Increasing the waddle

Penguin locomotion: "According to Dr Willener, getting these ungainly creatures to walk on a treadmill was one of the biggest challenges of the study, which is published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology."

Footnotology

Have sacrificed my morning run in order to get a handle on the huge list of tasks that need to be done in advance of tomorrow's travels. First up: returning a long-overdue ILL book I procured at great trouble earlier this year.

Peter Riess's Footnotology: Towards a Theory of the Footnote (New York and Berlin: Walter de Gruyter Publishers, 1985): “The footnote is (or pretends to be) the carrier of academic information, but is not the object of academic study” (3).

A functional typology of footnotes (pp. 15-17): excursive, supplementary, cautionary, disassociative, disputatious, cartel, clique, camouflage. Footnote neurosis, footnote fetishism, footnoteophobia, footnote aversion.

I am laughing, I think I now have something like five prospective book projects that are equally important to me (reading Austen, reading Clarissa, Gibbon's Rome, triathlon memoir, etc. etc.), but the biggie longterm one right now (I've just sent out a proposal for a short-term research fellowship) is for the most ambitious academic book I have contemplated to date, a literary history of the footnote, 1680-1818. Here is some of what I wrote recently:

In an essay on the history of the transition from marginal annotation to footnotes, Evelyn B. Tribble has suggested that the shape of the page often becomes “more than usually visible” at periods when “paradigms for receiving the past are under stress”: “In the early modern period, as models of annotation move from marginal glosses to footnotes, the note becomes the battlefield upon which competing notions of the relationship of authority and tradition, past and present, are fought” (“‘Like a Looking-Glas in the Frame’: From the Marginal Note to the Footnote,” in The Margins of the Text, ed. D. C. Greetham [Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997], 229-244). In this context, the page itself rather than the book in all of its rich materiality becomes the focus of interest. This matters for a number of significant literary works of the period that are still widely read, and the monograph that I am looking towards writing will be structured around discussion of those more or less canonical texts: Swift’s Tale of a Tub, Pope’s Dunciad, Richardson’s Clarissa and its increasingly controlling use of footnotes to cross-reference and moralize in subsequent revisions, the self-annotation of mid-century poets such as Thomas Gray and James Grainger, the apotheosis of the footnote in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with a convenient end point provided by the multiple texts of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the notorious marginal glosses of the version published in 1817. But I want to offer very full contextualization concerning the more general literary and historical record; more than that, I suspect that there is a good deal of interpretive work to be done on books with footnotes in their own right, especially in the genre of history.

The practices of glossing and marginalia run much longer than the history of the printed book, but I am especially interested in the new structures of page-based meaning that are facilitated by the sudden predominance of notes at the foot of the page rather than as a long appendage at the end of the text as the annotating authors of printed books in the 1680s move relatively quickly from margins to the foot of the page (Marcus Walsh has identified the French historian Richard Simon as an important node of change here, and his books are one of my first targets, with another important early French exemplar being Brossette’s two-volume 1716 edition of Boileau, whose importance for Pope’s vision of what could be done in the Dunciad Variorum has been roundly demonstrated by James McLaverty). These footnotes are continuous with older forms but also strikingly innovative in various respects, not least because one promise of the print world is that an author can relatively easily sanction multiple editions of his or her own work with increasingly complex and multi-layered annotation. One of my interests here is authorial involvement in the production of multiple editions of a given work, not revision in the most general sense but the specific problem of revision as it comes up in the question of writers with a compulsion to annotate their own works. I will be especially keen to find multi-edition works whose critical apparatus increases with each iteration or indeed in some cases transforms the work at hand.

Some initial theoretical work on this concept was done in Gérard Genette’s Paratexts, and the monograph I will ultimately write will touch briefly on some important twentieth-century forms of authorial annotation (The Waste Land, Pale Fire, the novels and essays of David Foster Wallace). In the early modern period, much of the footwork on this topic has been done and has begun to be elaborated in sophisticated critical works: Evelyn Tribble, Anthony Grafton, William Slights in his work on marginalia. But though work has begun in this area in the long eighteenth century, I was taken aback to realize when I began delving into the critical literature that there was no existing literary history of the footnote in this period; I think there’s a need for it, and I think what I must do before anything else is read exhaustively across the 12 or so decades I am contemplating (but with an initial concentration in the first half of the period) just to track the use of the footnote across major genres in English and French. I am especially interested in history, poetry and the novel, but I will be keeping an eye out for other genres that may prove especially interesting (natural history, say, or theology and moral philosophy – I will initially cast a very wide net).

Jet lag/speed read

Alas, I experienced an intense bout of wakefulness after those optimistic last posts - still at the computer rather than winding down, it's 1:30am here and I was really hoping to run in the morning before 9:30am departure for sightseeing. Probably that is not realistic....

But I saw a funny link I had to share....

Brendan Byrne at Rhizome on speed-reading caught my attention anyway - and then I came upon this paragraph:

"If only I'd known about RSVP while in college, I may have actually gotten through all 1,000 pages of Tom Jones," writes Jim Pagels in Slate. The initial impulse to question Pagels' purity of spirit should be quashed. No one can read Tom Jones the way Fielding's initial audience did in 1749 (unless someone were to construct an immersive VR world, complete with memory wipes, to enable full reading-experience). And, indeed, the first page or so of Tom Jones goes down easily enough on Spreeder, if only because it is primarily table-setting. Stick the first couple of paragraphs of The Manifesto of the Communist Party in there, and you'll get the gist, but you begin to see the delicate impact of the loss of subvocalization. The twin delicious names "Metternich and Guizot" cannot be chewed over, nor can the inadvisable nostalgia associated with the phrase "French Radicals and German police-spies" be indulged in, even briefly.

Obviously I had to click through that link - Jim Pagels was my Columbia student, that may well have been my Tom Jones assignment! Here is the underlying link.

I think I am not in agreement with the Byrne commentary - I have never endeavored for speed reading, but I can't remember not knowing how to read and I have always been able to read at a not preternaturally but certainly implausibly fast rate. I can only think of a few times when I actually had to pause after and digest - I remember a spell of daily reading in the Rare Books and Manuscripts room at the British Library when I would request the maximum number of books (fifteen, maybe, or was it only twelve?) per day and basically just go through them all (many were shorter eighteenth-century things like Jethro Tull's The New Horse-Houghing Husbandry, more pamphlet than book) so that I could get my full total of new ones the next day.

It's not quite skimming, it's definitely speed-reading in some sense, and assuming I'm not trying to read something densely philosophical, I can probably under real pressure get through about 2000 pages in 8 hours and have decent recall (this works best when you are reading purposefully, i.e. for research for a book or because you need to write a report on a dossier or similar - for real serious reading i.e. of narrative history or non-theoretical scholarship, 100pp/hr is more realistic, or perhaps more comfortable is the better way of putting it). That particular library session was almost the only time I remember when I didn't read a novel on public transportation on the way home - I was clearly still letting it sink in and sort itself out. It was an interesting feeling but doing it too often would probably take years off your life!

I read Bleak House as a teenager in not much more than one sitting, maybe eight or ten hours, and I reread War and Peace a few summers ago also just over a couple of days, in three or four longish sessions - an average crime novel c. 75K will probably take me less than two hours to read, and I do like really long novels that will give me better value for money! This is a gift, especially for work purposes, but it is also a curse in terms of the gaping maw always needing to have more things fed into it (I had a shock of recognition when I saw this scene at the end of Fargo - it is a little frightening, but I have never seen a better depiction of my relationship with books!).

One of the things I write about in the style book is the impact of duration on the experience of reading - I think War and Peace at 10 hours is a quite different animal than War and Peace at 50 hours....

Closing tabs

Cumulative fatigue has made me unproductive! It's a recovery week, training-wise, but of course there are many small things that need to get done before I leave town early Thursday morning: things to do with bicycles, things to do with syllabi and course book orders, things to do with library materials for an article revision and a secret project that is beginning to percolate, etc. etc.

Miscellaneous light reading (not enough of it - I need the soothing mental bath of reading a good many narrative pages!): Ivy Pochoda's Visitation Street (I thought it was very good - definitely lived up to the advance praise - in vein of Richard Price or Colin Harrison, with good feel for inner lives of teenage girls); a reread of Tana French's Broken Harbor; and an extremely good epic fantasy, Daniel Abraham's The Dagger and the Coin. I saw someone reading it on a plane earlier this summer and it looked appealing: epic fantasy is often a dodgy bet (it's a genre I much enjoy, but I also find a great deal of it unreadable), but this really was good. I would have gotten it even sooner if I had realized that Abraham is one of the co-authors of those pseudonymous science-fiction novels I recently enjoyed so much.

Closing tabs:

How the FBI turned Natalie Zemon Davis on to rare books.

Phil Dyess-Nugent on Funky 4 + 1's "That's the Joint" (and check out the whole series here).

Salad-bar ingenuity. (Great pictures at that link.)

Losing track

Gamblers want to get into the zone. (Via GeekPress.)

Soviet aerialism

Courtesy of Marina H., a lovely piece by Chloe Aridjis on time spent in  East Berlin researching the early Soviet space program:

One tome suggests applying the four humours to the process of task selection: the choleric individual is quick to learn but, prone to impatience, makes mistakes – therefore best for special assignments rather than routine ones; sanguine types flourish under variety and constant excitement rather than repetition (Gagarin was apparently one of these); phlegmatic types, on the other hand, are recommended for systematic activity; and melancholic types . . . cannot become cosmonauts due to their nervous, fearful temperament, and are best suited to be scientific advisors on ground.

Perambulations

From the base of the Samuel Tilden memorial on Riverside Drive:

In the Biblical Garden at St. John the Divine:

Denning under a softball field

The secret lives of free-roaming cats! Some very good quotes in this piece... (Via Roger Ebert.)

The Chinese 4-suited money pack

Unsolved Problems in Playing Card Research. (Via Bookforum, who found it here.)

Stuff

An interview with me at Creative Writing Now about research and world-building in alternate history.

(I am laid low with a bad chest cold that is making me extremely glum...)

Today in culture

More good gaming links from Ed Park: the germ of a novel; Adventure Generator!

I had three books of high research priority Amazoned to the hotel in Miami last week, as shipping to Cayman is either very expensive or very slow; Access All Areas is interesting and relevant to TBOMS and deeply charming, but Pervasive Games: Theory and Design is UTTERLY BRILLIANT! In fact (I am laughing, it is implausible, but somehow my research interests always converge across genres/modes and centuries) I am wondering whether I could somehow assign a chapter or two of it in my spring lecture class on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, which is going to have a "presentation of self" theme and include tons of Erving Goffman and theories of moral sentiments and so forth - isn't it possible that Garrick's Stratford Jubilee was one of the world's first LARPs?!?

In other news, I enjoyed the first part of J. D. Daniels' "week in culture" (I am a Daniels fan - I want a book! - but here are a couple shorter bits you can read for free online), even though the name of the feature slightly makes me laugh...

Footprints

I liked Sebastian Faulks' Human Traces quite a bit, though it seems to me a flawed novel in certain respects (the case studies and lectures do not work for me, and perhaps I am a bit too well acquainted with the sources he used to research the book - it often works better to be in relative ignorance of the source material).

It is an ambitious and interesting topic, though, and I still find Faulks one of the most readable novelists I can think of - cannot say whether it is despite or because of the fact that his idiom is that of another generation. I think my favorite book of his is still Charlotte Gray...

Invisible worlds

Colleen Mondor recently interviewed me about the research I did for The Explosionist, as well as touching on some more general questions about the relationship between research and fiction-writing, science fiction versus fantasy, parasites, brain-washing and other matters of mutual interest.

(Colleen has also put together a project to get books into the hands of teenagers in the LA County Juvenile Justice System - here's their wish list at Powell's, though you'll need some more details from Colleen's initial post if you want to purchase anything there - but it's a great list of recommendations for boys of all ages who may be reluctant readers.)

"FOUR FIELD MICE lost from laboratory"

Paul Collins at the Paper Cuts blog. Here he praises the internet and searchable archives:

Computers have created a Golden Age for historians, because searchable archives make no distinction between the mighty and the obscure — if it’s in there, you’ll find it. Let me give you an example: I wrote an article on the Tricho medical scandal, about a 1920s company that used radiation for cosmetic hair-removal. It was run by a physician named Albert Geyser. When I plugged his address — not even his name, just his address — into the New York Times Historical Files, out jumped a “Lost and Found” ad he’d run in 1923, before his company launched: “FOUR FIELD MICE lost from laboratory, 244 W 74th St., each mou[s]e has a round bald spot on right side caused by scientific experimentation; $20 reward …”

ZEEP

One of the books I've liked most while reading for background for the Explosionist sequel is Otto Frisch's immensely likeable and engaging memoir What Little I Remember. I have gleaned from it some minor details that I may be able to use to fill out some things in the book's Copenhagen scenes, but of course lots of this stuff is not really usable, delightful as it may be.

In the world of my novels, for instance, we never visit England because it is part of a fascist European Federation whose borders the heroine is not allowed to cross; in my alternate England, moreover, there is certainly no longer any such thing as Woolworth's. Frisch on working conditions in the 1930s at Birkbeck College:

Of course I had been spoiled at Stern's institute where two first-rate mechanics and a good glass-blower were at our disposal, as well as a supply of up-to-date instruments and materials. I remember writing home from England that to build equipment was so much patchwork and make-do that after a few weeks of it my imagination boggled at the thought of asking for a piece of rubber tube 18 inches long! What saved me was the existence of Woolworth's. In those days no item cost more than sixpence. Admittedly a pair of socks cost a shilling; but Houtermans once insisted on buying one sock, explaining that it was a present for somebody who had only one leg. One could buy almost anything there. Once I bought a piece of ladies' black underwear; it was the easiest way of getting hold of some smooth black fabric for lining my cloud chamber. I didn't have the courage to charge the laboratory for that particular purchase.

A novel set and published in the late 1940s that includes a good description of what can be bought at Woolworth's: Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar!

Adventures in research

Four years ago I went to Copenhagen to do a couple days' worth of research for the sequel to The Explosionist--the novel I'm only just now writing this summer, due to the intervention of life and other obligations...

My main purpose was to visit Niels Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics, where the very wonderful archivist took me around the place and told me a number of stories that lodged securely in my imagination. Many of the opening scenes of The Snow Queen (the sequel's title) are set in my alternate universe's version of the Institute, and there are all sorts of things it is difficult to glean from books...

(Me: "Would the scientists have eaten lunch in, say, a cafeteria?" Wonderful Archivist [humorously shocked]: "Oh, no! Denmark is a nation of box lunches!")

The story she told me that utterly captivated me, though, involved the escape of a number of cats from the basement. They were the subjects in an experiment concerning radio-isotopes, and the Institute backs onto a rather lovely park: the afternoon was spent frantically rushing around with a Geiger counter to try and distinguish the cats in the experiment from the ordinary feral cats that lived in the park and retrieve them so that all was not lost!

The alchemy of fiction: I wanted the story of the cats, but I did not want them to come to the sorry end that one knows, really, cats setting off Geiger counters undoubtedly must have come to...

I did not at the time register the names of the particular scientists involved, but after doing a bit of reading this summer it became clear that the main instigator would have been the intriguing Hevesy. I was very pleased to find a firsthand account of the incident of the cat (singular), in his assistant and collaborator Hilde Levi's very interesting biography of Hevesy:

I recall our excitement when the P-32 injected cat suddenly escaped; she jumped out through the window and disappeared into the nearby park. Everybody rushed out to retrieve the precious animal. Several wild beasts were caught and wipe tests of their saliva were placed under a Geiger counter - alas in vain! After hours of chasing, the right cat was found and the experiment could proceed in an orderly manner.

Hevesy published a collection of his major scientific papers in two volumes, under the title Adventures in Radioisotope Research: these are the volumes whose arrival at the library I was eagerly awaiting earlier this month...

The papers proved - what? Dry and mesmerizing at the same time, and of course very grim in terms of the hard facts they presented about the animals involved in all of these very important and valuable physiological experiments! I strongly believe in the value and legitimacy of animal experimentation, but I also (weak-mindedly) am very glad that I am not involved in it myself, because I am fond of animals and I think it would prove painful to me.

In a strange way, Hevesy's personality comes through very strongly in these papers, despite the fact that much of the writing is quite impersonal:

UREY'S discovery of heavy water was bound to impress the tracer-minded scientists, although their number was very restricted in those days. The present writer at once approached Professor UREY who most generously mailed a few litres of water containing 0.5 mol. per cent heavy water. In view of the great sensitivity with which the density of water can be determined, this strongly diluted heavy water sufficed to study the interchange between the water molecules of the goldfish and the surrounding water, and also to carry out studies described in paper 48, and presented in more detail by HEVESY and HOFER (1934). . . .

In paper 48 it is stated that the goldfish behaves in the same way in the heavy water employed in the experiments described as in tap water, though it may behave differently in more concentrated heavy water. In experiments with HAGGKVIST carried out in recent years (1958), we found that the life-span of the fish investigated was reduced from years to 10 days when kept in 40 per cent heavy water. When the fish were placed in 50 per cent heavy water, they tried to escape by jumping out from the vessel in which they were kept.

But the most painful page for me to read was this one! (The first sentence of the footnote induced in me a sort of horrified laughter...)



When I was really dug in writing The Explosionist, I had a strong image of myself hacking through something like a field of cane with a blunt machete: it was hard work, but it was straightforward, I was clearing the way. And even before I started writing it, I had a strange illusion that if I concentrated really hard, I could actually visualize - not the incidents of the story, as though they were a film, but the printed pages of the published novel, in chapters and laid out on the page in a particular format and font that I could still describe to you!

This one, on the other hand, is giving me a feeling of needing to nerve myself up to put aside the research (I cling to research, I love facts!) and start making things up. The sensory image in this case is not of fieldwork (the machete image was so vivid to me that I could feel the effects of the work in my triceps!) but of being a blindfolded person in utter darkness. I am still with my hands pressed right up against the wall, because it feels like the safest place, but I have to take the plunge and start feeling my way, blind, around the room and getting a sense of the space by bumping into things...

Postscript: Wittgenstein had a more obviously appealing orientation towards animals. Here is another funny bit of his friend Maurice Drury's reminiscences:

He told me that he had got to know some wonderful characters in Norway. A woman who had said to him how fond she was of rats! "they had such wonderful eyes." This same woman once sat up every night for a month waiting for a sow to farrow, so as to be on hand to help if necessary. This attention to animals seemed to have pleased Wittgenstein especially.

On his journey back from Norway, the boat bringing him down the fiord stopped at a jetty. There was a woman standing on the jetty dressed in a trouser suit.

WITTGENSTEIN: "Usually I dislike seeing women wearing trousers, but this woman looked magnificent."