Closing tabs

A few weeks ago B. sent me a link with the subject line "A Young Scientist's Illustrated Primer," and it inevitably gave me an irresistible urge to reread what is surely my favorite Neal Stephenson novel, The Diamond Age.  I first read it c. 2001 or so, when I picked up a used mass-market paperback from the science-fiction-oriented table in front of Milano Market, and it was something of a revelation.  It  is the perfect book for me! 

(I think my two other favorites of Stephenson's are Cryptonomicon, which I read in a single sitting on the redeye flight back from Seattle when I was doing the low-budget book tour for Heredity - in certain respects, the length of Stephenson's novels is a vice, but for travel reading, it's a huge virtue, and I think I can also say with some specificity that though I bought a hardcover copy of Anathem, I didn't actually read it until I purchased a second copy for Kindle and devoured it on the trip we took last year to Costa Rica.  Snow Crash is more iconic, perhaps, but it doesn't hold as dear a place in my heart...)

Anyway, the reread totally lived up to my memory of it (I've probably read it a couple times before, couldn't say exactly).  Mouse army!  The texture of the primer passages is perhaps not quite as captivating as a different kind of writer might have managed, but it really is an excellent book.

Finally finished the last section of True Believers, which I'd stalled out on.  Also, this Black Cat Appreciation Day post made me realize that the two Carbonel books I knew very well as a child were followed by a third that I could actually obtain on Kindle.  It is not up to the standard of the first two, but it caused me to reflect on how I might obtain a copy of another book that represented a fantastically desirable and unavailable thing to me as a child, the fourth and final installment in Pamela Brown's Blue Door Theatre series, Maddy Again - I read the first three countless times, but this one I have never read.  Interlibrary loan?

The copyedited manuscript of The Magic Circle came back to me last night, which is exciting.  My favorite thing (I will scan and post a page of it, I think): the personalized style sheet, with all of my proper nouns and allusions tabulated in neat columns. 

About to have a morning session on the style book.  Slightly anxiety-provoking having two projects on my desk and the start of the semester so close, but everything should be manageable if I keep my head.

Miscellaneous other linkage: FBI files on Sylvia Plath's father; literary soap (underlying link is rather delightful); Tom Stoppard interviewed at More Intelligent Life.

TSP

Itamar Moses's play Completeness at Playwrights Horizons is excellent - first half is truly superb, it passed by in a flash, second half perhaps slightly less mesmerizing and more chaotic but still representing quite an accomplishment. I suspect it could be honed down to 1:45 with no intermission (it was 2:15 with an intermission, and with some goofy distracting stuff in the second half, including a bit when the two minor actors break out of character and come forward - not as effective as when this happened in the Albee "Counting the Ways" some years ago). The acting is excellent too, particularly in the case of the male lead - this play depicts grad student life impeccably, down to the haggard looks of the graduate students! It is not as complex as a Tom Stoppard play in its structure, but there is some of the same (quite unusual) sense of intelligence both in the writing of the characters and in the actors' performance of them; it is a very funny play, that is one of its chief pleasures, but I also appreciated the way that it weaves together the scientific analogies with the argument about 'life' without ever having characters state things in their banal exactitude: it is surprisingly rare for a playwright to hold back and go up to the brink of the thought and let the other character register it, as the first character moves towards it, without feeling the need to have either of them actually say the words out loud and effectively ruin the moment.

Quick dinner afterwards at the West Bank Cafe: I had a very delicious hanger steak salad (tomatoes, blue cheese, fingerling potatoes), and would have ordered the frozen lemon mousse for dessert only the wait staff was under the sway of a horseshoe-tabled birthday party of hilarity and mirth, and the moment passed: made more sense just to come on home. In sum, though, dinner and the play were both very good...

Home again

in the land of easy internet access, though I am resolved to start spending much less time online as part of multi-pronged anti-insomnia strategy. Various links to follow - here is Simon Schama at the FT on the revival of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia (site registration required). I saw that original production, and it was indeed one of the most lovely things I have ever seen in my life...

Lotteries of life

At the Telegraph, Noel Malcolm gives a favorable review to Alexander Waugh's book about the Wittgensteins:

Paul, the closest sibling in age to Ludwig, had some of his younger brother's qualities: asceticism, an iron will, an inability to dissemble, and a sometimes comical unawareness of how the world worked.

(Once, in New York, he complained to a friend that his shoes were hurting, and that the replacement pair he had asked the Wittgenstein staff in Vienna to send him had not arrived. 'Why don't you buy a pair here?' asked the friend. He looked at her in astonishment: 'What a wonderful idea. I never thought of that.')

He gave his debut concert in Vienna in December 1913. Eight months later, during his first week on the Eastern Front, he was hit in the right elbow by a Russian bullet; surgeons at a field hospital amputated most of his right arm, and he was taken off to Siberia as a prisoner of war, eventually returning to Vienna after more than a year of atrocious ill-treatment.

But during that year he had made up his mind to continue his career as a pianist; and that is what, with his Wittgensteinian iron will, he proceeded to do.

The Wittgensteinian money also helped. Realising that the repertoire for the left hand was extremely limited, he commissioned concertos and other pieces from a number of leading composers, including Strauss, Hindemith, Prokofiev, Ravel and, later, Benjamin Britten.

The fees he offered were huge, but the composers soon discovered that he believed himself to have thereby bought their music in a truly comprehensive way: he wanted not only exclusive performance rights, but also the right to engage in large-scale tinkering with the score.

Also of interest: Maya Jaggi interviews Tom Stoppard at the Guardian.

Poultry contentment

I cannot at all tell you where I heard about this book--some online venue shrouded now in the dim mists of my inattentive recent past--but wherever it was, the title and premise prompted me to request it from my beloved BorrowDirect. It is a slender little volume titled Counting My Chickens: And Other Home Thoughts by Deborah Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (known to her friends as "Debo"); I think it was the combination of the chickens of the title and the fact of its having an introduction by Tom Stoppard that caught my attention...

In any case, though it is itself a kind of anthology or miscellany of odd bits and pieces, it is very much the sort of book that deserves the mini-anthology treatment; it is full of gems.

Forthwith:

Evelyn Waugh, in Paris shortly after the liberation, bought Debo a white felt hat with a blue straw brim and two white stuffed birds perched on top. Other prized possessions of hers include copious amounts of chicken-themed art, including "an enormous canvas of double-combed Derbyshire Redcaps by T. Benson" and a pair of life-sized speckled hens, made of Belgian faience, "with heads turned back and beaks buried in their feathers, in that expression of poultry contentment hens wear after a dust bath on a spring day. One has a brood of chicks poking out from her breast, the other an egg. They are dishes - the top halves lids, heads and necks the handles." When she first met Patrick Leigh Fermor, it was at a fancy dress party sometime in the 1950s and the writer was dressed as a Roman gladiator armed with a net and trident.

A trove of menu cards dating from 1893 to 1939 surfaces in an old cupboard as the kitchen at Chatsworth is being repainted and retiled; the Duchess comments that "the selection of teatime food" offered at an afternoon reception given for Commanding General Sir Kaiser Shumshere Jung Bahadur Rana KBE of Nepal (in 1937) "is a child's dream, or a grown-up's, for that matter":

The guests were offered ices, cakes, éclairs, five kinds of sandwiches including fois gras, lobster and caviar, petits pains fourrés, wine cup, and every non-alcoholic drink imaginable, including thé.

The contents of a random drawer opened at Chatsworth in Debo's early days there: "a miniature of Duchess Georgiana, a Women's Institute programme of 1932, a bracelet given by Pauline Borghese to the Bachelor Duke to hide a crack in the marble arm of a statue of Venus, and a crystal wireless set"

On gardening catalogues:

Someone has had a jolly time thinking up names. Even the professors who have so kindly written to me to tell me what a quantum leap is may be stumped by Howard's Lancer, Black Velvet, Captivator, Leveller, and Whinham's Industry, gooseberries all.

The National Rhubarb Collection, believe it or not, contains more than one hundred varieties. I won't weary you with all their names, but you might fancy Grooveless Crimson. I don't think Early White Stone is an advertising man's dream description of a turnip, but whoever christened the parsnip Tender and True was a poet of the kitchen garden.

The oddest of all is the radish called French Breakfast. I have never seen a Frenchman tucking in to radishes for his petit déjeuner, but that is what they would have you believe.

The list of things the Duchess wants to bring back: "scyths, sharpes, and middlings, Invalid Bovril, brogues, mourning, silence, housewives, telegrams, spring cleaning, snow in January instead of at lambing time, nurses in uniform, muffins, the 1662 prayer book, pinafores for little boys, fish shops, Bud Flanagan, Ethel Merman, and Elvis Presley"

On the milking demonstration in the Farmyard at Chatsworth:

The audience remains riveted to the spot, fascinated, shocked, and delighted by this twice-daily ritual. One little boy from the middle of Sheffield said to me, "It's the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in me life. I'll never drink milk again."

A priceless description, too long to transcribe, of being at her parents' small island off the coast of Mull in Scotland when war was declared in September 1939, and a marathon journey she undertook from the Hebrides to London with a whippet, a Labrador and her beloved pet goat (at Stirling, "I milked the goat in the first-class waiting room, which I should not have done, as I only had a third-class ticket")

And this, I think, is my single favorite paragraph:

The feel, smell, and taste of the oak pews at Swinbrook (I suppose that all children lick pews under cover of praying for their guinea pigs) are not the same as those at Edensor. They were put in by my father, who paid for them with the money he won by backing a long-priced Grand National winner owned by a cousin. He wanted a horse's head carved on the end of each one, but the bishop would not allow such frivolity, which was hypocritical of him, as I am sure he knew the source of my father's bounty perfectly well.