Bright in its proper station

From Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland:

[O]ne generation of ignorance effaces the whole series of unwritten history. Books are faithful repositories, which may be a while neglected or forgotten; but when they are opened again, will again impart their instruction: memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. Written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has past away, is again bright in its proper station. Tradition is but a meteor, which, if once it falls, cannot be rekindled.

Reading my grandmother's books

I come from a family of teachers. Both of my father's parents were English teachers and great readers; they met at teacher training college in Glasgow in the early 1930s, and though I have in my possession only a very small fraction of the books they collected over the years, they occupy a place of high honor in my office.

I sometimes tell a story to my students - it so perfectly seems to recapitulate crucial elements of the history of women's writing - in which my grandmother, during WWII, used the parchment pages of the sole copy of her undergraduate senior thesis to boil a Christmas pudding....

My grandfather was an omnivorous reader, possessing a serious interest in Scottish history, a wide range of literary tastes and an addiction to detective novels and "teach-yourself-X" language books, of which he owned dozens (he also religiously watched the Gaelic-language-instruction programs on public television, though really he and my grandmother grew up speaking Scots, not Gaelic, and lapsed into the familiar tongue of childhood more and more often in their old age as they retreated from the public world). I was tickled recently, while reading Pierre LeMaitre, to see that one of the literary crime scenes staged in his first book is from William McIlvanny's Laidlaw, a particular favorite of my grandfather's; the book he gave me to read the last time I saw him was this.

My grandmother suffered badly from dementia in her last years, but she remained a passionate reader: she had always been partial to the North American female short-story writers (Eudora Welty in particular), and Alice Munro was a favorite, not least because she wrote about rural Ontario scenes that resonated strongly with my grandmother's memories of an Ontario childhood (her mother was also a schoolteacher, though they moved back to Scotland after my grandmother's elementary-school years). The last book I remember her giving to me, not long before she died, was William Dalrymple's City of Djinns. I've never met Dalrymple, but he had grown up in North Berwick, the small seaside town outside Edinburgh where my grandparents lived for many years (my grandfather was headmaster of the North Berwick High School before he retired), and they had a proprietary interest in his budding success.

After my grandparents were dead, it was impossible to transfer more than a small selection of books from their house ("Old School House, 4 School Lane" - a quaint address I enjoyed writing on envelopes as a child!) to my graduate student quarters on the other side of the Atlantic. The ones I especially cherished - many of them my grandfather had already shipped to me in brown-paper-wrapped boxes from the local post office by the "book rate" - were the books they had as undergraduates, Everyman editions and a host of other small student-oriented hardcovers that dated mostly from their undergraduate years at Jordanhill. I used some of them while I was studying for my grad school orals: I remember that on my last visit to my grandmother, we had a rather wonderful circular conversation about my upcoming exams - a topic of interest and concern to both of us - she couldn't remember we'd already just talked it all through, so she'd pick up again as we left off by asking me to tell her about them - possibly in that sense she was the ideal auditor for an anxious third-year PhD student with an obsessive fondness for British literature and the ins and outs of academic study!

When I cleaned up my office in December, I came across this volume, which I remembered being there somewhere but which seemed especially lovely to lay hands on now given that it is something I'm currently writing about. I'm especially interested in the ways the page format of the scholarly edition is used by Johnson, so this little book isn't of exclusive utility, or indeed of notable monetary value, but what a precious memento....

From the outside.

Bookseller's stamp.

"Elizabeth C. W. H. Sillars. 1930." (She was born in 1911.)

You see from the list of cities on the title page that this is still the high imperial era of colonial education....

Diligent markup to the "Preface": a strong suspicion of an attentive student marking as the lecturer suggests!

The sheets of notes folded and tucked between the pages:

The uncomfortable desire to be writing books

I am having a very nice quiet week in Cayman: not completely off from work, but there wasn't any single obvious thing that I needed to motor ahead on, so I'm just taking care of bits and bobs as they come up.

It is always sort of awful to have to write a title and description for a future talk that is as yet not even begun, and this one has the typical flaws of vagueness and grandiosity, but I did enjoy contemplating it this morning and getting some sentences down on paper for the draft program:

“Talking Pages: The Eighteenth-Century Variorum Page”

Jenny Davidson will consider the form and function of the variorum page in Johnson’s Shakespeare editions in the context not just of eighteenth-century scholarly editing but of Scriblerian takes on the edited page. She will look closely at the workings of several specific pages of Johnson’s Shakespeare, but her larger concern is to consider Johnson’s literary career in the light of a late-stage revisiting of the quarrel of ancients and moderns. After telling a sort of prequel story about Swift, Bentley, Theobald and Pope, she will turn to Johnson’s editorial work as an effort of reconciliation and resolution in response to still unresolved tensions between the Scriblerian critical project and the reading techniques of a triumphalist modernity. Johnson’s reclamation of a “conversational” and relatively civil variorum page for what is in some ways a conservative literary project seems to represent a critical turning point in eighteenth-century literary history, and Davidson will conclude by considering analogies between Johnson’s use of the variorum page and the theme of generosity in present-day relationships with the past elsewhere in his writing, with brief excursions to Gibbon and Burke as points of comparison.

This made me think about how there are now three projects I am urgently desiring to work on (four if you count the "Gibbon's Rome" offshoot of the ancients-and-moderns project as a separate book), and how that feeling of desire is so satisfying and yet also so uncomfortable, almost so much so as to make me feel out of breath with anxiety and dissatisfaction that I am not doing anything towards any of 'em RIGHT NOW! I think getting new books started is my single highest priority for 2015, though calm and freedom from anxiety are always the highest thing on the list (time spent on my own work is good for this, so the two goals are not inherently incompatible).

I am still really excited about the Clarissa book, and as I'm teaching that seminar in the spring (and no other course - course release for the Tenure Review Advisory Committee, which keeps me very busy, but it's nice to imagine having the mental space free for doing some bits of actual work on this), it seems not implausible to think I might get some actual pages drafted. But higher priorities for January are to put in some of the groundwork for the Johnson's Shakespeare talk and to draft a proposal for a book that would be something like this only titled "Reading Jane Austen"!

If I'm not miscalculating, I have a full year of sabbatical coming up for 2016-2017: I've been considering taking it as two separate semesters (teach fall and take spring off for two years in a row), as in certain respects you get more bang for the buck that way (two very decent stretches of writing time rather than just one long one, and the fall-semester load of letters of recommendation and job market candidates is heavy enough that it doesn't always feel like leave if you're not teaching), but really if I have all these different books on the go, I should just take both at once, make as much progress as I can and then perhaps apply for a year of fellowship somewhere in the couple years following to finish up what remains undone. A project has to be pretty far forward before I can write a really good fellowship application for it, I think; this is not true for everyone, but seems to be for me....

Heel-dragging morning update

It is taking me a ridiculously long time this morning to get out the door for my run, the run I should have done yesterday but didn't get it together to do then at all! It is still grotesquely humid, but much cooler than yesterday, so that's something....

The fourth of July makes me grumpy, from a strictly personal point of view - the library is closed, and there is less interesting news than usual on the USian part of the internet. On the bright side, as it is a holiday I feel justified in blowing a large chunk of morning and midday on exercise - will hope to get in a few good hours of work on the wretched article revisions (which are enjoyable now that I am actually immersed in them, only I am waiting on some BorrowDirect sources that are delayed because of the holiday!) later on in the afternoon.

A few tabs to close:

King Lear with sheep! (Via John Kuhn. Amazingly reminds me of the exhilarating brief moment when I thought the Clydesdale Hamlet at Busch Gardens was going to feature a production of Hamlet performed by gigantic drayhorses - it was one of those fantastical glitches. Ditto, in a weaker version, my onetime quest for the Penguin Euripides....)

The reading habits of tennis players.

Jordan Ellenberg on the summer's most unread books as glimpsed by Kindle highlights.

A really nice piece by Mark Halliday on Kenneth Koch.

The Yale Digital Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson! I have something exciting coming up next year, by the way: I need to write a really good talk for this (it is going to be a good chance to delve into my battle-of-ancients-and-moderns project, which I think I haven't yet written about here as I am trying to stay focused on the still-unwritten Ten-Week Clarissa proposal - Johnson is not directly in that one, but the question of textual editing and commentary looms large throughout, thus Spinoza and other recent dipping into Grafton on Poliziano etc.)....

(Also excited that I have two rewarding minor work trips coming up in the fall - I like the feeling that my career is enabling me to have interesting travel experiences I wouldn't have otherwise: Dublin, for this year's edition of the Swift symposium conducted at the Deanery of St. Patrick's Cathedral; and Paris, in December, for a dissertation defense. I am excited about the latter for various reasons, one of which is that I will finally be able to go and get a cupcake at a bakery I have long admired from afar!)

The class

I am teaching this semester is one of the strangest, easiest and most purely pleasurable teaching experiences I have ever had! Today we were reading the amazing pair of narratives by Johnson and Boswell, Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.

Johnson's narrative is studded with amazing formulations (“If an epicure could remove by a wish, in quest of sensual gratifications, wherever he had supped he would breakfast in Scotland”), but this observation of Johnson's about aphorism - mediated through Boswell - also especially caught my eye:

Besides, I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but a few, in comparison of what we might get.

Aerialism

Tom Keymer on Samuel Johnson and ballooning.

I've had this one bookmarked for some days: it's appealing to me in its own right, because I love Samuel Johnson and I also love the early history of ballooning, but it also caused me to think very intensely of Wendy, who would have turned fifty-three today.

Wendy had cherished for many years a plan to have breakfast near Tiffany's, namely an expedition to the famous Manhattan jewelry emporium! There we saw, among an inconceivable array of wonders, one very lovely piece of jewelry that has stuck with me. I will quote from Wendy's own description of it, because she had a precision of observation and notation that I cannot command when it comes to such things: "A pear shaped peacock tahitian mounted upside down inside a gold netted framework — it was a hot air balloon pendant." It really was extraordinary - it was the most delicate and beautiful thing, very much in the spirit of the Faberge eggs which are the only jeweled thing I could say I actually have an emotional relationship with (they, too, represent a twentieth-century reimagining of an eighteenth-century tradition), and powerfully evoked that strange science-fictional spirit of early aerialism.

Hurricane update

Well, I have been lucky, Morningside Heights is high in elevation and I never lost power, but it has been a discombobulating and curiously stressful week! Obviously I couldn't fly out from LaGuardia yesterday. I'm on a direct flight to Cayman on Sunday instead; I will miss the triathlon, but it seemed the best of the available alternatives, and I'm now just trying not to worry neurotically about whether gas shortages will make it difficult to get a cab to JFK early on Sunday morning. I have two human evacuees and one feline in the living room; the younger human and I have had some good runs in Riverside Park and are enjoying massive amounts of Firefly/Big Bang Theory/Fringe to make the time go by. They have a good shot at getting back into their place Sunday morning, I think: fingers crossed that all these transitions go smoothly.

It now seems about a million years ago, but The Tempest at the Met last weekend was great. (Strange sense, during first two acts, of composer deliberately and rather perversely not writing the ravishing music of which he is capable, and moving towards difficulty or stringency instead, but the third act is emotionally much more forthcoming and draws everything back together. The orchestra sounded fantastic.)

Hurricane reading, appropriately and postapocalyptically: Justin Cronin's The Twelve. I enjoyed it, though it's not altogether to my tastes: a bit metaphysical/theological in its priorities, and the cast of thousands makes it sometimes difficult to differentiate one character from another. I thought this review was truly grossly unfair! Not my style of reviewing, anyway: if I hated it that much, I probably just wouldn't write about it.

Yoga today was beneficial!

Jane Yeh's The Ninjas is fantastically good. Separate post to follow at some less distracted juncture.

Irrelevant but interesting: the popularity of Clarks shoes in Jamaica.

Also, someone needs to send me a review copy of Swimming with Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale: Sports, Health and Exercise in Eighteenth-Century England! (Courtesy of Steve B.)

Delay, deferral

From Johnson's "Life of Pope," on Pope's Iliad translation:

When we find him translating fifty lines a day, it is natural to suppose that he would have brought his work to a more speedy conclusion. The Iliad, containing less than sixteen thousand verses, might have been despatched in less than three hundred and twenty days by fifty verses in a day. The notes, compiled with the assistance of his mercenaries, could not be supposed to require more time than the text. According to this calculation, the progress of Pope may seem to have been slow; but the distance is commonly very great between actual performances and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose, that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow; but on the morrow some difficulty emerges, or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure, all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualties.

X.

Is a letter, which, though found in Saxon words, begins no word in the English language.

5mph

The preamble to Cabinet's Speed Reading event:

(Picture poached from here. And a picture may or may not be worth a thousand words...)

It will be clear to anyone who knows me why I found the following text irresistible - the range of choices included everything from Gilbreth to Virilio - twenty-four of us read various bits and pieces - and in the meantime, a screen with images included an appealing and eclectic mix of stuff on the side (the film of Roger Bannister's four-minute mile, record-breaking Rubik's Cube-twisting, speed stacking, cats running in an exercise wheel, etc. etc.).

Valéry Larbaud, "Slowness" ("La lenteur"; 1930)
for Paul Morand

There is a moving tribute to speed in this quote from Samuel Johnson reported to us by Boswell: “One of the greatest pleasures in life is to travel in a coach moving at full speed.”

Though this tribute seems outdated by today’s standards of speed, it touches us, first, because it brings to mind the image we hold of Doctor Johnson: a very tall man, very fat, very slow, hippopotamus-like, thus the thought is made heavy with eloquence, lexicography, and pomposity; next, because this statement was made in the middle of the 18th century at a time when modern speed only existed in the imagination and in people’s desires, as though they could sense it. A promised land toward which they strove as fast as their horses could carry them, and which they sought in this direction, through means of breeding and selection, hoping perhaps to eventually create a race of quadrupeds with winged hooves . . . Yes, this word from the ponderous Doctor summarizes for us the aspiration of those generations who, relatively close to our own, did not know our speed which we obtained through the domestication of fire and thunder, in creating bulls and soon after bees of bronze (the description of locomotives in Ovid’s Metamorphoses is equally moving).

* * *

Shortly after Doctor Johnson came Napoleon, who dashed toward this future and who still surprises us by the truly imperial speed of his maneuvers, due to the skillful economy of well-prepared stops, fast and well-fed animals, and grooms skilled at unhitching and rehitching in a matter of minutes. Had Caligula done any better? . . . He went away on a sailboat, and here, going round in circles in those remote years, in a place before railroads, riding at full speed on a “hell train,” on the high roads around the capital, the coach that carries, through fog and under the fine Parisian rain, Louis XVIII, aging, weary, and sick, sometimes closing his heavy eyelids on eyes that would never see Canaan.

* * *

The generation that was already born then enters the scene. The first steps were difficult, and the Poets sang that Man had mounted the bronze monster too soon. But in a few more years, the Emperor would sharpen the fine points of his mustache, waxed before the mirrors of the railcar-salon-throne-room that would transport him in twelve hours from Saint-Cloud to Vichy. His pretty train—which must have been blue, white, and pink, or blue, white, and mauve like the uniform of the Cent-Gardes cavalry—preceded, and for us, followed, Waltman’s snowplow locomotive, Jules Verne’s Transcaucasian railway, and Rudyard Kipling’s Compounds.

* * *

But the railway cars and the car compartments, especially the first-class compartments, the sleeping cars, and the salon cars, grew weary—one always wants more than one has—of politely following behind the monster, who had become all too familiar and who smoked too much. Like city dwellers and the high and mighty, they felt nostalgia for the country and for pastoral life. They wanted freedom, anonymity, adventure, and horizons without cities or train stations. One night, toward the end of the 19th century, taking advantage of an unexpected stop in the middle of a field and close to a railway junction that someone had forgotten to close, the first-class compartments—which were brand new but without a hallway, and displeased with having been created based on an old model—escaped, scattered, and—finally!—took to the Open Road; the road with neither tracks nor railway switches, the road that branched out in all directions, through all of Europe’s shrubberies, and through the path of school children walking home chewing their crust of bread.

Some died from it, but the others were much the better for it, and increased in strength and speed, and had many children, even more vigorous and fast than their parents, and some of which would grow until they reached the dimensions of the original railway car. The species proliferated and grew into new varieties: there was a flying race, a warrior race, an amphibious race. But it is the road race that reproduces most easily today—too easily, in fact, for our tranquility.

For the automobile’s greatest days were those when the machine already had all of its organs, which functioned without risk for man who steered it, but the species had not yet multiplied to the point of creating the traffic jams we endure in large cities. Back then, the Limousines and Landaus were coaches that had plenty of space, found the street free before them, and ruled the road.

At that time, the encounter with another automobile in the middle of nowhere—“Hey, some comrades!”—was a genuine event, like the encounter of two ocean liners on the high seas. Back then, in the cities in which one stopped in the course of a journey in an automobile, one visited train stations with a sense of scorn.

"Lovelily dreadful"

A new adverb for Light Reading?

Impedimenta

Samuel Johnson, from the Life of Pope, on why it took Pope five years to translate Homer:

When we find him translating fifty lines a day, it is natural to suppose that he would have brought his work to a more speedy conclusion. The Iliad, containing less than sixteen thousand verses, might have been despatched in less than three hundred and twenty days by fifty verses in a day. The notes, compiled with the assistance of his mercenaries, could not be supposed to require more time than the text. According to this calculation, the progress of Pope may seem to have been slow; but the distance is commonly very great between actual performance and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose, that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow – but on the morrow some difficulty emerges, or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure, all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker’s mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualties.

"A word not elegant, nor in use"

I am thinking Samuel Johnson would not have endorsed the term defrag...

A great piece by Thomas Keymer in the TLS this week (a version of the introduction to a forthcoming Oxford World's Classics edition) on Samuel Johnson's Rasselas. I was just mentioning that the other day as something I have never taught but would like to. This I did not know:

Even against this political backdrop, however, there remained readers for whom Rasselas could continue to express the hopeful pursuit of autonomy and happiness. This may have been especially true for African readers in the century following publication, when the name of Johnson’s hero was occasionally adopted by emancipated slaves. Traceable individuals such as Rasselas Belfield (c1790–1822) and Rasselas Morjan (c1820–1839), both former slaves who lived as free men in England, took the name not only because Rasselas was one of the very few eligible Africans in English literature (one would hardly pick Oroonoko, or Othello), and not only because Johnson was revered among abolitionists for his public declarations against slavery. Rasselas is among much else an ingenious variation on the standard eighteenth-century captivity narrative, documenting the hero’s liberation or escape from imprisonment, and in this sense the name also connoted deliverance into a world of potential fulfilment, confronted in freedom.

“Rescued from a state of slavery in this life and enabled by God’s grace to become a member of his church he rests here in the hope of a greater deliverance hereafter”, reads the headstone of Rasselas Morjan’s grave in Wanlip, Leicestershire. At Bowness on Windermere, Rasselas Belfield is memorialized in more secular style, and in first-person verse: “A Slave by birth I left my native Land / And found my Freedom on Britannia’s Strand: / Blest Isle! Thou Glory of the Wise and Free, / Thy Touch alone unbinds the Chains of Slavery”. We cannot know the relationship between these rather conventional inscriptions and the lives and aspirations of their subjects, and it is clear that despite their manumission both men continued to work as domestic servants. That said, the expensiveness and quality of the surviving monuments to Rasselas Morjan and Rasselas Belfield make clear that both were valued upper servants in enlightened households. Whatever questions there might be about the completeness of their emancipation, we can safely assume that they had better chances of pursuing happiness than their still enslaved contemporaries across the Atlantic. Life itself still had to be lived, but like Johnson’s hero they could at least choose how to endure and even enjoy it.

Caballing

Via Levi, the Beinecke Library offers a daily post from Johnson's Dictionary.

"Long periods of procrastination followed by bursts of superhuman activity"

At the Guardian, Christopher Taylor on Peter Martin's new biography of Samuel Johnson. Nice opening - this I did not know:

One of the more expensive items in Samuel Beckett's working library was an 18th-century edition of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language. He probably bought it in Dublin in the 1930s, when he made extensive notes on Johnson for a play that he was planning to write about the great man. The Johnson that Beckett was interested in wasn't "Boswell's wit and wisdom machine", as he put it, but a sufferer from melancholia, idleness, guilt and fears of madness and annihilation. Beckett pictured his hero as an exhausted old man, "terrified of dying, terrified of deadness", and copied out quotations from the medical diary in which Johnson charted his own decline. The play, Human Wishes, which included a role for Johnson's cat Hodge ("sleeping - if possible"), was eventually abandoned, but the image of the dying writer stayed with Beckett. Years later, pressed for comment on his debts to Swift and Sterne, he told his first biographer that "it's Johnson, always Johnson, who is with me".