The wobble

Jellies were once the pinnacle of sophistication.

(As a child, I made jellies in the shape of rabbits as an edible school project for our medieval feast - but though we had, at home, both a very good though now no longer fully functional large orange plastic jelly mold [it was benevolently tested last Xmas as part of small-child-oriented holiday preparations, but the jelly that emerged was not zoologically recognizable] and also smaller metal rabbit molds that perhaps worked better as cake tins, I believe that I used cookie cutters to solve the problem of how to scale up and make enough rabbits for everybody in the class to have their own.)

And here is the jellymongers website. Victorian breakfast looks to be a thing of considerable deliciousness (do I spy decorative anchovies?). Also, for the discerning, bespoke jelly moulds (pictured above). I wouldn't mind having one of these for a party.

I always have a trickle of advance reading copies coming into my apartment, many of which seem to have been sent to me on no rationally comprehensible grounds, but late last week I got one which I seized upon with delight: Lev Grossman's forthcoming novel The Magicians.

It is perhaps too dark to be the perfect escapist reading, but I thought it was very good indeed. For comic relief, I will also observe that I recently bought another book about magic partly because the Amazon reviewers' back-and-forth made me laugh...

A teemingness of rubrics

I cannot explain this, but it is somehow funny and apt...

Literary minefields

From Rousseau's Confessions:

I have always considered M. de Malesherbes to be a man of inviolable integrity. Nothing that has happened to me has ever made me doubt for a moment his probity; but, as weak as he is honourable, he sometimes harms the people in whom he takes an interest through his very desire to protect them. Not only did he have more than one hundred pages cut from the Paris edition [of Julie]; but he made a cut that could even be described as an act of disloyalty in the copy of the good edition that he sent to Mme de Pompadour. Somewhere in this work there is a remark to the effect that the wife of a coal-merchant is more deserving of respect than the mistress of a prince. This sentence suggested itself to me in the heat of composition without, I swear it, any allusion being intended. On rereading the work, I realized that the connection would nevertheless be made. Faithful, nevertheless, to my own very imprudent maxim of never suppressing anything out of fear that connections might be made, provided my conscience is my witness that I was not aware of them while writing, I was reluctant to remove this sentence, but contented myself with substituting the word prince for the word king, which is what I had originally written. This modification did not go far enough for M. de Malesherbes: he removed the whole sentence, which is missing from the new page he had printed specially and stuck as neatly as possible into Mme de Pompadour's copy. She was not deceived by this vanishing act. There was no shortage of charitable souls eager to inform her of it.

Amazing rare things

The illustration to another NYRB piece, taken from here (it is Maria Sybilla Merian's illustration of a common or spectacled caiman with a South American false coral snake!):

"My my I do like to work"

An amazing phrase in Joyce Carol Oates's NYRB piece on Flannery O'Connor:

As her lupus steadily worsened, O'Connor remained an unfailingly devout Catholic waking each morning, "as soon as the first chicken cackles," with a ritual reading of prayers from a breviary before being driven into Milledgeville by Regina to attend 7:00 AM mass at Sacred Heart Church; her writing life was compressed into just a few hours, but these hours were precious to her, under the protection of her mother. On her very deathbed O'Connor was determined to work—"My my I do like to work.... I et up that one hour like it was filet mignon."

Carnivorous boarding

In the NYTBR, Caleb Crain on 19th-century American boardinghouse life:

Boardinghouses in Victorian America served three meals a day, and the low quality of them is Gunn’s chief complaint. At the Fashionable Boardinghouse, the meat is sliced too thin and the plates are whisked away too quickly; at the Dirty Boardinghouse, there are “hairs and crumbs in the ketchup,” and “every body was over-porked.” The landlady of one Mean Boardinghouse serves salt fish and sheep’s liver three times a week, along with pastry “of solid construction, and damp, ­putty-like material,” while the landlady of another prepares salt mackerel and pickled pork by “interring and then baking them in batter.” For one experimental summer at a Vegetarian Boardinghouse, Gunn allows himself to be fed “bananas, melons, peaches, grapes, oranges, cherries, [and] pine-apples,” but he worries that the diet fosters meekness and “a generally-sublimated and windy estimation of our own importance and destiny,” and soon returns to carnivorous boarding, with results not altogether happy. Of an establishment presided over by an untidy Southern woman, he writes that “we have known blood to follow an incision in a shoulder of veal.”

Scanner = 1; camera = 0

Scanwiches! (Via Personal Days.)

"More public-spirited pigs"

Why T. S. Eliot rejected Animal Farm.

Pig racing

At the FT, Michael Moorcock on his recent visit to a science fiction convention in Biloxi and points south (site registration required). He offers up this reminiscence of a visit to a local country fair on an earlier visit to Mississippi:

One of its chief attractions was all-day pig racing. Linda has never been able to resist the prospect of a really good pig race. Like most old-fashioned fairs of its kind, this one was a mixture of carnival, freak show, travelling zoo and church fête.

We were enjoying an evangelical Punch and Judy show, when Beau attached himself to us. Beau was about the size and shape of Ratso Rizzo, Dustin Hoffman’s character in Midnight Cowboy. He wore a filthy white cowboy hat, cracked, worn-out western boots and a greasy red, white and blue shirt. He was grotesquely ugly, stank and was clearly simple. Fixing us with a friendly eye, he elected to be our tour guide. “That’s the carousel, this here’s the bearded lady. Over there’s your two-headed man. And here’s the zoo!”

He brightened. The zoo was horrible: a stinking tent filled with rows of various sizes of pet cages containing mostly common forms of local wildlife. “He’s a alligator. He’d bite y’all’s arm off soon as look at y’all. Thet there’s a raccoon. Make good eating if y’all kin ketch yerself one. See the bobcat? Hey!” The dying animal looked up through tired, uncaring eyes. Beau produced a stick and began inserting it through the wire. “He’ll liven up if ya poke him!” The cat uttered a halfhearted snarl; the nearby alligator tried to sink into its too-shallow water.

We fled from Beau into a tent where, to our astonishment, a cheerleading contest was being held. In the deepest heart of the Baptist Bible Belt, these cheerleaders were aged between four and nine, and heavy with make-up (mascara, blusher, lipstick) and perms. They looked like downmarket Tokyo whores. The creators of these creatures, good Baptist pimp-moms to a woman, urged their offspring on to greater deeds of hip-jutting, chest-thrusting, bottom-pushing cheerleading prowess.

We slipped out and were just able to catch the start of the pig race – black ones running against white. The prize? An Oreo cookie.

The counterfactual mode

I am going to an interesting conference this summer in London...

Syringed

Exposure to the open air has left A.L. Kennedy's ear feeling shy and wayward.

1950s B-movie soundtracks

I must confess to a sudden aspiration to take up the theremin. (Link courtesy of The Rumpus.)

Ostrich Eggshell Beads

Chris Wingfield on anthropology and the making of the material world:

I increasingly realised that just as I had set out to learn how to make Ostrich Eggshell Beads as the best way of understanding the techniques and technology involved, so Henry Balfour and his colleagues such as Francis Knowles had set about learning to knap flints in order to under[s]tand the objects they collected classified and displayed. A course in technology was central to the Oxford Diploma in Anthropology until 1940 and was taught primarily in the Pitt Rivers Museum. While today Anthropologists are formed by being made to write texts as part of their education - usually a doctoral thesis - in the first half of the twentieth century, the making of anthropologists in Oxford frequently involved the making of material objects at the Pitt Rivers Museum.

Technology, however is not just about objects and tools - things we use to do things - but is crucially about the way in which we do them - techniques. Central to the 'French tradition' of studies of technology is an essay published by Marcel Mauss Techniques of the Body in 1934. Mauss focussed on the ways in which we learn to use our bodies as members of society and the differences to be found in techniques of walking, swimming, sleeping, standing and sitting as well as other basic biological functions. Mauss wrote about his experience in the First World War of having to change 8000 spades in the trenches because English troops could not use French spades. To capture the way in which we are formed by these learned techniques of being and doing, Mauss coined the term habitus - 'the techniques and work of collective and individual practical reason.' The body, Mauss suggested, was 'man's first and most natural instrument.'

...

The objects that fill the museum are not themselves the techniques that are the components of the habitus - our learned ways of being and doing things. They are instead the material forms that are the result of the action of human bodily techniques on various sorts of matter. The objects in the museum come alive as evidence for the history of human techniques and technology when imagined in relation to the human bodies that had to act in particular learned ways to create them.

When approached in this way the museum objects become the sites of a sort of micro-archaeology. They can be investigated for evidence of human bodies acting in particular ways. The techniques are inscribed into their material form as the effects of human action. There are also many tools in the collections which were themselves used to have an effect on other things and became in the process extensions of the human body - a paddle, a knife or a stone blade - and these too make most sense when imagined in relation to the action of that human body.

Convergences

I am not alone!

From Marcel O'Gorman's "Swimming to Obsolescence":

When I was about halfway through the essays collected by Harold W. Baillie and Timothy K. Casey in Is Human Nature Obsolete? Genetics, Bioengineering, and the Future of the Human Condition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005, $24.95), I took a few days off to compete in my first triathlon, the off-road type. This might seem inconsequential to a review of the book, but as this excellent anthology reminds us, there is no such thing as "inconsequential." No act is without consequence, and nothing, in the end, is safe from sequencing.

Swimming is a primitive, even atavistic, sport. This is especially true if one adheres to the theory that we evolved from aquatic ancestors. Like running, swimming requires no conspicuous technological implements—no sticks, no projectiles, no protective equipment. And yet I could easily argue that running is more "natural" than swimming, at least for a human being. Running is primary, a universal response to danger. Swimming, on the other hand, is a provocation, an embracing of danger in defiance of human limitations.

Monasticism

Hmmmm, really I am an extreme recluse and have been allowing my stay-at-home tendencies to override any notion that I should get out and do things, but I was thinking that next week's Happy Endings reading at Joe's Pub (featuring Colson Whitehead, Kevin Wilson, Amy Cohen and musical guest Sam Amidon - possibly Thomas Bartlett as well?) would be worth getting myself downtown for - only by now it is sold out! Anyone got an extra they want to sell me?!?