TWO chocolate ice creams

Adam Mars-Jones has a thoughtful piece at the Observer on the problem with publishing Dirk Bogarde's letters, and I cannot resist pasting in these paragraphs:

Dirk Bogarde's books were painstakingly shaped and rewritten. Writing letters functioned as a sort of five-finger exercise for him, but they were exercises mainly in the key of G: gush and grumble. The English moan is a complex phenomenon. Well-off expatriates moan about little things ('I refuse to pay five francs 50 for a small root of impatiens'; 'We cannot really afford to have [meat] more than once a week') because things are so nearly as they want them, or because they don't want to discuss their real worries, or for superstitious reasons. If you stop grumbling, the gods may suddenly notice how fortunate you are and take steps.

Letter writing was part of Dirk Bogarde's life-support system, but what part, exactly? Perhaps it had a sort of renal function, clearing the blood of toxins. Many of these letters express the negatives of his virtues, such as a reflex of ungraciousness after generous hospitality, written when the washing-up was a stronger memory than the meal (which Forwood cooked anyway). 'A huge, really big, leek-pie, which Dick had two helpings of, TWO chocolate ice creams with nuts and cream walloped on top, half a round of cheese, lots of bread and butter, figs from the garden and TWO bananas from the greengrocer!' If that's what happens when you invite your dear neighbour Dickie Attenborough to dinner, either don't ask him again or don't expect leftovers next time.

Another guest, the British consul's wife, may have thought she was making things easy for her host by drinking only hot water, but no ('A bit tiresome topping up her cup all afternoon ... ').

"Is Brenda coming?"

Rachel Johnson has a very nice profile of Dick Francis and son/collaborator Felix at the Times Online:

Okay, but what about the violence and the injuries that all Dick Francis heroes have to sustain on a page-by-page basis? Both admit that Dick Francis heroes, all of whom are in some way injured, disappointed, lame or wing-down, are based on Francis père. Did the two men have the same approach to character, to violence and to, er, sex?

At the mention of physical pain and injury, Dick perks up. “As I’ve got older I’ve become no less violent,” he says cheerily.

“Yes, the Queen Mother did once complain you were getting too bloodthirsty,” Felix reminds him. “But the truth, Dad, is that the books are about what you’re about. Loyalty and courage. Not sex and violence.”

It is still slightly one of my life goals to write a thriller that has some of the appeal of a Dick Francis novel - I do not know that I quite have it in me, but it would be worth a shot. (The alternate universe where I am a writer of irresistible thrillers is less vivid and plausible to me than the universe where I am an epidemiologist specializing in science-fictional disaster scenarios. However on the whole I think I am pretty much in the right line of work as is. I am gaining self-knowledge with age!)

Mal educato

For the FT, Rahul Jacob has tea with Miss Manners (a.k.a. Judith Martin).

An interesting thing I did not know:

Martin worked at The Washington Post for about three decades, starting in 1958 initially doing clerical jobs. Later, her reporting duties included covering embassy parties and social events at the White House. Well before Watergate brought the Post and the Nixon White House to loggerheads, Martin’s coverage of Julie Nixon’s wedding to David Eisenhower in 1968 irritated that excessively controlling administration. The Nixon White House gave journalists credentials to attend the reception but then cordoned them off in a room far from the party, asking them to make do with briefings from a staff member and write the story as if they had been at the party. Instead, Martin slipped by the security with the bridesmaids. A few years later, the Post was asked by the White House not to assign Martin to cover Tricia Nixon’s wedding. The Post’s executive editor at the time, Ben Bradlee, refused and the paper declined to cover the event.

Old chimps' home

This is a book I must get....

The blog's been quiet this week due to some combination of the following: (1) actual novel-writing (versus internet procrastination); (2) very slow literary news in August, always irksome to me - much less than usual that's interesting to link to!; and (3) a hurricane-related travel swerve.

Whiled away an unexpected (and considerably delayed) flight with the gift that wretched Miami airport gave to me - a new novel by Dick Francis and his son Felix of which I had heard nary a peep! It is fairly awful, but it was delightfully soothing to me - there is a truly comical sex scene about two thirds of the way through, and the protagonist makes a number of morally suspect choices - in the end, though, there is nothing like a Dick Francis novel for calming one down...

Other light reading around the edges of work: Laurie King's Touchstone (good, but not nearly as much to my taste as Jo Walton's Farthing books or the novels of Peter Dickinson); a very charming and well-written young-adult novel about life and running, Martin Wilson's What They Always Tell Us (recommendation courtesy of Gautam); Charlie Stross's Accelerando (at its best, really and truly hilarious and thought-provoking, but somewhat uneven when taken as a whole).

Hot dog

Food so good it eats itself. (Via BoingBoing.)

Face-off

More on crows (Michelle Nijuis writing for the Science Times):

Though Dr. Marzluff’s is the first formal study of human face recognition in wild birds, his preliminary findings confirm the suspicions of many other researchers who have observed similar abilities in crows, ravens, gulls and other species. The pioneering animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz was so convinced of the perceptive capacities of crows and their relatives that he wore a devil costume when handling jackdaws. Stacia Backensto, a master’s student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who studies ravens in the oil fields on Alaska’s North Slope, has assembled an elaborate costume — including a fake beard and a potbelly made of pillows — because she believes her face and body are familiar to previously captured birds.

The next screen

A very good interview with Helen DeWitt at A Softer World. NB she is not exaggerating about the time and energy it takes to see books into print - it is the bane of my life, the one thing that there is no hope of changing and that I must just suffer through! I do not begrudge the time as such, it is necessary to do something with time, only it so clearly ends up being time spent not having enough energy to think about new things and write new books!

Here's a great bit, anyway:

Our social practices aren't as well developed as our games. A community of game players improves the standard at which a game is played over time. Bridge has only been around for a bit over a century, for instance, but well-developed bidding systems enable even very weak players to communicate the strength and shape of their hand and determine whether they have a good fit with their partner; the systems work well because they have been developed by first-class players who have a good sense of which hands play well. (You can't know the potential strength of a pair of hands, obviously, unless you know what can be done with them.) So if I'm playing bridge and have a six-card heart suit and 3 Aces a King and a Jack I have a very good chance of finding out whether my partner has a) a four-card heart suit and a fistful of honours, b) a four-card heart suit but a weakish hand, c) no hearts, a long spade suit and a fistful of honours, d) a few honours and no strong suit, or e) zilch. (to name just a few possibilities) By way of contrast, we have no comparable sophistication in the communication of sexual preferences or strength of interest. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever gone to jail for optimistically raising a 1 heart opening to slam on a hand with a singleton heart and the Jack of diamonds; we might think that the sophistication of the game could usefully be transferred to areas of life where the penalties for misunderstanding are higher.

Chatternag, chatterpie, haggister

At the Observer, Olivia Laing reviews Esther Woolfson's magical-sounding Corvus: A Life With Birds.

The Telegraph had a good excerpt the other week. Here's a bit I especially liked:

Magpies' nests are large, layered, well designed, executed with care against weather and predation. They can take longer to construct than many modern houses: weeks spent transporting twigs, mud, grass, forming them into deep, domed superstructures, lining the curved sides with feathers, sticks, hair, objets trouvés. Some are dome-roofed, accessible by side entrances, magpie cathedrals, magpie palaces; all, I like to imagine, fan vaulting, Romanesque arch and piano nobile.

In the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow there is a magpie's nest constructed, along with the usual assemblage of twigs and leaves, from metallic objects, old coat hangers, builders' waste, barbed wire, a glittering object of strange charm and beauty.

From my bedroom window I watch magpies, flying, criss-crossing, I believe, from one old tree to the other, over the steep Parisian-style mansard-roof of the house opposite, as members of two magpie families (clans, perhaps, Macdonalds and Campbells, Montagues and Capulets) or one extended family exchange visits, for what purpose, peaceable or otherwise, I do not know.

Animal-handsome

At the Sunday Times, Christopher Hart reviews Being a Scot, by Sean Connery and Murray Grigor. A postscript to the story:

Connery's unfeigned delight in discovering more about his country - and himself - gives his book its idiosyncratic charm. While delving in the archives of the National Library of Scotland for the heart-breaking last letter written by Mary Queen of Scots six hours before her execution, he learns the archivist has found a still more extraordinary document: one of Connery's first pay slips as a 13-year-old delivery boy for St Cuthbert's dairy, Edinburgh. The slip records his title ‘the Costorphine Dairy barrow worker' and his 1944 salary (a guinea a week). Within weeks, he had a horse of his own to drive. ‘ME! I couldn't grasp it, I was so elated.'

"You're so uncouth"

Nice story at the Times about an unusual animal rescue operation.

Neurasthenic lunging

Alice sees a bat at Barnard. Oh dear, I am laughing out loud, I have never read such a poem in my life as that first D. H. Lawrence one she links to, how utterly and horrifyingly delightful...

Tickets to writhe

Matthew Syed on sex and the Olympic village. (Courtesy of Roman Mica.)

Head-spinning

America's foremost demonologist. (Via Bookforum.)

A teaser:

In the autumn of 1961 Bradshaw reported for the first time to the book-strewn office of Matthew Black, his Ph.D. thesis advisor at St Andrews.

To this day, his memory of that initial encounter is crystal clear. "Mr. Bradshaw," Bradshaw remembers Black telling him, "I want you to study demonology."

"At first I thought he was joking," Bradshaw adds. "But Dr. Black was not a humorous man."

Emus

Implausible headline - a little too self-conscious to be really funny, perhaps. Interesting style-sheet choices, though; it would make a good sentence on a copy-editing test. Also, animals should be given more dignified names....

The letter C

I have been wrestling with a virus (stomach, not computer) and an index - between the two of them, they have thoroughly eroded the quality of my life over the last few days...

But my health seems to be on the mend, and the index and book proofs are winging their way back to the copy-editor in New Jersey as we speak, so this is very good.

Official publication date is January 2009, but my editor had a vision of us having it for the MLA conference at the end of December that seems (barring unforeseen calamity) as though it will be realized - in retrospect, I am extremely grateful, as it was only the power and plausibility of her vision that made it possible for me to complete the final book revisions in January and February of this year. I was in a seriously exhausted and zombie-like state and had no spare will-power for self-motivated and seemingly non-essential book-finishing!

I had a funny bit of correspondence after the glimpse I gave last week of my indexing process. Old friend Steve Burt, whose Randall Jarrell biography contains some words of Jarrell's that speak to me more strongly than almost anything else I've ever read, commented mildly, with a link on his blog, "That’s not the way I did it…" A brief correspondence ensued:

JMD: I want to hear how you did yours! I fear that the way we tackle this sort of project is deeply revealing of thinking preferences/habits... And in fact I was looking at your Jarrell one, because my copy of the Chicago Manual of Style was at the office; I wanted to look at a Columbia UP example!

SB: I never look at Manuals of Style any more, just at models (same journal or same press).

I went through the proofs with three colors of highlighters, one for names of people, one for other proper nouns, and one for common nouns ("personhood," "totalitarianism," "squirrels") that I thought I wanted to index. Then I read through the highlighted MS and created a word file. This works for everything except the entry for the idea or person the whole book is about ("Randall Jarrell," "adolescence"), which editors insist you have, and which you have to create by flipping through the book rapidly after the rest of the index has been prepared.

I'm not sure what that reveals.

My mother, a longtime elementary-school teacher, always used to quote one particular sixth-grader's words when she asked him how that day at school had been. He said (of a strict and demanding but much-loved teacher), "Mrs. Hineline busted my brain!" It is in the nature of indexing that it busts the brain, that is its charm and its purpose.

(Well, perhaps that is hyperbolic, its purpose is not brain-busting - but you do want the index to sort of crack open the book in a disconcerting and unexpected way, it's one last shot at making your case!)

I got some truly wonderful corrections and comments from my overseas assistant; I have not asked his permission, I'm afraid, but I'm pasting in a sample page that includes the absolutely delightful query (on my use of hereditary as a subheading under inheritance) "a bit pleonastic?" (This also gives me the opportunity for an irresistible new post label below which I will endeavor not to make excessive use of in future.)

And here is the promised sample letter: