Closing tabs

Tiny books of the Bronte children: digital facsimiles here. These are so amazing (I think the link came via Becca?)....

Also:

The Lawn Road Flats chronicled (truth is sometimes more interesting than fiction!).

Jim Holt on the conundrum of personal identity.

Abandoned settlements of the far north. (Via Anna.)

"On the Subject of Sex"

At the NYTBR, Ben Macintyre reviews Christopher Andrew's history of MI5:

Perhaps inevitably, in an organization relying on imagination and subterfuge, the ranks of MI5 included more than a fair share of eccentrics and fantasists. Among the most notable of these was one Maxwell Knight, whose agents successfully penetrated both Fascist and Communist networks in London. He was also a passionate naturalist who went on to become “Uncle Max,” a much loved children’s broadcaster on the BBC.

Knight could often be seen taking his pet bear, Bessie, for walks around London. He published the definitive book on how to keep a domesticated gorilla. He also wrote a delightful internal MI5 memo, “On the Subject of Sex, in connection with using women as agents.” This declares: “It is difficult to imagine anything more terrifying than for an officer to become landed with a woman agent who suffers from an overdose of Sex.” (Knight consistently capitalizes “Sex,” of which he was plainly ­terrified.)

The rightness is all

Anna Clark has a great interview with translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky at The Millions:

TM: Together, you’ve worked your way through some of the greatest fiction ever written. What are the unique pressures you have as translators of fiction that is both beloved and so highly regarded?

RP and LV: The pressure comes more from the quality of the writing itself. There are two questions that it might seem quite proper for a translator to keep in mind, but that in fact will spoil the translation. The first is, “What will the reader think?” And the second is, “How do we say that in English?” A good writer does what he or she has to do in the writing so that it “goes right,” as Robert Frost put it. There is at least as much intuition as intention in the process. A good translator has to follow that process far more consciously than the writer and yet come as close as possible in the new language to the instinctive “rightness” of the original. The greater the writer, the closer you want to come. That is both the challenge and the joy of it. But exactly what that “rightness” is remains undefinable, which is why there is no such thing as a definitive translation.

I would love to dabble in some translation myself. French is the language I read reasonably well, but I (for reasons mysterious even to myself - desire to write spy novels, or perhaps to read Dostoevsky in the original?) took several years of Russian in college, and have periodically said that with a dictionary and an infinite amount of time I could read anything - it is more accessible to me as a literary language than as a conversational one...

"Not silence, only publicity could protect us in the west"

At the Guardian, this year's Nobelist in Literature Herta Müller on the file kept on her by the Romanian secret service:

In my file I am two different persons. One is called Cristina, who is an enemy of the state and is being fought. To compromise this Cristina a dummy is produced in the falsification workshop of Branch "D" (Disinformation), with all the ingredients that harm me the most – party faithful communist, unscrupulous agent. Wherever I went, I had to live with this dummy. It wasn't just sent after me, it hurried ahead of me. Even though I have, from the beginning and always, written only against the dictatorship, the dummy goes its own way to this day. It has become independent of me. Even though the dictatorship has been dead for 20 years, the dummy leads its ghostly life. For how long yet?

Cookstrips

The reissue of Len Deighton's cult cookbook.

"Acoustic Kitty"

From Dominic Streatfeild, Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control:

The Office of Research and Development seems to have been especially interested in the idea of implanting microchips into the mammalian brain. By November 1961, 'feasibility of remote control activities in several species of animals' had been demonstrated. Six years later the Agency actually produced a cat ('Acoustic Kitty') that could be guided via remote control. The idea was that the cat, which contained hidden microphones, could be steered close to surveillance targets. Results were not good. A memo detailing plans for the first test, to take place on Monday, 20 February 1967, explains that the cat's operators should beware of traffic and that the team should 'secure gear and remove animals before rush hour'. They didn't. On its first field test the cat was run over by a taxi.

The perfect martini

Top ten real-life spy gadgets.

Cold wars

The beginning of a spy novel.

Also: iceberg calamity!

Temza

At the Times, extracts from a Philip Howard's alluring-sounding The British Library: A Treasure House of Knowledge. On the map reproduced above:

This 1977 map looks unusual but strangely familiar. It shows parts of Essex and Kent linked across the River Thames by the Dartford Tunnel, but it is in Russian. It was not realised outside the Eastern Bloc that the Soviet military were secretly mapping the world at several scales. Their maps are backed with detailed information, down to the types of trees and the number of telephones in a village.

600 letters an hour

Elizabeth Gudrais has a fascinating little piece on Kristie Macrakis' Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi's Spy-Tech World:

Consider the “smell chair,” whose seat covering was an interchangeable cloth fastened down to look like a regular cushion. After the “target” got up from the chair, Stasi agents would collect the cloth and store it in an airtight jar. The captured scent served as a kind of pheromonal fingerprint, a form of positive ID in an age of ever-multiplying code names and aliases. The Stasi used this method to check up on known dissidents and employees suspected of acting as double agents. If they could gain access to the hotel room or office where an allegedly duplicitous meeting took place, they could use dogs to determine whether their target had been there.

Macrakis' next book is on the history of invisible ink...

I went to the the KGB museum in Moscow--one of the more chilling places I have ever been. They had a volume full of ceremonial photographs of the agency's heads--in the late thirties, each man's tenure was only a matter of months, at which point his life would end also...

The camera-in-a-bra, which could take pictures through sheer fabric (the photo is courtesy of Macrakis via the Harvard Magazine website)