Towel love

I've had this tab open for a while - a very nice piece about a favorite novel of mine, Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. (Also a great fan of the dalmatian books!)

The mind's construction in the face

At Vanity Fair, Francis Wheen on the life and work of Josephine Tey.

Greaves and pauldrons

Mark Kingwell on Paul Fussell. It was at age thirteen or fourteen I think that I first read Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. (I also had a treasured copy of Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, loaned to me I suspect by my singularly inspiring teacher Deborah Dempsey!) I had the electrifying sense of reading a book that was something like what I wanted to write myself someday - I had already had that feeling very strongly based on novels by Robert Graves, Anthony Burgess and a few others (Gore Vidal?), but this was a new vision of what might be possible....

The best thing about Mark's Hilobrow shout-out to P. Fussell was that it reminded me of the existence of a book I heard about on its first publication but never read, and which was perhaps more perfectly suited to my current state of mind than anything else imaginable: Sam Fussell's Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder. Happily for me, this book has just been reissued, and I devoured this week (again, curiously, thinking - this is inspirational in terms of a book I might write myself one of these days!).

Here are a few snippets. First, on coming across a copy of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder in the autobiography section of the Strand in September 1984:

As for his body, why, here was protection, and loads of it. What were these great chunks of tanned, taut muscle but modern-day armor? Here were breastplates, greaves, and pauldrons aplenty, and all made from human flesh. He had taken stock of his own situation and used he weight room as his smithy. A human fortress--a perfect defense to keep the enemy host at bay. What fool would dare storm those foundations?
--
Pre-iron, I'd spent my days convicting myself of avarice and envy and sloth. To become something else seemed the only alternative. As long as I covered myself with the equivalent of scaffolding and labeled myself a "work in progress" I could escape the doubt and uncertainty that plagued my past and spend every second of my present concentrating on a pristine future. I hated the flawed, weak, vulnerable nature of being human as much as I hated the Adam's apple which bobbed beneath my chin. The attempt at physical perfection grew from seeds of self-disgust.
--
It had begun to dawn on me that the whole building thing might be merely a parody of labor, and I myself a well-muscled dilettante. What would Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, think of bodybuilding? He had to be turning over in his grave. After all, the iron we lifted didn't help build a bridge or a battleship or a skyscraper. It enlarged our biceps and spread the sweep of our thighs. The labor of farmers and factory workers and longshoremen had a kind of dignity and purpose that ours didn't.

Here's an excellent interview with Fussell about the bodybuilding, the book and the paths his life has taken since.

Bonus link: Lionel Shriver on the body as a trench coat.

The last...

At the end of January my father and I were both keen to read Antonia Fraser's memoir of childhood, My History; it's not properly published in the US, i.e. unavailable for Kindle, so he kindly ordered us each a copy from the Book Depository in the UK. Thus leading to my painful awareness, as I read the book this week with considerable pleasure, that this is the last book my father will ever send me....

A passage that I know would have caught his eye, as Enid Blyton was also famously banned by the librarian in the Kirkcaldy of my father's childhood:

One author was never allowed to pollute our imaginations and that was Enid Blyton. In an excess of Thirties moralistic disapproval - the only example of such that I can remember - my mother banned her works. Unusually for me, I took no steps to get hold of the books in question later from the library. Indeed, I followed my mother when dealing with my own family, more for reasons of intellectual snobbery, I suspect, rather than anything else. My daughters, however, showed more spirit: it was not long before a stockpile of the dread works came tumbling out of their wardrobe. 'Jane' - a lively schoolfriend - 'gave them to us' was the explanation. 'She felt sorry for us not being able to read them. It was so exciting reading them in secret.' (A lesson, surely, in the dangers of censorship.)

To a curious degree, I share some of Fraser's influences in the matter of childhood reading: I suppose these were my English grandmother's books rather than even my mother's (Our Island Story and the unforgettably good Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies). When it came to Our Island Story, I was particularly fascinated by the story of the coming of Hengist and Horsa, which Fraser doesn't single out here but which I cannot resist quoting:

Then Hengist said, "You have indeed given us lands and houses, but as we have helped you so much I think you should give me a castle and make me a prince."

"I cannot do that," replied Vortigern. "Only Britons are allowed to be princes in this land. You are strangers and you are heathen. My people would be very angry if I made any one but a Christian a prince."

At that Hengist made a low bow, pretending to be very humble. "Give your servant then just so much land as can be surrounded by a leather thong," he said.

Vortigern thought there could be no harm in doing that, so he said, "Yes, you may have so much." But he did not know what a cunning fellow Hengist was.

As soon as Vortigern had given his consent, Hengist and Horsa killed the largest bullock they could find. Then they took its skin and cut it round and round into one long narrow strip of leather. This they stretched out and laid upon the ground in a large circle, enclosing a piece of land big enough upon which to build a fortress.

If you do not quite understand how Hengist and Horsa managed to cut the skin of a bullock into one long strip, get a piece of paper and a pair of scissors. Begin at the edge and cut the paper round and round in circles till you come to the middle. You will then find that you have a string of paper quite long enough to surround a brick castle. If you are not allowed to use scissors, ask some kind person to do it for you.

Vortigern was very angry when he learned how he had been cheated by Hengist and Horsa. But he was beginning to be rather afraid of them, so he said nothing, but allowed them to build their fortress. It was called Thong Castle, and stood not far from Lincoln, at a place now called Caistor.

It's a very interesting memoir, but shallow rather than deep: you only get glimpses into more complicated ideas and states of feeling (I liked the aside where Fraser notes of her father that his trait of marking a book with a strong pencil as he read was so characteristic and ingrained that "after his death, I was able to identify a copy of the New Testament left behind in the House of Lords library, without an owner's name, but full of those ritual stabbings"). And here are a few of the passages that most resonated with me:

It is a fact that, being a quick reader, apart from enabling a person to study good books such as Macaulay and Gibbon, enables a person to read a lot of bad books as well. It would however be ungrateful to pick out the titles that gave me such pleasure and stigmatize them as bad books; besides, I would maintain that such books can teach you narrative skill, which certainly never comes amiss in writing History.

And again:

It was now for the first time that the pleasure of what for tax purposes I came to term (perfectly accurately) Optical Research was revealed to me. It also could be called Going to Places and Looking at Them. But what an essential process it is in the making of a historical biography! With the respectful handling of the original documents, it ranks as one of the major ways of reaching what G. M. Trevelyan in his Autobiography called 'the poetry of history': 'the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another . . .'

(Note to self: you must write that little book about Gibbon's Rome!)

Other appealing details concern the "Fish Furniture" at Admiralty House and Cecil Beaton's pedantic habit of preferring the plural "gins-and-tonic": a life of privilege needless to say, which has irked some readers I think, but I couldn't put it down.

Quincunciall Lozenges

Oliver Sacks' personal history in libraries (courtesy of Dave Lull), with a call for keeping books on shelves. This piece should be read in its entirety by anyone who loves books - it is heavenly - but I was especially captivated by this bit, for obvious reasons:

But the library I most loved at Oxford was our own library at the Queen’s College. The magnificent library building itself had been designed by Christopher Wren, and beneath this, in an underground maze of heating pipes and shelves, were the vast subterranean holdings of the library. To hold ancient books, incunabula, in my own hands was a new experience for me—I particularly adored Gesner’s Historiae Animalium (1551), richly illustrated with Dürer’s drawing of a rhinoceros and Agassiz’s four-volume work on fossil fishes. It was there, too, that I saw all of Darwin’s works in their original editions, and it was in the stacks that I found and fell in love with all the works of Sir Thomas Browne—his Religio Medici, his Hydrotaphia, and The Garden of Cyrus (The Quincunciall Lozenge). How absurd some of these were, but how magnificent the language! And if Browne’s classical magniloquence became too much at times, one could switch to the lapidary cut-and-thrust of Swift—all of whose works, of course, were there in their original editions. While I had grown up on the nineteenth-century works that my parents favored, it was the catacombs of the Queen’s library that introduced me to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature—Johnson, Hume, Pope, and Dryden. All of these books were freely available, not in some special, locked-away rare books enclave, but just sitting on the shelves, as they had done (I imagined) since their original publication. It was in the vaults of the Queen’s College that I really gained a sense of history, and of my own language.

(Note to my mother: make sure you read this one, you will like it in any case but the Willesden public library makes a star appearance!)

2 writers

Two writers who meant a lot to me when I was growing up died recently; a few links to mark their passing.

Farley Mowat died at the age of 92. Here is a wonderful appreciation by Dorian Stuber. Both Never Cry Wolf and The Dog Who Wouldn't Be were very important to me (though as Dorian says in his post, the books of Gerald Durrell were probably more influential the long run - I too was a child who imagined a future as a sort of hybrid of Durrell and Jane Goodall, and spent untold hours cleaning out the cages of rabbits, guinea-pigs, snakes, lizards, etc. in the school science room!). Two things that have always stuck with me: the claim (possibly fabricated) that Mowat peed around the perimeter of his camp in order to mark it as his territory; and the wonderful cover for the edition of The Dog Who Wouldn't Be that lived at my grandparents' house in London.


Also: Mary Stewart dies age 97. Both the thrillers and the Merlin novels were among my absolute favorites when I was ten or eleven - I have read them all about a million times (again, they were on the shelf at my grandmother's house in London, I reread the whole set every two years when we visited).

Prosthesis

We really are living in a great age of prosthetics (it is one of my favorite things about doing the New York City Triathlon, too, which is otherwise a rather overpriced and crowded and hot race, that you see so many young fast athletes racing on prosthetic legs). (FT site registration required.)

(Photo credit: Takao Ochi for the FT)

This picture makes me think of my mild prejudice against most performance art - given the possibilities of avant-garde musical performance, why wouldn't you be a musician instead? You get all the potentially good parts of performance art plus music....

Writing from Cayman. I made it here safely, only as so often the case at the cost of a minor lung ailment! No exercise this weekend, accordingly & unfortunately, but it is still very nice to be here, even with massive pile of work and lungs like creaky bellows. Light reading along the route: Mark Billingham, From the Dead (not actually a new book and rather inferior to the usual Thorne standard, which may explain why it wasn't published in the US at the time); Victor Gischler, The Deputy (enjoyable gonzo noir, slightly under-proofread); James S. A. Corey, The Butcher of Anderson Station. Just now dug in on the first installment of one of my favorite books from childhood, one of the best value-for-money (re)reading opportunities on the internet!

Dope literature

From the TLS archive, a 1938 review of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca:

The conventions of a story of this kind are not the conventions of the so-called realistic novel, and it would be absurd to reproach Miss du Maurier for her fine, careless rapture. In its kind “Rebecca” is extraordinarily bold and confident, eloquent and accomplished to a degree that merits genuine respect. Hundreds of novelists to-day try to write in a similar vein: the few who produce novels as readable as this are household names. It is fair, no doubt, to call this type of fiction “dope”. But it is no good pretending that everybody would read Tolstoy or Proust if there were no dope literature.

I read a lot of Daphne Du Maurier's novels when I was a teenager - I think the one that has most stayed with me is The House on the Strand - which in turn reminds me of another childhood favorite, Anya Seton's Green Darkness....

The Jersey Metal Detectorists' Society

This news item reminded me of a Roald Dahl tale in a volume I read again and again as a child.

(I think the stories I read most obsessively at that age were inevitably the Sherlock Holmes ones, and certainly R. L. Stevenson and other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tales of the uncanny, but Dahl's children's stories and also the stories of Joan Aiken were also a major influence....)

Closing tabs

A few weeks ago B. sent me a link with the subject line "A Young Scientist's Illustrated Primer," and it inevitably gave me an irresistible urge to reread what is surely my favorite Neal Stephenson novel, The Diamond Age.  I first read it c. 2001 or so, when I picked up a used mass-market paperback from the science-fiction-oriented table in front of Milano Market, and it was something of a revelation.  It  is the perfect book for me! 

(I think my two other favorites of Stephenson's are Cryptonomicon, which I read in a single sitting on the redeye flight back from Seattle when I was doing the low-budget book tour for Heredity - in certain respects, the length of Stephenson's novels is a vice, but for travel reading, it's a huge virtue, and I think I can also say with some specificity that though I bought a hardcover copy of Anathem, I didn't actually read it until I purchased a second copy for Kindle and devoured it on the trip we took last year to Costa Rica.  Snow Crash is more iconic, perhaps, but it doesn't hold as dear a place in my heart...)

Anyway, the reread totally lived up to my memory of it (I've probably read it a couple times before, couldn't say exactly).  Mouse army!  The texture of the primer passages is perhaps not quite as captivating as a different kind of writer might have managed, but it really is an excellent book.

Finally finished the last section of True Believers, which I'd stalled out on.  Also, this Black Cat Appreciation Day post made me realize that the two Carbonel books I knew very well as a child were followed by a third that I could actually obtain on Kindle.  It is not up to the standard of the first two, but it caused me to reflect on how I might obtain a copy of another book that represented a fantastically desirable and unavailable thing to me as a child, the fourth and final installment in Pamela Brown's Blue Door Theatre series, Maddy Again - I read the first three countless times, but this one I have never read.  Interlibrary loan?

The copyedited manuscript of The Magic Circle came back to me last night, which is exciting.  My favorite thing (I will scan and post a page of it, I think): the personalized style sheet, with all of my proper nouns and allusions tabulated in neat columns. 

About to have a morning session on the style book.  Slightly anxiety-provoking having two projects on my desk and the start of the semester so close, but everything should be manageable if I keep my head.

Miscellaneous other linkage: FBI files on Sylvia Plath's father; literary soap (underlying link is rather delightful); Tom Stoppard interviewed at More Intelligent Life.

Nine red herrings

Via Alice, two good Encyclopedia Brown links: Tom Scocca on nine red herrings; Kathryn Schulz on the desire to be Encyclopedia Brown.

The most distrusted of writers?

At the Paris Review, Randy Boyagoda on Enid Blyton in Sri Lanka.

Lashings of ginger beer

What the Famous Five ate.  (Via the Paris Review.)

End-of-week update

These Seven Sicknesses, a.k.a. the Sophocles marathon at the Flea, was highly worthwhile: the treatment of the Oedipus plays seems a bit unstable on the farce-tragedy axis (and I thought the actor playing Oedipus was perhaps the weakest in the show, or at any rate his performance was too campy to be at all moving), but the middle segment of Philoctetes-Ajax is excellent (the Ajax staging is just superb, particularly the handling of the sheep scene) and the concluding pair of Electra-Antigone works very well also.

I finished reading A Dance with Dragons and all I can say is that I really do not see that George R. R. Martin will be able to wrap up the rest of the story in only one more volume, however long!  He is temperamentally averse to leaving anything out, and it leads to some frustrating choices in volumes four and five; my heart sank when I realized that the last volume was literally going to go back to the temporal starting point of the previous one and cover exactly the same time period, not to show a markedly divergent view but just to fill out some things that didn't fit in.  You then see a character you care about, who grew and changed over the previous installment, back in his pre-change version, and for no good reason; this strikes me as a fundamental breach of the compact with the reader, just as I dislike the playing-fast-and-loose-with-alternate-timestream thing that a certain television series I love has been indulging in: the sense of reality you have in television drama is thin enough that you cannot afford to erode it too far by, say, bringing back to life a character you have killed off in the alternate timestream by letting the space-time continuum shift and reconfigure everything. . . .

(You can get the first four installments of George R. R. Martin in a box or a bundle, but really what I recommend instead is Wolf Hall on the one end or Garth Nix's brilliant Abhorsen trilogy on the other.)

The due date is rapidly approaching for my ratings on second-round reading for the New York Public Library Young Lions Prize, so I won't be writing much here about what I'm reading over next few weeks (confidentiality!), and I'm also teaching Clarissa again this semester, which eats up quite a bit of reading time.  However there is always room for a little light reading round the edges...

Miscellaneous links:

Neil Gaiman on growing up reading C. S. Lewis, Tolkien and Chesterton.

And I'm giving a talk today at 4pm at the CUNY Graduate Center; I am just hoping it will stop raining to the extent that people will actually be willing to leave their dwellings and venture out into the world to come to it!

I am mournful

that Diana Wynne Jones is dead.

Really I have read many of her books so many times that they are part of my internal landscape, but my two absolute favorites are probably Fire and Hemlock (that was the edition I had, and I read it countless times as a teenager) and Howl's Moving Castle, which I checked out again and again from the school library (but I can't find a picture of that cover online) and have owned in several different editions since.

The first book of hers I ever read was The Magicians of Caprona, which I found absolutely spellbinding (and continue to do so); her most autobiographical novel (it is not her best, but it is interesting, and it takes up a notion that she revisits so often that it clearly had some special personal significance, of the parts of a person's identity being split up in a way that erodes their selfhood) is surely The Time of the Ghost.

I think of all of these books very frequently, it is difficult to explain how deeply I have been steeped for many years now in Diana Wynne Jones's fiction; the one that I have the strongest urge to reread right now, though, and would download to my Kindle if I could (I don't own a copy, though I have given away several), is Deep Secret, which includes among other good things one of the best depictions EVER of a science-fiction convention...

Deadwood legends

A cool bit at Wired Science about the afterlife of the Homestake gold mine as a physics lab: this is the mythology of my childhood, my father worked on that project for some years in the 1980s at Penn and had a stint actually living in South Dakota while they built the original neutrino-detection tank! The museum sounds as though it will be highly worthwhile; I have long had a yen to visit that part of the world due to the great impression Laura Ingalls Wilder's books made on me as a young child....

3 other influential books

These three made a huge impression on me starting when I was seven or eight through about eleven or so - I was a precocious reader, but they were topics of serious interest to me! In those days I thought I would be a primatologist when I grew up. Only later did I realize that the most interesting and complex primate is the human being...

1. Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man. I read it again and again, and knew the chimpanzee genealogies by heart.

2. Harlan Lane, The Wild Boy of Aveyron. The discussions of language in this book burst upon me like an explosion.

3. Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind.

Other influential books at this age, excluding fiction: the D'Aulaires' books of Greek and Norse myths; David Macaulay's castle and cathedral books.

Reading/writing

Monica Edinger responds to several recent pieces on children's reading.

Also, via The Rumpus, Clive Thompson weighs in at Wired on the "new literacy".

Light reading catch-up

I was saving up some especially good light reading for my plane trip a week ago and initial days of tropical idyll (which is really partly a work trip, but includes a vacation module), so I have a more than usually excellent pile of books to report on, including a pair of books (one a re-read, one that I haven't yet finished) which deserve their own post and a wonderful book on running that I think I will also write about separately.

It took considerable self-restraint not to pounce on The Girl Who Played With Fire the moment it arrived from Amazon, but fortunately I was so busy with novel-revising that I literally had no time to read it - it was a delightful way to pass the flight, and I think that if anything it is even more compulsively readable than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

I think it is more wish-fulfillment than actual similarity, but I strongly identify with the semi-feral female heroine in the model of Lisbeth Salander - the crime-fiction prototype for this sort of character is Carol O'Connell's Mallory, but one also finds a version of the type in Smilla's Sense of Snow, and gentler incarnations in my favorite Peter Dickinson novel (The Lively Dead) and in some of Iain non-M. Banks's female protagonists (Whit, The Business). Bonus link: the Literary Saloon reflects on the quite different titles chosen for the translations of Stieg Larsson into various languages.

As soon as I read Jo Walton's recommendation at the Tor website for The Dragon Waiting: A Masque of History, I knew I had to get it! I absolutely loved it, and only regret that I cannot offer it to my twelve-year-old self, who as a passionate devotee of historical fiction (Robert Graves, Mary Renault, Anya Seton) and a lover of Richard III (Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, Shakespeare) and an obsessive reader of books set in Roman Britain and/or Arthurian spinoffs (Rosemary Sutcliffe, Gillian Bradshaw, Mary Stewart) would have found this an utterly magical read when it was originally published in 1983. The opening sentences still sent a thrill through my heart:

The road the Romans made traversed North Wales a little way inland, between the weather off the Irish Sea and the mountains of Gwynedd and Powys; past the copper and the lead that the travel-hungry Empire craved. The road crossed the Conwy at Caerhun, the Clwyd at Asaph sacred to Esus, and the Roman engineers passed it through the hills, above the shore and below the peaks, never penetrating the spine of the country. Which is not to say that there were no ways in; only that the Romans did not find them.

It is a strange and elliptical and wonderful book; the two are not at all alike, but I would compare it to Pamela Dean's Tam Lin in terms of its power simultaneously to call up my childhood self and still enchant my adult one.

And then another treat: Charlie Williams' Stairway to Hell. There is a special place in my heart that will be forever reserved for the exploits of Royston Blake, but this is a very unusual and appealing novel (and could be well paired with Lewis Shiner's Glimpses and George R. R. Martin's The Armageddon Rag on a rock-and-roll fantasy syllabus - if they ever make a sequel to This Is Spinal Tap, let Charlie be the screenwriter, please!).