Promotional

Breeding makes a minor appearance via Jessica Bennett's interesting list of the top ten publishers' blogs. It is striking what a difference there is between the publisher blogs that successfully navigate the shoals between the need to be interesting and the need to sell books and the ones that have not at all realized that this is the challenge...

38p a packet

Trial Walkers Crisps flavors include Cajun squirrel and fish-and-chips:

Emma Rushin, a 26-year-old housewife from Belper in Derbyshire, burst into tears when she was told that her "builder's breakfast" flavour had made it to the final six.

Ms Rushin, who will put down a deposit on a house if she wins the competition, said: "First you get a hint of sausage, then egg, bacon, and last the buttery toast."

Casting her mind back to November when she learnt that she was in the last six, she recalled: "I think I was in shock for about three days."

After the entries were narrowed down and the finalists selected, food technologists set about creating the flavours in the laboratory, using a mixture of natural ingredients and unspecified "flavouring", which Walkers' head of flavour development, James Stilman, said were "natural flavour compounds" and not e-numbers.

The little orchestra

Courtesy of NPR and friend/musical impresario/demented band-leader Thomas Lauderdale, listen to Pink Martini's New Year's Eve concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA.

Miniaturized

Tilt-shift photography (via The Dizzies.)

"Inward"

Alex Danchev has a useful TLS piece on some new books about theatre. I need to start reading some of the critical stuff in this field for my notional new book project - really what I love reading is strange and wayward primary sources of all sorts, but my next book will need some sort of responsible methodological background, even if in the end it is scarcely visible in the book itself...

Really I have to finish this other book, though, before I can start thinking about my next one!

I am writing very steadily this week. I have strong thoughts about the enabling conditions for writing. One is that a quota system works for me, where once I'm writing (which is of necessity only a small proportion of my actual life, as it requires there not to be too many other demands on my attention) I just have to write X number of pages every day, from start to finish, and withhold all judgments concerning quality.

For this book I particularly needed a mental boost, and so I am writing just now with a very soft graphite pencil on the pages of a sketch book - it means that I can cover a lot of pages with a feeling of ease and power!

Tingle cream

Daniel Nester decides to get a tan...

The eye and the ear

Some interesting bits in Gary Lutz's Believer piece on the sentence, a unit of language that I am fairly obsessed with myself:

It took me almost another decade after graduate school to figure out what writing really is, or at least what it could be for me; and what prompted this second lesson in language was my discovery of certain remaindered books—mostly of fiction, most notably by Barry Hannah, and all of them, I later learned, edited by Gordon Lish—in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude. These were books written by writers who recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy. As a reader, I finally knew what I wanted to read, and as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself. I once later tried to define this kind of sentence as “an outcry combining the acoustical elegance of the aphorism with the force and utility of the load-bearing, tractional sentence of more or less conventional narrative.” The writers of such sentences became the writers I read and reread. I favored books that you could open to any page and find in every paragraph sentences that had been worked and reworked until their forms and contours and their organizations of sound had about them an air of having been foreordained—as if this combination of words could not be improved upon and had finished readying itself for infinity.

(I had a Lutz post churning away at the back of the head a couple years ago, only the book got buried in a pile - it resurfaced during the move, I should dig it out and write something up...)

Wayne Koestenbaum writes sentences that do this thing Lutz is talking about, and so (obviously) does Lydia Davis. But they are just the most glaring examples that come to mind, the most lavish and gratuitous (Koestenbaum towards the gothic side of things, Davis in a sparer mode) - it is certainly a useful way of thinking about less (what is the word?) outlandish sentences also!

Rumbledethumps

Gordon Brown, food writer?

ZEEP

One of the books I've liked most while reading for background for the Explosionist sequel is Otto Frisch's immensely likeable and engaging memoir What Little I Remember. I have gleaned from it some minor details that I may be able to use to fill out some things in the book's Copenhagen scenes, but of course lots of this stuff is not really usable, delightful as it may be.

In the world of my novels, for instance, we never visit England because it is part of a fascist European Federation whose borders the heroine is not allowed to cross; in my alternate England, moreover, there is certainly no longer any such thing as Woolworth's. Frisch on working conditions in the 1930s at Birkbeck College:

Of course I had been spoiled at Stern's institute where two first-rate mechanics and a good glass-blower were at our disposal, as well as a supply of up-to-date instruments and materials. I remember writing home from England that to build equipment was so much patchwork and make-do that after a few weeks of it my imagination boggled at the thought of asking for a piece of rubber tube 18 inches long! What saved me was the existence of Woolworth's. In those days no item cost more than sixpence. Admittedly a pair of socks cost a shilling; but Houtermans once insisted on buying one sock, explaining that it was a present for somebody who had only one leg. One could buy almost anything there. Once I bought a piece of ladies' black underwear; it was the easiest way of getting hold of some smooth black fabric for lining my cloud chamber. I didn't have the courage to charge the laboratory for that particular purchase.

A novel set and published in the late 1940s that includes a good description of what can be bought at Woolworth's: Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar!

Reborn

Hmmm, in chaos of moving, I did not get around to changing the address for my New Yorker subscription, and now I've missed several issues (though should be back on track around now). Belatedly, here's Darryl Pinckney on Susan Sontag's journals:

Sontag the essayist was more confident than Sontag the fiction writer. She had inspirations about how to tell a story that made up for some of the things she couldn’t do in fiction—such as realistic dialogue—but her humility toward the Novel arose from the fear that her prose lacked the amplitude and lyricism that her literary ambitions called for. Her discipline and her capacity for labor were remarkable, almost an accusation, and yet it was touching to hear her say that she read aloud to herself pages of “The Volcano Lover” (1992) and crossed out words and phrases, trying for the right tone, hoping to increase the velocity of her sentences, struggling to make her prose sound effortless—like Elizabeth Hardwick’s “Sleepless Nights,” she’d say. Her need to prove herself as a novelist turned her against the essay form for a while and put her in a rage with her own best achievements. After “In America” (1999) received a National Book Award, she felt vindicated and went back to writing essays; “Regarding the Pain of Others” (2003) is an example of her brilliance at a kind of moral inquiry that was neither academic nor merely belletristic. For Sontag, prose was not a vehicle for expressing what she thought; it was itself a form of thinking, and, perhaps more exactingly, of feeling as well.

“I don’t know what my real feelings are,” she wrote in 1960. “That’s why I’m so interested in moral philosophy, which tells me (or at least turns me toward) what my feelings ought to be. Why worry about analyzing the crude ore, I reason, if you know how to produce the refined metal directly?” She had assumed that only the academic life could give space to her love of books. An underlying story of “Reborn” concerns her disengagement from that creed. When a Harvard professor asked her what she thought of the legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart’s seminar, Sontag recounts, “I was condescendingly, politely negative: the attitude I know he takes.” In “Reborn,” whether she is teaching at the City College of New York or at Sarah Lawrence—and missing, yet again, one of her classes—it is clear that, as fond of her students as she could be, she doesn’t want them in her head. Her way of putting forward an argument did retain an aggressiveness learned in the graduate seminar, when she declined to defer to the guys. But she wanted to be a writer, and would do almost anything to make that happen, which is why it is moving to find in her notebooks a degree of self-doubt and self-criticism not usually associated with Susan Sontag: “The mind is a whore.”

"A pair of human feet with boots on them"

Things found in sharks' stomachs, from the Times Archive blog.

This one might be the best....

This one is an ouroboros!

"A cupboard full of Vaseline"

At the Guardian, Kira Cochrane interviews editor and memoirist Diana Athill:

She says that the author she liked most was Molly Keane, who was "an absolute darling. And I suppose of all the men, the nicest was - is - John Updike." One of the less attractive characters was VS Naipaul; when Athill needed cheering up, "I used to tell myself: 'At least I'm not married to Vidia.'"

One of the authors whose writing style she most admired was Jean Rhys. "Jean used to simply say that she was trying to get it like it had really been. To get it right," she says. This is the hallmark of her own work. She uses metaphor rarely and perfectly, suggesting, for instance, that scarlet lipstick can make older women look "like a vampire bat disturbed in mid-dinner". "Jean used to say, 'Cut, cut, cut, cut,' and she was right," Athill says. "Accurate writing means accurate thinking."

Sweat, n.

I have a minor sinus infection and (it is not really causal) have been lounging around in sweatpants, giving rise to etymological curiosity...

The OED:

IV. 11. attrib. and Comb., as sweat-drop, labour, -scraper, -secretion, -stain; spec. = ‘exciting or relating to the secretion of sweat’, as sweat-absorber, apparatus, canal, centre, coil, fibre, nerve; sweat-dried, -marked, -shining, -soaked, -stained, -wet adjs.; also sweat-band, (a) a band of leather or other substance forming a lining of a hat or cap for protection against the sweat of the head; (b) in Sport, a strip of material worn around the (fore)head or wrist to absorb perspiration; sweat-bath, a steam-bath or hot-air bath, esp. among N. American Indians; cf. SWEAT-HOUSE 1; sweat-bee, a name for the small bees of the family Andrenidæ; sweat-box, (a) a narrow cell in which a prisoner is confined (slang); also U.S., a room in which a prisoner undergoes intensive questioning (see quot. 1931); (b) a box in which hides are sweated; (c) a large box in which figs are placed to undergo a ‘sweat’; (d) transf. and fig., spec. a heated compartment in which perspiration is induced, to encourage weight loss, etc.; sweat-cloth, a cloth or handkerchief used for wiping off sweat; a sudary; see also quot. 1872; sweat cooling Engin., a form of cooling in which the coolant is passed through a porous wall and evenly distributed over the surface, which is cooled by its evaporation; hence sweat-cooled ppl. a.; sweat-cyst Path., a cyst resulting from some disorder of the sweat-glands; sweat-duct Anat., the duct of a sweat-gland, by which the sweat is conveyed to the surface of the skin; sweat equity U.S., an interest in a property earned by a tenant who contributes his labour to its upkeep or renovation; sweat flap, a leather flap in harness, for protecting the rider's leg from the sweat of the horse; sweat-gland Anat., each of the numerous minute coiled tubular glands just beneath the skin which secrete sweat; sweat heat Gardening, the heat at which fermentation takes place; sweat-hog U.S. slang, a difficult student singled out in school or college for special instruction; {dag}sweat-hole, = sweat-pore; sweat-leather, (a) a leather sweat-band in a hat or cap; also sweat lining; (b) = sweat-flap; sweat-lodge, = SWEAT-HOUSE 1; sweat-orifice = sweat-pore; sweat pants chiefly U.S., trousers of thick cotton cloth worn by athletes, esp. before or after strenuous exercise; tracksuit trousers; sweat-pit, {dag}(a) the arm-pit exuding sweat (obs. nonce-use); (b) in Tanning, a pit in which hides are sweated, a sweating-pit; sweat-pore Anat., each of the pores of the skin formed by the openings of the sweat-ducts; sweat-rag (slang), any cloth used for wiping off sweat, or worn round the head to keep sweat out of the eyes; sweat-rash Path., an eruption caused by obstruction of the sweat-pores; sweat-room, a room in which tobacco is sweated; sweat root, Polemonium reptans (Dunglison Med. Lex. 1857); sweat rug a rug put on a horse after exercise; sweat-shirt orig. U.S., a loose shirt; spec. a long-sleeved, high-necked pullover shirt of thick cotton cloth (usu. with a fleecy lining), worn by athletes to avoid taking cold before or after exercise (cf. SWEATER 7b); hence sweat-shirted a.; sweat-shop orig. U.S., a workshop in a dwelling-house, in which work is done under the sweating system (or, by extension, under any system of sub-contract); also fig. and attrib.; sweat-stock Tanning, a collective term for hides which are being or have been sweated (see SWEAT v. 13); sweat-suit orig. U.S., an athlete's suit consisting of a sweat-shirt and sweat-pants; {dag}sweat-sweet a. nonce-wd., having a sweet exudation; sweat vesicle Path., = sweat-cyst; sweat-vessel Anat., = sweat-duct; sweat-weed, marsh mallow, Althæa officinalis (Billings Med. Dict. 1890). See also SWEAT-HOUSE.
1956 S. BECKETT Malone Dies 93 A *sweat-absorber for the armpit. 1883 F. T. ROBERTS Handbk. Med. (ed. 5) 960 Affections of the *sweat-apparatus. 1891 Pall Mall G. 28 Sept. 2/3 An American chemist..threatens us with lead-poisoning from the ‘*sweat-band’. 1956 R. H. APPLEWHAITE Lawn Tennis i. 12 Sweatbands..are worn round the wrist to prevent perspiration running down the arms into the hands. 1977 J. F. FIXX Compl. Bk. Running xii. 134 When I started running, I saw a lot of runners wearing sweatbands, so after sweat had dripped into my eyes a few times I went out and bought one. 1877 S. POWERS Tribes of California xxvi. 244 [The Shasta Indians] have no assembly chamber..; nothing but a kind of oven large enough that one person may stretch himself therein and enjoy a *sweat-bath. 1921 J. HASTINGS Encycl. Relig. & Ethics XII. 128/2 When we turn to the Old World, we find a striking resemblance to the American customs in Herodotus's description of the use of the sweat-bath among the Scythians as a means of purification, after mourning. 1963 E. WAUGH Let. Sept. in C. Sykes Evelyn Waugh (1975) xxvi. 439, I have sat in a ‘sweat-bath’ and been severely massaged. 1965 S. G. LAWRENCE 40 Yrs. on Yukon Telegraph xiv. 75 They [sc. some Indians] stayed over a day and all the old men took sweat baths. 1894 U.S. Dept. Agric., Div. Veg. Physiol. & Path. Bulletin v. 79 (Cent. Dict., Suppl.) The *sweat bees of the genus Halictus and Andrena. 1870 U.S. Navy Gen. Orders & Circulars (1887) 97 He was..gagged and confined in a *sweat-box of such dimensions that it was impossible to sit down. 1888 W. B. CHURCHWARD Blackbirding in S. Pacific 28 This sweat-box is a sort of cell in the lowest part of the ship, pitch dark, and hot as hell. 1890 BARRÈRE & LELAND Slang Dict., Sweat-box, the cell where prisoners are confined on arrest previous to being brought up for examination before the magistrate. 1895 Pop. Sci. Monthly XLVI. 345 When sympathetic visitors crowded around his sweatbox. 1897 Chicago Tribune 10 July 1/4 The upper gallery commonly known as the ‘sweat box’ in regular theaters. 1900 Yearbk. U.S. Dept. Agric. 94 After the figs were dried they were placed in sweat boxes holding about 200 pounds each, where they were allowed to remain for two weeks, to pass through a sweat. 1901 ‘J. FLYNT’ World of Graft 102 He was copped out on suspicion. They put him in the sweat-box, made him cough, an' you know the rest. 1931 Z. CHAFEE et al. in Rep. Nat. Comm. Law Observance & Enforcement (U.S.) ii. 38 The original ‘sweat box’ used during the period following the Civil War..was a cell in close proximity to a stove, in which a scorching fire was built and fed with old bones, pieces of rubber shoes, etc., all to make great heat and offensive smells, until the sickened and perspiring inmate of the cell confessed in order to get released. 1973 ‘H. HOWARD’ Highway to Murder ii. 28, I ought to stick you in the sweat box until you told me the name of your client. 1974 J. ENGELHARD Horsemen vi. 38, I never go in a sweatbox... I lose all the weight I want playing tennis. 1890 BILLINGS Med. Dict., *Sweat canal, excretory duct of a sweat-gland. Ibid., *Sweat centre. 1898 Allbutt's Syst. Med. V. 200 The effect of this [accumulation of carbonic acid in the blood] being to stimulate the sweat centres. 1872 SCHELE DE VERE Americanisms 329 The *sweat-cloth, a cloth marked with figures, and used by gamblers with dice. 1894 Athenæum 24 Feb. 239/3 The appearance of the sweat-cloth is a very characteristic mark. 1899 Allbutt's Syst. Med. VIII. 741 An uninterrupted series of changes in the *sweat-coils was observed from the beginning up to the end of the disease. 1948 Technical Publ. Amer. Inst. Mining & Metall. Engineers No. 2343. Class E. 1 In designing a *sweat cooled part it is imperative to assure a given rate of flow of coolant. Ibid., A less orthodox method consists of making the part to be cooled of a porous material, so that the cooling fluid can be forced through the pores... This method, referred to as ‘*sweat cooling’, was proposed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in September 1944. 1969 E. C. ROBERTSON Now Bks. Rocket Motors iv. 29 Many devices have been tried to keep the walls of the chamber cool and techniques have ranged from sweat cooling..to the one that is most common today. 1898 HUTCHINSON Archives Surgery IX. 160 My patient had been liable to unilateral sweating of the face... The vesicles or little cysts..varied in size from pins' heads to peas... There could be little doubt that these were *sweat-cysts. 1885 B. HARTE Maruja iii, As he groomed the *sweat-dried skin of the mustang. 1776 MICKLE tr. Camoens' Lusiad 304 Fell the hot *sweat-drops as he champt the rein. 1817 BYRON Mazeppa xi, And my cold sweat-drops fell like rain Upon the courser's bristling mane. 1881 HUXLEY Elem. Physiol. v. (new ed.) 114 Cells lining the *sweat duct. 1973 Time 16 July 43 A group of poor, racially mixed tenants took over a nearby city-owned tenement, stripped the shabby interiors and are building modern apartments to replace the narrow, cold-water flats... In return for their ‘*sweat equity’, the builder-residents will make payments as low as $80 per month and ultimately own the building as a cooperative. 1980 B. VILA This Old House v. 83/1 The calculations you make in a sweat equity job are different from those in a project in which you are employing professionals. 1908 Animal Managem. 182 The *sweat flap of the girth. 1845 TODD & BOWMAN Phys. Anat. I. 423 The *sweat-glands exist under almost every part of the cutaneous surface. 1843 Florist's Jrnl. (1846) IV. 225 A ‘*sweat heat’ of from 85° to 95° temperature. 1976 Senior Scholastic 4 May 41 John Travolta..[is] back in the classroom..as the leader of the *sweathogs in ABC's Welcome Back, Kotter. 1979 BROOKS & MARSH Compl. Directory Prime Time Network TV Shows, 1946-Present 673/1 Gabe's ‘sweathogs’ were the outcasts of the academic system, streetwise but unable or unwilling to make it in normal classes.

"The essence of our Lancelot"

More on dog cloning. (Via Educating Alice.)

Sources

Jonathan Coe published an intriguing piece in the Guardian last year about his love affair with the Virago Modern Classics, a series I read very widely around in as a teenager and in my early twenties (I was always plucking the green volumes from the library shelves without even really looking too closely as to what they were - I think one of the ones that most stuck with me was Barbara Comyns' The Skin Chairs - I cannot say that I think that is a very good description of the book, but both the description and the author biography have just made me laugh!).

Anyway, I have been reading Coe with admiration and enjoyment for ten years or so now (here's an old post on Like a Fiery Elephant), and a copy of his latest novel came my way, only I was somehow left with the impression that I had to read Rosamond Lehmann's The Ballad and the Source first! I am not sure that is quite true, but I have just read both the Lehmann novel and Coe's The Rain Before It Falls, and found them both well worth my while.

I think Coe himself could not hold it against me if I say that I found Lehmann's novel astonishingly and strikingly good, and now feel I must read everything else of hers! I have only read one or two others, in distant memory, so I will get them all from the library and just see what strikes my fancy. I would not place this novel with Sybille Bedford's, which seem to me possibly superior in terms of their power to stir the emotions and imagination, but the descriptive writing is utterly lovely. One tiny passage that caught my attention (but really this novel should be read by everyone, especially if you like descriptions of clothes - Abigail Joseph, I am looking at you, you have to read this book!): oh, but I do not have time to find it again now, I did not mark it as I was reading because (a) it is a wartime edition, borrowed by me from the Columbia library, on very poor-quality paper and (b) I was on a plane! To a very beautiful and warm place - the flight was delayed by an hour in New York this morning, I might add, for the unprecedented and comical reason that all the water on the plane had frozen, and the crew rightly refused to take off without the wherewithal for producing tea and coffee!