Closing tabs

Ah, I am long overdue some tab-closing and a light reading update, but life is complicated and Facebook continues to leach the energy out of blogging! I'm in Cayman for a couple more days, but my term isn't really over - flying back to New York Thursday for a couple more Friday tenure meetings and some end-of-semester teaching stuff. Can get through a couple more weeks without disaster I think....

Anyway, links first (I have upgraded to a new Kindle and will need to consult 2 different devices to get the full log):

How many eggs does a chicken lay in its lifetime?

On the subject of recreational zoology, read Jane Yeh's rhino poem in the NYRB!

At the New Yorker, Adelle Waldman on loving and loathing Samuel Richardson.

The new era of drone vandalism.

Should brand protection extend to paper offerings to the dead?

Top ten things junior faculty should know in order to get tenure. (There was a feminist rebuttal to this somewhere, but I have misplaced the link, and besides, it didn't invalidate the original points, just complemented them!)

What do Enid Blyton's school stories teach a reader about ethics?

Who will come with me to try this sour-cherry-pie sundae?

Finally, on a sadder note, Frederic Tuten interviewed Jenny Diski in 1999 and it's well worth a reread. I won't write more about Diski here, as I am attempting to write a proper piece about her for an online publication I admire, but I have been thinking very much of one of my favorite passages of hers, from On Trying to Keep Still (I think of it all the time and have certainly never read such an uncannily accurate description of why I have such a strong aversion to making plans to see even my favorite people!):

Being really alone means being free from anticipation. Even to know that something is going to happen, that I am required to do something is an intrusion on the emptiness I am after. What I love to see is an empty diary, pages and pages of nothing planned. A date, an arrangement, is a point in the future when something is required of me. I begin to worry about it days, sometimes weeks ahead. Just a haircut, a hospital visit, a dinner party. Going out. The weight of the thing-that-is-going-to-happen sits on my heart and crushes the present into non-existence. My ability to live in the here and now depends on not having any plans, on there being no expected interruption. I have no other way to do it. How can you be alone, properly alone, if you know someone is going to knock at the door in five hours, or tomorrow morning, or you have to get ready and go out in three days' time? I can't abide the fracturing of the present by the intrusion of a planned future.

18th-century bits

Two nice eighteenth-century bits:

"Puzzle purse" a.k.a. love token at the Houghton Library;

Road maps! (Heyeresque....)

The missing notes for chapter six

Pretty much as soon as the style book was published, I started receiving emails from readers gently noting that there were no endnotes for chapter six! Alas, as per Alice Boone on the progress of error, somehow this omission eluded all of us as we read proofs.

In any case, I wanted to make sure that the information was available somewhere for searching, and it should be corrected in subsequent printings.

(Now that I have really looked through and pulled this stuff from the manuscript, I have a theory about what happened - note 8 is the anomaly here, it was a parenthetical aside in the manuscript and I dimly recall my editor suggesting that it should be either cut or moved to a note, but this was after I had already submitted my final manuscript and I would have sent changes by email rather than integrating them into the file myself - I suspect that tinkering with that text may have precipitated the larger omission.)

Notes for Chapter Six, "Late Style: The Golden Bowl and Swann's Way," Reading Style: A Life in Sentences:

1. Theodor W. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” in Essays on Music, intro. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2002), 565-67.

2. Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 456.

3. Henry James, The Golden Bowl, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (London and New York: Penguin, 2009), 3.

4. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967), 280.

5. Alan Hollinghurst, “The shy, steely Ronald Firbank,” TLS (15 Nov. 2006).

6. Ronald Firbank, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926), in Five Novels (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, [1949]), chapter 1, 333-34. The following paragraph reveals that the entity being christened is “a week-old police-dog."

7. Quoted in the introduction to Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Penguin, 2004), xiv.

8. When my brothers and I were small children, our Scottish grandmother used to give us a sort of sachet or envelope labelled “Japanese Water Flowers” full of colored snippets that would magically unfold into blossoms when placed on the surface of a bowl of water; they are most commonly made out of paper, so that there is perhaps something additionally and self-consciously literary about the notion of reading the past from such signs.

9. André Aciman, letter, NYRB 53:6 (6 April 2006), as given at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18851.

Works on paper redux

Brad Pasanek at People of the Book: especially good bits on watermarks, as well as a nice shout-out to the now-deceased Jay Fliegelman, author of one of my favorite books in eighteenth-century studies.

Works on paper

At the TLS, Leah Price reviews an alluring book on paper.

Invisible libraries

Minor resurgence of lung ailment is making me take the day off exercise, but the good thing about that and the gradual winding-down of holiday family obligations is that I am finally having a much-needed day at home cleaning up the floods of paper that accumulate over the course of the semester. Will probably post a stern to-do list later: it is not interesting, but it provides accountability....

(I am also due an end-of-year reading roundup which I hope to put together in the next couple of days.)

I read a funny book a couple weeks ago, a good recommendation from Brian Berger. It is George Steiner's My Unwritten Books, a title and a concept I wish I had thought of myself (I suppose I can revisit it if I get an opportunity late in my career!). I found a couple of the essays not very interesting, "School Terms" disturbingly elitist and judgment-oriented and "The Tongues of Eros" - about what it is like to have sex in different languages - so grotesquely embarrassing that I could read it only with a kind of appalled horror.

But "Chinoiserie," on Joseph Needham (his wildly wide-ranging history of embryology was one of my favorites of all the books I encountered while reading for the breeding book), is an excellent opener, and I thought "Invidia" was absolutely brilliant and striking, rather like Adam Phillips at his very best.

Here is a bit:

What is it like to be an epic poet with philosophic aspirations when Dante is, as it were, in the neighborhood? To be a contemporary playwright when Shakespeare is out to lunch? "How can I be if another is?" asks Goethe. Outside my door at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton I heard J. Robert Oppenheimer fling at a junior physicist the demand: "You are so young and already you have done so little."

Also of interest: at the FT, Emma Jacobs on the life of ghostwriting (site registration required).

A folded paper

Middlemarch, book 4:

Who shall tell what may be the effect of writing?  If it happens to have been cut in stone, though it lie face downmost for ages on a forsaken beach, or 'rest quietly under the drums and tramplings of many conquests', it may end by letting us into the secret of usurpations and other scandals gossiped about long empires ago: - this world being apparently a huge whispering-gallery.  Such conditions are often minutely represented in our petty lifetime.  As the stone which has been kicked by generations of clowns may come by curious little links of effect under the eyes of a scholar, through whose labours it may at last fix the date of invasions and unlock religions, so a bit of ink and paper which has long been an innocent wrapping or stop-gap may at last be laid open under the one pair of eyes which have knowledge enough to turn it into the opening of a catastrophe.  To Uriel watching the progress of planetary history from the Sun, the one result would be just as much of a coincidence as the other.

School year blues

I have nothing interesting to say when I see colleagues and students except for the ever-present observation that it is a bad time of the school year!  This coming week will again be very busy.  I have managed to finish all my reading for Monday today (for the final undergraduate seminar, Swift's "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift," Pope's "Epistle to Arbuthnot" and several pieces of criticism including a very lovely essay by David Womersley with the suggestive title "'now deaf 1740'" from this volume, and for my graduate class David Markson's haunting novel Reader's Block).  A long list of tasks to get done tomorrow before the whirlwind final end-of-semester week, which includes a department meeting, two committee meetings, a dissertation defense, one final independent study meeting (better remember to read that book this week!) and a host of other student meetings.  If I do my grading promptly, though, I could submit grades on Monday the 19th (I also have a review due that day) and transition shortly thereafter to novel revision...

Not much time for light reading this past week, but I have read a few books here and there around the edges of the vast mounds of paper that have demanded my more immediate attention (dissertations, writing samples, job letters, etc.)  Finished Moneyball, which I enjoyed a great deal despite knowing virtually nothing about baseball.  Read Michael Connelly's latest, The Drop - Connelly's novels are a very consistent pleasure, and he never just seems to be going through the motions even in these installments of long-running series.  Read a very unusual mystery novel by Alice LaPlante, called Turn of Mind, after reading about it here: it has some flaws as a crime novel, but as a portrait of a narrator/protagonist with Alzheimer's it is mesmerizing.  About halfway through Stephen King's 11/22/63, as I knew I would need something long and narrative and relatively undemanding to get me through the week.

Upcoming

events:

At the next meeting of the Columbia University Cultural Memory Colloquium, on Monday, Sept. 26 at 6pm in 754 Schermerhorn Extension, Professor Jenny Davidson will present on the work of filmmaker Helen Hill. Helen Hill, experimental animator and handmade film advocate, was shot and killed in her home in New Orleans in January 2007. Her last film, completed posthumously by her husband Paul Gailiunas, is 'The Florestine Collection.' One Mardi Gras Day in New Orleans some years earlier, Hill found more than a hundred handmade dresses in trash bags on the curb; she set out to restore them and recover the story of the woman who had made them, a recently deceased African-American seamstress named Florestine Kinchen. Both the dresses and the footage were seriously damaged by Katrina; the completed film includes Helen's original silhouette, cut-out, and puppet animation, as well as flood-damaged and restored home movies. Three of Hill's films will be screened - 'Madame Winger Makes a Film' (9:29), 'Mouseholes' (7:40) and 'The Florestine Collection' (31:00) - followed by a discussion by Professor Davidson that will touch on questions about memorialization and the materiality of film, the persistence and contingency of archives and the imperatives of preservation in the wake of catastrophe.

On a totally different note, I'm speaking about my ABCs of the novel project at Columbia's Cafe Humanities on Monday, Oct. 17 at 6pm.

The gesture of a dandy

From Roland Barthes' essay "Cy Twombly: Works on Paper," in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard:

Through TW's work, the germs of writing proceed from the greatest rarity to a swarming multiplicity: a kind of graphic pruritus. In its tendency, then, writing becomes culture. When writing bears down, explodes, pushes toward the margins, it rejoins the idea of the Book. The Book which is potentially present in TW's work is the old Book, the annotated Book: a super-added word invades the margins, the interlinea: this is the gloss. When TW writes and repeats this one word: Virgil, it is already a commentary on Virgil, for the name, inscribed by hand, not only calls up a whole idea (though an empty one) of ancient culture but also "operates" a kind of citation: that of an era of bygone, calm, leisurely, even decadent studies: English preparatory schools, Latin verses, desks, lamps, tiny pencil annotations. That is culture for TW: an ease, a memory, an irony, a posture, the gesture of a dandy.

"Wet documents, moldy paper, insect and vermin residue, and other unpleasant things"

Radioactive lab notebooks! (Courtesy of Brent, who got it here.)

At schools like Princeton and Columbia, one is really on the spot for this Manhattan Project history, it's pretty amazing. I would love to go sometime and see the sites in New Mexico. My friend N. (I may have this story slightly wrong!) was subletting an apartment down the street from the widow of this physicist, for instance, and one day archivists turned up to plumb the apartment's contents for the papers of Kitty Oppenheimer...

Yesterday I sent out the manuscript of my own novel of adventures in radioisotope research, set in an alternate-universe version of Niels Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics (a.k.a. the sequel to The Explosionist). I'll do one more pass through the manuscript in September, and of course then there will be copy-editing and proofing - but still, it's huge to be done. New provisional title, already announced on Facebook: Invisible Things!