Like minds

The latest xkcd echoes the opening of Charlie Stross's The Family Trade!

I spent the later part of the evening soliciting the soothing effects of the Jeeves Omnibus.

What I wish I were doing right now?

Things to look forward to in 2010!

I am tempted to link to the very gruesome stories about Peruvian murders for human fat, but will instead end on a happier note: pet duck rescued from overflow pipe by team of firefighters.

And

this is so farfetched that I could hardly believe the email in my inbox - but my younger self would never have forgiven me if I did not get a ticket to this, although it will mean missing a talk that I really wanted to attend! Arghhhh, schedule conflicts...

Upcoming

I think I must go to this, it sounds so exactly my cup of tea, although it will have to be squeezed in before meet-up for early family dinner:

November 21 5PM Andrea Rosen Gallery
525 W. 24th St NY (212) 627-6000

Writer Shelley Jackson offers an illustrated lecture in applied necrophysics, with selections from the archives of the Shelley Jackson Vocational School of Ghost Speaking and Hearing-Mouth Children (founded 1898), including early travel writings from the land of the dead and recordings from the school choir’s Music for Stammererers. The mechanics of channelling the dead and the structure of the necrocosmos will be explained, with a brief refutation of certain errors made by fellow thanatomath Matthew Ritchie. Class will conclude with a collective attempt to channel the dead.

Postscript

Re: sabbatical plans, I am wanting to write two books and do vast amounts of triathlon training in preparation for IMWI!

4 more Mondays

I teach Mondays and Wednesdays this semester, but Monday is my heavy day: so, four more Mondays and then (it is a strange thought - I have a sabbatical coming up!) I will not teach again until January 2011; I would guess I can scrape through the next four weeks somehow?!?

Light reading around the edges: three books of true excellence, and all (curiously) very much the sort of thing I would have liked to write myself in a slightly alternate life: Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, which is so funny I was actually regularly laughing out loud as I read it but which makes me also fairly glad I do not live in Geoff Dyer's head (but I am certainly now going to read D. H. Lawrence's book on Thomas Hardy, which David Bromwich was also praising recently); Denise Mina's The Dead Hour, which I do not know why I did not read much sooner (it has been hanging around here for some time, I have loved her previous books - especially the Garnethill trilogy - but had a spate a year or two ago of going slightly off crime fiction - however, it was a happy find on the shelf as I bounced off the walls Friday night with exhaustion and the mental insanity of mid-November in a very busy fall semester); and Daryl Gregory's Pandemonium, which is absolutely the sort of book I most perfectly love and wish I could write, only I am having - not a midlife crisis - a midlife acknowledgment that I will never write the books of Dick Francis, Lee Child, Charlie Huston, Mary Stewart, Charlaine Harris or indeed for that matter Daryl Gregory (the list is quite long, and includes my best-beloved practitioners of the Light Reading genre, with or without demons/vampires/zombies) - I highly recommend it, though...

The sequel

More Barthes:

. . . if you like words to the point of succumbing to them, you exclude yourself from the law of the signified. . . . My body itself (and not only my ideas) can make up to words, can be in some sense created by them: today, I discover on my tongue a red patch which appears to be an abrasion, or in medical terms an excoriation--painless, moreover, which fits in perfectly, I decide, with cancer! But examined closely, this sign is merely a faint desquamation of the whitish film which covers the tongue. I cannot swear that this whole little obsessive scenario has not been worked up in order to use that rare word, so attractive by dint of its exactitude: excoriation.

Effet bienfaisant d'une phrase ~ Beneficent effect of a phrase

From Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes:

X tells me that one day he decided "to exonerate his life from his unhappy loves," and that this phrase seemed so splendid to him that it almost managed to compensate for the failures which had provoked it; he then determined (and determined me) to take more advantage of this reservoir of irony in all (aesthetic) language.

Recap: "I like, I don't like"

From September 2007, the Dizzies challenge and my old response...

"Cockamamies"

Reading Roland Barthes is amazing for many reasons, but the latest one is that by looking up the word decalcomania ("Fiction: slight detachment, slight separation which forms a complete, colored scene, like a decalcomania") I have learned the origin of the term decal!

(And: the decal craze of the late 1800s!)

The final assignment

for the class I've been teaching this semester on style:

In “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Sontag writes, “To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful, one must be tentative and nimble. The form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility.” Adopting the form or mode of “jottings” – other “jotters” we’ve read this semester include Barthes, Koestenbaum, Sante and to a lesser extent Sebald – write a piece called “Notes on Style.” The notes should be ordered by some principle – numbering, alphabetization by keyword – that is neither chronological nor obviously logic-or-argument-driven. You are welcome to use quotations from Austen, Flaubert, James, Proust, etc. as illustrations, but you are not obligated to do so; examples from other spheres are also welcome. Be as vivid and precise as possible, and include at least one original “maxim” or “aphorism” about style or one of style’s affiliates as a self-standing item in your list of jottings.

Typographic errors

“I think sometimes that being overly type-sensitive is like an allergy.”

5mph

The preamble to Cabinet's Speed Reading event:

(Picture poached from here. And a picture may or may not be worth a thousand words...)

It will be clear to anyone who knows me why I found the following text irresistible - the range of choices included everything from Gilbreth to Virilio - twenty-four of us read various bits and pieces - and in the meantime, a screen with images included an appealing and eclectic mix of stuff on the side (the film of Roger Bannister's four-minute mile, record-breaking Rubik's Cube-twisting, speed stacking, cats running in an exercise wheel, etc. etc.).

Valéry Larbaud, "Slowness" ("La lenteur"; 1930)
for Paul Morand

There is a moving tribute to speed in this quote from Samuel Johnson reported to us by Boswell: “One of the greatest pleasures in life is to travel in a coach moving at full speed.”

Though this tribute seems outdated by today’s standards of speed, it touches us, first, because it brings to mind the image we hold of Doctor Johnson: a very tall man, very fat, very slow, hippopotamus-like, thus the thought is made heavy with eloquence, lexicography, and pomposity; next, because this statement was made in the middle of the 18th century at a time when modern speed only existed in the imagination and in people’s desires, as though they could sense it. A promised land toward which they strove as fast as their horses could carry them, and which they sought in this direction, through means of breeding and selection, hoping perhaps to eventually create a race of quadrupeds with winged hooves . . . Yes, this word from the ponderous Doctor summarizes for us the aspiration of those generations who, relatively close to our own, did not know our speed which we obtained through the domestication of fire and thunder, in creating bulls and soon after bees of bronze (the description of locomotives in Ovid’s Metamorphoses is equally moving).

* * *

Shortly after Doctor Johnson came Napoleon, who dashed toward this future and who still surprises us by the truly imperial speed of his maneuvers, due to the skillful economy of well-prepared stops, fast and well-fed animals, and grooms skilled at unhitching and rehitching in a matter of minutes. Had Caligula done any better? . . . He went away on a sailboat, and here, going round in circles in those remote years, in a place before railroads, riding at full speed on a “hell train,” on the high roads around the capital, the coach that carries, through fog and under the fine Parisian rain, Louis XVIII, aging, weary, and sick, sometimes closing his heavy eyelids on eyes that would never see Canaan.

* * *

The generation that was already born then enters the scene. The first steps were difficult, and the Poets sang that Man had mounted the bronze monster too soon. But in a few more years, the Emperor would sharpen the fine points of his mustache, waxed before the mirrors of the railcar-salon-throne-room that would transport him in twelve hours from Saint-Cloud to Vichy. His pretty train—which must have been blue, white, and pink, or blue, white, and mauve like the uniform of the Cent-Gardes cavalry—preceded, and for us, followed, Waltman’s snowplow locomotive, Jules Verne’s Transcaucasian railway, and Rudyard Kipling’s Compounds.

* * *

But the railway cars and the car compartments, especially the first-class compartments, the sleeping cars, and the salon cars, grew weary—one always wants more than one has—of politely following behind the monster, who had become all too familiar and who smoked too much. Like city dwellers and the high and mighty, they felt nostalgia for the country and for pastoral life. They wanted freedom, anonymity, adventure, and horizons without cities or train stations. One night, toward the end of the 19th century, taking advantage of an unexpected stop in the middle of a field and close to a railway junction that someone had forgotten to close, the first-class compartments—which were brand new but without a hallway, and displeased with having been created based on an old model—escaped, scattered, and—finally!—took to the Open Road; the road with neither tracks nor railway switches, the road that branched out in all directions, through all of Europe’s shrubberies, and through the path of school children walking home chewing their crust of bread.

Some died from it, but the others were much the better for it, and increased in strength and speed, and had many children, even more vigorous and fast than their parents, and some of which would grow until they reached the dimensions of the original railway car. The species proliferated and grew into new varieties: there was a flying race, a warrior race, an amphibious race. But it is the road race that reproduces most easily today—too easily, in fact, for our tranquility.

For the automobile’s greatest days were those when the machine already had all of its organs, which functioned without risk for man who steered it, but the species had not yet multiplied to the point of creating the traffic jams we endure in large cities. Back then, the Limousines and Landaus were coaches that had plenty of space, found the street free before them, and ruled the road.

At that time, the encounter with another automobile in the middle of nowhere—“Hey, some comrades!”—was a genuine event, like the encounter of two ocean liners on the high seas. Back then, in the cities in which one stopped in the course of a journey in an automobile, one visited train stations with a sense of scorn.

Slim memorials

Umberto Eco on lists (courtesy of Marginal Revolution).

Michael Wood on Roland Barthes (courtesy of Paperpools)

"Drives superb"

At the Guardian, Hilary Mantel on where ideas come from.

Brother/Sister

An absolutely heavenly evening of theatergoing last night, though I am at this point in the week now so tired that I am looking at the time and wondering whether I might not go to bed at eight o'clock!

The play was Tarell Alvin McCraney's In the Red and Brown Water, and it was extraordinarily good in every respect. McCraney has invented his own idiom - it is hilarious, it is touching, it is mythic, it is altogether delightful - interesting, too, to see how this one picks up some tricks from the in certain respects quite tonally different Wig Out! I of course especially love it that he has invented a way to include third-person stage directions as part of the words spoken on stage - honestly, though, if you see only ONE thing this fall, go to the Public Theatre and see one or both of these plays (I loved The Brothers Size when I saw it two years ago - with Brent! - but if anything this one is even better - the contrast to the Robert Wilson production the night before is especially painful to contemplate, not least because the use of music and dance in this one is so superb).

And a divinely good meal afterwards, too, at Indochine (spicy beef salad, an entree special of grilled striped bass with sauteed greens, a ridiculously tasty dessert of steamed Vietnamese coffee cake with bourbon ice-cream and coffee granita): a two-for-two night, which does not happen as often as you might think!