Ottoman affairs

I really enjoyed doing this interview with Danny O'Quinn about his remarkable new book Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690-1815.

Small teaser:

I’m pretty committed to this violent non-traditional archive and to this unfamiliar repertoire: once one sees these things, they can’t be unseen. But violence poses extremely challenging theoretical questions for what we do: questions pertaining to the limits of form and representation, to matters of historical complicity, to the affective dynamics of economic and political domination and subjugation. Much of my work has revolved around matters of wartime affect; Engaging the Ottoman Empire feels like my most sustained attempt to understand the precarity of life as it permeates the mediascape.

You can find older installments of this interview series at Medium and also at the Rambling.

For me, this format is perfect. I like choosing and reading the book and thinking up the questions - and at that point, my work is pretty much done! The annoying conventions that have to be followed when you write a formal review for publication are a small bane of my existence. In general I prefer to write comments on manuscripts rather than weigh in once something's already been published (and I also place a higher priority on tenure and promotion letters than on published reviews), but I like getting to pose a few questions about things that struck me.

(Note to self: just said yes to promotion/tenure letter #6 for the summer, that is large workload, HARD NO TO ANYONE ELSE WHO ASKS! But then again if it's someone you know, it's very difficult to turn down. At Columbia, declines to write tend to be counted against the candidate, even when the refusal comes with a reasonable explanation that doesn't have to do with the candidate's work.)

Pamela Weaponized

The stress of the trip gave me a huge relapse vis-a-vis ongoing lung ailment and precipitated a visit to a doctor who gave me some serious medications. But I was very set on seeing Martin Crimp's Pamela adaptation When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other so that I could write about it, and it was highly worthwhile in the end - my piece has just gone live at The Rambling.

A teaser:

My Pamela, when I teach or write about Richardson’s novel, is the Pamela of resistance. I don’t care whether or not my students read much (any?) of the dreadful parts that follow Pamela’s acceptance of Mr. B’s marriage proposal. I refuse to foreground the fact that Pamela voluntarily marries her would-be rapist, or that the main work (the deluded and delusory work!) of the rest of the novel is retrospectively to redeem all that was violent, coercive, troubling in the relationship between the two. Before that, in the first few hundred pages, Richardson has brilliantly conveyed the moment-by-moment consciousness of a young woman under constant threat from the sexual predator who employs her.

Closing tabs

Quiet summer on the blog - Facebook is getting the sort of idle thought that used to show up here, and I think there is no point resisting the drain in that direction.  Have a lot of open tabs to close, as well as a light reading update that I will write separately.  Funny summer in life - I have done no substantive work of my own, it's all life stuff (apartment declutter, 100 runs in 100 days, family Disney trip etc.) and other people's work stuff - but I am going to have to accept that sometimes I have to pay attention to things that are not a book that I am writing....

The Clown Egg Register.

The beautiful afterlife of Edward Gorey's mink stroller coat.

Starbucks card value exceeds money on deposit at many financial institutions.

Eighteenth-century note-taking (and the interesting underlying link).

Secrets of the London Library.

Roger Luckhurst on trouble in Lovecraft Country.

Sheep View 360.

Baroque wigs of paper.

Long silence

I have a lot of catch-up posts to make, but right now I'm just registering humility in the face of an enormous reviewing job that nominally needs to be done by the 20th (it will take more days than that).  Literalizing the dimensions of the job is helpful!  (It's the Studies in English Literature eighteenth-century roundup.)

Tail-pieces of morality (NSFW!)

Working furiously this weekend, but with one very funny extra bit of reading. I'm doing a sort of mini-independent study with the two graduate students who are working as my graders for the history of the novel course, we're just reading three extra novels and some bits of criticism, and the first one up for discussion this afternoon is Cleland's Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

I don't think I've reread this since undergraduate days. It is really delightful - a sort of blithe defense of libertinism written in a uniquely appealing periphrastic style of considerable elevation! Here's a funny bit from the end:

Charles then roused me sommewhat out of this ecstatic distraction with a complaint softly murmured, amidst a crowd of kisses, at the position, not so favourable to his desires, in which I received his urgent insistence for admission, where that insistence was alone so engrossing a pleasure that it made me inconsistently suffer a much dearer one to be kept out. But how sweet to correct such a mistake! My thighs, now obedient to the imntimations of love and nature, gladly disclose, and with a ready submission resign up the lost gateway to entrance at pleasure: I see! I feel! the delicious velvet tip! -- he enters might and main with -- oh! --- my pen drops from me here in the ecstasy now present to my faithful memory! Description, too, deserts me and delivers over a task, above its strength of wing, to the imagination: but it must be an imagination exalted by such a flame as mine, that can do justice to that sweetest, noblest of all sensations that hailed and accompanied the stiff insinuation all the way up, till it was at the end of its penetration, sending up, all the way up, till it was at the end of its penetration, sending up, through my eyes, the sparks of the love-fire that ran all over me, and blazed in every vein and every pore of me: a system incarnate of joy all over.

The phrase "stiff insinuation" gives me a yen to be reading late Henry James....

Dimples and dismay

Mr. Foote's other leg. I wish I could see this - someone has to bring the production to NYC! Simon Russell Beale is a genius - I saw him in Jumpers, I really thought nobody could have topped Paul Eddington in that role and yet that is exactly what Beale managed to do....

The sorrows of gin

My former student Siobhan Phillips on women and the gin market.

Turtle soup

At the Guardian, John Mullan reviews Christopher Plumb's new book on exotic animals in Georgian London:

The Earl of Shelburne, later to be prime minister, kept an orangutan and a supposedly tame leopard in his orangery at Bowood House. The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham liked to stroke the leopard when he visited. Sir Robert Walpole’s pet flamingo warmed itself by the kitchen fire. Sir Hans Sloane was followed round his Chelsea home by a tame, one-eyed wolverine. He also owned an opossum and a porcupine.

18th-century bits

Two nice eighteenth-century bits:

"Puzzle purse" a.k.a. love token at the Houghton Library;

Road maps! (Heyeresque....)

"their most recreative & dulcet croaking"

At the LRB, Tom Keymer on the latest edited volume of Burney's court journals (subscriber only):

Burney’s writing process was highly self-conscious. There are what she calls her ‘alives’: brief letters to intimates, typically functional, often dashed off in lulls during attendance on the queen. Then there are her daily memoranda: candid, fragmentary but copious notes on court life – ‘memoranduming scraps’, she calls them at one point – which she then wrote up. The memoranda are intensely private, but dried up at times of emotional strain, such as the death of Delany. The missing experiences were reconstructed in retrospect: ‘a general sketch’, she calls her account of one month, ‘for I kept no journal, not even a memorandum’. She abandoned the memoranda when the king’s first bout of madness disrupted the life of the court. ‘I have now no more fair running Journal – I kept not now even a memorandum for some time – but I made them by recollection afterwards, & very fully, for not a circumstance could escape a memory that seemed now to retain nothing but present events.’ There’s something novelistic in the mismatch between tense and deixis (‘I kept not now … a memory that seemed now’). Often the journals were written up a year or more after the events they describe, then immediately sent to Susanna, who received the journals for November and December 1788, for example, in January and February 1790. The immediacy is still there in them: they often portray a writer grappling with unresolved experience, ‘tormented with a sort of indefinable perplexity’. But they also possess a layer of considered analysis; and though Burney always resists explicit prolepsis, sometimes they’re coloured by events that have taken place between the original memorandum and its revision. ‘Troublous Times’ (from the Book of Daniel) is her summary comment in the December journal on the king’s descent into madness, which was already destabilising state affairs. But the institution of monarchy was in much deeper trouble in 1790 when Burney wrote those words. The Gothic style of her response to George’s condition – ‘nothing before us but despair & horrour!’ – has an unmistakable, albeit implicit, political inflection.

"Sight moaty and dimmish"

Diseases incident to literary and sedentary persons!

Minute particulars

Someone was recently asking me to write a post about time management and writing, it is something I should weigh in on: but I am not always a good role model, to say the least. I like the part where I read and think and get a first draft down on paper as a speaking script, but it is not as enjoyable to turn it into something publishable: I am pleased with this essay, but also full of self-reproach that I did not turn it into an article shortly after I first wrote up the basic material in 2006!....

(This essay may also be the first publication in which I have cited Facebook crowdsourcing as a scholarly source.)

Available through JSTOR now, anyway: "The Minute Particular in Life-Writing and the Novel."

The uncomfortable desire to be writing books

I am having a very nice quiet week in Cayman: not completely off from work, but there wasn't any single obvious thing that I needed to motor ahead on, so I'm just taking care of bits and bobs as they come up.

It is always sort of awful to have to write a title and description for a future talk that is as yet not even begun, and this one has the typical flaws of vagueness and grandiosity, but I did enjoy contemplating it this morning and getting some sentences down on paper for the draft program:

“Talking Pages: The Eighteenth-Century Variorum Page”

Jenny Davidson will consider the form and function of the variorum page in Johnson’s Shakespeare editions in the context not just of eighteenth-century scholarly editing but of Scriblerian takes on the edited page. She will look closely at the workings of several specific pages of Johnson’s Shakespeare, but her larger concern is to consider Johnson’s literary career in the light of a late-stage revisiting of the quarrel of ancients and moderns. After telling a sort of prequel story about Swift, Bentley, Theobald and Pope, she will turn to Johnson’s editorial work as an effort of reconciliation and resolution in response to still unresolved tensions between the Scriblerian critical project and the reading techniques of a triumphalist modernity. Johnson’s reclamation of a “conversational” and relatively civil variorum page for what is in some ways a conservative literary project seems to represent a critical turning point in eighteenth-century literary history, and Davidson will conclude by considering analogies between Johnson’s use of the variorum page and the theme of generosity in present-day relationships with the past elsewhere in his writing, with brief excursions to Gibbon and Burke as points of comparison.

This made me think about how there are now three projects I am urgently desiring to work on (four if you count the "Gibbon's Rome" offshoot of the ancients-and-moderns project as a separate book), and how that feeling of desire is so satisfying and yet also so uncomfortable, almost so much so as to make me feel out of breath with anxiety and dissatisfaction that I am not doing anything towards any of 'em RIGHT NOW! I think getting new books started is my single highest priority for 2015, though calm and freedom from anxiety are always the highest thing on the list (time spent on my own work is good for this, so the two goals are not inherently incompatible).

I am still really excited about the Clarissa book, and as I'm teaching that seminar in the spring (and no other course - course release for the Tenure Review Advisory Committee, which keeps me very busy, but it's nice to imagine having the mental space free for doing some bits of actual work on this), it seems not implausible to think I might get some actual pages drafted. But higher priorities for January are to put in some of the groundwork for the Johnson's Shakespeare talk and to draft a proposal for a book that would be something like this only titled "Reading Jane Austen"!

If I'm not miscalculating, I have a full year of sabbatical coming up for 2016-2017: I've been considering taking it as two separate semesters (teach fall and take spring off for two years in a row), as in certain respects you get more bang for the buck that way (two very decent stretches of writing time rather than just one long one, and the fall-semester load of letters of recommendation and job market candidates is heavy enough that it doesn't always feel like leave if you're not teaching), but really if I have all these different books on the go, I should just take both at once, make as much progress as I can and then perhaps apply for a year of fellowship somewhere in the couple years following to finish up what remains undone. A project has to be pretty far forward before I can write a really good fellowship application for it, I think; this is not true for everyone, but seems to be for me....

Closing tabs

A long-overdue post to close some tabs. I am finally running again this weekend, very slowly, though lungs are still impaired. In work as opposed to lung capacity, though the two may be loosely aligned, I am at the point of the semester where I am barely functioning at 60% capacity - teaching Heart of Midlothian and associated criticism tomorrow just overwhelmed me with a desire to write JEDEDIAH CLEISHBOTHAM on all forms of social media, and I must also, alarmingly, write a lecture on Endgame and Adorno for Tuesday evening!

A wonderful personal assistant from my friend Jill's company Lambent Services helped me clean up my work office so that I have lots of room for NEW PROJECTS (about which more anon at some more leisurely moment probably about a month from now). This service is highly recommended - that office has always been a chaotic and neglected enclave, to the point of functionality being impaired, and I am going to make sure to have regular tune-ups to keep it in good nick.

Liz had an extra ticket to this for Thursday: Black Mountain Songs. Enjoyable, interesting, thought-provoking: I had some pangs of guilt that though I am a dedicated teacher with considerable meta-interest in teaching, I have never (yet) been involved in a really utopian teaching scheme. I wouldn't rule it out, only in reality such things probably happen mostly in summers and I am not sure I would survive year-round teaching! Deep Springs has always interested me as a possibility: now I think they either have gone or about to go co-ed, it might be an actual opportunity?

Other bits of interest:

On founding your own country. (Via I.H.D.)

Helen DeWitt's personal library.

Lottje Sodderland on recovery from a stroke.

The Tingle Alley bear report.

Himalayan marmots! (Via B.) Also, an eagle's view of London.

Slight obsession with this historic food site, especially the ices... (Original link possibly via Teri D.?)

Last but not least, pygmy marmoset loves being brushed with a toothbrush and a short history of the black pug.

I must log the light reading or it will be forever lost in the dim mists of history. It has mostly been a very large number of werewolf-vampire-type novels that I think I will not log individually - Ilona Andrews' Kate Daniels novels, which I thought were really very good (I should not have then read the first couple of the Edge series, they are not so much suited to my taste); Stephen King, Revival (suffered for me in comparison to The Shining and sequel, which I read last year, but certainly worth the time); two crime novels by the Israeli writer D. A. Mishani, The Missing File and A Possibility of Violence, both very much the kind of thing I enjoy reading; a reread of a favorite novel of mine by Diana Wynne Jones, Deep Secret, now happily available for Kindle (this caused me to think I should write a long essay or a short book about her); Heather Abel's fascinating and troubling Gut Instincts, an excellent Kindle Single about celiac and mysterious gut woes (could be paired with Leslie Jamison's Morgellon's essay and Sarah Manguso on illness for an interesting trio); Dorothy Hughes' The Expendable Man; then Patricia Briggs' Mercy Thompson novels en masse (still finishing the last few of these - it is mighty soothing to have such a good flow of high-quality light reading).

Also I remembered during grumpy desperate non-exercising binge of book acquisition that I very much wanted to read my longtime digital correspondent Robert Hudson's second novel, and finally got around to obtaining a copy: it is called The Dazzle, and I enjoyed it hugely. Recommended in particular to readers of Peter Dickinson and good interwar period pastiche, but really it's just very appealing (good use of epistolary format!): I am going to pass it on to my mother now, in confidence that she will enjoy it as much as I did.

Reconceiving the Grand Tour

Interesting piece by John Hooper at More Intelligent Life on how digital humanities techniques can reveal new stories that emerge from old research.

Closing tabs

A lovely interview with Alysia Abbott, whose memoir Fairyland is one of my favorite of all the books I've read in the past few years.

The Hove roots of Anthony Burgess' Enderby.

John Brewer reviews Colin Jones' new book on the smile in eighteenth-century Paris (must get this one and read it, I like the history of dentistry in the eighteenth century!).

Last but not least, an amazing sequence of X-rays of the human body performing yoga poses.

Reading like Nabokov

Janine Barchas on Nabokov's annotations of Mansfield Park.

Quincunciall Lozenges

Oliver Sacks' personal history in libraries (courtesy of Dave Lull), with a call for keeping books on shelves. This piece should be read in its entirety by anyone who loves books - it is heavenly - but I was especially captivated by this bit, for obvious reasons:

But the library I most loved at Oxford was our own library at the Queen’s College. The magnificent library building itself had been designed by Christopher Wren, and beneath this, in an underground maze of heating pipes and shelves, were the vast subterranean holdings of the library. To hold ancient books, incunabula, in my own hands was a new experience for me—I particularly adored Gesner’s Historiae Animalium (1551), richly illustrated with Dürer’s drawing of a rhinoceros and Agassiz’s four-volume work on fossil fishes. It was there, too, that I saw all of Darwin’s works in their original editions, and it was in the stacks that I found and fell in love with all the works of Sir Thomas Browne—his Religio Medici, his Hydrotaphia, and The Garden of Cyrus (The Quincunciall Lozenge). How absurd some of these were, but how magnificent the language! And if Browne’s classical magniloquence became too much at times, one could switch to the lapidary cut-and-thrust of Swift—all of whose works, of course, were there in their original editions. While I had grown up on the nineteenth-century works that my parents favored, it was the catacombs of the Queen’s library that introduced me to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature—Johnson, Hume, Pope, and Dryden. All of these books were freely available, not in some special, locked-away rare books enclave, but just sitting on the shelves, as they had done (I imagined) since their original publication. It was in the vaults of the Queen’s College that I really gained a sense of history, and of my own language.

(Note to my mother: make sure you read this one, you will like it in any case but the Willesden public library makes a star appearance!)

“read Caleb Williams—a strange book—”

Julie Park on Jane Porter's pocket diary.

Works on paper redux

Brad Pasanek at People of the Book: especially good bits on watermarks, as well as a nice shout-out to the now-deceased Jay Fliegelman, author of one of my favorite books in eighteenth-century studies.