Saturday, March 31, 2007
Industrial magic
Philip Oltermann at the Guardian has a very nice little piece at the Guardian about the Quaker Homeless Action's mobile library--it will warm the cockles of your heart--really I need to embark on some massive and reading-related service-type project, it's at the back of my head but of course there are always more pressing things--however once my new novel comes out I am determined to get going on that, find a really good way of doing it (something to do with teenagers and libraries I suppose--maybe teenage felons--the other thing I read this week that made me feel absolutely ashamed was Jason DeParle's absolutely devastating NYRB piece about the American prison system, I always have this in the back of my head as the lurking thing that really I will be permanently ashamed of myself later for never having done anything about, I know people feel like this about animal rights & I take the point but surely we are going to look back from the middle of the 21st century--if the world has not started to fall apart in Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic chaos, which really I believe it will, although for some reason this does not stop me putting all my spare dollars in a retirement account, it's like going to the dentist even when you are skeptical about your own future!--and find our most devastating moral failure of these decades to have been the growth of an abusive and inhumane home-grown prison system that erodes the humanity of prisoners and guards and has destroyed the future of millions--DeParle calmly shows the scope of the fallout, it is pretty much what you suspected but still horrifying to see it on the page like this--very effective piece of writing, I must say...).
Friday, March 30, 2007
His hand around my throat
A magically good essay by Colm Toibin at the LRB site (no subscription required). It's indescribable, it's about everything (memory and loss and voices and Irish literature), but it's particularly about Beckett's actors (Jack MacGowran especially), and each paragraph is like a little world opening up. It is a scandal that I have not read any of this guy's novels, that must be remedied...
Really the essay is too good to excerpt, something about the flow from paragraph to paragraph makes me feel you must have it altogether, but here's a nice late aside:
Sometimes when I was teaching at Stanford last year I would go down into the bowels of the library late at night and, just to cheer myself up, watch both men perform as the students played Google games all around me. First, Magee in Eh Joe from 1972. The face sensuous, the expression mournful but oddly flexible, the mouth trembling, the lips full, the gaze full of deep intelligence and a sort of brutality, a figure for whom silence was natural but on whom the holding back of both thoughts and tears had taken its toll, so that at the end of this brilliant and sustained performance the trickling of tears comes to have enormous power.
And then MacGowran’s Krapp from 1970, made for American TV by Alan Schneider and never shown – out of loyalty to Magee, MacGowran had turned down an offer to make it in London a decade earlier. Look at it now: the eyes utterly beautiful, prominent, liquid, veiled; the face emaciated, drawn, haggard, lit as in a painting, managing to look young and old; the voice on tape like that of an RTE announcer, almost cheerful, but now troubled, frightened, a barrister turned beggar, both Lear and a Fool, both old Dublin and quite posh; the face suddenly alert and feral, the laughter fiercely ugly, and then the clownish tenderness in the eyes as he darts to listen; he is brilliant at conveying wondering, puzzlement, all fidgety and not at all like the man I remember in Gorey although I saw him in that same year. Here he is conveying the self as parchment, dried up despite the fire that was there once and which he manages also to convey. Death is in every darting gesture, every flicker, every sudden turn towards tenderness and a terrible melancholy, but there is too much life in the eyes, too much brooding memory for death to be anything more than a tasty shadow here. No use to anyone. This tape was lost for years and now exists merely in the basement of a few libraries. It is, by any standards, one of the treasures of our age.
Really the essay is too good to excerpt, something about the flow from paragraph to paragraph makes me feel you must have it altogether, but here's a nice late aside:
Sometimes when I was teaching at Stanford last year I would go down into the bowels of the library late at night and, just to cheer myself up, watch both men perform as the students played Google games all around me. First, Magee in Eh Joe from 1972. The face sensuous, the expression mournful but oddly flexible, the mouth trembling, the lips full, the gaze full of deep intelligence and a sort of brutality, a figure for whom silence was natural but on whom the holding back of both thoughts and tears had taken its toll, so that at the end of this brilliant and sustained performance the trickling of tears comes to have enormous power.
And then MacGowran’s Krapp from 1970, made for American TV by Alan Schneider and never shown – out of loyalty to Magee, MacGowran had turned down an offer to make it in London a decade earlier. Look at it now: the eyes utterly beautiful, prominent, liquid, veiled; the face emaciated, drawn, haggard, lit as in a painting, managing to look young and old; the voice on tape like that of an RTE announcer, almost cheerful, but now troubled, frightened, a barrister turned beggar, both Lear and a Fool, both old Dublin and quite posh; the face suddenly alert and feral, the laughter fiercely ugly, and then the clownish tenderness in the eyes as he darts to listen; he is brilliant at conveying wondering, puzzlement, all fidgety and not at all like the man I remember in Gorey although I saw him in that same year. Here he is conveying the self as parchment, dried up despite the fire that was there once and which he manages also to convey. Death is in every darting gesture, every flicker, every sudden turn towards tenderness and a terrible melancholy, but there is too much life in the eyes, too much brooding memory for death to be anything more than a tasty shadow here. No use to anyone. This tape was lost for years and now exists merely in the basement of a few libraries. It is, by any standards, one of the treasures of our age.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
The post-birthday world
is a phrase that I feel should enter the standard lexicon--I rationalized reading Lionel Shriver's new novel The Post-Birthday World when I should have been doing other more immediately pressing things because (a) it seemed the perfect book to talk about at this style panel we did the other night and (b) it was good for my soul. Shriver is an amazing writer, definitely one of my touchstones--for various reasons having to do with my own personal psychology I still think that Double Fault is my particular favorite (here was what I wrote about it last year), but this one is a deep pleasure that should not be missed by anyone who loves reading long rich novels about human relationships.
The Post-Birthday World involves an interesting structural choice--the first chapter has the novel's protagonist Irina, an American children's book illustrator living in London with her staid solid think-tank employed partner Lawrence, spending an evening with their glamorous acquaintance Ramsey, a professional snooker-player; Irina and Lawrence always see Ramsey on his birthday, but this year Lawrence is out of town. When Ramsey suggests going back to his house after dinner to get stoned, Irina says yes, and as she sits & watches him shoot frames of snooker, she's overcome with the impulse to kiss him. The novel then unfolds in two parallel paths from this moment of choice, with two chapter twos, two chapter threes, etc. May sound gimmicky (and also reminiscent of the awful Sliding Doors, a movie whose only redeeming feature was Gwyneth Paltrow's nice haircut--my brother saw this by accident when the movie he was trying to see was sold out, & walked out in disgust--when he told me, I thought he was having general disapproval of this sort of movie--then I saw it on a plane and was truly appalled by its lameness, what a pointless thing for someone to have made), but it is a delight, I read it pretty much in one sitting.
I have a longstanding obsession with the question of whether we can talk about style as something moralized. Beyond the linguistic or strictly literary aspects of a novel's style, is it just a kind of fallacy to think that styles encapsulate moral orientations towards characters (i.e. would this be better reframed in more technical terms?), or is it fair? What happens when you make the leap from the stylistic to the moral in considering a prose style? And the reason this book's such a good one for illuminating this question arises from the parallel-tracks-ness of it. I must get sensibly down to work, cannot be sitting here writing about Lionel Shriver all morning, but here are two passages, the first from the post-birthday world in which Irina has kissed Ramsey (Lawrence has just arrived home the next evening, and Irina's in the kitchen cutting him a piece of the pie she baked the day before for his homecoming):
Leadenly, Irina removed the pie from the fridge. Chilling for under two hours, it wasn’t completely set. With any luck the egg in the filling had cooked thoroughly enough that the pie’s having been left out on the counter for a full day wasn’t deadly. Well, she herself wouldn’t manage more than a bite. (She’d not been able to eat a thing since that last spoonful of green-tea ice cream. Though there had been another cognac around noon . . . ) The slice she cut for herself was so slight that it fell over. For Lawrence, she hacked off a far larger piece—Lawrence was always watching his weight—than she knew he wanted. The wedge sat fat and stupid on the plate; the filling drooled. Ramsey didn’t need admiration of his snooker game, and Lawrence didn’t need pie.
She pulled an ale from the fridge, and pondered the freezer. Normally, she’d join him with a glass of wine, but the frozen Stolichnaya beckoned. Since she’d brushed her teeth, Lawrence needn’t know that she’d already knocked back two hefty belts of neat vodka to gird herself for his return. Spirits on an empty stomach wasn’t like her, but apparently acting out of character could slide from temporary liberation to permanent estrangement from your former self in the wink of an eye. She withdrew the frosted bottle, took a furtive slug, and poured herself a better-than-genteel measure. After all. They were “celebrating.”
And here's the post-birthday world in which Irina has virtuously suppressed her sexual attraction to Ramsey (Lawrence has just criticized her for having had a drink before he got home):
Scrutinized for signs of inebriation and disgusted with herself for having overimbibed the night before, in the kitchen Irina poured herself an abstemious half-glass of white wine. She pulled out the pie, which after chilling for a full day was nice and firm, and made picture-perfect slices that might have joined the duplicitous array of photographs over a Woolworth’s lunch counter. She shouldn’t have any herself; oddly, she’d snacked all afternoon. But countless chunks of cheddar had failed to quell a ravenous appetite, so tonight she cut herself a wide wedge, whose filling blushed a fleshy, labial pink. This she crowned with a scoop of vanilla. Lawrence’s slice she carefully made more modest, with only a dollop of ice cream. No gesture was truly generous that made him feel fat.
Interesting, eh? I leave you to draw your own conclusions...
The Post-Birthday World involves an interesting structural choice--the first chapter has the novel's protagonist Irina, an American children's book illustrator living in London with her staid solid think-tank employed partner Lawrence, spending an evening with their glamorous acquaintance Ramsey, a professional snooker-player; Irina and Lawrence always see Ramsey on his birthday, but this year Lawrence is out of town. When Ramsey suggests going back to his house after dinner to get stoned, Irina says yes, and as she sits & watches him shoot frames of snooker, she's overcome with the impulse to kiss him. The novel then unfolds in two parallel paths from this moment of choice, with two chapter twos, two chapter threes, etc. May sound gimmicky (and also reminiscent of the awful Sliding Doors, a movie whose only redeeming feature was Gwyneth Paltrow's nice haircut--my brother saw this by accident when the movie he was trying to see was sold out, & walked out in disgust--when he told me, I thought he was having general disapproval of this sort of movie--then I saw it on a plane and was truly appalled by its lameness, what a pointless thing for someone to have made), but it is a delight, I read it pretty much in one sitting.
I have a longstanding obsession with the question of whether we can talk about style as something moralized. Beyond the linguistic or strictly literary aspects of a novel's style, is it just a kind of fallacy to think that styles encapsulate moral orientations towards characters (i.e. would this be better reframed in more technical terms?), or is it fair? What happens when you make the leap from the stylistic to the moral in considering a prose style? And the reason this book's such a good one for illuminating this question arises from the parallel-tracks-ness of it. I must get sensibly down to work, cannot be sitting here writing about Lionel Shriver all morning, but here are two passages, the first from the post-birthday world in which Irina has kissed Ramsey (Lawrence has just arrived home the next evening, and Irina's in the kitchen cutting him a piece of the pie she baked the day before for his homecoming):
Leadenly, Irina removed the pie from the fridge. Chilling for under two hours, it wasn’t completely set. With any luck the egg in the filling had cooked thoroughly enough that the pie’s having been left out on the counter for a full day wasn’t deadly. Well, she herself wouldn’t manage more than a bite. (She’d not been able to eat a thing since that last spoonful of green-tea ice cream. Though there had been another cognac around noon . . . ) The slice she cut for herself was so slight that it fell over. For Lawrence, she hacked off a far larger piece—Lawrence was always watching his weight—than she knew he wanted. The wedge sat fat and stupid on the plate; the filling drooled. Ramsey didn’t need admiration of his snooker game, and Lawrence didn’t need pie.
She pulled an ale from the fridge, and pondered the freezer. Normally, she’d join him with a glass of wine, but the frozen Stolichnaya beckoned. Since she’d brushed her teeth, Lawrence needn’t know that she’d already knocked back two hefty belts of neat vodka to gird herself for his return. Spirits on an empty stomach wasn’t like her, but apparently acting out of character could slide from temporary liberation to permanent estrangement from your former self in the wink of an eye. She withdrew the frosted bottle, took a furtive slug, and poured herself a better-than-genteel measure. After all. They were “celebrating.”
And here's the post-birthday world in which Irina has virtuously suppressed her sexual attraction to Ramsey (Lawrence has just criticized her for having had a drink before he got home):
Scrutinized for signs of inebriation and disgusted with herself for having overimbibed the night before, in the kitchen Irina poured herself an abstemious half-glass of white wine. She pulled out the pie, which after chilling for a full day was nice and firm, and made picture-perfect slices that might have joined the duplicitous array of photographs over a Woolworth’s lunch counter. She shouldn’t have any herself; oddly, she’d snacked all afternoon. But countless chunks of cheddar had failed to quell a ravenous appetite, so tonight she cut herself a wide wedge, whose filling blushed a fleshy, labial pink. This she crowned with a scoop of vanilla. Lawrence’s slice she carefully made more modest, with only a dollop of ice cream. No gesture was truly generous that made him feel fat.
Interesting, eh? I leave you to draw your own conclusions...
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Two good things
of Wayne Koestenbaum's (both courtesy of the excellent Dave Lull). First of all, a delightful piece in the new issue of Bookforum (I'm going to post at greater length about that issue when I have a minute to spare, lots of other great stuff too) that opens with this mouth-watering sentence:
Here’s how I read Mallarmé’s prose, in Barbara Johnson’s lustrous new English translation: painfully, dutifully, passionately, a sentence at a time, while holding the French original in my other hand, so I can compare her sentence with his sentence, and so I can measure as accurately as possible each crevice where an adjective meets a noun, a comma meets a dependent clause.
Wayne is one of only a handful of writers (Toni Schlesinger's another) who makes me want to put their sentences in my mouth!
And here Tony Leuzzi interviews Wayne at Jacket Magazine. Mostly they're talking about sex and ottava rima (two very interesting topics, intersecting in the person of Byron) but there's a very funny and apt part about the writing process also, with regard to Wayne's own long ottava rima poem Model Homes:
WK: The book started as an exercise for myself. I wrote the warm-up, which appears before the “First Canto.” I was so happy to do this. I hadn’t had so much fun in years. I thought, “I’m going to write until I run out of inspiration.” I wrote much of it in August, which is the best month of writing for me because I go back to teaching in September and I’ve had a little leisure in the previous summer months, a kind of inner-fertilization period. I hit this August stride. Actually, it was in July. No, I wrote it in July. I started to revise the book in August. This is how I do most of my writing. I go with an impulse until it dies. And don’t give up. I get kind of obsessed and manic and work daily on the process and just keep going until I run out. It’s really hard to do. Since I wrote each of those cantos in a day, it was very hard to sustain it. I kept saying to myself “Don’t stop until you get to a satisfying number.” It was nine, but I completed fourteen or fifteen cantos and condensed them into twelve.
TL: Writing in form requires a good deal of discipline. Many writers write a long formal poem over a number of years. But you wrote it quickly.
WK: It did ultimately –– and this is the sad thing about spontaneity –– take several years. I wrote it that summer, spent a couple of months revising it, and then I showed it to a number of poet friends who told me the rhymes weren’t working. The original had much more approximate rhymes in it. Very approximate. Then I went back and reworked it. This process took me a year to make the rhymes as exact as I could and make the meter as exact as I could. This was Hell. By the time I had finished rewriting it, any memory of the original pleasure it had given me was gone.
That is a feeling every writer knows, and surely there is nothing to be done about it either. I like revising, it is often interesting and always essential, but I am deeply resentful of the long afterlife in editing of a project whose first draft seemed to use up all of the excitement and enthusiasm you had for it. I can work myself up again to enthusiasm as needed, but the problem is that the long spell of follow-up and reworking is generally incompatible with doing significant new writing, at least for me, so that you end up losing stretches of months that you had earmarked for the deep gratifications of new writing to the solid but less spiritually nourishing fare of revision.
Here’s how I read Mallarmé’s prose, in Barbara Johnson’s lustrous new English translation: painfully, dutifully, passionately, a sentence at a time, while holding the French original in my other hand, so I can compare her sentence with his sentence, and so I can measure as accurately as possible each crevice where an adjective meets a noun, a comma meets a dependent clause.
Wayne is one of only a handful of writers (Toni Schlesinger's another) who makes me want to put their sentences in my mouth!
And here Tony Leuzzi interviews Wayne at Jacket Magazine. Mostly they're talking about sex and ottava rima (two very interesting topics, intersecting in the person of Byron) but there's a very funny and apt part about the writing process also, with regard to Wayne's own long ottava rima poem Model Homes:
WK: The book started as an exercise for myself. I wrote the warm-up, which appears before the “First Canto.” I was so happy to do this. I hadn’t had so much fun in years. I thought, “I’m going to write until I run out of inspiration.” I wrote much of it in August, which is the best month of writing for me because I go back to teaching in September and I’ve had a little leisure in the previous summer months, a kind of inner-fertilization period. I hit this August stride. Actually, it was in July. No, I wrote it in July. I started to revise the book in August. This is how I do most of my writing. I go with an impulse until it dies. And don’t give up. I get kind of obsessed and manic and work daily on the process and just keep going until I run out. It’s really hard to do. Since I wrote each of those cantos in a day, it was very hard to sustain it. I kept saying to myself “Don’t stop until you get to a satisfying number.” It was nine, but I completed fourteen or fifteen cantos and condensed them into twelve.
TL: Writing in form requires a good deal of discipline. Many writers write a long formal poem over a number of years. But you wrote it quickly.
WK: It did ultimately –– and this is the sad thing about spontaneity –– take several years. I wrote it that summer, spent a couple of months revising it, and then I showed it to a number of poet friends who told me the rhymes weren’t working. The original had much more approximate rhymes in it. Very approximate. Then I went back and reworked it. This process took me a year to make the rhymes as exact as I could and make the meter as exact as I could. This was Hell. By the time I had finished rewriting it, any memory of the original pleasure it had given me was gone.
That is a feeling every writer knows, and surely there is nothing to be done about it either. I like revising, it is often interesting and always essential, but I am deeply resentful of the long afterlife in editing of a project whose first draft seemed to use up all of the excitement and enthusiasm you had for it. I can work myself up again to enthusiasm as needed, but the problem is that the long spell of follow-up and reworking is generally incompatible with doing significant new writing, at least for me, so that you end up losing stretches of months that you had earmarked for the deep gratifications of new writing to the solid but less spiritually nourishing fare of revision.
A lost love
Lots of good free content in the latest NYRB, including Pankaj Mishra on Hisham Matar and Laila Lalami and a rather funny but very good piece on Shakespeare and the uses of power by Stephen Greenblatt (my personal opinion is that if I should ever find myself shaking hands with the president of the United States, whoever that might be, I would be physically incapable of uttering the words "Mr. President" with a straight face--it is my Quaker education, I just feel unbelievably over the top using ostentatious titles, and in fact when I went to college it was a nasty shock to realize that the custom was indeed to say "Professor X" when you spoke to a professor--I feel unbelievably obsequious when I address someone this way, I have to give it a mildly satirical flavor just in order to feel myself--but more importantly Greenblatt's is the third thing I've read recently that makes me realize I must, must, must read Bernard Williams, a shocking gap in my knowledge of things I care about).
Quite a lot of other good stuff isn't online (Hilary Mantel on Adam Sisman's Wordsworth-Coleridge book, Keith Thomas with a very funny and apt mini-essay about Hugh Trevor-Roper, Daniel Kevles on the history of chemical warfare--really it's full of other interesting things too, I can't be listing everything here!) but the one I particularly commend to your attention is a lovely essay by Colm Toibin about Andre Aciman's new novel. (If you're Columbia-affiliated, you can read it here; otherwise, hit the library or the newsstand...)
Really I am tempted to paste in the whole last part, but that is not sensible, so here's a taste (Toibin's reflecting here on a question that will undoubtedly have occurred to many readers of Call Me By Your Name--did Aciman himself, a married man with children, have a same-sex love affair as a teenager that corresponds to his narrator's?):
For most novelists, writing is a sly disturbance of the self, a spreading out of the self into places where only the spirit has ventured. Carlos Fuentes, for example, dining in a hotel in Zurich in 1950, could observe at another table Thomas Mann as a "quiet and dignified old man" having a meal with his wife and daughter. All of his life Mann has been battling with his own dignity, his solidity, his deeply conservative nature, working out ways to defrock himself in fiction, using parts of his own life, adding bits of the lives of Nietzsche, Mahler, Schoenberg, playing with ideas of violence, risk-taking, the demonic. In the meantime, he sat in the hotel doing a perfect imitation of an ordinary high-bourgeois man.
Some readers of André Aciman's novel may wish to ask how much of the book is autobiographical, as readers of "Death in Venice" asked, or other readers may wish to know how much of the book is a playful exploration of the private aspects of an imagined self. But there is another question which is more interesting and more fruitful. Call Me by Your Name seems to me a deeply autobiographical book not because the events may actually have taken place and merely been recorded by the author, much as Thomas Mann recorded in his diary entry for January 20, 1942, his memories of a similar lost love:
Read for a long time old diaries from the Klaus Heuser time, when I was a happy lover. The most beautiful and touching occasion the farewell in Munich, when for the first time I took "a leap into dreamland" and rested his temple on mine. Now indeed—lived and loved. Dark eyes that spilled tears for me, beloved lips that I kissed —this was it, I too had this, I can tell myself when I die.
The origins in autobiography of Call Me by Your Name lie not in its theme but in its shape. The golden summer, the sheer happiness of Elio as he finds Oliver and his misery when he loses him, can be read as a version, deeply embedded in metaphor, of Aciman's life in Alexandria and his exile from there, from what Cafavy calls its "exquisite music," which Aciman described in Out of Egypt. There were the servants and the summer, the family meals, the books and the music, the abundance of things; there too was the sense of an all-embracing and all-enclosing love but existing as Elio recounts in the novel only "on borrowed time." In both books there is an abiding sorrow for what was so glorious and is now so lost. Experience in both books is something that will seem more perfect in the light of the scattering which came afterward. Thus it seems that Aciman is not exploring or dramatizing a masked self but finding a new story with which to tell his own story, which seems to have come back to him in eloquent whispers, more erotically changed and consciously shaped the second time around.
Toibin then makes several other interesting points, about the politics of sex with minors and of fluid sexual identities as they are treated by Aciman--will be interesting to see how people respond to this one, these things are so controversial to talk about and yet it seems to me a deeply persuasive and perceptive piece. The Thomas Mann stuff is heartbreaking. And read Aciman's novel if you have not already, it is quite extraordinary!
Quite a lot of other good stuff isn't online (Hilary Mantel on Adam Sisman's Wordsworth-Coleridge book, Keith Thomas with a very funny and apt mini-essay about Hugh Trevor-Roper, Daniel Kevles on the history of chemical warfare--really it's full of other interesting things too, I can't be listing everything here!) but the one I particularly commend to your attention is a lovely essay by Colm Toibin about Andre Aciman's new novel. (If you're Columbia-affiliated, you can read it here; otherwise, hit the library or the newsstand...)
Really I am tempted to paste in the whole last part, but that is not sensible, so here's a taste (Toibin's reflecting here on a question that will undoubtedly have occurred to many readers of Call Me By Your Name--did Aciman himself, a married man with children, have a same-sex love affair as a teenager that corresponds to his narrator's?):
For most novelists, writing is a sly disturbance of the self, a spreading out of the self into places where only the spirit has ventured. Carlos Fuentes, for example, dining in a hotel in Zurich in 1950, could observe at another table Thomas Mann as a "quiet and dignified old man" having a meal with his wife and daughter. All of his life Mann has been battling with his own dignity, his solidity, his deeply conservative nature, working out ways to defrock himself in fiction, using parts of his own life, adding bits of the lives of Nietzsche, Mahler, Schoenberg, playing with ideas of violence, risk-taking, the demonic. In the meantime, he sat in the hotel doing a perfect imitation of an ordinary high-bourgeois man.
Some readers of André Aciman's novel may wish to ask how much of the book is autobiographical, as readers of "Death in Venice" asked, or other readers may wish to know how much of the book is a playful exploration of the private aspects of an imagined self. But there is another question which is more interesting and more fruitful. Call Me by Your Name seems to me a deeply autobiographical book not because the events may actually have taken place and merely been recorded by the author, much as Thomas Mann recorded in his diary entry for January 20, 1942, his memories of a similar lost love:
Read for a long time old diaries from the Klaus Heuser time, when I was a happy lover. The most beautiful and touching occasion the farewell in Munich, when for the first time I took "a leap into dreamland" and rested his temple on mine. Now indeed—lived and loved. Dark eyes that spilled tears for me, beloved lips that I kissed —this was it, I too had this, I can tell myself when I die.
The origins in autobiography of Call Me by Your Name lie not in its theme but in its shape. The golden summer, the sheer happiness of Elio as he finds Oliver and his misery when he loses him, can be read as a version, deeply embedded in metaphor, of Aciman's life in Alexandria and his exile from there, from what Cafavy calls its "exquisite music," which Aciman described in Out of Egypt. There were the servants and the summer, the family meals, the books and the music, the abundance of things; there too was the sense of an all-embracing and all-enclosing love but existing as Elio recounts in the novel only "on borrowed time." In both books there is an abiding sorrow for what was so glorious and is now so lost. Experience in both books is something that will seem more perfect in the light of the scattering which came afterward. Thus it seems that Aciman is not exploring or dramatizing a masked self but finding a new story with which to tell his own story, which seems to have come back to him in eloquent whispers, more erotically changed and consciously shaped the second time around.
Toibin then makes several other interesting points, about the politics of sex with minors and of fluid sexual identities as they are treated by Aciman--will be interesting to see how people respond to this one, these things are so controversial to talk about and yet it seems to me a deeply persuasive and perceptive piece. The Thomas Mann stuff is heartbreaking. And read Aciman's novel if you have not already, it is quite extraordinary!
Quantum computing and DNA origami
Theme for the day: science fact is even better than science fiction. Jonathan Hodgkin has a rather enchanting TLS piece about two recent books on biocomputing and twenty-first-century technology:
For solving some computational problems, it is possible to encode the problem in a complex soup of many different DNA molecules. Complementary DNA molecules are able to find and pair with one another, so with the right tricks a unique solution can be extracted from the soup. Gradually, more and more complicated problems are being attacked by this kind of approach, which is radically different from conventional computing. The second strand is the use of DNA in micro-fabrication, to construct minute structures by exploiting the ability of DNA to fold up in specific patterns dictated by base pairing. This process, sometimes called DNA origami, is tremendous fun, and has led to recent advances such as the synthesis of bits of DNA that spontaneously fold up into two-dimensional shapes like smiley faces, or maps of America. The smiley faces are a few millionths of an inch across, so they can only be seen with an atomic-force microscope, but they can be made by the billion, because it is so easy to replicate DNA. As a result, the scientists involved joked that they had been responsible for “the most concentrated happiness ever created”. Other scientists have gone on to make tiny motors attached to a DNA scaffold, or stable three-dimensional objects made of DNA. There seems to be no end in sight for ingenious creative developments in this area.
For solving some computational problems, it is possible to encode the problem in a complex soup of many different DNA molecules. Complementary DNA molecules are able to find and pair with one another, so with the right tricks a unique solution can be extracted from the soup. Gradually, more and more complicated problems are being attacked by this kind of approach, which is radically different from conventional computing. The second strand is the use of DNA in micro-fabrication, to construct minute structures by exploiting the ability of DNA to fold up in specific patterns dictated by base pairing. This process, sometimes called DNA origami, is tremendous fun, and has led to recent advances such as the synthesis of bits of DNA that spontaneously fold up into two-dimensional shapes like smiley faces, or maps of America. The smiley faces are a few millionths of an inch across, so they can only be seen with an atomic-force microscope, but they can be made by the billion, because it is so easy to replicate DNA. As a result, the scientists involved joked that they had been responsible for “the most concentrated happiness ever created”. Other scientists have gone on to make tiny motors attached to a DNA scaffold, or stable three-dimensional objects made of DNA. There seems to be no end in sight for ingenious creative developments in this area.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Your fashionable women
At Tin House, Stephen Elliott tells the story of his homeless year, at age thirteen and then fourteen. Only part of it's available online--I've got to get the rest. Was tipped off to it by a good post at Weekend Stubble, whose proprietor Paul Collins also has a piece in the same issue of the magazine. It's not up on the website, but he gives an alluring taste:
In Italy [knapsack traveler Lee Meriwether] has a glass-eye maker blow white orbs in front of him and then explain why discerning customers demand two sets of glass eyes. ("The pupil is much smaller in daytime than at night, and your fashionable woman would not think of entering a ballroom with the pupils of her eyes of different sizes.")
On the topic of fashionable women, I saw a most enchanting movie last night, breaking a year-and-a-half-long non-movie-watching streak. (I think the last movie I saw in the theatre was Syriana, over Thanksgiving 2005. In the calendar year 2006, unless I am much misremembering, the sole movie I saw was The Woodsman on DVD at my brother's house--he worked on it, and we were particularly checking out the Philadelphia locations, though I thought Kevin Bacon was very good & the movie only marred by over-artsiness. That little girl in the red riding hood should have been banned. Resolution: to see more movies in 2007!) It was The Earrings of Madame de ..., and I loved it (here's a bit of Anthony Lane's New Yorker piece a few weeks ago); among other reasons, it's a great movie about lying, a perennial favorite topic of mine (that Danielle Darrieux is an extraordinary beauty with a face like you would not believe--also I am confirmed in my longstanding impression that arguments about lying are often interwoven with the theme of master-servant relations), but it's also got the most lovely and delightful details. My favorites: the lovely pack of hounds (I want one of those dogs!); the conversation about the Waterloo painting. Very good stuff, genuinely transporting.
In Italy [knapsack traveler Lee Meriwether] has a glass-eye maker blow white orbs in front of him and then explain why discerning customers demand two sets of glass eyes. ("The pupil is much smaller in daytime than at night, and your fashionable woman would not think of entering a ballroom with the pupils of her eyes of different sizes.")
On the topic of fashionable women, I saw a most enchanting movie last night, breaking a year-and-a-half-long non-movie-watching streak. (I think the last movie I saw in the theatre was Syriana, over Thanksgiving 2005. In the calendar year 2006, unless I am much misremembering, the sole movie I saw was The Woodsman on DVD at my brother's house--he worked on it, and we were particularly checking out the Philadelphia locations, though I thought Kevin Bacon was very good & the movie only marred by over-artsiness. That little girl in the red riding hood should have been banned. Resolution: to see more movies in 2007!) It was The Earrings of Madame de ..., and I loved it (here's a bit of Anthony Lane's New Yorker piece a few weeks ago); among other reasons, it's a great movie about lying, a perennial favorite topic of mine (that Danielle Darrieux is an extraordinary beauty with a face like you would not believe--also I am confirmed in my longstanding impression that arguments about lying are often interwoven with the theme of master-servant relations), but it's also got the most lovely and delightful details. My favorites: the lovely pack of hounds (I want one of those dogs!); the conversation about the Waterloo painting. Very good stuff, genuinely transporting.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Extracurriculars
My colleague Karl Kroeber has some interesting thoughts on Columbia's Literature Humanities curriculum at the Spectator. (I mostly keep a fairly clear line between work thoughts and recreational thoughts, at times it amounts to a pretty effective cordon sanitaire but at this point in the school year the work stuff seems to be taking over!)
I did find time to read a couple much-anticipated young-adult novels over the past couple days, it is both a good and bad thing that these books are so short (bad because we want more): Catherine Gilbert Murdock's quite lovely The Off Season (sequel to Dairy Queen--these books are particularly indispensable reading for young-adult authors, I really love them--thanks to L. for getting me an advance copy BTW) and the immensely satisfying Magic's Child, the final installment in Justine Larbalestier's Magic or Madness trilogy. And the ending of this one seems to leave room for further installments! How excellent, I like it when trilogies turn into series--and I assume that Murdock will write more of her character's story also.
Bonus link: Magnus Linklater at the Times on the tyranny of the long-running hero (Rebus, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes et al.). It's a somewhat tongue-in-cheek piece, I think; I heartily deplore the over-long-running series myself (one of my betes noires is the kind of series where the main character doesn't age with the times, leading to implausibilities of many sorts--this is why certain writers would be better off adopting the Dick Francis-style "my characters are virtually indistinguishable from each other but just different enough that I can happily relocate them in the appropriate year with a cellphone and e-mail" method), but as a reader I always want more. Lee Child has said that Jack Reacher will die a couple books further along in a lonely motel room--this makes me sad, I want an infinite number of Reacher books, and yet it is certainly a more shapely way of concluding things than the option of continuing indefinitely...
I did find time to read a couple much-anticipated young-adult novels over the past couple days, it is both a good and bad thing that these books are so short (bad because we want more): Catherine Gilbert Murdock's quite lovely The Off Season (sequel to Dairy Queen--these books are particularly indispensable reading for young-adult authors, I really love them--thanks to L. for getting me an advance copy BTW) and the immensely satisfying Magic's Child, the final installment in Justine Larbalestier's Magic or Madness trilogy. And the ending of this one seems to leave room for further installments! How excellent, I like it when trilogies turn into series--and I assume that Murdock will write more of her character's story also.
Bonus link: Magnus Linklater at the Times on the tyranny of the long-running hero (Rebus, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes et al.). It's a somewhat tongue-in-cheek piece, I think; I heartily deplore the over-long-running series myself (one of my betes noires is the kind of series where the main character doesn't age with the times, leading to implausibilities of many sorts--this is why certain writers would be better off adopting the Dick Francis-style "my characters are virtually indistinguishable from each other but just different enough that I can happily relocate them in the appropriate year with a cellphone and e-mail" method), but as a reader I always want more. Lee Child has said that Jack Reacher will die a couple books further along in a lonely motel room--this makes me sad, I want an infinite number of Reacher books, and yet it is certainly a more shapely way of concluding things than the option of continuing indefinitely...
150 revisions
Geraldine Bedell interviews A. L. Kennedy at the Guardian. It's a hilariously funny interview, in a bleak way (I identify with A. L. Kennedy!); I am ashamed to think that I've only read one book of hers, I must read more this summer. She is such a good writer....
Here are some of the best parts of the piece (what I like is the way that she's still so strongly in control of her own voice, even once it's down on the page--the interviewer must have been good, too--but often you see people's words put down and their own self-mocking ironies have just become pompous in the transcription, here it remains very funny--funny because truthful...):
It's tempting to think that AL Kennedy might be playing up her misery, cultivating the bleakness that is often said to characterise her fiction. There is an unflinching, exposed quality to her work: Day is about RAF bombing raids and requires the reader to enter the head of a man who is mentally disintegrating. She is sensitive to absurdity, to the imminence of what she calls 'the pantomime surprise of death'.
She vigorously denies courting unhappiness, claiming to think it's wholly unnecessary to successful fiction. She'd rather have joy, but it's simply not available. 'I have sex about once every five years. I've lived alone since I was 17. I am slightly tired. My life is not comfortable to me. But I am philosophical. It's just the way things have worked out.'
What would make her comfortable? 'Occasional company,' she says. I am starting to find this self-pity slightly comical, so I say: 'I bet you've got a secret husband at home.' Perhaps she has too, because she answers: 'Yeah, I killed him and ate him.' She would like, she says, 'just to have people to talk to who you can actually talk to, which is quite rare'.
...
For all the craft, the revisions, the foraging for the ideal phrase, AL Kennedy manages to be pretty prolific: she is 41, and Day is her fifth novel. There have been four volumes of short stories (she's working on a fifth right now) plus eight or nine drama scripts, a couple of works of non-fiction, regular journalism and, now, the stand-up. 'If you're quite a fast cook, you don't have children, you don't have pets and you've got no one to talk to, what else are you going to do?' she asks. 'I've got vast amounts of time to occupy.'
Here are some of the best parts of the piece (what I like is the way that she's still so strongly in control of her own voice, even once it's down on the page--the interviewer must have been good, too--but often you see people's words put down and their own self-mocking ironies have just become pompous in the transcription, here it remains very funny--funny because truthful...):
It's tempting to think that AL Kennedy might be playing up her misery, cultivating the bleakness that is often said to characterise her fiction. There is an unflinching, exposed quality to her work: Day is about RAF bombing raids and requires the reader to enter the head of a man who is mentally disintegrating. She is sensitive to absurdity, to the imminence of what she calls 'the pantomime surprise of death'.
She vigorously denies courting unhappiness, claiming to think it's wholly unnecessary to successful fiction. She'd rather have joy, but it's simply not available. 'I have sex about once every five years. I've lived alone since I was 17. I am slightly tired. My life is not comfortable to me. But I am philosophical. It's just the way things have worked out.'
What would make her comfortable? 'Occasional company,' she says. I am starting to find this self-pity slightly comical, so I say: 'I bet you've got a secret husband at home.' Perhaps she has too, because she answers: 'Yeah, I killed him and ate him.' She would like, she says, 'just to have people to talk to who you can actually talk to, which is quite rare'.
...
For all the craft, the revisions, the foraging for the ideal phrase, AL Kennedy manages to be pretty prolific: she is 41, and Day is her fifth novel. There have been four volumes of short stories (she's working on a fifth right now) plus eight or nine drama scripts, a couple of works of non-fiction, regular journalism and, now, the stand-up. 'If you're quite a fast cook, you don't have children, you don't have pets and you've got no one to talk to, what else are you going to do?' she asks. 'I've got vast amounts of time to occupy.'
Saturday, March 24, 2007
What Keats said
A conversation between Janna Levin and Jonathan Lethem at Seed Magazine. (Many thanks to Maxine for the link.)
Here's Lethem, anyway, on the fiction-non-fiction divide:
Well, one of the underrated aspects of novels per se, one of the forms of pleasure that we readers derive from reading fiction that is least discussed in traditional literary criticism, is factual material. People thrive on finding great chunks of information on how the world works in their fiction. One of the great secrets to the crime drama is that readers are almost always inadvertently thrilling to descriptions of how, for instance, a bank operates. These are the sorts of things that ordinary novelists feel that they're not allowed to talk about or get interested in—they're supposed to be concerned with the emotional or psychological lives of their characters and would never stop to tell you at what hour the teller counts her drawer and moves it to the back of the bank. And yet we're all hungry for those pieces of information about our world. We're nourished, without even noticing it, by this genre that's devoted to telling us quite a lot about them.
Lots more good stuff too, go and have a look--I like reading this kind of thing, makes me itchy to write something really good (though I must say that the conversation itself is far more metaphysical than anything I'd like to be embroiled in)!
Mention of metaphysics reminds me that my favorite Irish philosophy PhD is reading in April at KGB, this is one that I'm going to totally clear the calendar for even though it's the dreaded Sunday-night scheduling which makes me crazy: here's the link, April 22 at 7pm. It's the Hard Case Crime lineup (too lazy to paste in links, but this should be fun): Ken Bruen and Jason Starr, who have authored a sequel to last year's collaborative neopulp experiment, Richard Aleas aka Charles Ardai, Peter Pavia and Max Phillips. That's excellent...
Here's Lethem, anyway, on the fiction-non-fiction divide:
Well, one of the underrated aspects of novels per se, one of the forms of pleasure that we readers derive from reading fiction that is least discussed in traditional literary criticism, is factual material. People thrive on finding great chunks of information on how the world works in their fiction. One of the great secrets to the crime drama is that readers are almost always inadvertently thrilling to descriptions of how, for instance, a bank operates. These are the sorts of things that ordinary novelists feel that they're not allowed to talk about or get interested in—they're supposed to be concerned with the emotional or psychological lives of their characters and would never stop to tell you at what hour the teller counts her drawer and moves it to the back of the bank. And yet we're all hungry for those pieces of information about our world. We're nourished, without even noticing it, by this genre that's devoted to telling us quite a lot about them.
Lots more good stuff too, go and have a look--I like reading this kind of thing, makes me itchy to write something really good (though I must say that the conversation itself is far more metaphysical than anything I'd like to be embroiled in)!
Mention of metaphysics reminds me that my favorite Irish philosophy PhD is reading in April at KGB, this is one that I'm going to totally clear the calendar for even though it's the dreaded Sunday-night scheduling which makes me crazy: here's the link, April 22 at 7pm. It's the Hard Case Crime lineup (too lazy to paste in links, but this should be fun): Ken Bruen and Jason Starr, who have authored a sequel to last year's collaborative neopulp experiment, Richard Aleas aka Charles Ardai, Peter Pavia and Max Phillips. That's excellent...
That boney light
A useful link from Nico: Historical Anatomies on the Web. Some really lovely things there (look at Cheselden's delightfully bony animals!--which irrelevantly makes me feel the need to quote Dickens--here's the chapter in question, from Our Mutual Friend--but I am going to recklessly paste in a huge chunk of it anyway, I have finished my essay and psychological exigencies persuade me it is worth taking the evening off before making a huge effort tomorrow to clear the deck of various work stuff--I do love taxidermy...):
'Oh dear me, dear me!' sighs Mr Venus, heavily, snuffing the candle, 'the world that appeared so flowery has ceased to blow! You're casting your eye round the shop, Mr Wegg. Let me show you a light. My working bench. My young man's bench. A Wice. Tools. Bones, warious. Skulls, warious. Preserved Indian baby. African ditto. Bottled preparations, warious. Everything within reach of your hand, in good preservation. The mouldy ones a-top. What's in those hampers over them again, I don't quite remember. Say, human warious. Cats. Articulated English baby. Dogs. Ducks. Glass eyes, warious. Mummied bird. Dried cuticle, warious. Oh, dear me! That's the general panoramic view.'
Having so held and waved the candle as that all these heterogeneous objects seemed to come forward obediently when they were named, and then retire again, Mr Venus despondently repeats, 'Oh dear me, dear me!' resumes his seat, and with drooping despondency upon him, falls to pouring himself out more tea.
'Where am I?' asks Mr Wegg.
'You're somewhere in the back shop across the yard, sir; and speaking quite candidly, I wish I'd never bought you of the Hospital Porter.'
'Now, look here, what did you give for me?'
'Well,' replies Venus, blowing his tea: his head and face peering out of the darkness, over the smoke of it, as if he were modernizing the old original rise in his family: 'you were one of a warious lot, and I don't know.'
Silas puts his point in the improved form of 'What will you take for me?'
'Well,' replies Venus, still blowing his tea, 'I'm not prepared, at a moment's notice, to tell you, Mr Wegg.'
'Come! According to your own account I'm not worth much,' Wegg reasons persuasively.
'Not for miscellaneous working in, I grant you, Mr Wegg; but you might turn out valuable yet, as a--' here Mr Venus takes a gulp of tea, so hot that it makes him choke, and sets his weak eyes watering; 'as a Monstrosity, if you'll excuse me.'
Repressing an indignant look, indicative of anything but a disposition to excuse him, Silas pursues his point.
'I think you know me, Mr Venus, and I think you know I never bargain.'
Mr Venus takes gulps of hot tea, shutting his eyes at every gulp, and opening them again in a spasmodic manner; but does not commit himself to assent.
'I have a prospect of getting on in life and elevating myself by my own independent exertions,' says Wegg, feelingly, 'and I shouldn't like--I tell you openly I should NOT like--under such circumstances, to be what I may call dispersed, a part of me here, and a part of me there, but should wish to collect myself like a genteel person.'
'It's a prospect at present, is it, Mr Wegg? Then you haven't got the money for a deal about you? Then I'll tell you what I'll do with you; I'll hold you over. I am a man of my word, and you needn't be afraid of my disposing of you. I'll hold you over. That's a promise. Oh dear me, dear me!'
Fain to accept his promise, and wishing to propitiate him, Mr Wegg looks on as he sighs and pours himself out more tea, and then says, trying to get a sympathetic tone into his voice:
'You seem very low, Mr Venus. Is business bad?'
'Never was so good.'
'Is your hand out at all?'
'Never was so well in. Mr Wegg, I'm not only first in the trade, but I'm THE trade. You may go and buy a skeleton at the West End if you like, and pay the West End price, but it'll be my putting together. I've as much to do as I can possibly do, with the assistance of my young man, and I take a pride and a pleasure in it.'
Mr Venus thus delivers hmself, his right hand extended, his smoking saucer in his left hand, protesting as though he were going to burst into a flood of tears.
'That ain't a state of things to make you low, Mr Venus.'
'Mr Wegg, I know it ain't. Mr Wegg, not to name myself as a workman without an equal, I've gone on improving myself in my knowledge of Anatomy, till both by sight and by name I'm perfect. Mr Wegg, if you was brought here loose in a bag to be articulated, I'd name your smallest bones blindfold equally with your largest, as fast as I could pick 'em out, and I'd sort 'em all, and sort your wertebrae, in a manner that would equally surprise and charm you.'
'Well,' remarks Silas (though not quite so readily as last time),
'THAT ain't a state of things to be low about.--Not for YOU to be low about, leastways.'
'Mr Wegg, I know it ain't; Mr Wegg, I know it ain't. But it's the heart that lowers me, it is the heart! Be so good as take and read that card out loud.'
Silas receives one from his hand, which Venus takes from a wonderful litter in a drawer, and putting on his spectacles, reads:
'"Mr Venus,'
'Yes. Go on.'
'"Preserver of Animals and Birds,"'
'Yes. Go on.'
'"Articulator of human bones."'
'That's it,' with a groan. 'That's it! Mr Wegg, I'm thirty-two, and a bachelor. Mr Wegg, I love her. Mr Wegg, she is worthy of being loved by a Potentate!' Here Silas is rather alarmed by Mr Venus's springing to his feet in the hurry of his spirits, and haggardly confronting him with his hand on his coat collar; but Mr Venus, begging pardon, sits down again, saying, with the calmness of despair, 'She objects to the business.'
'Does she know the profits of it?'
'She knows the profits of it, but she don't appreciate the art of it, and she objects to it. "I do not wish," she writes in her own handwriting, "to regard myself, nor yet to be regarded, in that boney light".'
Mr Venus pours himself out more tea, with a look and in an attitude of the deepest desolation.
'And so a man climbs to the top of the tree, Mr Wegg, only to see that there's no look-out when he's up there! I sit here of a night surrounded by the lovely trophies of my art, and what have they done for me? Ruined me. Brought me to the pass of being informed that "she does not wish to regard herself, nor yet to be regarded, in that boney light"!' Having repeated the fatal expressions, Mr Venus drinks more tea by gulps, and offers an explanation of his doing so.
'It lowers me. When I'm equally lowered all over, lethargy sets in. By sticking to it till one or two in the morning, I get oblivion. Don't let me detain you, Mr Wegg. I'm not company for any one.'
'Oh dear me, dear me!' sighs Mr Venus, heavily, snuffing the candle, 'the world that appeared so flowery has ceased to blow! You're casting your eye round the shop, Mr Wegg. Let me show you a light. My working bench. My young man's bench. A Wice. Tools. Bones, warious. Skulls, warious. Preserved Indian baby. African ditto. Bottled preparations, warious. Everything within reach of your hand, in good preservation. The mouldy ones a-top. What's in those hampers over them again, I don't quite remember. Say, human warious. Cats. Articulated English baby. Dogs. Ducks. Glass eyes, warious. Mummied bird. Dried cuticle, warious. Oh, dear me! That's the general panoramic view.'
Having so held and waved the candle as that all these heterogeneous objects seemed to come forward obediently when they were named, and then retire again, Mr Venus despondently repeats, 'Oh dear me, dear me!' resumes his seat, and with drooping despondency upon him, falls to pouring himself out more tea.
'Where am I?' asks Mr Wegg.
'You're somewhere in the back shop across the yard, sir; and speaking quite candidly, I wish I'd never bought you of the Hospital Porter.'
'Now, look here, what did you give for me?'
'Well,' replies Venus, blowing his tea: his head and face peering out of the darkness, over the smoke of it, as if he were modernizing the old original rise in his family: 'you were one of a warious lot, and I don't know.'
Silas puts his point in the improved form of 'What will you take for me?'
'Well,' replies Venus, still blowing his tea, 'I'm not prepared, at a moment's notice, to tell you, Mr Wegg.'
'Come! According to your own account I'm not worth much,' Wegg reasons persuasively.
'Not for miscellaneous working in, I grant you, Mr Wegg; but you might turn out valuable yet, as a--' here Mr Venus takes a gulp of tea, so hot that it makes him choke, and sets his weak eyes watering; 'as a Monstrosity, if you'll excuse me.'
Repressing an indignant look, indicative of anything but a disposition to excuse him, Silas pursues his point.
'I think you know me, Mr Venus, and I think you know I never bargain.'
Mr Venus takes gulps of hot tea, shutting his eyes at every gulp, and opening them again in a spasmodic manner; but does not commit himself to assent.
'I have a prospect of getting on in life and elevating myself by my own independent exertions,' says Wegg, feelingly, 'and I shouldn't like--I tell you openly I should NOT like--under such circumstances, to be what I may call dispersed, a part of me here, and a part of me there, but should wish to collect myself like a genteel person.'
'It's a prospect at present, is it, Mr Wegg? Then you haven't got the money for a deal about you? Then I'll tell you what I'll do with you; I'll hold you over. I am a man of my word, and you needn't be afraid of my disposing of you. I'll hold you over. That's a promise. Oh dear me, dear me!'
Fain to accept his promise, and wishing to propitiate him, Mr Wegg looks on as he sighs and pours himself out more tea, and then says, trying to get a sympathetic tone into his voice:
'You seem very low, Mr Venus. Is business bad?'
'Never was so good.'
'Is your hand out at all?'
'Never was so well in. Mr Wegg, I'm not only first in the trade, but I'm THE trade. You may go and buy a skeleton at the West End if you like, and pay the West End price, but it'll be my putting together. I've as much to do as I can possibly do, with the assistance of my young man, and I take a pride and a pleasure in it.'
Mr Venus thus delivers hmself, his right hand extended, his smoking saucer in his left hand, protesting as though he were going to burst into a flood of tears.
'That ain't a state of things to make you low, Mr Venus.'
'Mr Wegg, I know it ain't. Mr Wegg, not to name myself as a workman without an equal, I've gone on improving myself in my knowledge of Anatomy, till both by sight and by name I'm perfect. Mr Wegg, if you was brought here loose in a bag to be articulated, I'd name your smallest bones blindfold equally with your largest, as fast as I could pick 'em out, and I'd sort 'em all, and sort your wertebrae, in a manner that would equally surprise and charm you.'
'Well,' remarks Silas (though not quite so readily as last time),
'THAT ain't a state of things to be low about.--Not for YOU to be low about, leastways.'
'Mr Wegg, I know it ain't; Mr Wegg, I know it ain't. But it's the heart that lowers me, it is the heart! Be so good as take and read that card out loud.'
Silas receives one from his hand, which Venus takes from a wonderful litter in a drawer, and putting on his spectacles, reads:
'"Mr Venus,'
'Yes. Go on.'
'"Preserver of Animals and Birds,"'
'Yes. Go on.'
'"Articulator of human bones."'
'That's it,' with a groan. 'That's it! Mr Wegg, I'm thirty-two, and a bachelor. Mr Wegg, I love her. Mr Wegg, she is worthy of being loved by a Potentate!' Here Silas is rather alarmed by Mr Venus's springing to his feet in the hurry of his spirits, and haggardly confronting him with his hand on his coat collar; but Mr Venus, begging pardon, sits down again, saying, with the calmness of despair, 'She objects to the business.'
'Does she know the profits of it?'
'She knows the profits of it, but she don't appreciate the art of it, and she objects to it. "I do not wish," she writes in her own handwriting, "to regard myself, nor yet to be regarded, in that boney light".'
Mr Venus pours himself out more tea, with a look and in an attitude of the deepest desolation.
'And so a man climbs to the top of the tree, Mr Wegg, only to see that there's no look-out when he's up there! I sit here of a night surrounded by the lovely trophies of my art, and what have they done for me? Ruined me. Brought me to the pass of being informed that "she does not wish to regard herself, nor yet to be regarded, in that boney light"!' Having repeated the fatal expressions, Mr Venus drinks more tea by gulps, and offers an explanation of his doing so.
'It lowers me. When I'm equally lowered all over, lethargy sets in. By sticking to it till one or two in the morning, I get oblivion. Don't let me detain you, Mr Wegg. I'm not company for any one.'
At the Times
Jonathan Rosen has an interesting piece about my colleague David Damrosch's new book on Gilgamesh. (Here's the Amazon link--sounds pretty interesting, eh?) Which also reminds me I meant to link to a piece David published a few weeks in the Chronicle of Higher Education (that link should work without a subscription) about the risks and rewards of academics writing "trade" books for a wider audience. Here are the opening paragraphs:
The American public has a deeply ambivalent attitude toward scholarship. Parents are eager to have their children taught by leading scholars but are often bemused by what the scholars actually do, particularly in their work outside the classroom. Regularly mocked as purveyors of arcane topics in clotted prose, professors often display a reciprocal ambivalence toward the general public. To call a young colleague's work "rather ... journalistic" is to signal a negative vote on tenure. As much as we might like to help shape public understanding on contentious issues — and to earn royalties in the tens of thousands of dollars rather than in the tens of dollars — we hesitate to set aside our highly honed analytical skills, our close attention to history, nuance, and shades of meaning, and start turning out sound bites in prose.
The problem isn't that academics "can't write," as is often claimed, but that we are typically engaged in what scholars of the Renaissance know as coterie writing. In 16th-century England, for instance, small groups of aristocrats such as Sir Philip Sydney, his sister Mary Herbert, and their circle would compose poems for their mutual entertainment, circulating them privately from one country estate to another. Scholars today may reach a somewhat larger circle, but most academic writing is part of a continuing conversation among a coterie of fellow specialists with common interests and a shared history of debate. Even for scholars who are elegant prose stylists, it isn't an easy matter to make the transition from writing for Milton's "fit audience, though few" to a larger but less fit readership.
The American public has a deeply ambivalent attitude toward scholarship. Parents are eager to have their children taught by leading scholars but are often bemused by what the scholars actually do, particularly in their work outside the classroom. Regularly mocked as purveyors of arcane topics in clotted prose, professors often display a reciprocal ambivalence toward the general public. To call a young colleague's work "rather ... journalistic" is to signal a negative vote on tenure. As much as we might like to help shape public understanding on contentious issues — and to earn royalties in the tens of thousands of dollars rather than in the tens of dollars — we hesitate to set aside our highly honed analytical skills, our close attention to history, nuance, and shades of meaning, and start turning out sound bites in prose.
The problem isn't that academics "can't write," as is often claimed, but that we are typically engaged in what scholars of the Renaissance know as coterie writing. In 16th-century England, for instance, small groups of aristocrats such as Sir Philip Sydney, his sister Mary Herbert, and their circle would compose poems for their mutual entertainment, circulating them privately from one country estate to another. Scholars today may reach a somewhat larger circle, but most academic writing is part of a continuing conversation among a coterie of fellow specialists with common interests and a shared history of debate. Even for scholars who are elegant prose stylists, it isn't an easy matter to make the transition from writing for Milton's "fit audience, though few" to a larger but less fit readership.
Friday, March 23, 2007
The data-mining gambit
Alice considers the epistemological consequences for movie-making of the notion that obsessive reading will pay off. Here's a taste, but it's full of other interesting comments about everything from lie detectors to actors with famous voices to (Shakespeare assignmenters take note!) the career of Donald Foster:
I'm partial to any data-mining techniques practiced by young Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor, but I'm skeptical of how often the gambit gets used in movies and books because it frequently seems to provide exactly and only the information that the detectives need. I know I'm supposed to suspend disbelief at these things--I always do in 24, where data-mining seems to take seconds--but it strikes me as an interesting epistemological question (no, really) about crime procedurals: how do we know what we know in the procedural? How do we distinguish good and bad information? Why do we believe that more evidence-gathering will lead to greater clarity? The great thing about Zodiac is that it takes up many of these questions: the film is so long because there's so much contradictory information to be sorted out, and there are significant lags in coordinating the investigations among the three police departments involved in the case. Owen Gleiberman mentions this fascinating problem in his review of the film.
I'm partial to any data-mining techniques practiced by young Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor, but I'm skeptical of how often the gambit gets used in movies and books because it frequently seems to provide exactly and only the information that the detectives need. I know I'm supposed to suspend disbelief at these things--I always do in 24, where data-mining seems to take seconds--but it strikes me as an interesting epistemological question (no, really) about crime procedurals: how do we know what we know in the procedural? How do we distinguish good and bad information? Why do we believe that more evidence-gathering will lead to greater clarity? The great thing about Zodiac is that it takes up many of these questions: the film is so long because there's so much contradictory information to be sorted out, and there are significant lags in coordinating the investigations among the three police departments involved in the case. Owen Gleiberman mentions this fascinating problem in his review of the film.
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