just don’t change it too much.

Hmm, got to check out these books...

(Thanks to Gwenda for the link.)

Nice to be nice

Also at the Guardian, James Kelman offers some fascinating reflections on language and the writing career. Here he describes an early "workshop" experience:

After my reading came the critique. I enjoyed hearing people discuss my stories but certain aspects began to irritate me. I appeared to be absent. "What Kelman should do is this." "No, instead he should do that . . ." "Oh but what if he . . ."

Occasionally textual suggestions were made as though they never would have occurred to me. There was a vague assumption that the stories had just come. All I did was write them down. It was weird. I sweated blood over the damn things. Seventeen years later my novel A Disaffection was shortlisted for prizes and a member of an adjudicating panel asked if I ever revised "or did it just come out?"

It jist comes oot, ah says, it's the natchril rithm o the workin klass, ah jist opens ma mooth and oot it comes. Similar to the American dancer in reply to a related question, ah jes closes ma eyes an ma feets git to movin.

Some of what I encountered in those early days prepared me for later struggles. But the blatant elitism encountered by so-called working-class writers still surprises me. I can never predict it. I assumed that anybody who thought about art and writing would know that my finished work was hard won.

Some interesting reflections there on the first-person voice, also...

The freakishness of the inland

Germaine Greer has a rather good piece at the Guardian about (re)reading the best bad book she's ever read: Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds.

(I must confess I've never read it--didn't see the miniseries either, but I remember what a stir it made at the time!--this was the kind of book my English grandmother most liked, the multigenerational family saga in an interesting location, with heaving bosoms...)

Jane Austen mania

Here's the link for the NPR show on Austen that I participated in this morning.

I must say that was very enjoyable, I like being on the radio! It is deeply in human nature to enjoy having people ask your opinion about things and listen to the answer--I always think it is slightly morally low in me to enjoy it so much, really the best pleasure in life is a really productive writing day and no amount of glory or attention really quite feels as good as that (and I also believe in my heart of hearts that the work should be its own satisfaction--you know, full many a flower is born to blush unseen and all that)--in fact I saw some story recently about Charles Simic that opened with something along the lines of "Charles Simic must be having a really great day today" (having just won these two big awards) and yet my own experience of life is that mood responds much more to a good writing day than to external validation, so that actually if you get a prestigious award but work and/or life are not going well you are likely to feel more rather than less wretched!

Nonetheless it really was very enjoyable...

The cardinal rules of acronymy

I have been fond of Daniel Engber's Explainer feature at Slate for a long time, but he has now outdone himself with this report on the Pentagon's DARPATech conference. Engber thinks robots are played out (he doesn't see why we need wall-climbing lizards), but there are some interesting semi-prosthetic applications:

Animal locomotion does inspire one of my favorite devices—the simple and amazing PowerSwim. Worn over the lower legs of divers, the contraption uses a pair of oscillating fins connected by a spring to emulate the undulating movements of marine mammals. Video clips projected on a huge overhead screen show something that works a bit like an underwater bicycle: The swimmer propels himself forward by wiggling his legs back and forth at the knees. At a cost of less than $500, the PowerSwim seems destined for immediate placement in Skymall.

I'm so enchanted by the PowerSwim that I almost miss the insect cyborgs tucked away in the corner. The latest innovation from DARPA's Office of Creepy Technologies comes from Dr. Amit Lal, who wants to use controllable flying insects for surveillance missions. So far, his teams of engineers have managed to implant electrodes into moths during the pupa stage of early development, with minimal tissue damage. Video monitors show the insects as fully grown adults that can be induced to flap their wings in any direction. They're also working on a way to use the moth's living body—its movements and metabolism—as a power source for the implant's electronics.

(Thanks to Nico for the link.)

Phillips screwdrivers and Allen wrenches

Assembling furniture of the it-comes-in-a-flat-pallet-and-the-awfully-fake-veneer-looked-better-in-the-picture sort is psychologically risky, it tends to take you very strongly one way or the other: confidence- and competence-inducing, or fraught-fragile...

Fortunately these (hmmm, did I just not notice the prominence of the word "laminate"?!?) came with very clear instructions, and I have happily brought order out of chaos.

Before:

After:

There is still a fairly serious books-and-papers issue in the bedroom, but since it is thoroughly entangled with the pressing need for massive clean-up and reorganization in my campus office this must wait till September, I am making a promise on behalf of my future self to do something about that office situation....

Tomorrow: less problem-solving, more book-finishing! (Oh, but I think I am going to be on NPR in the morning, a show called On Point which airs between 11 and 12--I will be one of a couple of panelists discussing Austen-mania--tune in if you happen to be, you know, in your car or whatever!) (Ed.: a little further investigation reveals that the 11-12 time slot is for the Boston-area show; here is a list of other stations that will broadcast it, mostly at different times...)

(NB check out the great words for Allen wrench that they have in various other languages than English...)

Cherries and a big blond dog

Toni Schlesinger has a very funny and slightly unnerving piece up at the Observer about one man's experience of living with a model in a Chinatown loft--here are the opening paragraphs:

Behind a locked gate, a floor up from a street in Chinatown where men stare down at green vegetables and octopuses and woman carry parasols in the heat of the day, the model Emily Sandberg was eating cherries and her husband was watching her eat the cherries and a big blond dog had his eye on both of them. It was quiet except for the dog breathing.

To live with a model must be like living with a precious vase or something really valuable, like the Unicorn Tapestry. “She’s always easy on the eye,” said the husband, Gary Gold, a longtime drummer and music producer who has played with Keith Richards, B.B. King and Chuck Berry, and made albums for Smokey Robinson (the 2007 Grammy-nominated Timeless Love), Bonnie Raitt and the Neville Brothers. “I know a lot of models,” he said. “She’s just a special one from the bunch for me. Sometimes I see her”—maybe standing near the piano that Mr. Gold used to play for comedy acts at Catch a Rising Star, where John Belushi broke the piano keys—“and I’ll be struck, and she looks like a statue to me, like an alabaster statue, like wow. I just wonder.”

Neither Mr. Gold nor Ms. Sandberg would give their ages. She is tall and pale, otherworldly, sort of pre-cog: as if she has just risen out of the Philip Dick story where those psychic people live in a tub of water in a constant state of sleep. She is in magazines most of the time: Vogue, Elle, and in ad campaigns ranging from Barneys to Fendi to (soon) Banana Republic. Of course she has been on every runway from New York to Paris to Milan, which is where she met Mr. Gold, who had been brought by friends—“one of us was a movie star”—in sort of an Entourage situation, to a Donatella Versace after-party in 2000.

Triathlon spendthrift

Oh dear, it is comical but true to say that over the past few weeks the thought of cycling has made my heart rate spike and elicited thoughts of minor nervous breakdown!

I bought myself a few extra days by switching from the Tuesday to the Thursday class (also common sense belatedly told me that I did not need to do a fitness-related class that began at 6am at 83rd St. on the East Side, even if a bicycle does let you travel more quickly) but I had a mortifying revelation the other day, which is that what I really needed to do was throw money at the problem, swallow my pride (my mother is going to think to herself "I told her so," only she will be too nice to say it!) and buy another bike.

(Is this lunacy, or is this common sense?!? Bit of both...)

There is no way to pay someone money to teach me how to ride my fancy bike confidently, I need to just ride a regular bike for a little while where my feet are not attached to the pedals and I can put them on and off the ground very easily and it is not super-responsive to every touch and then (soon, I hope! my nice bike has kind of spoiled me for regular bikes now, it's like going from Proust or Henry James to a terribly badly written novel, or like the feeling I remember from teenage years when my oboe teacher would let me play hers briefly and then the horror of going back to my own clunker--the gears on my 'real' bike are like butter, it's crazy how great it feels when you're riding it, this one is a blunt instrument in comparison) once I have taught myself properly and am happy about all of the different aspects of bike-riding--traffic, starting again after a light, control of the bike while going fast down hills--I can switch back to the real one.

(It's a bit of a waste of the class, I will not be practicing gearing on the real bike or the details of transition stuff--i.e. changing from cycling shoes to running shoes etc.--but seriously at this point the important thing is just to have something that makes me get out there and ride the bike, also this bike more appropriately represents my beginner status! I don't care if I am the only person there with a regular bike, surely there will be a few others anyway and it is better for me to have to work really hard going up hills on a heavier bike than to be having insane fits of anxiety about being underqualified for the superstar bike I'm riding! And I can do another bike-run class any time I want, they're offered through the Triathlon Association of New York as well as through the Road Runners.)

(Maybe it will be a month from now and I'll feel like I can ride my real bike, and can use it for the last couple classes? That would be good, it's a six-week class... It was actually seeing how on various bike- and triathlon-related discussion forums many experienced cyclists seem to have minor nervous breakdowns about clipless pedals that made me realize I needed to break down the learning process into separate tasks...)

I must say that they were exceptionally nice at the bike store on 96th St.. I got the serious chain-type bike lock also, even though it costs almost half as much again as the bike (it was a pretty affordable bike I would say), because the other thing about getting this bike is that I could actually use it to ride around and do stuff!

(Like ride over to Central Park if I wanted to run there instead of Riverside Park and didn't have time to walk over, or to somewhere in the neighborhood where I might be doing an errand, or whatever--my 'real' bike is so nice that they wouldn't even sell me a lock at the store where I got it, it would be patently inappropriate and unwise to leave it on the street...)

I have no idea if this is standard, maybe they do this everywhere, but the mechanic spent a good bit of time giving me a special fix for convenience--I like watching people do inventive technical things that come from their imagination and know-how--the cloth sleeve is very slippery over the chain, so he took it off, made a little tool with a piece of wire and a vise and pliers, hooked one end of this tool round a post and the other around one end of the chain, then proceeded to shimmy a tube over it. (Sort of like the bike-mechanic version of how you use a safety pin attached to a drawstring that's come out of an item of clothing to inch it back through again.)

When he started to slide the cloth sleeve over again, it caught the tube and took it with it, so he made another little wire thingie and used it to tether the tube to the chain, then patiently worked the cloth back down over the tube. He also made a great little figure-eight-shaped device out of a discarded piece of bike chain and another bit of tubing to secure the seat to the bike--he said he left his own bike for five minutes outside a deli, with the heavy-duty chain securing it, and the seat was gone when he came out of the store...

(The conventional wisdom seems to be that anything not literally locked down will go--like if the seat post is attached with a security device, someone will still take the seat itself...)

I do not like having to retreat to a less excellent device, but I think it is for the best, and the nice one gives me something to strive towards, I am really eager (desperate!) to be riding it properly! It's my big obstacle right now. I just keep telling myself that the whole swimming thing seemed really impossible and inconvenient and horrible in January, and now it's all good--this will happen too for cycling if I am patient and persistent and just keep nibbling away at the problem...

I also do not like having to be patient, but I guess I look back on various things I've done and I can see that you do have to take the long view. This is not that different from doing a PhD or writing a book or some such thing. I started working out pretty seriously two years ago, the first year of it entirely in the gym, but as far as actual training goes that first year must be thought of as something like the way you can do all your medical-school application requirements in a post-baccalaureate year. (Which is to say--preliminary. And somewhat rushed or artificial--no substitute for years and years of loving study of organic chemistry or whatever...) Then I started running a year ago and swimming six months ago, but I need to keep working on the nuts and bolts and get the half-marathon thing working really well before I do a marathon next year. And I have to do a bunch of Olympic-distance triathlons next year before I can do a half-Iron one the year after, and I have to run at least a couple of marathons and have done quite a lot of century rides and short hard bike rides and stuff and long open-water swims before I can seriously think of training for an Ironman race. Because I don't want to just straggle through it, I want to do it well...

Billingsgate

Anthony Holden reviews Conrad Black's Nixon biography at the TLS. I do not think it is really morally good to cultivate one's talent for writing book reviews in this vein, and yet they are unfortunately so delightful to read! This one is an especially good incarnation of the form:

From the outset, Black makes it quite clear whose side he is on. Impartiality may not be a prerequisite of an effective biographer – quite the opposite, in my view – but a sense of balance surely is. As Black rehashes the familiar details of the many crises in Nixon’s long career, he is not merely reinterpreting events with the benign spin of like-minded hindsight; he is saying: this is how I would have handled it myself. He is identifying with his subject – a fellow Machiavel with the same self-righteous hostility to his critics – to the point of indistinguishability.

Is that a word? Are some of Black’s? His exasperating prose style throbs with such phrases as the “boosterish scatology” of Nixon’s school and the “rubesville environment” of his home town. When the Watergate tapes become public, the “shrieks of outrage” that greet the expletives deleted from the President’s tape-recorded conversations amount to “another herniating levitation of pandemic hypocrisy”. The problem with such infelicities transcends mere literary taste; they reek of ugly authorial sneers, as when commentators of whom he disapproves (usually “left-leaning”) are “stentorian in their laudations” of “self-serving claptrap” such as the observance of laws. In his first forty pages alone, like an adolescent reaching beyond his grasp for heightened effect, Black makes questionable use of such words as “collegiate”, “comported”, “canvass”, “proselytizing”, “verdant”, “provenance”, “resistless” and “abrasions”. Later he deploys “exceptionable”, “indefectible”, “integrality” and “disconcertion” (while, I confess, introducing me to such pleasing arcana as “billingsgate”, meaning “foul or profane language”). Musical readers will be as surprised at Nixon’s ability to play “the piano sections of symphonies” as poker-players that this wily cardsharp used to “bid” rather than bet.

And in conclusion:

For all Black’s tireless eye for detail, and his extraordinary authorial energy at a time of such crisis in his own life, his highly personalized agenda cumulatively converts a soi-disant work of history into a prolonged partisan plea on behalf of a man as misunderstood, underestimated and wronged as the author evidently considers himself to be.

At the time of writing, Black has vowed to clear his own name. But he cannot, for all his 1,100 pages of trying, clear Richard Nixon’s. Writing as his own trial loomed, Black must surely have anticipated the irony now attaching to the words he quotes Nixon as saying to Haig at the height of Watergate: “Some of the best writing in history has been done from prison. Think of Lenin and Gandhi”. Not to mention Nixon’s last biographer with a name familiar in Britain for extra-literary reasons, the former Tory Minister Jonathan Aitken, who himself turned born-again author in jail soon after befriending the former President and publishing an apologia pro vita sua. Wherever Conrad Black may rate himself on the scale between Aitken and Gandhi, we can but hope that his prison diaries may be an improvement on Jeffrey Archer’s. It’s a safe bet they’ll be longer.

A spirited monkey

My alternate-universe self has a blog that's basically geared towards goofy animal stories. My actual self tries to resist the temptation to post about everything animal-related, but this one seemed too appealing to miss:

A man smuggled a monkey onto an airplane Tuesday, stashing the furry fist-size primate under his hat until passengers spotted it perched on his ponytail, an airline official said.

The monkey escapade began in Lima, Peru, late Monday, when the man boarded a flight to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., said Spirit Airlines spokeswoman Alison Russell. After landing Tuesday morning, the man waited several hours before catching a connecting flight to LaGuardia Airport.

During the flight, people around the man noticed that the marmoset, which normally lives in forests and eats fruit and insects, had emerged from underneath his hat, Russell said.

"Other passengers asked the man if he knew he had a monkey on him," she said.

The monkey spent the remainder of the flight in the man's seat and behaved well, said Russell, who didn't know how it skirted customs and security.

Airport police were waiting for the man and his monkey when the plane landed about 3 p.m., and the man was taken away for questioning. It was unclear if he would face any criminal charges.

The city's animal control agency said the monkey appeared healthy. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was planning to take it for disease testing and keep it quarantined for 31 days, CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said.

If the monkey is healthy it could wind up in a zoo.

Russell, the airline spokeswoman, said she didn't know the monkey's name, but she quickly thought of one.

"It is kind of a spirited monkey," she said. "That will be the nickname of the monkey: Spirit."

Really I know I can never have a monkey as a pet, they are wild animals and it is inhumane and in any case they do not make good house-pets (the fantasy of having a monkey would be better fulfilled by having a very well-trained dog), and yet...

Bonus link: my favorite poem with the word marmoset in it.

The geek rapture

Steve Ranger interviews William Gibson:

Unlike many of your novels, which are set in the future, Spook Country is in the near past. What's different about writing about the past rather than the future?

I'm writing speculative fiction about the year before last [rather than] speculative fiction about the year after next Tuesday which is what I was doing for a while.

I am interested in these relationships of tenses--Gibson's also thinking here not just about the special case of writing speculative fiction about the (in this case recent) past but about that more general problem of what happens when the present catches up with the imagined future of a past speculative fiction....

(Thanks to Brent for the link.)

The fern spike

A rather lovely little piece by Oliver Sacks at the New Yorker about a Saturday-morning fern foray along the Park Avenue viaduct:

High above his head, Sundue spotted a gigantic Woodsia specimen, almost six feet across, clinging to the rock. “That one’s a good age,” he said. “Decades old—some species can be very long-lived.” When he was asked if ferns show signs of age, he hesitated; the answer is not clear. A fern tends to keep growing, until it outruns its food supply, is ousted by competitors, or (as will happen sooner or later with the Woodsia) becomes so heavy that it falls to the ground. In some botanical gardens, there are massive ferns more than a hundred years old. Death is not built in to these plants as it is for us more specialized life forms, with the ticking clocks of our telomeres, our liability to mutations, our running-down metabolisms. But youth is apparent, even in ferns. The young Woodsia are charming: a bright spring green; tiny, like babies’ toes; and very soft and vulnerable.

Also (but not available online) an interesting piece by Richard Preston on Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, a disease caused by a single small genetic mutation that causes sufferers compulsively to harm themselves. Here's what Preston says of one little boy with the disease:

The women had devised a contraption to keep him from biting his hands, a padded broomstick that they placed across his shoulders, and they tied his arms to it like a scarecrow. The family called it the "stringlyjack." Matthew often asked to wear it.

(It also sounds rather like the device Maggie Gyllenhaal wears in Secretary.) It's the word, though, I can't believe--how amazing--the stringlyjack...

I've had a minor obsession with Lesch-Nyhan ever since I first read about it in a thriller I would describe at once as rather bad and somehow at the same time grippingly memorable. Here's the Kirkus review, pasted in from Amazon:

Epidemiologist Marr and freelancer Baldwin (Ice Pick, 1982) team up to write a gripping (if styleless) suspenser about a mad scientist bringing down upon mankind the ten Biblical plagues of Exodus, plus one more for good measure. The dramatized plagues include bread-moldderived ergot from the rye fungus, which causes massive itching, cramps, spasms, and gangrene--as well as later centuries' smallpox, leprosy, Black Plague, syphilis, dysentery, TB, typhus, cholera, and AIDS, not to mention Ebola, Lyme, and more. World-class but crazy toxicologist Theodore ``Teddy'' Graham Kameron, abused as a child by his Bible-quoting mother and now led by a toxic Voice that he assumes must be God's, has been busy re-creating and distributing these basic plague cultures, inducing swarms of bees to attack humans, killing youngsters and horses with anthrax, breeding lice, pests, frog poisons, and much else, all in imitation of the wrath of God falling upon mankind (he has also wired himself up to catch the Voice if it comes to him in his sleep). Meanwhile, pitted against Teddy is epidemiological whiz Dr. Jack Brynne, who heads the ProMED computer hotline (quite real) and flies about the planet fighting epidemics. Jack's parents died from exposure to germ-warfare agents during Japanese tests at a WW II POW camp, though underweight Jack himself escaped testing. His busyness troubles his marriage with star-crossed fellow doctor Mia Hart, who dismisses Jack's idea that a Bible nut is at work. But his old lover, investigative TV journalist Vicki Wade, who does a sort of 60 Minutes show, does take him seriously (in every way). Culminating his campaign, Teddy extracts a superpoison from microscopic marine phytoplanktons. Ironically, the poison might also be a powerful new antibiotic--though that's not what Teddy has in mind. Is Manhattan ready for this (seemingly unstoppable) airborne killer? Creepy stuff. Wash your hands thoroughly after reading.

The two plagues that have really stayed with me are the induced Lesch-Nyhan syndrome and also a gruesome scene in which the killer (I may be slightly misremembering details) uses a water pistol to spray anthrax into the eyes of some teenagers at an amusement park--they get eye infections, the first-aid staff tape gauze over the eyes and then when they take it off the next day the teenagers' eyes have been almost entirely eaten away--very horrorific--hmmm, don't read books like this so often nowadays, kind of a pity!

Manhattan projects

Ben Wheeler on the network of subterranean tunnels under Columbia University.

A tryst for the ages

At Slate, Deidre Lynch asks why Jane Austen's spinsterhood bugs us so much. It's a great piece, go and take a look if you're interested...

(Thanks to Jason for the link.)

Notes to future self

Warning: excessive sport-related content!

I've been having ritual gnashing of the teeth this afternoon, because after all of my musings the other night on goals, guess what my time was in the race?!?

2:00:07!

Arghhh... eight seconds from the at-my-level-of-running blissful dream of a sub-two-hour half-marathon!

Actually it's like a lesson to me not to obsess about details. I ran as well as I could, and I finished pretty strong.

There are a number of places where I can see that I lost some seconds.

(I walked through all the water breaks in the second half, for instance, which I had not meant to, but trust me when I say it was just needed if I was going to keep on running pretty fast the rest of the time!)

Notes to future self:

#1 Check the footpod battery the night before the race!

I meant to, but forgot; and realized when I went to turn it on that I must have left it off after my last run on Thursday, it was totally dead. In a way this was a good thing--I actually really like the purity of running by effort, to the extent that I wonder whether I didn't half do this on purpose (it is not like me to forget to check). I didn't miss it at all for the first ten miles, I just pressed the split buttons at the mile markers and didn't pay too much attention to the details, which were at the outside edge of my acceptable slowness range and therefore did not deserve contemplation. But I could have used it in the last three--it's almost like cheating!--but it would have helped me focus on those seconds I needed to make up.

#2 It is a pity that you have a bladder the size of a walnut!

Arghh--I must have peed at least three times already between when I got there at 5:45 or so and quarter to seven, usually before long runs I just don't drink anything but I had a very 'dry' run as it were on Tuesday evening and realized it wasn't a good idea; but around when they started getting ready to raise the barriers between the different corrals, I suddenly had to again join the rather long line for the toilets, and the result was that I lost several thousand places of advantage--you only get timed once you go over the start line, so it's not actual time, but if I had started where I was before I am guessing that's pretty much exactly the sort of eight-second difference I needed, if you start with runners slower than you you waste some energy speeding up and veering around them till you find the right pace group.

I was aware at least from mile three that it was going to be very tough to break under two hours, and I guess I have to say that I ran as hard as I could on that particular course under those particular conditions at my current level of training. I would call it, actually, a very good race--I felt like I was running very smoothly, my legs and core and stuff were all good, but the breathing/heart-pumping effort level right from the start felt way higher than it should have for that speed. The last three miles, I was well aware of how close I was to the two-hour possibility and how likely I was to miss it, and all I can say is that I ran pretty much as fast as I could!

(It was blessedly non-humid by New York summer standards, quite acceptable, but of course it really is rather hot, especially by the end--certainly high 70s, maybe really into the low 80s.)

Final thoughts (for now!):

There's nothing like experience when it comes to these things. The couple friends I've been mostly training with had considerably more frustrating races than mine--and the fact is it takes a while to get really good at this stuff. It is not surprising that I cannot yet race a half-marathon in the way I feel I should be able to, I have done a total of two twelve-mile training runs and two half-marathons in my entire life, I should wait till I have another year's worth of doing very regular twelve-mile runs before I think I should somehow magically be able to run at my very best for that kind of duration!

Hmmmm--really we all learned from reading fairy tales that you should never make a deal with a stranger who comes offering riches of one kind or another, but I must say that it would be very tempting to me at this juncture if the devil appeared and charmingly offered me a nice dose of running speed and stamina....

The answer to all this is MORE TRAINING! (Steady training for more time rather than more volume, that is.) At least it's clear--rationally I did pretty well today (and we had a lovely friends-and-family brunch afterwards that was especially enjoyable because a number of us had just been however frustratedly striving to the utmost, these races are special days, it was really good)--and if I am sensible and diligent then next year I will be able to do a lot better!

I'm running three more half-marathons this year--one as a training run for the second, which is in early October, and then the last as a purely enjoyable run with my brother and sister-in-law and whoever else wants to join in. And somehow I am betting that the greatest day is going to be the last one, where I will not at all care about what time I come in at and will spend the two hours plus having the kind of good conversation that you sometimes get in cars also, where it is strangely psychologically beneficial to be facing in the same direction as the person you're talking to rather than looking them in the face!

(One more further thought: I cannot wait till I am at the stage where I can appropriately do a half-iron distance triathlon! Probably two years from now, due to the bike limiter... In my opinion, 13.1 miles is pretty much the perfect distance to run, more than that is somewhat excessive [in a good way, but still!]--but two hours is not nearly long enough for a really satisfying race, I would not have wanted to run further today but I was sort of full of energy still afterwards, I want more! Marathon next year for sure, and hopefully quite a few more marathons in my future, but the half-Ironman race seems to embody my particular ideal, I have a strong though perhaps irrational conviction that it will be remarkably well-suited to my strengths. Mmmm.... half-Ironman....)

(One last further final thought: Swimming! I love it. I'm going to pay it a lot of attention in the next two months, put the running somewhat on autopilot and let it steadily progress I hope but lavish a little love on the water thing. I had a funny post-run conversation the other night with B. and D., two good runners from the group I've been training with. D. I've known since the fall, when we ran a lot together in the beginner's group; B. is a lovely New Zealander I only met in the class this summer. D. happened also to do the same deep-water running class I took in the winter and the level I swim clinic this spring, she's a great athlete--much better than me--but she just kind of didn't like swimming. And she accusingly said to me as we stood there talking at the corner of 72nd and Broadway, "You really took to it!" And then she and B. started questioning me as to whether I liked swimming or running more! And it was funny, I had to pretty much admit that there is a large place in my heart for both. Where I live, running's kind of just better, you can go out and run in the world in a direction and it's lovely (in a strenuous and sometimes horrible but mostly exhilarating way); if I could just go out and swim like that, as Lynne Cox does in those ocean swims she describes in Swimming to Antarctica--an excellent book BTW--it would be a hard call.... On the other hand, a hard-core swimming workout is the most lovely thing! You can't do track workouts like that if you're just a regular old runner, you can do them now and again but you'd get injured if you worked out like that all the time, and in any case running super-fast for short distances does not give me great pleasure, more just a sensation of queasiness that tells me I've crossed my lactate threshold. But you can do swim workouts all the time! You go as fast as you can on those swim sprints and the blood's just pounding in your whole body and even if you slightly feel light-headed and black-outish--like a cartoon character whose heart's actually jumping out of his chest!--it is in the most enjoyable possible way--and you're moving through water, which is the most delightful medium in the world! And if I am lucky and work hard, I will feel this way about biking too... but that might take a bit more of an act of grace!)

Frozen shoulder

Jennie Erdal wanders through a host of interesting topics at the FT. I like this sort of meandering unstructured essay...

The change

Why is this the first I've heard of this amazing-sounding book?!?

Mark Ford at the FT on Toby Barlow's novel Sharp Teeth:

Sharp Teeth is a novel in verse set in Los Angeles. It relates a struggle waged between three rival packs of werewolves - though, in the main, they are closer to dogs than wolves. These lycanthropes don’t need a full moon to assume their canine identity. Indeed, they can make what Toby Barlow calls “the change” whenever they want - though it’s best to do so in private. They communicate by mobile phone, and even enjoy playing bridge.

Like vampires in the Dracula myth, Barlow’s beasts are always on the lookout for new recruits. They scour the streets looking for the disaffected and damaged - anyone who can be seduced by a vision of power and freedom. The pact between dog and dog-to-be is sealed by an exchange of blood drawn from their respective little fingers.

Barlow’s unsettling narrative is not quite an allegory of LA gang warfare. Rather, it develops a supernatural parallel to the gory struggles for turf fought out by the city’s trigger-happy tribes. Sharp Teeth also draws heavily on traditions of noir and gothic, of comic-book fantasy and Hollywood horror.

The verse throughout is strictly functional - a way of keeping the story moving as fast as possible. The characters are deliberately stylised. At work on the werewolves’ case is a cop, Peabody, who could have stepped out of the pages of any crime thriller. The arch-baddie, Venable, has a lisp and looks like Truman Capote.

At the book’s centre is a romance between a sympathetic dogcatcher and a female “weredog” determined to renounce her feral past - though this involves tracking down, killing and eating all the members of her former pack.

Sharp Teeth is not for the faint hearted - and should be avoided by those with even a hint of dog phobia.

Mmmm.... and it gives me a terrible pang of wishing I was currently writing my upper Manhattan animal shape-shifter novel. Choices, choices...

(I sort of had an inspiration of great genius the other day and thought that if I made the protagonist a triathlete as well as an animal shape-shifter, and if she made her living as a personal trainer, there would suddenly be a lot of massive new deductions I could take on my taxes...)

The same way that I think you're either an Iliad or an Odyssey person (here was where I asked this before), I think you're either a vampire or an animal-shape-shifter person. I like novels about vampires too, but I'm definitely more on the animal-shape-shifter side of things.

It's part of the appeal of Philip Pullman's novels, too, this notion that there's some animal that perfectly corresponds to our inner self. In practice, if we're picking them for other people, we probably rely more on body type than on personality, which is not really fair; and of course also it is the sort of thing where we would probably get a more accurate selection if we did not choose for ourselves, the temptation is to choose something more glamorous and less ordinary!

(Pullman does well choosing the whole range of animals for his characters, only I often found myself thinking while I was reading the books that he likes dogs less than I do and birds more.)

In any case, and on an entirely frivolous note, here's the animal my protagonist turns into (also my own preference of course--if you are not above such things, you may reveal your own in the comments!):

Frequencies

Ed Park has a miraculously good piece at the LA Times about William Gibson's new novel Spook Country. I must get that and read it, I absolutely loved Pattern Recognition (I think it's my favorite of all his novels, it was sort of like reading a book written by my alternate self, it's got a strange family resemblance to my first novel and I totally identify with the main character!).

Also, Ligaya Mishan's review of Nicholas Christopher's The Bestiary compounds my feeling that I must get it and read it at once!

Or--do I already have a copy round here somewhere?!?

There was an article in the Times the other week about a furniture store with the appealing name Tiny Living, and I got as far as this page and thought, "Yes, I am going to get a couple of those, I've got to deal with that questionable book overflow situation by the doorway of my apartment" and then never did anything about it--I'm kind of in the thick of work stuff right now, I could imagine the boxes just sitting there till September, assembling furniture is not an especially appealing form of procrastination! And also, really, I should just get rid of a lot of books, putting them on shelves is an admission that they may be longer-term features of the scenery than I quite like to acknowledge. But something must be done....

The taper

Skip if non-sports-interested, this is long and earnest!

So this is a definition of the word taper that I was wholly unfamiliar with prior to my immersion in this whole insane training thing; there are all sorts of other things I have learned about which I greet with great enthusiasm ("high elbow recovery" is a favorite phrase for instance, and also a good thing when you can get it to happen, which is not always) but the taper is a slightly insanity-inducing phenomenon that I don't think anybody really enjoys.

Basically after training like a maniac for some months you wildly reduce all forms of exercise as you get close to your goal race; on the day, you are meant to feel absolutely full of beans and with very springy legs or what-have-you, but while you are tapering you have huge and distracting exercise withdrawal and it does not contribute to concentration or mental health!

This has been taper week for my goal race, the Nike half-marathon on Sunday. It's been a good training season--I'm going to run in quite a few more races over the rest of the calendar year (in fact, I am still faintly holding out hope that I might run the nine races I need to get a NYC marathon spot for next year, only I am disproportionately out of town for the short ones and in town only for the long ones!), but I won't be doing much if any race-specific training over the next few months. The priority following this race is (a) step up the swimming (b) maintain running fitness and continue to improve form and efficiency and (c) learn how to ride that bike properly so that I can decently race triathlons in 2007...

I've been obsessing all week about pacing and strategy. In shorter races, you can kind of wing it, run it based on perceived effort and then (since I am not far along from being a beginner I am still having a lot of improvement) be pleasantly "surprised" when you get a better time than you thought. This is not a wise strategy for a half-marathon...

So: thoughts.

I've done one half-marathon before, last November, but it was under extremely adverse conditions and I pretty much feel that my time doesn't "count"!

(NB what I thought was a thigh/groin muscle pull was actually a stress fracture. The next time I ran after that was on Feb. 15, for one mile on the treadmill, when the doctor had finally cleared me as good to go. The note in my running log: "A huge relief. Slightly uncomfortable but not actually painful; a few hours later, sort of 'itchy.' I feel calm, though..." I built back up incredibly cautiously, by teeny-tiny degrees; the first four-mile run was on March 12, for instance, the first six-mile run not till April 22. I did a 10K race on May 19, and it was super-enjoyable, totally at lactate threshold if you know what I'm saying, that is a stomach-churningly tough distance but very rewarding. The official return to non-injured running, I felt, and I was surprised and pleased to come in at an 8:44 mile pace, rather faster than anything I ran last fall due mostly to obsessive cross-training in the interim and to close attention to running form once I was allowed out again, as it were.)

I've been doing an actual half-marathon training program since May, plus quite a lot of cross-training (swimming, weights/core-type stuff, yoga), and both speed and fitness have definitely improved. I still have a lot more room for improvement--I am holding out for eight-minute miles in 2008 (Ed: Keep getting those dates wrong, it's wishful thinking!), I think it's definitely within my physical capabilities, not having that yet makes me self-critical--but I'm pleased with my progress.

(I've still only been running three days a week--the coach is a quality-over-quantity theorist, three days is cool with her half-marathon schedule, there was an optional fourth day but after trying it a couple times I realized I could only get away with it if I cut back on something else, or else I felt it in the formerly injured area, and it seemed to me better to keep the mix--swimming and yoga and strength training are all good...)

Now I'm going to be honest here about my goals for the race.

(Oh, and a huge amount depends on the weather. I had a ludicrously slow run yesterday evening, with a heart-rate as high as it would usually be for a super-intense workout, just because of the heat and humidity. It easily could slow you down as much as thirty seconds per mile if it's, say, mid-80s and 60% humidity as opposed to 70 and not so humid. And even that still feels pretty hot when you're running! If it's awful, I must just slow down and run and enjoy it. This is supposed to be enjoyable, I cannot sit around beating myself up if I don't go under two hours, if I can't do it then it will have been for some substantive good reason that was not overcome-able!)

This is the course--a perfect course for negative splits, since the first seven miles are hilly and the last six extremely flat.

(And it is going to be very very exciting to run through Times Square...)

The coach has come through with some goals that correspond extremely closely to what I believe I can actually do (weather permitting), and here they are. She categorizes time goals as acceptable, challenging and dream, and here they are.

Acceptable: 2:02 (9:20 pace)
Challenging: 1:59 (9:05 pace)
Dream: 1:56 (8:50 pace)

(For arbitrary but obvious reasons, 1:59:59 is more mentally acceptable than 2:00:01, but I will attempt not to get excessively sucked in to this line of thinking...)

I'm going for 1:58. Anything faster than that is icing. (I do like icing though!)

What this means for race strategy: run the first seven miles steady and a little slower, 9:00-9:10; run the last six 8:50-9:00ish. I think I can hold close to nine for the park loop-and-a-bit, especially because there are some lovely downhills in the last mile or so before you exit the park (one thing I have learned to love this summer is running fast downhill, I was very timid about it last fall in contrast; I have also learned a lot more about pacing). And I think I can run 8:45 on the flats. But I will have to be flexible and see! Also I must get some water into myself at the water stations and I think I'll stop and walk for a tiny bit as I'm coming out of the park, in order to get down a gel and a cup of water. It would be nice to do without the gel, I feel like it might be OK and you risk getting a bit of an upset stomach, but I have a strong suspicion that it will really aid in concentration and energy levels in the second half.

Running goals for 2008 (Ed.: I got the numbers all wrong on this the first time!):

Eight-minute miles on longish runs

Race a four-mile race below 8:00 pace

Race a half-marathon in the 1:40s rather than the 1:50s

Run my first marathon more or less injury-free and as close to four hours as possible (below that if possible, of course, that is everyone at my sort of speed level's dream goal, but it may not be a conservative enough goal for my first time, I can see even now that it makes more sense to do a 4:15 and then a 4:05 and then a 3:57 rather than to aim right out of the gate at 3:57 but crash in the second half of the race...)

I am still having strong mental pangs about not doing a marathon this fall, but I am sure it's for the best. Not least because to some extent, especially when you're relatively new to the sport, speed and endurance are mutually exclusive goals. Not just because of the risk of injury at pushing too far too soon, in other words, I think I'm more likely to be happy with my marathon performance next fall, I'll work mostly on stamina and hills over the winter and start doing speedwork again in the early spring and I should be quite a bit faster by this time next year. And I've got to get those triathlon skills going, the bike is going to hold me back otherwise!

Race report Sunday evening...

Tubular

An extraordinary set of film clips concerning the squid giant nerve axon. This is amazing! (Go and watch the dissection and anatomy one...)

The pure and calm friendship that reading is

From Marcel Proust, On Reading, trans. and ed. Jean Autret and William Burford:

No doubt friendship, friendship for individuals, is a frivolous thing, and reading is a friendship. But at least it is a sincere friendship, and the fact that it is directed to one who is dead, who is absent, gives it something disinterested, almost moving. It is, moreover, a friendship unencumbered with all that makes up the ugliness of other kinds. Since we are all, we the living, only the dead who have not yet assumed our roles, all these compliments, all these greetings in the hall which we call deference, gratitude, devotion, and in which we mingle so many lies, are sterile and tiresome. Furthermore--from our first relations of sympathy, of admiration, of gratitude--the first words we speak, the first letters we we write, weave around us the initial threads of a web of habits, of a veritable manner of being from which we can no longer extricate ourselves in ensuing friendships, without reckoning that during that time the excessive words we have spoken remain like debts which we have to pay, or which we will pay still more dearly all our life with the remorse of having let ourselves refuse them. In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its first purity. With books, no amiability. These friends, if we spend an evening with them, it is truly because we desire them. In their case, at least, we leave often only with regret. And with none of those thoughts, when we have left, that spoil friendship: What did they think of us? Didn't we lack tact? Did we please?--and the fear of being forgotten for another. All these agitations of friendship come to an end at the threshold of that pure and calm friendship that reading is.

A proportional Jack Russell 2

The prose at the New York Times often seems to have been afflicted with an unfortunate house style--a kind of flattening of voice and leaching-out of humor. Stories written in ways that draw attention to themselves are rare, and often it's not in a good way that they do so (I'm thinking of the very purple opening paragraphs of that piece a few weeks ago about Columbia's Manhattanville expansion...). But now and again you do find something really lively (how did she get away with it?!?). It's the brilliant Cintra Wilson on the reopening of the Miu Miu store in Soho:

In a subversive spoof on Eastern Bloc sleaze, Miu Miu seems to be shouting “Krakow ’96!” out of one side of its naughty pink mouth. Gray suede slouch boots purr “Soviet Models Waiting to Talk to You. Visa, Mastercard!” in a come-hither Borat accent. Go-go boots are swingin’ in chrome-shiny patent leather; V-neck ankle boots gleam with waterproof luster. All are slick examples of a Joris Karl Huysmans-like scheme to make deceptively cheap-looking merchandise out of the finest materials.

This gambit is also evident in the bell shapes of fall coats, which join a sleek “Belle du Jour” to a defiantly dorky “Georgy Girl.” A three-quarter-length leather jacket in hot fuchsia has been tortured into the synthetic texture of wet-suit neoprene; a jacket in a smooth marbled gray leather they call “fuomo” brings to mind the finer sectional couches of Belarus.

It is not all silly: I coveted a $3,595 black patent jacket lined in black shearling that seemed both lurid and practical. A short bolero I nicknamed “the Planet of the Apes shrug” — shaggy black Persian lamb with what looks like gorilla-fur epaulets — has, at $3,575, already sold out in most sizes.

Reminds me of my "Last of the Flock" coat, handed down from my mom who purchased it in the mid-60s just before she moved from London to Philadelphia--old-school shearling, stiff enough to remind you that you're basically wearing a sheep on your back--after the Wordsworth poem, which I have always found irresistibly funny:

IN distant countries have I been,
And yet I have not often seen
A healthy man, a man full grown,
Weep in the public roads, alone.
But such a one, on English ground,
And in the broad highway, I met;
Along the broad highway he came,
His cheeks with tears were wet:
Sturdy he seemed, though he was sad;
And in his arms a Lamb he had.

He saw me, and he turned aside,
As if he wished himself to hide:
And with his coat did then essay
To wipe those briny tears away.
I followed him, and said, "My friend,
What ails you? wherefore weep you so?"
--"Shame on me, Sir! this lusty Lamb,
He makes my tears to flow.
To-day I fetched him from the rock;
He is the last of all my flock[.]

An experiment on Oscar

Daniel Engber asks what the cat is doing in the New England Journal of Medicine. I have been reading these death-cat stories with much hilarity I'm afraid, at first it was rather enchantingly gothic but I agree with Engber that the NEJM piece was quite awful, like something I would use in a writing class as an example of literary bad faith...

Stories of development

Matthew Schuerman at the Observer on what Judith Rodin's experience as president at the University of Pennsylvania may contribute to Columbia's Manhattanville plans.

The city of brotherly love

My dear friend Emily Wilson has a delightful piece in the latest TLS on Isidore of Seville and sundry other matters:

Isidore became the patron saint of the internet in 1999. The analogy between the Etymologies and our own information superhighway is in many ways a tempting one. Like the internet, the book contains information from a bewildering number of different sources, ranging from ancient Roman proto-encyclopedias (especially Varro’s De Lingua Latina, Pliny’s Natural History and Servius’ commentaries on Virgil), through Byzantine school manuals on logic, music, grammar and architecture, to the works of Boethius, Jerome, Augustine and Eusebius. One of the few disappointments in the new English translation of the Etymologies is that the authors offer very little detailed information about Isidore’s sources. To do so would, of course, be the work of several lifetimes: more information on this subject will be forthcoming in the ongoing French edition of the Etymologies, of which so far five volumes out of twenty have appeared.

It may often seem as if Isidore, like a bad search engine, offers little or no control over all this material. Certainly, much of the “information” he provides is (from a modern perspective) blatantly false, albeit entertaining. For instance, we are assured that “Beavers (castor) are so-called from castrating (castrare). Their testicles are useful for medicines, on account of which, when they anticipate a hunter, they castrate themselves and amputate their own genitals with their teeth”. Isidore lifts this detail of natural history straight from Pliny (backed up, in this case, by a number of other ancient authorities, including Aristotle and Juvenal). As with the internet, written testimony takes on a life of its own – even in cases where you might think it would be better to go out and look at some beavers. That thought seems not to have occurred to anybody for several hundred years: the story of the self-castrating beavers was still current in the seventeenth century, and was mocked by Thomas Browne in his wonderful analysis of ancient errors, the Pseudodoxia Epidemica of 1646.

Emily's new book on the death of Socrates is just out and getting some very nice notices; here it is at Amazon UK (mmmm, I can't wait to read it!), and here's the US edition (not out till October unfortunately).

Two good links

The New-York Ghost gets a nod from New York Magazine:

Published by an anonymous someone, this “Weekly Newsletter You Print Out at Work” has taken the exploitation of office supplies to new cultural heights. It’s a wonder of both style and substance, laid out in columns like a newspaper and containing a hodgepodge of hilarious, surreal features such as one-line interviews, “daily negations,” and helpful hints on “ways to avoid being down whilst working on a novel.” (Sign up by e-mailing thenyghost@gmail.com.)

I have remarked here before that the successes of my students make me just burst with pride, a cleaner and more enjoyable pride than it is possible to take in one's own accomplishments. (I hasten to add that I consider all sorts of different things successes, there is no need for it to something rewarded with national media attention!) But I was certainly bursting with pride just now when my old student Paul Kiel, who I have long known to be an extraordinarily talented writer, sent me this link to fill me in on what he's been doing recently. The story's by Sam Apple for the FT, about the San Diego Union-Tribune's early coverage of Carol Lam's firing and the story's neglect in the national media:

But to one blogger, at least, the news about Lam seemed like a big deal. “I was stunned by it,” says Josh Marshall, of the blog Talking Points Memo. “Normally, in a case like that, the prosecutor would be untouchable.” For the past year and a half, Marshall had been following Lam’s work on the Cunningham case and its various threads as closely as any news organisation in the country. Marshall is the editor and publisher of TPM Media, a small news blogging outfit that publishes the websites TPM Muckraker and TPM Cafe in addition to the flagship Talking Points Memo. By 11.08am on the morning the Tribune ran its Lam story, Marshall had already flagged it on Talking Points Memo. At 11.29am, a second post appeared on TPM Muckraker with several hundred words of background on Lam’s work on the Cunningham case. By the time The New York Times reported on the story, TPM sites had already posted 15 items related to Lam’s firing.

It was in the second of these posts that TPM Muckraker pointed out another tantalising titbit buried in the Union-Tribune story: California Senator Diane Feinstein was claiming that Carol Lam was only the tip of the iceberg. The Bush administration was quietly pushing out US attorneys across the country.

Over the next several months, Marshall and TPM’s deputy editor, Paul Kiel, kept up their steady coverage of the firing of Carol Lam and the eight other US attorneys forced out as part of what became known as “the US attorney purge”. Thanks in large part to Marshall and Kiel’s tenacity, by mid-May, three top Justice Department staffers had resigned. Today, the future of Alberto Gonzales, the US attorney-general and a longtime Bush loyalist, is in doubt, with even some Republicans calling for him to step down.

“Marshall almost single-handedly kept the attorney purge story alive,” says Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow at the progressive media watchdog organisation Media Matters for America. “He pulled off a textbook example of what new media and online media can do.”

I will resist the temptation to boldface Paul's name! (Also I am making a mental note to read start reading TPM, I had no idea Paul was doing all this great stuff, lazily I seem to only read things online concerning literary matters, triathlons and weird science! Here's an NPR story on all this too--oh dear, must keep myself better informed about the state of things in the world, I fear it's like the way that for some years now I really should have been wearing glasses to counteract nearsightedness only I kind of like walking around in a soft-focus daze! The state of the world is so dire, it seems often not worth contemplating...)

Compass and clock

Adam Kirsch has a good piece at the Sun on the new Cecil Day-Lewis biography, which in a world where my apartment was not already full of new and newish unread books I would be going to some trouble to procure and read at my earliest convenience.