Permutations and combinations

At the LRB, Gavin Stamp has an interesting piece on Mackintosh and the destruction by fire of the library at the Glasgow School of Art (gated for subscribers):

The dramatic west front, with its towering oriels, is an abstracted Tudor composition which, as John Summerson pointed out, may owe something to the central reference library in Bristol designed by a distinguished but less applauded English near contemporary, Charles Holden. But there was no precedent for the extraordinary library space behind those tall metal oriels.

The library was at once very practical and very strange. Made entirely of dark timber, it was dominated by tall square piers rising from floor to ceiling which supported the balcony running around the room on all four sides. The piers were placed far in front so as to be conspicuous. Was the idea of a Forest of Knowledge in Mackintosh’s mind, in which symbolism was so important? Oddest, and most personal of all, were the timber pendants on the balcony front, each with what might be hanging tassels, but with little ovals, like bubbles, in the gaps. Each one was slightly different.

Closing tabs/minor update

All is well, except that I am suffering from an absolute dreadful cold!

On a brighter note, the NEASECS conference in New Haven is excellent (both yesterday and today I basically went to good morning stuff then came back to hotel room and collapsed for much of the afternoon - I did have some good pizza for dinner last night on my own at Zinc Kitchen, and a lovely dinner at Ibiza on Thursday with C., lunch yesterday with A. at Zinc, coffee with S. at Atticus, etc. etc. - I've got a lot of old friends here).

(I am feeling too ill to paste in links!)

Have just had a long nap and a hot shower to moisten lungs and de-sinusify face, it has given me fortitude I think for pre-dinner cocktails at the Union League with C., B. and J. and the conference dinner at the Peabody Museum. Am taking a whole box of tissues in my bag, I keep on having to fall back on awful brown recycled ones from bathroom paper towel dispensers. One panel to chair tomorrow, then I'll be on a panel home mid-afternoon, having done absolutely NONE of my grading for Monday....

(And I got an extension till Monday on my review from my kind editor, but still haven't really felt well enough to deal with it - if I can get most of the grading done tomorrow evening at home, then I should have a couple hours first thing Monday morning to consolidate what I have and turn it into an actual coherent piece.)

Americaneh is stunningly good, one of the best couple novels I've read all year - not quite sure why I haven't read her other two, but have loaded them onto the Kindle and will look forward to reading them sooner rather than later.

Dinner on Wednesday with G. at the West Bank Cafe was nice, though the play (DeeDee Bridgewater as Billie Holiday) was predictably slightly dreadful - they should just do it as a musical revue rather than trying to make it a melodramatic bio-retrospective! (The flashback scenes in the first half are particularly awful, but I am also not keen on the singer-pretending-to-be-drunk thing in the second half - which is a pity, because really in many respects the music is extremely good, if you can swallow the pastiche element.)

Had a very nice lunch with E. on Thursday at Artisanal (en route to Grand Central - that is possibly the best macaroni and cheese I've ever had, though it is so rich you feel slightly queasy after eating most of the large portion - the cheese crumb/crust on top is absolutely perfect) to talk about my upcoming presentation at the NYU humanities institute - that's one I'm really looking forward to. Many restaurant meals and no exercise do not lead to a feeling of mental and physical equilibrium, but really I just have to let this cold pass - I think Tuesday morning is the first day I'm likely to be really legitimately functional for a run, ugh....

Trilling's Sandbags

Belatedly (this comes courtesy of someone who once audited one of my classes and who now regularly sends me appealing little envelopes packed full of clippings that have caught her attention as falling within my purview - also in this particular clutch, for instance, and offered in relation to the satire class I'm currently teaching, was information about a screening of the film Darling! - a biography of Pieter-Dirk Uys - and a couple other bits of that sort, with relevant observations and questions jotted down in the margins!), Stefan Collini on Lionel Trilling in the Nation.

Collini produces an appealing and clever pair of opening paragraphs:

There is, for many of us, something vaguely oppressive about the thought of having to reread Lionel Trilling now. His elegant periods, always in danger of sliding into sonorousness; his confident, familiar invocation of the great names of modern European thought and literature; his cultivated superiority to all that might be tainted by provincialism or pragmatism, which, he concedes with the stoical air of the dutiful mourner at a funeral, amounts to most of American life; and above all, that elusive but pervasive note that runs through his prose--the note of a mind taking stock of its resources and finding that they are, despite their fragility, adequate to its tasks. We can't help feeling that we should be improved by reading Trilling, and this feeling itself is inevitably oppressive.

The previous paragraph, as will have been evident to those familiar with Trilling's writing, deliberately blends characterization with homage and pastiche. His liberal use of the first-person plural to suggest a community of the like-minded was a much criticized mannerism, as was his unembarrassed recourse to cultural name-dropping as a substitute for argument. Then there was the too ready suggestion of rereading, signaling his great storehouse of literary experience. And finally, there was the characteristic structure of a Trilling sentence, with the clauses queuing up to make their restraining or amplifying comment on their predecessors. The blending of homage and pastiche in my tribute may be expressive of the ambivalence Trilling excites. We, I might imitatively say, admire him; we may even sense that we need him; yet it remains true that we have ever so slightly to brace ourselves for a prolonged spell in his company. Reading him keeps us up to the mark, but we can't help but be aware that the mark is set rather higher than we are used to.