Jam yesterday

From William Sherman, "Dirty Books? Attitudes Toward Readers' Marks":

According to his former lodger, the translator and playwright John Henry Jones, Empson was once forced to buy the London Library a new copy of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: when he returned it they found it covered not only with his marginal notes but with the jam from his morning toast. When I cited this anecdote in a Times Literary Supplement review, Jones himself wrote in to elaborate on the nature of Empson's marginalia: "The work in question was W. W. Greg's parallel-text edition of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and the librarian . . . was hardly straining at a gnat in demanding a fresh copy--the book was virtually done to death in Empson's zeal to demolish Greg's argument in favour of the B-text, a process which . . . was maintained throughout all quotidian activities."

Closing tabs

I am all tuckered out from the combination of much culture and much teaching!

Too many nights out in a row, to tell the truth; it doesn't suit me.  But it was all very good stuff: the Joshua Light Show on Friday (I was turned on to this by Gary Panter, whose Dal Tokyo is certainly the most amazing-looking book currently in my apartment!); on Saturday, Toni Schlesinger's The Mystery of Oyster Street (very good dinner with G. afterwards at Jacques, including an amazing dessert of coffee and vanilla ice-cream in a martini glass with whipped cream and chocolate sauce and a shot of [decaf] espresso); and on Sunday, the mesmerizing Einstein on the Beach, which I loved.  It seems implausible, but at the end of 4.5 hours, all you want is for it to keep on going forever!  Interesting, too, how the Wilsonian visual semaphore language really converges on Glass's idiom in the last act (this is amazing!).

The friends I was with got a piece of good news after the show and we went and celebrated with oysters and champagne at Walter's, prompting considerable regret on my part that I had not done more of my work earlier in the day...

Got up at an ungodly hour to finish rereading Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity and crank out a few letters of recommendation (the season has begun!); Austen lecture in the afternoon.  Shortly I will collapse?

Miscellanous light reading around the edges: several more Jack Reacher rereads (One Shot and The Hard Way); Deon Meyer's excellent Seven Days; Peter James's Dead Simple (not sure about this one, might have to read the next before I can decide); Chuck Wendig's amazing Blackbirds, which I absolutely loved; and G. Willow Wilson's Alif the Unseen.

Light reading catch-up

I had such good intentions about making this a semester in which I would spread my work out evenly across the week, but in fact I worked so hard Sunday through Tuesday that I basically collapsed and could do nothing yesterday except exercise and read a novel (the first two thirds or so of Neal Stephenson's Reamde, on which my verdict so far is very similar to that of the Amazon reviewers - fun fast read, but there's not so much to it - it rather reminds me of Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net - I prefer my female protagonists to have a more fully rendered interiority!). I must write comments on some assignments today, or Sunday will not be a pretty sight chez Davidson (I am doing a long swim on Saturday morning, one for which I am signally undertrained, and am not counting on any great level of mental acuity and application in the afternoon!).

Other light reading around the edges (really I feel I have had no time to read anything, but this is clearly a misapprehension of sorts, I seem to have read several novels): Marcus Sakey's excellent Chicago noir The Blade Itself; Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus (quite reasonably good, but falling under the same rubric as what William Empson diagnoses as "the badness of much nineteenth-century poetry," explained by him as being "written by critically sensitive people [who] admired the poetry of previous generations, very rightly, for the taste it left in the head, and, failing to realise that the process of putting such a taste into a reader's head involves a great deal of work which does not feel like a taste in the head while it is being done, attempting, therefore, to conceive a taste in the head and put it straight on to their paper, they produced tastes in the head which were in fact blurred, complacent, and unpleasing"). Unfair as a description of, say, Tennyson's best poems, and in a similar respect perhaps slightly unfair to apply to Morgenstern, but there is something to the diagnosis (and in fact this is, curiously, what Morgenstern's novel is about/thematizes, as her circus is even more clearly than her novel trying to 'put the taste into a reader's head' without grounding it effectively in technique).

Closing tabs:

Guinea pig rentals! (Via Tyler Cowen.)

Things Apple is worth more than.

Strawberry Hill forever

At the TLS, Rosemary Hill on Horace Walpole's creation of Strawberry Hill and its gothick aesthetic.

The whole piece is very much worth reading, but I can't decide if I think this argument about punctuation is brilliant or over-ingenious:

Walpole’s love of display was as great as his love of mystery, and the public could apply for tickets to view Strawberry. What they were allowed to see, a daring mixture of styles and an apparent flouting of the principles of taste, was shocking enough to some. In the Preface to the Description, Walpole prepares the reader for Strawberry’s “heterogeneous” combination of “obsolete architecture . . . French porcelaine, and Greek and Roman Sculptures”, describing it as a mixture that “may be denominated, in some words of Pope, ‘A Gothic Vatican of Greece and Rome’”. Here once again, however, Walpole was playing tricks with the poet’s memory. Pope’s line, from the Dunciad, refers to the meretricious library of Bayes, the laureate of dullness. This collection of worthless volumes is not at all mixed; it is, as the lines read in the original: “A Gothic Vatican! of Greece and Rome / Well purg’d”. Walpole’s interference with the text is telling, for, whether it was Pope or Popery, literature or architecture, what he was concerned with was realizing his own ideas. The removal of Pope’s punctuation had a parallel in the collaging of medieval motifs in his house where Walpole used prints of Gothic tombs as models for his chimneypieces. The choir screen from old St Paul’s Cathedral gave his friend John Chute an idea for fitting out the library, and the exhibition includes Walpole’s copy of William Dugdale’s History of St Paul’s of 1658 with the relevant detail carefully snipped out.

But what if it's not so much Walpole playing tricks with Pope's memory as Walpole's memory playing tricks on him? Pope's couplets do occasionally use enjambment to string a thought across a line break, as in the line quoted, but it is a sort of reversion to the mean when Walpole keeps the ringing and conclusive line-segregated phrase and omits the rest: in other words, it seems to me as likely to be an almost philistine opportunism (or a serendipitous misremembering, as the verb collaging suggests) than something over which Walpole himself would be likely to have had conscious awareness or control.

A wide prevalence of misquotings is a natural byproduct of a culture in which readers are as likely to have access to versions of poems held in their memories as to the books in which they encounter them; here were some of John Haffenden's thoughts a few years ago on William Empson as a notorious misquoter, in the best tradition of Hazlitt and others.

I realize that I have not dipped into Walpole's correspondence since graduate school - time for another look, perhaps...

Bonus eighteenth-century link: at the Nation, Sam Moyn's devastating take-down of Jonathan Israel's A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy.