Light Reading round-up

Hmmmm, what have I been doing with myself? Reading interesting things about cognition and counterfactuals (Lisa Zunshine's Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel seems to me very good - she has quite a lot of stuff up at her website if you are curious), obsessing about bicycles and triathlon-related matters (uncharacteristically I wrote a full-on review of a triathlon training book at my other blog), generally going crazy in the way that I always do as I try to make the transition to my own work after the end of the school year...

I enjoyed Patricia C. Wrede's Thirteenth Child and Barbara Hambly's Stranger at the Wedding - this sort of thing is my ideal light reading (I think both were recommendations of Jo Walton's at the Tor website).

At a loose end, I delved into the shelves of paperbacks here and found several unread used ones that clearly had been deemed not so immediately compelling that they had to be gulped down instantly and yet proved thoroughly satisfactory on the light reading front: Sheri Tepper's The Family Tree (I loved it, why did I not read it sooner?!? I am sure I purchased it with a bunch of others - $2 a pop - years ago from the fellow who sells used books outside Milano Market on Broadway, and then just tucked it onto a shelf and never got to it); Reginald Hill's Exit Lines (plucked from my adopted grandfather's New Jersey shelves for train-reading purposes, and never called upon for such).

I have a strangely large number of books on the go, I can't seem to settle into any of 'em properly - Ross Macdonald's Blue City; Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm, which strange to say I have never read; Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost: The Search for Six of Six Million. Better finish one or two of these before I start any others - and I am also reading (it is resting at the kitchen table where I eat my meals - books set aside for this purpose, when I have run out of New Yorkers and New York Reviews of Books and so forth, must be interesting enough that I want to read them at every meal and yet put-down-able i.e. non-narrative enough that I do not just end up reading the whole thing instead of going back to whatever else I was doing, which pretty much rules out fiction!) Toby Tanser's More Fire: How to Run the Kenyan Way, which would have benefited from more professional editing and copy-editing but which is nonetheless an enthralling read...

Soundings

From Niall Ferguson, introduction to Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, quoting Hippolyte Taine as quoted by Isaiah Berlin in "The Concept of Scientific History," in Philosophical Analysis and History, ed. Dray (hmmm, better track that one down to the source and see where the original passage can be found, this is too much of a remove!):

According to Taine, the monograph was the historian's best tool: 'He plunges it into the past like a lancet and draws it out charged with complete and authentic specimens. One understands a period after twenty or thirty such soundings.'

"The Enthusiastically Sticky zone of the Self-Love Continuum"

A.L. Kennedy on how rehearsing her comedy show feeds back into the writer's "voice" on the page:

It's been fascinating, working on my literal voice again for a while (in order to be audible and flexible) and seeing that work slowly have an effect on the "voice" on the page.

I've always been in favour of writers working with their voices. Although we are usually fugitive creatures, often grating (at best) in person and rambling of tongue – writers (especially poets) will almost inevitably end up reading their work in public for many pressing financial reasons. This will very often involve standing in a space specifically designed to make spoken-word events impossible and to irritate as many of those involved as possible. There will be noise, there will be atrocious sight-lines, there will be non-functioning mikes, there will be wild pigs in the foyer … you simply have to accept that nothing will run smoothly. Meanwhile, as the writer, you have to make the experience as nice as possible for the ladies and gentlemen (I never like kiddies to hear my versions of adult life in case they become disheartened and go all Tin Drum and stunted) who have turned out for the event – who may even have paid money for it to happen at them. This is not only polite, it's also deeply practical.

If a writer can experience their words being enjoyed by others, can make strangers laugh, or go "hmmmmm…" or sigh, or cry, or clap, or sit, alarmingly, with eyes closed in an attitude of profound concentration, sleep, or death – then the writer can feel more confidence in his or her words and move forward with them. This short-circuits something of that "playing alone with people you made up earlier for the benefit of strangers" aspect of the typing life.

Closing tabs: Stephen Fry on the joys of being a member of English Heritage's blue plaques panel; “If you need cake, eat the cake”; a secret history of the New Criticism and counterintelligence; Levi Stahl on why self-publishing was the perfect choice for Caleb Crain's latest book, a "meatspace edition" of some years' worth of very high-quality blogging (and Caleb gives a direct link with discount); and a delightful piece by one of my favorite sports journalists about the Flowers Sea Swim in Grand Cayman, which I will hope to do next weekend (this weekend, it's the Park to Park 2-mile Hudson River swim - the start is at W. 125th St., less than a mile from my apartment!).

Vintage

Sister-in-law Michelle Teague's new store JM Dry Goods gets a very nice mention at the NY Times site! (Thanks to Jessi for the link.)

"I've never been without an OED since"

Simon Winchester on English's one million words and an interesting coinage episode.

Chicken and champagne

From Clement Freud's collected racing columns, as reviewed at the Guardian by Stephen Moss:

"I asked a friend who had been to a West Country course to assess the meal he had eaten, to be told that: 'If the soup had been as warm as the champagne, the champagne as old as the chicken, and the chicken as fat as the waitress, it would have been adequate." At Yarmouth, he recalled, "a fish and chip van was on hand to sell what St Paul in his letter to the Philippians called 'the piece of cod that passeth all understanding'."

Natural histories

Chimpanzees should not be kept as house pets.

The Widener deeps

At Hilobrow, Matthew Battles on the Benjamin Translation Machine...

"Their heads were full of Durkheim"

At the LRB, Hilary Mantel has a merciless piece on her time as a social work trainee in the early 1970s:

I was getting a crash course in what age can do to the body and brain. Through writing them down repeatedly, I became familiar with some of the worst phrases in the English language: you can’t beat ‘terminal’, but a close second is ‘immobile, disorientated and doubly incontinent’.

And this:

Who’d be a social worker, anyway? The problem was the same then as now. Communal expectation was riven by contradiction. You were a busybody and a do-gooder, interfering in private life; or you were a useless, gormless, uncaring drain on the public purse. Whichever role you were cast in you had to get on with the job. My next stop was the community worker: Ruby’s estate was such a trouble spot that it needed its own staff. He was a jaunty young man, and he balled his fists in his pockets as he told me he knew the stepfather: ‘Nah, he’s all right.’ Shrugging, he made it clear that he intended to do precisely nothing. And there was nothing more I could do. I’d liaised with the ‘appropriate agencies’. I’d told my seniors. Ruby’s allegations were not so particular that I could go to the police, and she was in no state to be badgered for specifics. She complained of a climate of violence, not one discrete incident. Even if they were willing to investigate, a police visit with no follow-through might make things worse. Certainly, I’d never get into the house again.

What sort of judgment was the community social worker making when he swore the stepfather was a nice feller? Was he frightened of the man? That was possible; but more likely he wanted to be his mate. The young social workers of the time, coming up through university courses – postgraduate training after a sociology degree – thought it a sin to be judgmental. In fact they were making judgments all the time. Uneasy about their own middle-class backgrounds, and always feeling vaguely uncool, they believed they should not ‘label’ clients or assess ‘working-class’ people by their own middle-class criteria; so they treated them as if they were dogs and cats, not responsible for their actions. They had a whole set of interesting beliefs about the uneducated and the poor. They didn’t see that they were being grossly condescending, while pretending to be the opposite. Aspiration was a middle-class trait, they thought; the working classes preferred to muddle along. The privileged had their ethical standards, but it was unfair to universalise them. The workers had their own amusements, bless them, and should be allowed their vices. Their houses were dirty, but it was petty bourgeois to worry about grime. And if they were drunken or semi-criminal, and beat each other, wasn’t that their culture? These young graduates took as typical the malfunctioning families with whom their case files brought them into contact. Worse, they wanted their clients to like them. They dressed in recidivist chic and roughed up their accents. Their heads were full of Durkheim, their mouths full of glottal stops. They were occupied in creating a moral vacuum; theirs was a world safe for theory but profoundly unsafe for any child who needed them to shape up and go to work.

"It's utterly fab"

The Phillips machine (and see also "Gloop!").

Streets of crocodiles

Not freely available online, unless you have registered at the site already, but the New Yorker fiction issue includes a must-read piece by David Grossman on Bruno Schulz, the writer whose stories spurred Grossman's extraordinary See Under: Love.

Hmmmm, that novel is due in my life for a re-read; and so is Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers, as this Open Letters Monthly piece by John Cotter reminded me (link via Maud Newton).

I vividly remember reading both of those books for the first time. The Grossman was given to me by an Israeli friend in grad school, and I read it with amazement and delight. The Burgess conjures up an almost hallinatorily intense scene of me sitting (it was a very beautiful spring day, with clear blue skies) on the bleachers on the school playing fields, age 13 and dressed in the glen plaid skirt and polo shirt that were our team uniforms, reading frantically and desperately hoping that I would not catch the coach's eye and spur her thought that she should put me in at point for the remainder of the lacrosse game - a sport I truly, truly did not enjoy playing, and gave up very happily after that ninth-grade year...

"Licensed to chill"

Limited-release ice lolly in shape of Daniel Craig (via Maxine).

Able Baker

Plaintive space monkeys (via BoingBoing).

Luke Skywalker's robotic hand

Pasta machine used to extrude thin layer of red clay for hominid facial muscle reconstruction.

Also: former student Paul Morton interviews Colm Tóibín at Bookslut.

Hauntings

I have been following the coverage of Sarah Waters' new book The Little Stranger and thinking that I must get hold of a copy (here's the Bat Segundo interview, but Waters' own essay on how this book was inspired by Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair is the clincher!