Slivers of occurrence

James Fenton has a rather lovely little piece in the Guardian about anarchists and other matters (including Luc Sante's translation of Novels in Three Lines which I am now sort of Hound-of-the-Baskervilles-level slavering for):

Tailhade had been an anarchist, as had the mysterious writer Félix Fénéon, whose newly translated Novels in Three Lines I have been reading. According to Luc Sante's introduction, during a series of anarchist bombing activities in Paris, a man called Ravachol planted bombs intended to kill two judges in a recent case. Although no one was killed, Ravachol was guillotined. In 1893 Auguste Vaillant threw a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies. Again no one was killed, but Vaillant went to the guillotine, where he predicted his death would be avenged. The prediction was fulfilled in an incident at the Café Terminus near the Gare Saint-Lazare: one killed, 20 injured.

Tailhade notoriously remarked on this occasion: "Qu'importent quelques vagues humanités, si le geste est beau?" Sante's translation: "Of what importance are a few vague people if the gesture is beautiful?" It is one of those lines that seem to sum up an epoch, and Tailhade paid for this observation - as Sante says - "with unimprovable irony", by losing an eye, as the sole victim of the next major bombing. A bomb had been left on the windowsill of the restaurant where he was dining with his mistress.

The person who left the device in the restaurant was never identified; clearly he, too, would have been guillotined if he had been. The writer Fénéon was among those arrested in the aftermath, and had to explain how a search of his office cupboard turned up a vial of mercury and a matchbox containing 10 detonators. Fénéon claimed in court that his recently deceased father had found them in the street. The prosecutor suggested this was unusual.

Fénéon's reply gives us a flavour of his sly wit and insolence: "The examining magistrate asked me why I hadn't thrown them out the window instead of taking them to the Ministry [where he worked]. So you see, it is possible to find detonators in the street." Mallarmé, among those who came to Fénéon's defence, said: "You say they are talking of detonators. Certainly, for Fénéon, there are no better detonators than his articles."

All done

Book manuscript finished, tenure materials handed in. The apartment displays the usual signs of such goings-on: drifts of marked-up pages all over the floor...

I will take this occasion to remark that I am on a mission to reclaim the exclamation point. When I was growing up, I was always taught that exclamation points were to be avoided; I think they were viewed as tacky, overly enthusiasic and just generally inappropriate for either fiction or critical prose. And indeed my favorite quotation mark is the semi-colon, with the hyphen a close second: these are nice stringent tasteful accidentals... But I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that it is time to give up the tyranny of good taste and embrace the exclamation point!

Exclamation point count in the new book: 35 total, 26 in quotations and 9 of my own. I will try not to let too many of 'em get edited out in the stages still to come...

Aphorism of the day

Editing is like cooking something very delicate that must be milled or strained three or four or five times. (In practice, more.) If you skimp on steps, you will regret it later on, because the whole thing takes so much trouble that there is no point balking so near the end; and sometimes you just have to keep doing it until the texture, as it were, comes right. No answers in advance on how long it will take, but you can feel when it's acquiring that desirable smoothness.

Proust, squids

I've got a piece I really enjoyed working on in the latest issue of Bookforum, a review of two new books that were in different ways peculiarly well-suited to my interests: Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain and Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist.

The green light

At Bookslut, Colleen Mondor on the problem with high-school English classes. She's reviewing a handful of young-adult novels that seem likely to instigate or cultivate a love of literature, including one about Jane Austen that sounds rather good... and really everyone should read Pamela Dean's Tam Lin!

Preposterous quotations #199

A nice story by Laura Blumenfeld at the Washington Post about underachieving dogs retrained as bomb-sniffers. One of the main dogs profiled was raised by a convicted murderer:

Pucci threw a party for "my baby girl" who was leaving to fight al-Qaeda. He made her "ooganooga meatballs": mashed puppy food, olive oil, peanut butter and rice.

Pucci said, "I may be a criminal, but I'm an American criminal." His voice caught. "A little piece of me goes out to fight for the American way -- to keep the Yankee games going."

?!?
(Thanks to Gwenda for the link.)

You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive...

Jim Gilchrist at the Scotsman on an excellent-sounding new biography of Arthur Conan Doyle by Andrew Lycett.

I really grew up on those Sherlock Holmes stories, I love 'em....

There is a captivating detail here that would make a good example in a history-writing workshop:

Lycett refers to Leckie as Doyle's "mistress", but how certain is he that, prior to Louise's death and his marriage to Leckie in 1907, theirs was a physical affair? "I think he was in this awful dilemma. He had this wife who was ill, who I don't think he was very passionate about but who he respected and liked. He did his best for her in many ways, taking her abroad to try and ensure she'd live longer. However, during this period he met and fell in love with this younger, attractive and in many ways more suitable woman.

"It's quite difficult to get into his relationship with Jean, even from this vast material, because a lot of it has been weeded out. But what is interesting, and seems very revealing, is to find out from the 1901 census [five years before Louise's death] that on that day Conan Doyle was staying in a hotel in Forest Row in Sussex, we see Jean Leckie was also a guest. So, it was a pretty close liaison."

The 1901 census! Evidence! Isn't that amazing?!? And so appropriate to the subject...

Whale sandwich

Stephen Moss profiles Michelle Paver at the Guardian. Somehow I have never gotten around to reading these books, but I think I must:

Paver's series is the everyday story of boy meets wolf. The central character is Torak, a 12-year-old who is orphaned when his father is killed by a bear. The books follow his struggle to survive, aided by a faithful wolf and a girl called Renn, in a hostile environment - Paver's vision of northern Scandinavia circa 6,000 BC - and faced by a complex clan system that rejects him. Rarely has an adolescent faced such a tortuous rite of passage, and Paver accepts that, four books in, poor Torak must be a psychological wreck.

Since she insists on getting as close as possible to what Torak has to go through, Paver herself seems remarkably level-headed. She has made journeys across Scandinavia and into the mountains and forests of central Europe in her quest for authenticity, swum with killer whales, peered into the mouth of a large brown bear, and eaten elk heart and fish eyes. I'm quite pleased to be having a coffee with her in a cafe in Wimbledon, south London, where she lives, rather than a whale sandwich and goblet of elk blood in a windswept bar in Spitzbergen.

Paver's wanderings reflect her desire to present as accurate a picture of the stone age as possible. "There's no message in these books at all," she says, "but regarding hunter-gatherers as the Flintstones is something I hope I will have changed a little bit. Dramatic reconstructions of the stone age on TV usually have them running around with awful, rough clothes flapping open in sub-zero temperatures, and they are all unshaven, with messy hair. I don't think it was like that because they wouldn't have survived - Eskimos and Inuit have very carefully engineered and highly sophisticated clothes. Indigenous people all over the world take quite a lot of trouble with their hair and their clothes."

Hmmm, today's one of those days when I kind of wish I lived in the stone age...

[ED. AFTERTHOUGHT. My stone-age self is probably working to a tight deadline on a very large and complicated wall painting and wasting the early-morning hours brewing up another pot of some sort of bark tea, doing the stone-age equivalent of reading the literary news online and resolving to give up stimulants temporarily once the project is finished...]

An update

I am wrestling my academic book manuscript into submission, and believe I am still on track for submitting the entire thing with the rest of tenure materials by the end of the day on Friday.

It will be a great relief to e-mail it to my editor at the same time--this thing's been a millstone round my neck, I like it but I will be glad to be (provisionally--there'll be one more round of revisions once I get readers' reports, then the usual quotation-checking, copy-editing, proofreading, indexing, etc.) rid of it! The introduction is quite good, I think...

I was fantasizing earlier this week about taking a guilt-free week and a half off from all non-school-related work. (Of course, it is a true fact that my thermostat, as it were, is set very high... The projected time off included the regulation classes and office hours and meetings with students, plus one road race, four other runs, three hard-core swim workouts and a swimming lesson concentrating on non-front-crawl-related matters, several serious sessions at the gym, three or four bike rides, a considerable amount of light reading and a lot of blogging. But it's the guilt-free-ness that's crucial--normally I am doing all of these things and just feeling intense pangs of irresponsibility and neglectfulness about not having time to write!)

But then my other editor called this afternoon to say that she was about to overnight the copy-edited manuscript of the novel to me. It's due back to her a week and a half from now.

My time off!

I am now leafing through my appointment book to see when I can schedule the nervous breakdown. Oh dear, I think I really will not have time for it until January, unless an unexpected window of opportunity opens...

Good things at the TLS

(Four for four, exceptionally high interestingness rate this week--or perhaps I am just procrastinating...)

Richard Dawkins on Christopher Hitchens:

God Is Not Great is a coolly angry book, but there are good laughs too; for example, Hitchens’s hilarious account of how Malcolm Muggeridge launched “the ‘Mother Teresa’ brand upon the world” with his story that, while the BBC struggled to film her under low-light conditions, she spontaneously glowed. The cameraman later told Hitchens the true explanation of the “miracle” – the ultra-sensitivity of a new type of film from Kodak – but Muggeridge fatuously wrote: “I myself am absolutely convinced that the technically unaccountable light is, in fact, the Kindly Light that Cardinal Newman refers to in his well-known exquisite hymn”.

Bettina Bildhauer on a cultural history of flagellation (good topic; the book itself doesn't sound that great, though...).

Michael Caines on Joseph Roach's book It (Caines seems of two minds about this book, but I've heard a few pieces of it as talks and found them utterly magical, I've got to get this one...)

And best of all, Mary Beard on the history of Pompeii sightseeing:

The entrance to the city via the Street of Tombs, which continued to be the recommended route until the 1870s, underlined the fact that for most nineteenth-century tourists a visit to Pompeii was a visit to the city of the dead. It was a funerary as much as an archaeological site, prompting reflections on the tragedy of the destruction and the fragility of the human condition at the same time as it, paradoxically, seemed to bring the ancient world to “life”. Skeletons had always been high on the visitor’s agenda. But the pathos of the Pompeii experience was even further intensified by the technique of making casts of the bodies of the victims, developed in the 1860s by Giuseppe Fiorelli (the erstwhile radical politician, who became one of the most influential directors in the history of the Pompeian excavations). Plaster poured into the cavities left by the decomposing flesh and clothing of the dead produced startling images of their physical features and the contortions of their last moments.

These casts are the subject of a fascinating chapter by Eugene Dwyer in Antiquity Recovered, a sumptuously illustrated collection of essays on the modern history of Pompeii and Herculaneum, edited by Victoria C. Gardner Coates and Jon L. Seydl. Dwyer explains how the heavy clothing visible on the casts, the trousers apparently worn by both sexes and the scarved heads of the women – “all’uso degli orientali”, as one archaeologist put it – dispelled the popular image of Roman dress as scanty, if not lasciviously revealing. (Others have since wondered if what people decide to wear in the middle of a volcanic eruption can really be taken as typical everyday clothing: maybe the headscarves were not so much “oriental” as a practical device to keep ash out of the hair.) He also follows the history of several casts that became particularly famous symbols of the city and its destruction. These included one of the first group to be made by Fiorelli: a woman fallen on her back, straining upwards to breathe, her skirt gathered around her hips giving the probably misleading impression that she was pregnant. Some Victorian scholars took her to be a prostitute (she was carrying a small statuette of Cupid and a silver mirror); others saw her as a dutiful housewife (on the basis of a large iron key she was also carrying). Either way, this “pregnant woman”, as she was usually known, took a starring role in discussions of the site in the 1860s and early 1870s and is recorded in early photographs – until she was upstaged by yet more evocative images of suffering, and her cast was mysteriously lost.

These dying figures continue to haunt the modern imagination. As Jennie Hirsh discusses in another essay in Antiquity Recovered, two such casts, clinging to each other even in death, take a cameo role in Rossellini’s 1953 film, Voyage to Italy – serving as a sharp and upsetting reminder to two modern tourists to the site (Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders) of just how distant and empty their own marriage has become. And even the most stony-hearted or austerely academic visitor finds it hard not to be a little moved by the few casts still displayed in glass cases on the site – their death agonies, uncomfortably, on show for all to see.

Primate diplomacy

(I desperately want a tour of the primate center...)

Frans de Waal interviewed at the Believer.

I should not say it, but in a way I feel that if you were going to give a brand-new graduate student only two books to learn about academic life, they should be Chimpanzee Politics and Barchester Towers!

A word I like

From the OED, "Depravity":

The quality or condition of being depraved or corrupt. {dag}a. Perverted or corrupted quality. Obs.
1643 SIR T. BROWNE Rel. Med. II. §7 An humorous depravity of mind. 1758 J. S. Le Dran's Observ. Surg. (1771) 298 A depravity in the Fluids may have a great Share in producing these Symptoms.

b. Perversion of the moral faculties; corruption, viciousness, abandoned wickedness.
1646 SIR T. BROWNE Pseud. Ep. VII. i, By aberration of conceit they extenuate his depravitie, and ascribe some goodnesse unto him. 1791 MRS. RADCLIFFE Rom. Forest i, Such depravity cannot surely exist in human nature. 1830 MACKINTOSH Eth. Philos. Wks. 1846 I. 232 The winding approaches of temptation, the slippery path to depravity. 1883 FROUDE Short Stud., Origen IV. III. 300 The conscience of the ignorant masses..was rising in indignation against the depravity of the educated.

c. Theol. The innate corruption of human nature due to original sin. Often total depravity.
In common use from the time of Jonathan Edwards: the earlier terms were pravity and depravation.
[1735 J. TAYLOR Doctr. Orig. Sin III. 184 Inquiring into the Corruption and Depravity of Mankind, of the Men and Women that lived in his Times.] 1757 EDWARDS Doctr. Orig. Sin i. §1 By Original Sin, as the phrase has been most commonly used by divines, is meant the innate sinful depravity of the heart. But..it is vulgarly understood in that latitude, which includes not only the depravity of nature, but the imputation of Adam's first sin. 1794 A. FULLER Lett. i. 3 July Wks. 302 On the total depravity of Human Nature. 1874 J. H. BLUNT Dict. Sects s.v. Calvinists, Both the elect and non-elect come into the world in a state of total depravity and alienation from God, and can, of themselves, do nothing but sin.

d. A depraved act or practice.
1641 MILTON Reform. I. (1851) 4 Characterizing the Depravities of the Church. 1665 GLANVILL Sceps. Sci. xiv. 90 As some Regions have their proper Vices..so they have their mental depravities, which are drawn in with the air of their Countrey. 1808 J. MALCOLM Anecd. London 18th C. (Title-p.), Anecdotes of the Depravities, Dresses and Amusements of the Citizens of London.

That last title is a good one! Hmm, seems to me that the history of why I like this word so much must be traced back to a childhood fondness for T. S. Eliot's Macavity...

He is known to spend a good deal of time at the shop

Stephen Bates at the Guardian on Special Branch's decades-long monitoring of George Orwell and others:

A Sergeant Ewing of Special Branch, monitoring Orwell's attempt to recruit Indians to work for the BBC's India service in January 1942, noted: "This man has advanced communist views ... He dresses in a bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours."

The diamond sequence

Edwidge Danticat's memoir sounds amazing, I must get that...

So sue me!

This is probably illegal, but I am hereby posting the pages of what is one of my all-time favorite short pieces ever composed in the whole history of writing. It's Georges Perec's "Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and the Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four," translated by John Sturrock and first published in English in Granta 52 (1995). If I was teaching a semester-long writing class in which I could use only one text apart from student writing, this is it....