Three lives, nine objects

At the TLS, Samantha Ellis considers Deborah Lutz's history of the Brontes in objects:

This book is partly an attempt to talk to the dead, by looking at (and holding, sniffing, weighing) the Brontës’ things. Fans of the writers who cross the world to gaze at Charlotte’s stockings and Anne’s bloodstained handkerchief, sequestered behind glass, might envy Lutz’s intimacy with these objects. They sometimes speak as eloquently about their owners as the books, maybe because although we may not have written great novels, we all have stuff. We have also all watched CSI, so there is something familiar about Lutz, hunched over a scratch on Emily Brontë’s desk, as she says herself, “Was this a message from the dead, or just the results of a bump into a table? I felt like a detective looking for clues, traces of evidence, even bodily fluids. But here no crime had been committed”.

Becca's less enthusiastic thoughts here.

Objective correlatives

I must confess that I became ridiculously excited during today's class on Madame Bovary. Check out these sentences (Lydia Davis's translation):

Yet she resigned herself: reverently she put away in the chest of drawers her beautiful dress and even her satin shoes, whose soles had been yellowed by the slippery wax of the dance floor. Her heart was like them: contact with wealth had laid something over it that would not be wiped away.

He had his cap pulled down over his eyebrows, and his thick lips were quivering, which gave a stupid look to his face; even his back, his placid back, was irritating to look at, and she found displayed there, on his coat, all the man’s dullness.

The letter was a tangle of spelling mistakes, and Emma followed the gentle thought that clucked its way through them like a hen half hidden in a hedge of thorns. The writing had been dried with ashes from the fireplace, for a little gray powder slid from the letter onto her dress, and she thought she could almost see her father bending toward the hearth to grasp the tongs....

[Justin cleaned Emma's boots,] which were caked in mud—the mud from her rendezvous; it would fall away as dust under his fingers, and he would watch it rising gently in a ray of sunlight.

It was the first time Emma had heard such things said to her; and her pride, like a person relaxing in a steam bath, stretched out languidly in the warmth of the words.

Tabloid treasures

A very good piece at the FT by Marek Kohn (site registration required, but if you do not register you will miss the picture of the "merman chimera"...) on the Wellcome Trust's collection of curiosities. It is accompanied by a fantastic slideshow.

I survived my 10K swim this morning; the water was full of chop and the buoys kept shooting all over the place in misleading directions, but it was very enjoyable taken in sum. I can now hardly lift my arms above my shoulders!

Finished the Neal Stephenson book this afternoon. It is enjoyable, but not so much my cup of tea: I think so highly of some of his books that this one has to count as something of a disappointment. I think the fact is that for thrillers, I really prefer either first-person or third-person limited narration, and see no reason for an absolutely enormous cast of characters: there is some serious redundancy here, at least if you consider the book from the point of view of the Lee Child-Dick Francis school of thriller-writing, a school I obviously admire (perhaps partly because my own cast of thought is more clearly Stephensonian than Childish or Franciscan). There are three separate pairs of young man-young woman who basically end up all blending together: it really is true of the men as well as the woman (older-generation protagonist Richard is by far the most fully realized character), but it is particularly problematic for me as a reader in the case of the women. I wanted to press a copy of Taylor Stevens's The Informationist into Stephenson's hands to show him what can be done in this vein. This may, though, really be primarily a function of genre preference: I don't think the Stieg Larsson books are perfect, but they are so very much what I like in terms of light reading that I can forgive them their implausibilities, wish-fulfilling aspects and other excesses. There is some very good writing here, lots of funny and sharp observations very effectively phrased (his prose style is as Gary Lutz might say "tractional, load-bearing" but with interesting word choice and an excellent ear for a phrase), and I feel certain that the book will appeal profoundly to those who have ever played role-playing games, table-top or computer-based!

Swimming and Stephenson were both good for mental health, but though I did a couple hours of work-related stuff today as well, I still have a huge amount to get done tomorrow for Monday - the semester is well and truly underway...

Vile jelly

At the Sunday Times, Erica Wagner on the means of production:

Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote for more than four decades on an Underwood portable. For him, his machine was a kind of first editor. “If this typewriter doesn’t like a story, it refuses to work,” he said. “I don’t get a man to correct it since I know if I get a good idea the machine will make peace with me again. I don’t believe my own words saying this, but I’ve had the experience so many times that I’m really astonished. But the typewriter is 42 years old. It should have some literary experience, it should have a mind of its own.”

Significant objects redux

I did not imbue the hot dog with major significance! (See list item 99.)

"Wooden hot dogs with plastic buns"

The hot dog found a good home!

(I do not think hot dogs are camp or unappetizing - I probably only eat one once a year, but I think they are delicious, especially with a decorative squiggle of ketchup and/or when cooked on a grill. In Stockholm, you can get a delicious hot dog on the street outside of a club at 4am....)

Significant objects

Meerkats and Michael Phelps.