Closing tabs

The Harvard color vault.

A St. Petersburg seed vault.

Shakespeare First Folio confirmed as genuine. (I have to say, this exhibit runs through Oct. 30 and if there is any chance I would be in the UK between now and then, it seems worth the trek north to get to see this - I guess I can visit another time, it doesn't have to be while the exhibit is up. All I would really need is an appointment here....)

Via Sarang, the 'Werewolf of Worcester'?

PEZ collection! (Underlying occasion.)

Jon Ronson interviews Monica Lewinsky (and Mary Beard against internet trolling)

The 28 naughtiest children in literature?

Shades of Pynchon

The quest for an authentic zoot suit! Via Lynn Peril.

Nuances

From Maggie Nelson, Bluets:

7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don't fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? There is so little blue food in nature--in fact blue in the wild tends to mark food to avoid (mold, poisonous berries)--that culinary advisers generally recommend against blue light, blue paint, and blue plates when and where serving food. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others. You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin's robe with it. But still you wouldn't be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly.
....
63. Generally speaking I do not hunt blue things down, nor do I pay for them. The blue things I treasure are gifts, or surprises in the landscape. The rocks I dug up this summer in the north country, for example, each one mysteriously painted round its belly with a bright blue band. The little square junk of navy blue dye you brought me long ago, when we barely knew each other, folded neatly into a paper wrapper.
....
106. When I first heard of the cyanometer, I imagined a complicated machine with dials, cranks, and knobs. But what de Saussure actually "invented" was a cardboard chart with 53 cut-out squares sitting alongside 53 numbered swatches, or "nuances," as he called them, of blue: you simply hold the sheet up to the sky and match its color, to the best of your ability, to a swatch. As in Humboldt's Travels (Ross, 1852): "We beheld with admiration the azure colour of the sky. Its intensity at the zenith appeared to correspond to 41 [degrees] of the cyanometer." This latter sentence brings me great pleasure, but really it takes us no further--either into knowledge, or into beauty.

See also #170 and 226, only I am too lazy to retype them!

Shiny things

Luc Sante's method is the magpie's.

Turtle soup

At the Guardian, John Mullan reviews Christopher Plumb's new book on exotic animals in Georgian London:

The Earl of Shelburne, later to be prime minister, kept an orangutan and a supposedly tame leopard in his orangery at Bowood House. The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham liked to stroke the leopard when he visited. Sir Robert Walpole’s pet flamingo warmed itself by the kitchen fire. Sir Hans Sloane was followed round his Chelsea home by a tame, one-eyed wolverine. He also owned an opossum and a porcupine.

"I want to live with these objects!"

Never go to sleep on a dragon's hoard.

On reading books in other countries

At Tablet, Mark Oppenheimer interviews Alberto Manguel. (Via The Literary Saloon.)

A 300-bag collection

Magdalena Edwards visits the Simone Handbag Museum in Seoul.

"Crocodile"

"We'd expect the collection, including denture moulds, to sell for £2,000 to £3,000."

Closing tabs

A conversation with Randall Munroe, including a fascinating description of the origin of the What If? series (via GeekPress):

It actually started with a class. MIT has a weekend program where volunteers can teach classes to groups of high school students on any subject you want. I had a friend who was doing it, and it sounded really cool -- so I signed up to teach a class about energy, which I always thought was interesting, but which is a slippery idea to define. I was really getting into the nuts and bolts of what energy is, and it was a lot of fun -- but when I started to get into the normal lecture part of the class, it felt kind of dry, and I could tell the kids weren't super into it. And then we got to a part where I brought up an example -- I think it was Yoda in Star Wars. And they got really excited about that. And then they started throwing out more questions about different movies -- like, "When the Eye of Sauron exploded at the end of The Lord of the Rings, and knocked people over from this far away, can we tell how big a blast that was?" They got really excited about that -- and I had a lot more fun doing it than I did just teaching the regular material.

So I spent the second half of the class just solving problems like that in front of them. And then I was like, "That was really fun. I want to keep doing it."

A journey into the opium underworld.

Miniature car models photographed (via Things).

Uganda's Royal Ascot goat races!  (Via Khakasa.)

Closing tabs

The internet does not seem to have been bountifully full of the particular kind of thing I like to link to this weekend, but here are a few decent ones:

A nice obituary for the author of My Side of the Mountain, a particular favorite of mine in childhood.

"I've collected 10 million buttons."  (FT site registration required.)

"The obvious thing was to have jelly on the glass plate."  (Via Jane.)

I think I'm almost ready to get back to work (I'd better be, as this essay is not going to write itself!).  This week mostly I've just been exercising massively and reading novels: a quite reasonable Swedish thriller called Three Seconds; a book much-awaited by me, Garth Nix's A Confusion of Princes, which does not quite touch the sublimity of his Abhorsen books but which happily made me want to reread Diana Wynne Jones's Deep Secret, which is unfortunately not available for Kindle; Liza Marklund's Red Wolf and Last Will, which I liked very much but due to carelessness read in the wrong order; and Helene Tursten's tediously-titled-in-translation Detective Inspector Huss.  I will definitely read the rest of Tursten's series, as I thought this one was quite good, but the only thing I really have to note about it is that the detectives are constantly eating pizza, open-faced sandwiches and Lucia buns, which made me hungry!

Caslon et al.

A book repository designed along the model of the Svalbard seed vault.  (John Seabrook's memorable piece about the seed vault is online only to New Yorker subscribers, but here's a good slide show to an old NYT story on the same topic.  Peruvian potatoes and Syrian legumes are among the most recent deposits.)

"Let It Bleed"

Ian Rankin prefers vinyl (FT site registration required).

Tabloid treasures

A very good piece at the FT by Marek Kohn (site registration required, but if you do not register you will miss the picture of the "merman chimera"...) on the Wellcome Trust's collection of curiosities. It is accompanied by a fantastic slideshow.

I survived my 10K swim this morning; the water was full of chop and the buoys kept shooting all over the place in misleading directions, but it was very enjoyable taken in sum. I can now hardly lift my arms above my shoulders!

Finished the Neal Stephenson book this afternoon. It is enjoyable, but not so much my cup of tea: I think so highly of some of his books that this one has to count as something of a disappointment. I think the fact is that for thrillers, I really prefer either first-person or third-person limited narration, and see no reason for an absolutely enormous cast of characters: there is some serious redundancy here, at least if you consider the book from the point of view of the Lee Child-Dick Francis school of thriller-writing, a school I obviously admire (perhaps partly because my own cast of thought is more clearly Stephensonian than Childish or Franciscan). There are three separate pairs of young man-young woman who basically end up all blending together: it really is true of the men as well as the woman (older-generation protagonist Richard is by far the most fully realized character), but it is particularly problematic for me as a reader in the case of the women. I wanted to press a copy of Taylor Stevens's The Informationist into Stephenson's hands to show him what can be done in this vein. This may, though, really be primarily a function of genre preference: I don't think the Stieg Larsson books are perfect, but they are so very much what I like in terms of light reading that I can forgive them their implausibilities, wish-fulfilling aspects and other excesses. There is some very good writing here, lots of funny and sharp observations very effectively phrased (his prose style is as Gary Lutz might say "tractional, load-bearing" but with interesting word choice and an excellent ear for a phrase), and I feel certain that the book will appeal profoundly to those who have ever played role-playing games, table-top or computer-based!

Swimming and Stephenson were both good for mental health, but though I did a couple hours of work-related stuff today as well, I still have a huge amount to get done tomorrow for Monday - the semester is well and truly underway...

The anti-fetishistic-twaddle position

Luc Sante's book collection devoured his life! (Via Yeti Mike.)

"The tender new catch"

An absolutely delightful interview with Oliver Sacks at the Times. (Link courtesy of the excellent Dave Lull, who kindly steers my way interesting things Sacksian and Koestenbaumian!) Two of my favorite bits:

I don’t know what Facebook and Twitter are since I don’t use a computer. But a friend gave me a hat with a built-in compass, since I have no sense of direction. It beeps when you face north and the intensity of the beeps shows how close you are. I like to think it’s improving my awareness but truthfully, I don’t think I’m getting any better. And I get a little embarrassed wearing a hat that beeps.
...
I buy lumps of metals because I’m a periodic-table freak. I bought rhenium for my 75th birthday, osmium for my 76th birthday, iridium for my 77th birthday. But I may not be able to afford more than a tiny pellet of platinum for my 78th birthday this year.

"He was wedded to his sans serifs"

Jon Ronson's fascinating 2004 piece about Stanley Kubrick's collecting practices. (Via Brent, who saw it here.) Almost every sentence is grippingly excerptable, and the piece is full of wonderful phrases too, but here is a bit I especially liked:

"I was just talking to Tony about typefaces," I say to Jan.

"Ah yes," says Jan. "Stanley loved typefaces." Jan pauses. "I tell you what else he loved."

"What?" I ask.

"Stationery," says Jan.

I glance over at the boxes full of letters from people who felt about Kubrick the way Kubrick felt about stationery, and then back to Jan. "His great hobby was stationery," he says. "One time a package arrived with 100 bottles of brown ink. I said to Stanley, 'What are you going to do with all that ink?' He said, 'I was told they were going to discontinue the line, so I bought all the remaining bottles in existence.' Stanley had a tremendous amount of ink." Jan pauses. "He loved stationery, pads, everything like that."

The Florestine Collection

A story about Helen Hill and how her husband Paul Gailiunas finished her last film.

I'm heading to South Carolina tomorrow for the premiere; it is a bittersweet prospect, but it will be good to see so many of Helen's family and friends gathered in one place, and of course I am very much looking forward to seeing the film itself. I visited Helen and Paul in New Orleans not long after she had first discovered those dresses in trash bags on the curb, and the brightness of her face as she described the treasure and showed me some of the dresses is still very vivid to me.

(It may have been the same visit where she introduced me to Rosie the pig, a delightful housemate, and warned me that if I had a lipstick in my bag, I had better put the bag up out of reach on a high shelf: pigs will root through handbags and snuffle up as delicious anything that is made of animal or vegetable fat!)

Things of minor note

Closing tabs:

High Gygaxian (via The Dizzies).

Digital collecting at things magazine (I believe the original site link was via L. Lee Lowe; the underlying link to Things Organized Neatly is particularly worthwhile, as a cake theme seems to predominate!).

Light reading around the edges of an especially busy couple of weeks: Patricia McKillip's The Bards of Bone Plain, which I found evocative and engaging but much too reminiscent of the books of hers I endlessly read and reread when I was young, the Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy; a quite mediocre novel by Robert Crais; two novels by Jennifer Crusie on the recommendation of Jo Walton (I preferred Maybe This Time to Faking It); a comfort reread of A Girl's Guide to Kissing Frogs (not Victoria Clayton's best novel, but the one that came most readily to hand); and - last but most certainly not least - the second installment of Patrick Rothfuss's series, The Wise Man's Fear. It is not that those Rothfuss installments are the perfect books, but they are so wonderfully readable, I finished this one with a huge sense of loss when I realized how long I am likely to have to wait for the next installment. However I have just started reading a novel that seems to me wonderfully appealing also, so that is some small consolation: more anon!

(Saw a bunch of movies last week too, and a show, but don't know that I feel that need to blog any of it here.)

A dried chameleon and the eardrum of a lion

At the TLS, a rather lovely reminiscence by William Dalrymple of his encounters with Bruce Chatwin (the occasion is the publication of a collection of Chatwin's letters). For me as a reader Chatwin has been eclipsed by Sebald, who seems to me immeasurably the greater writer, but I am attracted to Chatwin's curiosities of course - I think Dalrymple may slightly overstate Chatwin's current lack of fashionability?

Here's a good bit, anyway:

“I’ve never liked big books”, he writes while hard at work on The Viceroy of Ouidah, “so I don’t see why I should try and write them. Unless you’re Tolstoy most of the ‘great books’ of the world should have been cut in half.” One characteristic remark notes how “I have written four bad pages and will reduce them to a single line”. He also advises younger writers to avoid journalism “because ultimately it corrodes”, and while he occasionally writes for the TLS, he believes that “the besetting sin of all English writers is their fatal attraction for periodicals, their fascination for reviews and their passion for bickering in print. Resolution of the month: Never write for newspapers”. Above all he advises writers to avoid listening to reviews, which he says are “paralysing”: “Don’t flap too much about the critics – and never try to please them (it isn’t worth it). The function of an artist is to work for a) himself b) to leave something memorable, for the future, to shore up the ruins. Fuck the rest of them!”.