Iced gems

Poorly decorated cakes. (Courtesy of Jay Patrikios.)

Speaking volumes

From "A Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, on the Affairs of America," in On Empire, Liberty, and Reform: Speeches and Letters of Edmund Burke, edited by David Bromwich:

A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood. He would feel some apprehension at being called to a tremendous account for engaging in so deep a play, without any sort of knowledge of the game. It is no excuse for presumptuous ignorance, that it is directed by insolent passion. The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man. But I cannot conceive any existence under heaven, (which in the depths of its wisdom, tolerates all sorts of things) that is more truly odious and disgusting, than an impotent helpless creature, without civil wisdom or military skill, without a consciousness of any other qualification for power but his servility to it, bloated with pride and arrogance, calling for battles which he is not to fight, contending for a violent dominion which he can never exercise, and satisfied to be himself mean and miserable, in order to render others contemptible and wretched.

CHICKEN CHICKEN

I cannot resist posting these paragraphs from Christopher Benfey's NYRB piece on several recent books about Robert Frost (subscribers only):

[I]n 1900, Frost found in raising chickens an occupation that gave him money, time, and a landscape ripe with metaphors for the poems he had begun to write late at night when his wife and children were sleeping. Elliott, the Frosts' first child, died of cholera during the summer of 1900. During the decade the Frosts spent on their thirty-acre farm in Derry, New Hampshire, the four surviving children, Lesley, Irma, Marjorie, and another son, Carol, roamed the rock-strewn countryside as freely as Frost's three hundred Wyandotte chickens.

"Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms," Sherwood Anderson wrote in his story "The Egg" (1920). "One unversed in such matters can have no notion of the many and tragic things that can happen to a chicken." It's clear from the eleven lively stories Frost published in the trade journals The Eastern Poultryman and Farm-Poultry, from 1903 to 1905, that he was imaginatively engaged by the tragic things that can happen to a chicken. In "Trap Nests," a couple new to chicken farming employ a device "intended to catch and hold the hen until she was willing to purchase freedom at the price of an egg." The trap nests "savor of vivisection and the Inquisition"; the city-bred farmer finds himself taking "a growing satisfaction in ruthlessness, for such, he felt, was life." In another story, a farmer's "first hatches were so exceptionally fine that the gods fell in love with them, and they died young."

Concrete

Edwin Morgan's "Chaffinch Map of Scotland."

On dying young

I have inadvertently brought tears to my eyes by reading Ben Naparstek's piece touching on the untimely death of Natasha Fuentes.

The humble hog

International Hedgehog Olympics. (Tracked down via Alfred Hickling's review of Hugh Warwick's book.)

Ley-lines

Adam Nicholson on Roger Deakin's posthumous Notes from Walnut Tree Farm. Best quotation: "The thing that falls out of a walnut shell is like a brain."

Woodpecker hammer

Annals of improbable research. (Via the Bookforum blog.)

Figments of the auditory imagination

At the LRB, Andrew O'Hagan muses on the recordings of authorial voices recently released by the British Library:

There are two compilations, one British, one American, and the British one gets off to a startling beginning by bodying forth the ghostly voice of Arthur Conan Doyle, whom one expects to sound like Basil Rathbone. In actual fact he sounds like Gordon Brown. It’s somehow easy to forget that Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, and his voice, recorded in 1930, is here filled with lilting plangencies about the age of materialism and the fact that death is not the end. He was right about that, about death not being the end. Last week in Liverpool I found myself broadcasting with a woman who wants to create a social networking website for the dead.

Despite Auden’s thing about memorable speech, a strong literary style bears the same relation to everyday conversation that Matisse bears to the demands of home decoration. That’s to say, they feel friendly to one another, but where they might share content they don’t share form. That is why the conversation of writers can often seem so unbearably silly in the light of our expectations. We think Virginia Woolf should sound like her style, but she doesn’t: in her British Library recording (the only one in existence), she sounds like a person imprisoned by her sensibility and her class as opposed to someone who floats somewhere above it. Woolf was recorded in 1937 and we listen for the sound of her prose and find instead a person fast in the grip of banality.

The Longitudes Examin'd

At the TLS, Pat Rogers considers a hoax pamphlet that has taken in countless scholars of the eighteenth-century attempt to develop a method for ascertaining longitude. One of the genuine schemes Rogers also discusses

involved the use of strategically placed ships which would fire off a number of shells programmed to explode at a set time. Even during foggy weather the explosions would be audible, and, just in time for the project, a reasonably accurate estimate (very slightly on the high side) had been made for the speed of sound, using gunshot reports. The findings came from the Revd William Derham, himself a man well versed in clockmaking, and they were published by the Royal Society in 1709. The committee had already looked at the Whiston–Ditton proposal, and the pair optimistically drafted an advertisement to launch a heavy press campaign, declaring that their method had been “so far approved by this present Parliament, that they have passed an Act, ordering a reward of 20000£. for such a Discovery”. In the event, the flying bombs turned out to be unworkable and did not get into contention for the prize. If Whiston had restrained himself on the subject of the early Church and the need for a reformed liturgy, he might have sat in judgement on his own idea. Nothing daunted, he arranged a display to prove his theory in July 1715: this involved letting off rockets at intervals across an area of thirty-six square miles centred on Hampstead.

Abi Normal

A reprieve for "wonky" fruits and vegetables in Europe.

Former exuberance

In the New Yorker's Talk of the Town, Lizzie Widdicombe on the fate of the deal toy in an age of austerity:

On an afternoon not long ago, a conference room there [at Icon Recognition] had a day-after-Christmas feeling: boxes everywhere, rows of lonely Lucite toys (a cube with 3-D shoes etched inside, a fake bottle of suntan lotion). “This is definitely a tough time,” Stephen Sokoler, the president of the company, said. He’d been up early working the phones: “You call and ask, ‘Is there anyone who’s announced a deal recently or closed a deal? Anyone you’ve heard of?’ ” He added, “It feels like we’re a ship in the middle of a storm. Not only are you in the storm but there’s no visibility as to whether the storm’s gonna clear.”

Sokoler, who is twenty-nine, came to the company in 2002, and he recalled, with some wistfulness, the go-go days of the business, when, for example, he made a faux emerald-and-ruby crown to celebrate a deal for Merrill Lynch, and J. P. Morgan ordered up a batch of ten-by-fifteen-inch Lucite blocks with dinosaur heads inside (three hundred dollars each)—a “Jurassic Park” reference—to celebrate a deal involving Universal. “That was just a monstrous piece,” Sokoler said.

The most recent era of toys—the one that just ended—had been exuberant, too: a gold-plated replica of the Mandalay Bay Hotel, in Las Vegas, commissioned by Merrill Lynch; a Lucite banana split, commemorating Sun Capital Partners’ acquisition of Friendly’s; a snow globe made for Northoil (“Inside the snow globe we have placed a pewter casting of an oil rig,” the ad material says). Sokoler pointed to a catalogue picture of a little banjo, commemorating a deal that Merrill did for G.E. called Project Bluegrass. “Isn’t that cool?” he said. “You can actually play it.”

(And a follow-up in this week's letters column...)

Frazzled-out members of society

The word that most sums up my state of being: frazzled.

I had a sudden fit, while lying in bed last night, of wondering whether I had actually made this word up! No such thing - here is the OED...

trans. To fray, wear out, tear to rags or ribbons. lit. and fig. Also intr. Hence {sm}frazzled (-out) ppl. a.; {sm}frazzlings, ravellings.

a1825 FORBY Voc. E. Anglia, Frazle, to unravel or rend cloth. Frazlings, threads of cloth, torn or unravelled. 1872 Congress. Globe 30 May, App. 577/3 The ends of the switches were all frazzled. 1893 Amer. Missionary (N.Y.) Dec. 418 One's garments get frazzled in the grass; one's mind and body and spiritual sense sometimes become frazzled, torn to pieces, good-for-nothing. 1895 Nebraska State Jrnl. 23 June 3/1 Everyone believed that Thomas would..plant the frazzled banner of the distillers in its place. 1896 J. C. HARRIS Sister Jane 344 He's the genuine article, guaranteed not to rip in the seams or frazzle at the sleeves. 1912 J. H. MOORE Ethics & Educ. 34 Many a frazzled-out member of society owes his failure in life to no greater misdemeanour than the mere failure to make connection with his calling. 1912 J. LONDON Son of Sun viii. 285 Loose ends of rope stood out stiffly horizontal, and, when a whipping gave, the loose end frazzled and blew away. 1912 Chambers's Jrnl. Mar. 194/1 For bed a mud kang with a frazzled mat on it. 1927 J. DEVANNY Old Savage 43 His fight had left him ‘frazzled’, as he expressed it. 1960 Guardian 6 Jan. 1/7 The insistence of frazzled parents that merry~making and goodwill to men have got to stop somewhere.

The ghostly wolf

Interesting excerpt at the Telegraph from Mark Rowlands' The Philosopher and the Wolf (I must get this one):

One morning, while I was writing in the study, I heard a succession of loud thuds from the living-room. Not content with taking the cushions into the garden, Brenin had decided it might be a good idea to take the armchair too. And the thuds were caused by his repeatedly banging the chair against the door frame as he tried to drag it through. It was then that I realised a more radical approach towards Brenin's entertainment was required, an approach based on the premise that, all things considered, it would be best for both of us if Brenin were constantly exhausted. And so we began running together.

Trying to keep a wolf under control by making sure it's constantly exhausted is one approach. But even a moment's thought will tell you that it's not a very good one. Our runs did tire Brenin out initially. Me too - but that was of lesser importance, since I wasn't the one trying to drag the furniture out into the garden. Brenin, on the other hand, became fitter and fitter, and therefore more capable of wreaking havoc on the house and its contents at any given time. Soon, runs that used to plunge him into an exhausted slumber for the rest of the day he came to regard as a gentle loosener. And so the runs, of necessity, became longer and longer. But, of course, Brenin just got even fitter; and you can probably see where this is going. Bicycles were an option. But folks didn't take kindly to bicycles in Alabama back in those days - a fact I discovered through a near-decapitation incident involving me on a bicycle and some liquored-up rednecks with a baseball bat and a pick-up truck. Only pinko, commie, hippie bedwetters travelled under their own propulsion in Alabama back in those days. And so the bicycle option wasn't one I was really keen to explore at that juncture.

And so I kept running, and Brenin kept running with me; and we both got fitter, and leaner, and harder. This pragmatic impetus for my new-found fitness, however, quickly changed into something else. On our runs together, I realised something both humbling and profound: I was in the presence of a creature that was, in most important respects, unquestionably, demonstrably, irredeemably and categorically superior to me. This was a watershed moment in my life. I can't ever remember feeling this way in the presence of a human being. But now I realised that I wanted to be less like me and more like Brenin.

My realisation was fundamentally an aesthetic one. When we were running, Brenin would glide across the ground with an elegance and economy of movement I have never seen in a dog. When a dog trots, no matter how refined and efficient its gait, there is always a small vertical vector present in the movement of its feet. Depending on the type of dog, this movement will be obvious or almost indiscernible. But it's always there if you look carefully enough. With Brenin, you could see no such movement. A wolf uses its ankles and large feet to propel it forwards. As a result, there's far less movement in its legs - these remain straight, and move forwards and backwards but not up and down. So, when Brenin trotted, his shoulders and back remained flat and level. From a distance it looked as if he was floating an inch or two above the ground. When he was especially happy, or pleased with himself, this would be converted into an exaggerated bounce. But his default motion was the glide. Brenin is gone now, and when I try to picture him it is difficult to furnish this picture with the details necessary to make it a concrete and living representation. But his essence is still there for me. I can still see it: the ghostly wolf in the early-morning Alabama mist, gliding effortlessly over the ground, silent, fluid and serene.

Inquisitions

At the NYRB, David Bromwich has a wonderfully Burkean piece about Dick Cheney (note, especially, his use of the units of the sentence and paragraph, as well as the style of thought):

Never before, in the history of the United States, has there been an ideological camp so fully formed and equipped to extend itself as neoconservatism in the year 1999. It was, and remains, a sect that has some of the properties of a party. There are mentors now in the generation of the fathers as well as the grandfathers, summer internships for young enthusiasts, semiofficial platforms of programmed reactions to breaking news. But to grasp their collective character, one must think of a party that does not run for office at election time. They can therefore evade responsibility for botched policies and the leaders who promote those policies. Donald Rumsfeld had his first and warmest partisans among the neoconservatives, but they were also the first, with the solitary apparent exception of Cheney, to identify him as a scapegoat for the Iraq war and to call for his firing when the insurgency tore the country apart in 2006.

With the peculiar tightness of its loyalties and the convenience of its immunities, neoconservatism in the United States now has something of the consistency of an alternative culture. Its success in penetrating the mainstream culture is evident in the pundit shows on most of the networks and cable TV, and in the columns of The Washington Post and The New York Times. In the years between 1983 and 1986, and again, more potently, in 2001–2006, the neoconservatives went far to dislocate the boundaries of respectable opinion in America. The idea that wars are to be avoided except in cases of self-defense suffered an eclipse from which it has not yet returned, largely owing to the persistence of respected opinion makers in urging the spread of freedom and markets by force of arms. More particularly, and to confine ourselves to recent events, the nomination of Samuel Alito and the drafting and legitimation of the "surge" strategy by Retired General Jack Keane and Frederick Kagan of the AEI could not have succeeded as they did without the early and organized advocacy of the neoconservative camp.

How did they get so close to Dick Cheney? The answer lies in the fact that Cheney has an inquisitive mind, but from the accidents of his career and placement, he was for a long time a thinker deprived of intellectual society. Neoconservatism, as it developed in the 1980s, came to have its own heroes (Robert Bork), its canon of revered texts (Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind), and a set of prejudices delivered in a reasonable tone: hostile to individual liberty, appreciative of modern technology, friendly to religion as a guide to morals and an engine of state power. It was, to repeat, a substitute culture of satisfying density. The AEI along with journals like Commentary and, more recently, The Weekly Standard offer, for those who take the full course, a total environment, an idiom of managerial-intellectual judgment that blends the rapidity of journalism with the weightier pretensions of an academy.

I take this opportunity to note that David (who was one of my dissertation advisors, and a huge & ongoing influence in my intellectual life) is giving the Irving Howe Memorial Lecture this Tuesday at 6:30pm at the CUNY Graduate Center; his subject is "What Shakespeare's Heroes Learn."