Charterhouse Square

"[S]torage is becoming a problem."

(This book arrived with me recently, though I regretfully remember that the story when it first broke struck me with a kind of Grand Guignol Swift/Celine hilarity, not funny at all of course but with something of the pathos of the scene in Billy Liar where he has procrastinated delivering letters to the extent of wrecking his life and his home with their stored undelivered verbiage - now feel I must read the book in order to think about it from the more serious perspective of those whose loved ones (Evelyn Waugh, Jessica Mitford!) were mistreated there.)

Caslon et al.

A book repository designed along the model of the Svalbard seed vault.  (John Seabrook's memorable piece about the seed vault is online only to New Yorker subscribers, but here's a good slide show to an old NYT story on the same topic.  Peruvian potatoes and Syrian legumes are among the most recent deposits.)

2 bits

A delightful little story at the Guardian about an Italian snail that stowed away on imported Victorian stonework (via paperpools):

The snail, Papillifera bidens, was thought to have arrived on a balustrade from the Villa Borghese in Rome in 1896, and with suitably snail-paced progress seems to have taken more than a hundred years to reach stonework 60 yards away.

And courtesy of Julia Hoban, Jilian Mincer at the WSJ on "butter heads"...

The perfectibility theorem

I'm on the lineup now for what promises to be a very interesting event on Thursday, Oct. 15 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, "You Can't Be Anything You Want": "an evening examining the promise—and pitfalls—of personal and cultural reinvention, casting a curious eye over the world of minor-league wrestling, the depths of the self-help section, and rock 'n roll's perpetual second act."

Also: on Friday, Oct. 15, our departmental eighteenth-century group is having its first true conference! Both the panels and the lecture are going to be very good (guest speaker Matthew Kirschenbaum is a fantastically good speaker and writer whose talk has the teasing title "Shakespeare's Hard Drive") - open to anyone who's interested, you do not need to be a Columbia affiliate.