Youth

A nice piece at the Times about my college classmate Eisa Davis.

Baseless

John Lanchester's appealing essay in this week's New Yorker persuades me it would be well worth getting hold of a copy of Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez's Perfumes: The Guide. Here are Lanchester's final paragraphs:

There are fashions in smell, too, and the heavy-duty perfumes of the nineteen-eighties, in particular, come in for a hard time from Turin and Sanchez. They give some of these perfumes a rating of five out of five, while at the same time more or less begging the reader not to buy them. Opium is “unquestionably one of the greatest fragrances of all time,” Turin writes. “Yet I would hate it if anyone wore it near me today.”

That, it turns out, is relatively mild, as their criticisms go. Consider 212, from Carolina Herrera: “Like getting lemon juice in a paper cut.” Amarige, from Givenchy? “If you are reading this because it is your darling fragrance, please wear it at home exclusively, and tape the windows shut.” Heiress? “Hilariously vile 50/50 mix of cheap shampoo and canned peaches.” Princess? “Stupid name, pink perfume, heart shaped bottle, little crown on top. I half expected it to be really great just to spite me. But no, it’s probably the most repulsively cloying thing on the market today.” Hugo, the men’s cologne from Hugo Boss? “Dull but competent lavender-oakmoss thing, suggestive of a day filled with strategy meetings.” Love in White? “A chemical white floral so disastrously vile words nearly desert me. If this were a shampoo offered with your first shower after sleeping rough for two months in Nouakchott, you’d opt to keep the lice.” Lanvin’s Rumeur gets a one-word review: “Baseless.”

This is fun to read—and a rare pleasure, too, since the importance of perfume advertising means that one doesn’t often get to read strong criticism of multimillion-dollar-earning fragrances. The joy of Turin and Sanchez’s book, however, is their ability to write about smell in a way that manages to combine the science of the subject with the vocabulary of scent in witty, vivid descriptions of what these smells are like. Their work is, quite simply, ravishingly entertaining, and it passes the high test that their praise is even more compelling than their criticism. Here, in full, is Turin’s review of Lancôme’s Trésor:

I once sat in the London Tube across a young woman wearing a t-shirt printed with headline-size words ALL THIS across her large breasts, and in small type underneath “and brains too.” That vulgar-but-wily combination seems to me to sum up Trésor. Up close, when you can read the small print, Trésor is a superbly clever accord between powdery rose and vetiver, reminiscent of the structure of Habanita. From a distance, it’s the trashiest, most good-humored pink mohair sweater and bleached hair thing imaginable. When you manage to appeal to both the reptilian brain and the neocortex of menfolk, what happens is what befell Trésor: a huge success.

You don’t have to like perfume to like “Perfumes: The Guide.” Its blend of technical knowledge and evocative writing is exemplary in the strict sense: people who write about smell and taste in any context should use it as an example. Turin may be wrong about what appeals to the male neocortex, however. As Sanchez says, “The question that women casually shopping for perfume ask more than any other is this: ‘What scent drives men wild?’ After years of intense research, we know the definitive answer. It is bacon.”

The Model 11A

At the Telegraph, Nakki Goranin on the inventor of the photobooth:

By September 1925 he had opened up his Photomaton Studio on Broadway, between 51st and 52nd streets. Crowds, as many as 7,500 people a day, would line up to have their photos taken for 25 cents for a strip of eight: the place came to be known as 'Broadway's greatest quarter-snatcher.' The New York governor and a senator were among those waiting for the fun of the automatic photo strip. A white-gloved attendant would guide people to the booth and, once inside, direct them to 'look to the right, look to the left, look at the camera'.

An authentic utterance from a soul beyond the tomb

James Lovegrove has a very nice piece on four new books about spiritualism at the FT.

Also quite delightful to me: Peter Aspden speaks with Jeffrey Archer about prison life and other matters. Here's the opening, it really is a great piece:

One Arcadian summer in Cambridgeshire’s idyllic Grantchester Meadows, about 25 years ago, I was taking part in a charity cricket match that pitted the local newspaper’s team against a smattering of local celebrities. The scene was exquisitely lyrical; more to the point, I was batting well. I middled a ball to the square leg boundary, confident of adding four more runs. But the man fielding there moved sharply to one side, and had the audacity to catch me.

Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare, or plain Jeffrey Archer as he was then, intercepted me in the pavilion at tea. “That was a good catch,” he said of his admittedly impressive effort. “You were going well.” And the exchange stayed with me, for its sheer brazenness and slightly tactless tone of self-congratulation. But that was 25 years ago, and in truth, we hadn’t seen anything yet.

I recount the details of the catch – but not the tea-time remark – as we sit in Archer’s spectacular penthouse apartment on Albert Embankment, and his face beams. “How very rude of me,” he says, twice, but he doesn’t mean it of course. Nothing could mean more to him than a compliment on his sporting prowess. He is the cat that got the cream, sidled away, and then discovered a whole vat of it round the next corner. “I couldn’t bat and I couldn’t bowl but I could field,” he says, managing to sound both self-deprecatory and self-satisfied, a frequent Archer trope.

I've had kind of a thing for Jeffrey Archer ever since I first read the amazing piece about him in Iain Sinclair's striking book Lights Out for the Territory...

Matter of fact

At the Guardian, John Kerrigan considers Daniel Defoe's history as a spy and the importance of his Scottish experience for the technical breakthroughs of Defoe's prose:

Take the moment in 1706 when the Edinburgh crowds attacked the house of Sir Patrick Johnston, one of the treaty negotiators:

His Lady, in the utmost Despair with this Fright, comes to the Window, with two Candles in her Hand, that she might be known; and cryed out, for GODs Sake, to call the Guards: . . . one Captain Richardson, who Commanded, taking about thirty Men with him, March'd bravely up to them; and making his way with great Resolution thro' the Croud, they Flying, but Throwing Stones, and Hallowing at him, and his Men, he seized the Foot of the Stair Case; and then boldly went up, clear'd the Stair, and took six of the Rabble in the very Act; and so delivered the Gentleman and his Family.

It was Sir Walter Scott who noticed that Defoe creates "an appearance of REALITY" as a novelist by presenting himself as "a man of plain sense" and by including "some point which ascertains the eyewitness". In the assault on Johnston's house, we are persuaded that Defoe was there by the two candles in the lady's hands, by the mixing of honest-sounding approximation ("about thirty Men") with persuasive exactness ("six of the Rabble in the very Act"), and by Defoe's location as an observer: "the Author of this had one great Stone thrown at him, for but looking out of a Window". All this is designed to convince us that Defoe knows enough to sustain his charge that the protesters were a rabble led astray by Jacobites, yet the construction of the scene recalls the milling crowds in Moll Flanders. The motive is propagandist, but the fruit is a breakthrough in realism.

Further frivolities

To Alice, Pepperidge Farm tastes like disappointment. Go and read it, it's a geographically oriented baked-goods musing!

I too have strong Pepperidge Farm thrift shop memories...

When we were kids, our father worked for a few years at a company that was also near a Pepperidge Farm "thrift store." Periodically he brought home an amazing and thrillingly exciting haul of stuff--the gallon cartons of goldfish (catering size!), the strange frozen cakes with a weird hump out of 'em that was what led to the thrift-store mark-down...

I must confess, Alice, that my own taste in Pepperidge Farm cookies runs to the non-chocolate ones that are fairly plain--I have been known to eat Chessmen, and I like the Gingerbread Men. Now and again I eye the cakes in the freezer section, but I have not actually tasted one in adult life, and I think it might be better to leave them with the delicious sheen of childhood cake-eating memory!

Thursday frivolities

Slightly Cosmo-quizzical--but can you resist the appeal of finding out your personality type? (Mine seems an apt description--but what made me laugh was the list of famous INTJs at the end--who writes these things?!? The selection of fictional characters is particularly farfetched!)

(Via Harley Jane Kozak, author of an altogether delightful string of crime novels that I wholeheartedly recommend.)

In other news, I woke up from a dream yesterday morning in strong possession of the conviction that there was a field called dinosaur casuistry...

Jailbait vampires

Hmmm, I have just read Doree Shafrir's Observer piece about the craze for teen vampire fiction with the most demented readerly and writerly longing, I really am going to write a vampire novel one of these days! I want to read all of these:

Despite some recent attempts at getting away from vampires and anointing the next hot paranormal genre (Publishers Weekly recently declared that 2008 was the “year of the zombie”), publishers are continuing to fuel the vampire craze. Authors who have long written for adult audiences are making the jump, including Nancy A. Collins, whose Vamps (another Gossip Girl-with-vampires conceit) comes out in July. Zombies, werewolves, faeries and ghosts are all showing signs of popularity, but as Ms. Howard said, “I think vampires are always the leading edge in the interest in paranormal fiction.” One YA imprint gave its editors what essentially amounted to a mandate to acquire fresh vampire stories; the list of new vampire books coming out in the next few months, in addition to the ones just acquired, is a long one. Vunce Upon a Time, about a vegetarian vampire, comes out this fall; Evernight, a book about a vampire boarding school, will be published in May; and a new book in Ellen Schreiber’s Vampire Kisses series comes out in June. Recently sold YA vampire books include Vamped, about a fashionista vampire; a new book in Rachel Caine’s Morganville Vampires series; two more books in Heather Brewer’s Chronicles of Vladimir series; Svetlana Grimm and the Circle of Red, about a middle-schooler with the power to destroy vampires; another book in Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy series; Kimberly Pauley’s Sucks to Be Me: The All-True Confessions of Mina Hamilton, Teen Vampire (maybe); and Mario Acevedo’s Jailbait Vampire, a book in a series about a vampire private detective.

Mmmmm, vampires...

Something out of the usual run of things

For the Columbians amongst you, this Friday (I cannot tell you exactly what it will be like, but it should be interesting!):

SPEAKING THE BODY
An Interdisciplinary Conversation

Featuring:
Jenny Davidson, English and Comparative Literature
Geraldine Downey, Psychology
Coco Fusco, Spanish and Portuguese
Eugenia Lean, East Asian Languages and Cultures
Beth Povinelli, Anthropology

The speakers will address a range of topics, including the significance of the body as a site of meaning, especially as it relates to embodied subjects; the body's potential for interdisciplinary analysis; the boundaries of the body; the role of medical discourse and technology in their conceptualization of the body; and whether the human body is always already gendered (if de-gendered or transgendered bodies are considered "human").

Organized by the IRWaG Graduate Colloquium

WHEN: Friday March 7th, 1:00 - 3:00 PM

WHERE: 614 Schermerhorn

Please join us for this unique opportunity to see interdisciplinary
dialogue in action! A reception will follow in 754 Schermerhorn
Extension.

Questions? Contact irwag@columbia.edu for further information or directions.

Brooklyn Ghost Investigations

Useful to know who to call...

"The hyenas are the least of your trouble"

This article gave me an extraordinary pang of regret that I have not spent my life as an observer of baboons or spotted hyenas. On the other hand, I do not really have an adventurous soul:

To understand the social intelligence of hyenas, Dr. Holekamp and her colleagues track the animals from birth to death. Their work begins in the communal dens where the cubs live for their first few months. Crawling into the dens, a network of underground chambers, is Dr. Holekamp’s least favorite part of her job.

“The hyenas are the least of your trouble,” she said. “You know when the mom’s there and when she’s not. But is there also a warthog in there that’s going to take off your face with its tusks? Is it a cobra?”

Dative plural

At Open Letters Monthly, Garth Risk Hallberg on Helen DeWitt's altogether wonderful novel The Last Samurai. Helen's blog paperpools is also one of my personal internet delights...

(Link courtesy of TEV.)

Contributional compulsions

Widely linked to already, but Nicholson Baker has a great little essay on Wikipedia in the latest New York Review of Books:

Say you're working away on the Wikipedia article on aging. You've got some nice scientific language in there and it's really starting to shape up:

After a period of near perfect renewal (in Humans, between 20 and 50 years of age), organismal senescence is characterized by the declining ability to respond to stress, increasing homeostatic imbalance and increased risk of disease. This irreversible series of changes inevitably ends in Death.

Not bad!

And then somebody—a user with an address of 206.82.17.190, a "vandal"—replaces the entire article with a single sentence: "Aging is what you get when you get freakin old old old." That happened on December 20, 2007. A minute later, you "revert" that anonymous editor's edit, with a few clicks; you go back in history to the article as it stood before. You've just kept the aging article safe, for the moment. But you have to stay vigilant, because somebody might swoop in again at any time, and you'll have to undo their harm with your power reverter ray. Now you're addicted. You've become a force for good just by standing guard and looking out for juvenile delinquents.

Some articles are so out of the way that they get very little vandalism. (Although I once fixed a tiny page about a plant fungus, Colletotrichum trichellum, that infects English ivy; somebody before me had claimed that 40 percent of the humans who got it died.) Some articles are vandalized a lot. On January 11, 2008, the entire fascinating entry on the aardvark was replaced with "one ugly animal"; in February the aardvark was briefly described as a "medium-sized inflatable banana." On December 7, 2007, somebody altered the long article on bedbugs so that it read like a horror movie:

Bedbugs are generally active only at dawn, with a peak attack period about an hour before dawn, though given the opportunity, they may attempt to feed at your brain at other times.

A few weeks later, somebody replaced everything with:

BED BUGS MOTHER FUCKER THEY GON GET YO MOTHA FUCKING ASS BRAAAAAAAT FOOL BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP.

A piece of antivandalism software, VoABot II, reverted that edit, with a little sigh, less than a minute after it was made.

Walking the cat back

At the Times, Ben Macintyre on spyspeak.

Also--Marina Warner's essay on Beckett in this week's TLS had some lovely bits on Mallarme and strange English proverbs:

Thèmes anglais contains a gathering of a thousand English phrases, proverbs, adages and saws, all conscientiously marshalled in order to illustrate a rule of English grammar: first the definite article, then the indefinite, first the possessive pronoun, then the relative pronoun, etc. The contrast between the austerely dry objective of the examples and their fantastical oddity, the disjunction between the scrupulous lexical and grammatical rigour and the free-association lexical chain of words, achieve an exhilarating absurdity. A native speaker of English would know precious few of these locutions at the very most, and use them – never. The ones that you might know you would find stale; and you would have done so then, in the late nineteenth century – since some of the proverbs Mallarmé cites were already archaic by the seventeenth. He was using an anthology he had come upon in Truchy’s bookshop to glean a myriad equivalents to “My postilion has been struck by lightning”, regardless of current usage.

What is entirely seductive about his lists is their irreducibly foreign character. But this strangeness turns his collection into a kind of prose poem, sometimes beautiful, sometimes weirdly comic: “Under water, famine; under snow, bread. / Prettiness makes no pottage”. These enigmas are offered to illustrate how, where French uses a definite article, English does without. Besides “Who can shave an egg?”, phrases such as “You can’t hide an eel in a sack” are included in order to illustrate the use of the indefinite article. The quirkiness of these rules inspires a riddling sequence:

It is hard for an empty bag to sit upright.

To cut down an oak and set up a strawberry.

Undone, as a man would undo an oyster.

You ask an elm tree for pears.

You shall ride an inch behind the tail.

These adages – proverbs or whatever – teeter on the verge of incomprehensibility. But their cumulative effect is melancholy: failure stalks them, regardless of syntactical exactitude.

Who can shave an egg?!?

Aks

At the NYTBR, Christine Keneally on David Anthony's magical-sounding new book The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World:

The impact of horses on the reach of language is particularly important to Anthony, and he conveys his excitement at working out whether ancient horses wore bits (and were therefore ridden by Proto-Indo-Europeans) by comparing their teeth to those of modern domesticated and wild horses. He muses on the “deep-rooted, intransigent traditions of opposition” that existed along the Ural River frontier, slowing the spread of herding and the cultural innovations that went with it. He also cites remarkable genetic analyses suggesting that although all the domesticated horses in the world may have come from many different wild mothers, they might all share a single father.

Anthony also describes a world in which spoken poetry was the only medium, one that helped spread Proto-Indo-European through what he calls “elite recruitment.” It wasn’t enough for the newcomers to assume a dominant position: in order for their language to be picked up, they also had to offer the local population attractive opportunities to participate in their language culture — a process that continues today, incidentally, with the spread of English as a prestige language.