The Night Climbers

Tom Whipple at the Sunday Times on a magical secret society:

For my first six months at university an antique book, battered and tattered, sat unopened on my bookshelf. The Night Climbers of Cambridge, published in 1937, has a lot to say about drainpipes.

“The drainpipe is the most urgent thing to be mastered by the beginner,” an opening section explains, before describing in detail how to achieve that mastery.

Seventy years on, the book that many regard as the forerunner of the urban sports of free-running and building climbing — not to mention one of the first climbing guidebooks published — has just been reissued by Oleander.

My copy was a present from my father. With a look of conspiratorial glee, he had thrust it into my hand on the day I left for university. Then I promptly forgot it.

But the Night Climbers is too much a part of Cambridge folklore to remain forgotten for long. When a friend in the mountaineering club breathlessly passed on rumours of a guidebook — long out of print — that described routes up every building in Cambridge, I returned to my bookshelf and began to read.

Written by the pseudonymous “Whipplesnaith” (no relation), Night Climbers is a lot more than a guide for climbing the colleges of Cambridge. It is also a ripping Boy's Own romp, with climbers pictured performing heroic feats of derring-do when “as furtively as the bats of twilight, they shun the eyes of the world, going on their mysterious journeys and retiring as quietly as they set out”. What 18-year-old would not want to be part of such a society?

With the Night Climbers as my guide, I headed into the Cambridge night. After drainpipes came the easier buildings — Fitzwilliam Museum, Caius College Old Library. I soon learnt to deal with college countermeasures, with revolving spikes on fences and downward-pointing spikes on popular routes.

Shades of Roofworld! Hmmm, I really do not want to master drainpipe climbing, but certain kinds of story give me an almost irresistible urge to cast aside all my worldly responsibilities and sit down to write a novel, and this is a good instance of such a story...

Develope, mentionned, checque

Blake Morrison at the Guardian on Christopher Reid's selection of the letters of Ted Hughes. I must say, this collection sounds quite wonderful...

A real shoe lady

An obituary for Washoe the chimpanzee, who died Tuesday after a short illness.

A head on a stick

Ian Sample at the Guardian on the New Scientist's top-ten list of peculiar scientific experiments:

One of the most gruesome experiments to make New Scientist's list was performed by the Soviet surgeon Vladimir Demikhov. In 1954 he unveiled a two-headed dog, created in the lab by grafting the head, shoulders and front legs of a puppy on to the neck of a German shepherd dog. Journalists brought in to examine the creature noted how milk dribbled from the stump of the puppy's head when it attempted to lap milk. Occasionally, the two would fight, with the German shepherd trying to shake the puppy off, and the puppy retaliating by biting back.

The unfortunate creation lived for six days, though Dr Demikhov repeated the experiment 19 more times over the next 15 years, with the longest-lived lasting a month. Although the work was dismissed as a publicity stunt outside the Soviet Union, Dr Demikhov was credited with developing intricate surgical techniques that paved the way for the first human heart transplant.

(Courtesy of Nico.)

Punnishness

Phil Nugent contemplates Helen Hill's films, Joe Strummer and what it means to be afflicted with a bad case of other people's nostalgia.

A relishing soop preparatory to a fresh debauch

Bee Wilson at the TLS on the plight of coffee-growers and the eighteenth-century origins of coffee-house culture as revealed in Markman Ellis's anthology of primary sources. The fun part:

The main arguments in favour of coffee houses, in the words of an anonymous satire of 1661, were that they were “free to all comers”, promoted intermingling of different professions, “equality”, education and free discourse, and that coffee “makes no man drunk”, unlike the drinks served in ale-houses. However, in the view of this same satire, every one of these virtues had its corresponding vice. The freedom of speech led to time-wasting and “gabbling” (“Here men carried by instinct sipp muddy water, and like Frogs confusedly murmur Insignificant Notes, which tickle their own ears, and, to their inharmonious sense, make Music of jarring strings”). The education on offer was “a school . . . without a master”. As for the proposition that “coffee makes no man drunk”, the author suggests coffee houses encouraged drunkenness, because the effects of coffee “being mixt with the more drying smoak of Tobacco makes too many run to the Tavern or Alehouse to quench their thirst, which they cannot satisfy”.

The same point was made in a mock-petition of 1674, The Women’s Petition Against Coffee. The coffee house, in truth, was:

"Only a Pimp to the Tavern, a relishing soop preparative to a fresh debauch: For when people have swill’d themelves with a morning draught of more Ale than brewers horse can carry, hither they come for a pennyworth of Settle-brain . . . and after an hours impertinent Chat, begin to consider a bottle of Claret would do excellent well before Dinner; whereupon to the Bush they all march together, till every one of them is Drunk as a Drum, and then back again to the Coffee-House to drink themselves sober."

An outlandish animal

Ludwig Wittgenstein c. 1948 (from Culture and Value (ed. G. H. Von Wright with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch):

Two people are laughing together, say at a joke. One of them has used certain somewhat unusual words and now they both break out into a sort of bleating. That might appear very extraordinary to a visitor coming from quite a different environment. Whereas we find it completely reasonable.

(I recently witnessed this scene on a bus and was able to think myself into the position of someone to whom this would be unfamiliar. From that point of view it struck me as quite irrational, like the responses of an outlandish animal.)

That white look

Dina Rabinovitch has died of breast cancer. Here is a very moving series of extracts from her columns charting her illness:

Sunday morning I look at the dressing on my breast - ex-breast? - in the mirror for the first time. Lying propped on hospital pillows, peering down at myself, my body didn't seem that different. But in the mirror, stark as a minus sign, there it is, the new flatness.

Grief is waiting to swamp. To ward it off, I take snapshots of myself on my phone. Fluent breast-feeder, I could always summon milk at will. And what do you know? I can still do it. I am absolutely sure of the sensation, that old internal rush, and I can feel it to my right breast, site of Friday's mastectomy. I'm standing in front of a full-length mirror, watching myself tentatively, so tentatively, touch my way all around the soft, new, white bandages, and the tears are pouring down my face because I've made a mistake and let the grief in after all.

A paper-based cult

Avi Klein at the Washington Monthly on strange doings in the Lyndon LaRouche circle. (Thanks to Eric for the link.)

Jews with swords

At the Telegraph, Michael Chabon on his new swashbuckling epic and his movement away from naturalism:

I know it still seems incongruous, first of all, for me or a writer of my literary training, generation and pretensions to be writing stories featuring anybody with swords. As recently as 10 years ago, I had published two novels, and perhaps as many as 20 short stories, and not one of them featured weaponry more antique than a (lone) Glock 9mm. None was set any earlier than about 1972 or in any locale more far-flung or exotic than a radio studio in Paris, France.

Most of those stories appeared in sedate, respectable and generally sword-free places like The New Yorker and Harper's, and featured unarmed Americans undergoing the eternal fates of contemporary short story characters — disappointment, misfortune, loss, hard enlightenment, moments of bleak grace. Divorce; death; illness; violence, random and domestic; divorce; bad faith; deception and self-deception; love and hate among fathers and sons, men and women, friends and lovers; the transience of beauty and desire; divorce — I guess that about covers it. Story, more or less, of my life.

As for the two novels, they didn't stray in time or space any farther than the stories — or for that matter, any deeper into the realm of Jewishness: both set in Pittsburgh, liberally furnished with Pontiacs and Fords, scented with marijuana, Shalimar and kielbasa, featuring Smokey Robinson hits and Star Trek references, and starring gentiles or assimilated Jews, many of whom were self-consciously inspired, instructed and laid low by the teachings of rock and roll and Hollywood but not, for example, by the lost writings of the tzaddik of Regensburg whose commentaries are so important to one of the heroes of Gentlemen of the Road.

Goodness, I love that fellow's writing, I must get Gentlemen of the Road immediately--in fact, there, I've shopping-carted it...

Deid-bell, deid-drap, deid-nip, deid-rap, deid-spail

Kate Bolick's blogging this week at Slate on various imaginary Scotlands. There is a new course in supernatural studies at Glasgow University--shades of Laurell K. Hamilton, I love it!

Pickling

I read this story and learned a good new expert-knowledgeish term.

The Manhattan Project

William J. Broad has a quite interesting story at the Times about the Manhattan origins of America's nuclear project. This is rather my neck of the woods--and the best novel I know about this stuff, by the way, is Richard Powers' absolutely lovely book The Time of Our Singing.

This cant about cultural authenticity

Hari Kunzru has a great letter in the Guardian about this controversy concerning Monica Ali's representation of Brick Lane. I quite agree with everything he's saying, and I also admire his tone of righteous irritation, this is quite right!

As a mixed-race novelist (hell, just as a novelist), I would like to say to your leader writer (The trouble with Brick Lane, October 27) that I reserve the right to imagine anyone and anything I damn well please. If I want to write about Jewish people, or paedophiles or Patagonians or witches in 12th-century Finland, then I will do so, despite being "authentically" none of these things. I also give notice that if I choose, I intend to imagine what your muddled writer quaintly terms "real people" living in "real communities". My work may convince or it may not. However, I will not accept that I have any a priori responsibility to anyone - white, black or brown, let alone any "community" - to represent them in any particular way.

If Monica Ali isn't brown enough or working-class enough or Sylheti enough for you, then, well, that's your weird little identity-political screw-up. Presumably she's not white enough for someone else. I'm sick of all this cant about cultural authenticity, and sick of the duty (imposed only on "minority" writers) to represent in some quasi-political fashion. Art isn't about promoting social cohesion, or cementing community relations. It's about telling the truth as you see it, even if it annoys or offends some people. That's called freedom of expression, and last time I checked we all thought it was quite a good idea.

The rest is noise

Columbia-related but not exclusively so: the excellent Linden Park of selfdivider has organized an event this evening at 8pm in 501 Schermerhorn, an interview with music critic Alex Ross (I will confess that I always read Ross's New Yorker music criticism and wish that he was--were, subjunctive contrary-to-fact!--writing the book and film criticism also...). Get there early if you want a seat, this one's definitely going to be oversubscribed...