Mouth objects

Lost languages of the dead.

Story-telling

Aside from the story I am trying to tell in my novel, I also have a story to tell in each of the two classes I'm teaching this semester. I'll post the novel syllabus tomorrow after the first class has met, I think; I still need to put together the course reader for that and drop it off at the xerox shop in the next day or two.

The reader for the drama course is done, though; I dropped it off around 8pm on Friday night after a rather frenzied day of running around town. In addition to these required books (that's about eight plays altogether) and various stuff that we'll read online through the Columbia library system (including DNB entries for Garrick and Colley Cibber and a good chunk of Cibber's landmark autobiography), the reader includes these materials:

Erving Goffman, chapter one (“Performances”), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Doubleday, [1959]), 17-76.

William Wycherley, The Plain Dealer (1677), from The Plays of William Wycherley, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

Aphra Behn, The Second Part of the Rover (1681), from The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, vol. 6: The Plays, 1678-1682 (London: William Pickering, 1996).

William Congreve, Love for Love (1694), from The Complete Plays of William Congreve, ed. Herbert Davis (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1967).

John Dryden, All for Love: or, The World Well Lost (1678), from The Works of John Dryden, vol. 13: Plays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985).

Excerpts on acting styles given in David Thomas and Arnold Hare, eds., Restoration and Georgian England, 1660-1778 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 166-173 and 341-358.

[David Garrick], An Essay on Acting (London: W. Bickerton, 1746).

Denis Diderot, “Paradox on Acting,” in Diderot’s Selected Writings, ed. Lester G. Crocker, trans. Derek Coltman (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 318-329.

Joseph Roach, chapter two (“Nature Still, But Nature Mechanized”), The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (1985; rpt. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1993), 58-92.

Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” in Techniques, Technology and Civilisation, ed. Nathan Schlanger (New York and Oxford: Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books, 2009), pp. 77-95.

Peter Holland, “Hearing the Dead: The Sound of David Garrick,” in Players, Playwrights, Playhouses: Investigating Performance, 1660-1800, ed Michael Cordner and Peter (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 248-270.

David Garrick, The Country Girl (1766), from The Plays of David Garrick, Vol. 7: Garrick’s Own Plays, 1757-1773, ed. Harry William Pedicord (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982).

David Garrick, The Jubilee (1769), from The Plays of David Garrick, Vol. 2: Garrick's Own Plays, 1767 – 1775, ed. Harry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergmann (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980).

Frankenstein-level editing

At the FT (site registration required), Shirley Apthorp on two men's quest to reproduce Grieg's performances of nine of his own works:

And so Harrison, who harbours a lifelong fascination with old recordings, embarked on a project to reconstruct Grieg’s playing to the point that it was comprehensible for the modern listener. Digital remastering, he decided, would not do.

“When you first listen to it, all you hear is noise. There are various software solutions for noise reduction. But in the end, you can’t have your cake and eat it. When you take out noise, you also take out tiny bits of information, and it’s incredible how sensitive we are to that kind of information. The best computer we have is the human brain. So I decided to find a low-tech solution to a complex problem.”

In an age before mechanical repetition, before constant noise, before continuous acceleration, did people have a different sense of time? Grieg’s playing is a glimpse of an utterly different approach to sound in space. Pianists today are nowhere near as free with tempi, as improvisatory yet structured, as subtle.

A bottle imp

An interesting and gruesome story of a lampshade made of human skin.

Animal crossing

Savegames of the deceased, courtesy of Ed.

The dead speak

Alex Abramovitch visits the Strand.

Footprints

I liked Sebastian Faulks' Human Traces quite a bit, though it seems to me a flawed novel in certain respects (the case studies and lectures do not work for me, and perhaps I am a bit too well acquainted with the sources he used to research the book - it often works better to be in relative ignorance of the source material).

It is an ambitious and interesting topic, though, and I still find Faulks one of the most readable novelists I can think of - cannot say whether it is despite or because of the fact that his idiom is that of another generation. I think my favorite book of his is still Charlotte Gray...

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.

"Dance capsules"

At the Times Magazine, Arthur Lubow on the fragility of modern dance:

Unlike drama and music, which also unfold in time, dance is not dictated by a written script or score. Although choreographers may sketch out a work for themselves with notes, dance is still taught primarily by one dancer to another, “body to body,” as the saying goes, the way the arts were transmitted in ancient cultures. A sculptor’s blocks of stone or a painter’s pigments are paragons of stability compared to the human clay that the choreographer molds.

The dead speak

Caleb Crain revisits the to me utterly fascinating question of how John Keats actually talked.

(This post is a nice small example of how Caleb uses his blog to organize and annotate his more official publications.)

Also recommended: Lynda Mugglestone's Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol. And there is a magical essay by Peter Holland, "Hearing the Dead: The Sound of David Garrick," in Players, Playwrights, Playhouses.

Bonus link: Marco Roth has a really lovely piece at n+1 about Caleb's self-published collection of blog posts The Wreck of the Henry Clay.

Virtual autopsies

My friend Sarah Weinman has a very interesting piece at Tablet Magazine on the ways that new scanning technologies may help solve the problem of the incompatibility of the autopsy with Jewish law.

"Olympic and recessional dragons"

At the TLS, Alex Burghart (who has written a funny last paragraph and contributor's note here!) on the artefacts of the Staffordshire hoard:

I joined the thousands of others visiting the Birmingham Museum earlier this month to fog the glass of the display cases housing the choicest items. “Wow!” came the exclamation to my left. “What is it?” said a second. “I don’t know.” That exchange just about summarizes current knowledge. The artefacts are undoubtedly (as Howard Carter said on first leaving Tutankhamen's tomb) “wonderful things”, but the facts behind their wondrousness are not immediately obvious. Even speculating about the hoard before the earth is removed from all of its components is a dangerous business. Yet the early suppositions of those lucky enough to have handled and examined the material already seem to carry weight. Kevin Leahy, of the Portable Antiquities Scheme, has suggested that this is the spoil of battle – goods taken from the dead after a fight – and from what I have seen, the analysis fits. Were the hoard merely plunder we would expect to find everyday riches (coins, hairpins, ingots, etc) in amongst it. Instead we have as many as eighty-four sword and dagger pommel caps, seventy-one hilt collars, two or three gold crosses, a number of twisted-metal rings, what is probably a shield decoration, and at least one cheek-piece from a helmet. Tellingly, several of the items have bent pins still sticking out of them, which means they were ripped from their original mounts. Perhaps most wonderful of all is the resonance with a passage in Beowulf describing the gathering of sword hilts from the dead after battle. “One warrior stripped the other, / looted Ongentheow’s iron mail coat, / his hard sword-hilt, / his helmet too, / and carried the graith to King Hygelac”.

Seeing the finds with Leahy’s interpretation in mind is slightly chilling. The rows of unperished pommels become personal possessions, each one unique, as though fashioned for its owner’s particular fancy, each one a life. The seeming immortality of the gold, which the Anglo-Saxons so loved, somehow drives home the mortality of those who briefly wore it. Sutton Hoo is, above all, a testament to loyalty and love – whoever hauled that boat up that hill and filled it with precious gifts did so out of a profound sense of duty. The Staffordshire Hoard is almost the opposite.

Monday ghost miscellany

An eerie glimpse of Anne Frank on film.

Deborah Solomon interviews Rosanne Cash about her new album: covers of songs chosen by her father.

Phil Nugent on Jim Carroll.

Things long ago

The true meaning of Hamlet (courtesy of Matt).

Wing-whirring

At the FT, Ángel Gurría-Quintana on a dragonfly safari (FT site registration required):

Our dragonfly safari is coming to an unsatisfactory end when a flying critter buzzes out of the reeds and into sight, before flying away and back again. It’s the biggest dragonfly I’ve ever seen – perhaps the length of my hand-span. It hovers tantalisingly close, suspended in mid-air, then shoots vertically up into the trees, flies around them and returns. It darts at me, stops a few inches from my face, and then reverses. It seems to be examining me, taunting me. If this were a larger animal, I’d feel very threatened.

“A Southern Hawker,” Curry says, a note of excitement in his voice, “and it’s showing classic behaviour.” The British Dragonfly Society’s webpage describes the Southern Hawker as an “inquisitive” species, most often seen individually, which “may fly quite close to investigate observers”. This extraordinary display goes on for a few minutes, until – contrary to our expectations – it lands on some nearby reeds. “It’s posing for us,” says Curry.

We are now able to appreciate its characteristic paired yellow spots. It is a male, as is apparent from its slightly constricted abdomen and the claspers on the tip of its tail, which it uses to attach itself to females. We approach cautiously. Its wings shudder, shimmering in the weak sunlight. “That’s called wing-whirring,” says Curry. “It’s warming up its wing muscles in case it needs to take off suddenly.”

I am fascinated by the dragonflies’ flight control mechanisms. They have eight abdominal muscles, Curry explains, which they use to move each of their four wings independently. They can fly in ways that are inconceivable for any other animal. Southern Hawkers can fly for as long as an hour without resting. Ours gives a final whirr, and shoots off.

Also worth noting: Ludovic Hunter-Tilney on the vinyl countdown; lunch with Jared Diamond.

The fabric of the world

The day's page quota came fairly easily today - I am having a productive week of novel-revising, though still with a slightly anxious eye on my August 1 deadline. Right now I'm in the midst of a stretch of entirely new writing, which is enjoyable though somewhat nerve-racking (due to the aforementioned time issues) and causes me to contemplate Samuel R. Delany's description of what it means to revise fiction, which seems to me by far the best thing I have ever seen on the topic.

I read a great book this past week, Peter Terzian's collection Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums That Changed Their Lives. I've been looking forward to this book ever since I first heard about it, and it well lived up to expectations. Only a handful of the albums written about here play any significant role in my own internal discography, so it is perhaps not surprising that two of the essays I liked best are both on albums that matter to me also: Benjamin Kunkel's "Still Ill" (The Smiths, The Queen Is Dead) and Colm Toibin's "Three Weeks in the Summer" (Joni Mitchell, Blue). (The first of these two in particular is an unmissably good pieces of writing!) I also liked pieces by Sheila Heti, Martha Southgate and Peter Terzian for reasons that had nothing to do with the albums they described.

But the real standout here for me is an odder and more unusual piece that struck me as absolutely and divinely sublime, to the point that I have just Amazoned its uncanny subject American Primitive, Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897-1939). I've been a huge fan of John Jeremiah Sullivan ever since I read his book Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son, and this essay is basically the thing I magically most wanted to read in the world without at all knowing it yet!

Check out this paragraph:

In what is surely a trustworthy mark of obscurantist cred, one of the sides on Pre-War Revenants was discovered at a flea market in Nashville by the person who engineered the collection, Chris King, the guy who actually signs for delivery of the reinforced wooden boxes, put together with drywall screws and capable of withstanding an auto collision, in which most 78s arrive for projects like these. The collectors trust King; he's a major collector himself (owner, as it happens, of the second-best of three known copies of "Last Kind Words Blues") and an acknowledged savant when it comes to excavating and reconstructing sonic information from the wrecked grooves of pre-war disc recordings. I interviewed him a couple of years ago. A perk of magazine journalism is you can call up fascinating strangers and ask them questions on absolutely no pretext. King, like Fahey, graduated with degrees in religion and philosophy. He described "junking" that rare 78 in Tennessee, the Two Poor Boys' "Old Hen Cackle," which lay atop a stack of 45s on a table in the open sun. It was brown. In the heat, it had warped, he said, "into the shape of a soup bowl." At the bottom of the bowl he could read the word perfect: that's a short-lived hillbilly label. "Brown Perfects" are precious. He took it home and placed it outside between two panes of clear glass--collector's wisdom, handed down--and allowed the heat of the sun and the slight pressure of the glass's gravity slowly to press it flat again, to where he could play it. Now he could begin finding out what it remembered

The next two paragraphs are equally good - the volume is worth picking up for this piece alone (and you really do have to read that Smiths essay!).

Here's a playlist Peter did recently for the Paper Cuts blog at the Times.

(And here's a bonus link which I missed at the time, Lee Child's earlier installment in the same series! Much of it doesn't particularly catch my eye, but check out this description of why Child thinks of Pink Floyd's "Money" when he writes the action scenes in a Jack Reacher novel: "The lyric is O.K., but what I really like is the time signature change between the saxophone solo and the guitar solo — at that point, we really get down to it, and that’s a feeling I try to replicate whenever I start a major set-piece scene. Like saying: You want action? Try this." It is no surprise that this fellow is such a genius of light reading....)

Patternicity

Telephoning the dead? (Courtesy of Levi.)

Putting it to the bishop

This is an irresponsible illustration for a serious news story! (Thanks to my dad for the link.)

Categories

Colleen weighs in against genre labels.

Consistency

Jo Walton reviews The Explosionist at the Tor blog!

This is a huge thrill for me, as Walton's one of my absolutely favorite writers (I have also gotten a kick out of seeing my novel on end-of-year roundups by several other writers whose books I particularly enjoy, namely Ekaterina Sedia and Tamora Pierce - and forgive me if I have mentioned it already here - it might be that I have one too many blogs! - it's also great news that the book's on the short list for the Cybils young-adult fantasy and science fiction award).

Walton mostly likes the book quite a bit, but she has a very interesting objection on one significant count:

[T]he book ought to have made up its mind whether to be fantasy or science fiction.

Spiritualism—and all the apparatus of automatic writing, table tapping, mediums and spirit photography—was indeed an obsession in the 1930s, and earlier, from the mid-Victorian period onwards. (See Angels and Insects for a brilliant modern fictional treatment and Unnatural Death for a contemporary one.) But it didn’t ever actually work, and it couldn’t have ever worked in the real world. Spiritualism was largely a case of people who, as Byatt says, desperately wanted spiritual consolation in a secular age, and were tricked into believing they were getting messages from dead people. It was all fraudulent, as investigator after investigator proved.

This isn’t to say you can’t take it seriously in fiction, and even have it work just as the gullible people in our world believed it did. It’s just that if you do, you’ve moved from science fiction to fantasy. A world in which you can fairly reliably talk to dead people with crystal radios, where licensed spirit photographers can produce evidence admissible in court, and where mediums are not fakes would be a world far more different than one where Napoleon won. Davidson has thought through the consequences of her science fictional changes remarkably well, but of her fantasy ones far less so. It’s unlikely that a world with that kind of relationship with the dead would have been sufficiently like ours through any of its history to ever have got to Waterloo in the first place. Fantasy needs to be as integrated into the world as anything else, and it isn’t. I kept trying to think of the laws of magic in Randall Garrett, but Garrett’s magic is integrated into Lord Darcy’s world in a way that the spiritualism here just isn’t. It’s further unfortunate that the spiritualism is needed to drive the plot at every turn.

I have never read Randall Garrett, clearly I must... Hmmm, my inclinations are much more strongly towards fantasy than science fiction, but that doesn't answer the objection.

I guess that I fudged this in my own head - it wasn't that I was entirely unaware of this issue, but I thought of spiritualism (in fact I remember having a conversation with my editor about this!) as something practiced by and available to a mandarin class alone. In my vision of it, ordinary people who went to ordinary spiritualists were almost as likely to be cheated (like, approaching to 100% likely) as they would be in our world, so that didn't really make much of a difference; and it was only a tiny elite who had access to techniques and knowledge that would let them practice something more genuine, and still contested (like string theory!).

So that the real-world people like Henry Sidgwick or Conan Doyle or the world-of-my-novel people like Great-aunt Tabitha and her cronies are a kind of mandarin class whose doings are in certain respects isolated from the rest of society, though those activities must have a trickle-down effect that I think I have not sufficiently attended to: the nature of the mandarin class is like the class of nuclear physicists rather than the class of, say, Old Ones in Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising books, though Sophie is a figure like Will Stanton in certain respects. Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover books have the world of the towers fairly isolated from the ordinary social world (it is a world of sociopolitical elites with power to determine the fate of the planet), Anne McCaffrey's Pern books also have the world of the dragonriders relatively isolated from the daily lives of ordinary people - it may be that I have followed this sort of model too closely....

Hmmm, just thinking out loud here, this is very useful: the sequel in many respects moves more roundly into the world of historical fiction, I've done much less playing-around with alternateness and spiritualism is less of an issue, only there are several striking fantastical components, including talking animals, so clearly this is something worth thinking through more rigorously!