Friday, November 07, 2014
"I don't read Albanian, alas"
At the WSJ, Eben Shapiro interviews David Bellos on the art of translation. Here was a bit I hugely enjoyed:
In the new Kadare book that you translate, was there any particular passage or word that was particularly challenging to translate?
“Twilight of the Eastern God” is set in Moscow in the late 1950s. In it, Kadare refers to a mildly avant-garde and therefore politically scandalous hendecasyllabic couplet that had written in Albanian. It’s not a fiction—Kadare’s poetry was published in Albania and translated into Russian while he was still a student in the Soviet Union. I translate Kadare from his French translations, as I don’t read Albanian, alas. However, by inexplicable serendipity the Russian translation of the couplet that Kadare gives in transliterated form in the French edition of the novel allowed me to invent two lines of English verse that are also hendecasyllabic! There was absolutely no point in doing it—English verse isn’t measured in syllables anyway, so readers aren’t going to notice. But if you want an example of the kind of crazy challenges that translators encounter and sometimes meet (more by luck than genius, I must add)—well, that one certainly sticks in my mind.
Wednesday, November 05, 2014
Wires of underground influence
Teaching Billy Budd next week, I'm excited:
About as much was really known to the Bellipotent's tars of the master-at-arms' career before entering the service as an astronomer knows about a comet's travels prior to its first observable appearance in the sky. The verdict of the sea quidnuncs has been cited only by way of showing what sort of moral impression the man made upon rude uncultivated natures whose conceptions of human wickedness were necessarily of the narrowest, limited to ideas of vulgar rascality--a thief among the swinging hammocks during a night watch, or the man-brokers and land-sharks of the seaports.
It was no gossip, however, but fact that though, as before hinted, Claggart upon his entrance into the navy was, as a novice, assigned to the least honorable section of a man-of-war's crew, embracing the drudgery, he did not long remain there. The superior capacity he immediately evinced, his constitutional sobriety, an ingratiating deference to superiors, together with a peculiar ferreting genius manifested on a singular occasion; all this, capped by a certain austere patriotism, abruptly advanced him to the position of master-at-arms.
Of this maritime chief of police the ship's corporals, so called, were the immediate subordinates, and compliant ones; and this, as is to be noted in some business departments ashore, almost to a degree inconsistent with entire moral volition. His place put various converging wires of underground influence under the chief's control, capable when astutely worked through his understrappers of operating to the mysterious discomfort, if nothing worse, of any of the sea commonalty.
Tuesday, November 04, 2014
Monday, November 03, 2014
Closing tabs
A lovely interview with Alysia Abbott, whose memoir Fairyland is one of my favorite of all the books I've read in the past few years.
The Hove roots of Anthony Burgess' Enderby.
John Brewer reviews Colin Jones' new book on the smile in eighteenth-century Paris (must get this one and read it, I like the history of dentistry in the eighteenth century!).
Last but not least, an amazing sequence of X-rays of the human body performing yoga poses.
The Hove roots of Anthony Burgess' Enderby.
John Brewer reviews Colin Jones' new book on the smile in eighteenth-century Paris (must get this one and read it, I like the history of dentistry in the eighteenth century!).
Last but not least, an amazing sequence of X-rays of the human body performing yoga poses.
Saturday, November 01, 2014
Catch-up
It is unseemly that a minor cold can make me so grumpy - think of everyone battling genuinely major ailments of one kind or another! - but it is essentially two weeks now with no exercise, and despite everything else in life being pretty much OK, my mood has suffered as a result. Made a plea on Facebook and have lined up some good light reading suggestions for the rest of the weekend (I don't teach this week, due to the fall election holiday - I need to get my act together to do some of my own proper work, but in the meantime I'm slightly at sea without the need to do Monday and Tuesday's course readings over the weekend). Hoping to spend the evening so completely immersed in a fictional world that I stop paying attention to my own glumness!
Have had a rather good run of entertainment in the world as opposed to the mind over the last week or so, though the Britten is quiet in a way that made me feel AWFUL about periodic inability to suppress coughing (in fact it reminded me that I heard the War Requiem a number of years ago at Carnegie Hall with an even worse cold - conservation of character over time!).
First, courtesy of my friend T. who got us comps, the inspiring Storm Large at the Public Theater. Genuinely magical performance: I think everyone in the room was transported and uplifted! Lots of good samples at Youtube and I am going to order up some of the back catalog (bought the new album after the show, though my iPod touch is now so ancient that it won't update with iTunes). She's been singing with our friend Thomas Lauderdale and band Pink Martini recently, which was why it caught my attention; it was an absolutely wonderful show, enough so that I download and read her autobiography the next day. I suppose if you're only going to get one, an album is a more obvious choice than the book, but I hugely enjoyed it: definitely recommended (here's the Amazon link).
On Thursday, the extraordinary Britten parable Curlew River, part of the Lincoln Center White Light festival and performed, appropriately, in the Synod House at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Here's a review that conveys the feel of the performance. I had never heard Ian Bostridge in person: it is a beautiful work, and I could not imagine a better performance than his in the part of the Madwoman. The moment at the end when the child's voice comes through is genuinely unearthly. Drinks afterwards with Nadia and Nico, which was also fun; Nadia is recovering from pneumonia, we are all working a bit too hard in ways that tax the immune system.
And last night, at the Bushwick Starr, the excellent Ghost Quartet. Here's the NYT review. It took me a little longer to be won over - the performers are superb, but only a couple songs in the first forty minutes stood out for me, and there is always that risk of whimsy - the story also could still use a little focusing - but I really loved the last part, when the lights go out and the story really ramps up in intensity and appeal. The show is sold out through its final performance on Nov. 8, but if you get there by 7:15 or so, they can probably fit you in.
I will definitely download the cast album: the two standout songs in the first stretch are "Any Kind of Dead Person" and "Four Friends" (during which shots of whisky are poured for the audience - very welcome, on my part, and temporarily quieted my lung ailment!)
Miscellaneous light reading (too lazy to paste in links):
I did finish the Richard Morgan "Land Fit for Heroes" trilogy (decent writing, but way too much fighting and the three main characters are all too similar to each other).
Felix Francis, Dick Francis's Damage: actually this one is much better, I had really written the collaborative ones off as dreadful but this reads more like an actual Dick Francis novel as of ten years ago - i.e. still something like a child's cartoon of peak-era Francis, but much more readable!
Tricia Sullivan, Shadowboxer (very appealing, though I thought it would have been edited differently for a larger publisher - some pacing issues - but she's a great writer and I am eager for the next installment).
Patrick Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things: an immersive read, I like his writing a lot, but could not shake uncharacteristic politically correct impulse to disapprove of laudatory representation of anorexic OCD heroine!
Then, happily, William Gibson's new novel, The Peripheral: there was one funny moment when I had a sudden pang for the more sincere, less self-conscious pleasures of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, but really this is very good, I can't imagine anyone who likes reading novels at all not enjoying this. (Gibson shares with the late lamented Iain Banks the ability to write female protagonists that actually feel to me like they could be myself!)
Then Paulo Bacigalupi's The Doubt Factory, a good recommendation from Brent (and an interesting example of how a novel might attempt to approximate argument) though I wasn't sure I bought the ending.
Have had a rather good run of entertainment in the world as opposed to the mind over the last week or so, though the Britten is quiet in a way that made me feel AWFUL about periodic inability to suppress coughing (in fact it reminded me that I heard the War Requiem a number of years ago at Carnegie Hall with an even worse cold - conservation of character over time!).
First, courtesy of my friend T. who got us comps, the inspiring Storm Large at the Public Theater. Genuinely magical performance: I think everyone in the room was transported and uplifted! Lots of good samples at Youtube and I am going to order up some of the back catalog (bought the new album after the show, though my iPod touch is now so ancient that it won't update with iTunes). She's been singing with our friend Thomas Lauderdale and band Pink Martini recently, which was why it caught my attention; it was an absolutely wonderful show, enough so that I download and read her autobiography the next day. I suppose if you're only going to get one, an album is a more obvious choice than the book, but I hugely enjoyed it: definitely recommended (here's the Amazon link).
On Thursday, the extraordinary Britten parable Curlew River, part of the Lincoln Center White Light festival and performed, appropriately, in the Synod House at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Here's a review that conveys the feel of the performance. I had never heard Ian Bostridge in person: it is a beautiful work, and I could not imagine a better performance than his in the part of the Madwoman. The moment at the end when the child's voice comes through is genuinely unearthly. Drinks afterwards with Nadia and Nico, which was also fun; Nadia is recovering from pneumonia, we are all working a bit too hard in ways that tax the immune system.
And last night, at the Bushwick Starr, the excellent Ghost Quartet. Here's the NYT review. It took me a little longer to be won over - the performers are superb, but only a couple songs in the first forty minutes stood out for me, and there is always that risk of whimsy - the story also could still use a little focusing - but I really loved the last part, when the lights go out and the story really ramps up in intensity and appeal. The show is sold out through its final performance on Nov. 8, but if you get there by 7:15 or so, they can probably fit you in.
I will definitely download the cast album: the two standout songs in the first stretch are "Any Kind of Dead Person" and "Four Friends" (during which shots of whisky are poured for the audience - very welcome, on my part, and temporarily quieted my lung ailment!)
Miscellaneous light reading (too lazy to paste in links):
I did finish the Richard Morgan "Land Fit for Heroes" trilogy (decent writing, but way too much fighting and the three main characters are all too similar to each other).
Felix Francis, Dick Francis's Damage: actually this one is much better, I had really written the collaborative ones off as dreadful but this reads more like an actual Dick Francis novel as of ten years ago - i.e. still something like a child's cartoon of peak-era Francis, but much more readable!
Tricia Sullivan, Shadowboxer (very appealing, though I thought it would have been edited differently for a larger publisher - some pacing issues - but she's a great writer and I am eager for the next installment).
Patrick Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things: an immersive read, I like his writing a lot, but could not shake uncharacteristic politically correct impulse to disapprove of laudatory representation of anorexic OCD heroine!
Then, happily, William Gibson's new novel, The Peripheral: there was one funny moment when I had a sudden pang for the more sincere, less self-conscious pleasures of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, but really this is very good, I can't imagine anyone who likes reading novels at all not enjoying this. (Gibson shares with the late lamented Iain Banks the ability to write female protagonists that actually feel to me like they could be myself!)
Then Paulo Bacigalupi's The Doubt Factory, a good recommendation from Brent (and an interesting example of how a novel might attempt to approximate argument) though I wasn't sure I bought the ending.
Friday, October 31, 2014
Logophilia
At the LRB, Colin Burrow reviews a new book about the history of philology. Of interest to me in a general sense as well, for obvious reasons, but I particularly enjoyed this bit at the end:
This layer of general interest in knowing about humanity – call it culture – can all sometimes go wrong when academic specialisms waltz into the room. My mother, who was the children’s writer Diana Wynne Jones (and whose eightieth birthday recently prompted what must be the ultimate public recognition in the form of a Google doodle: the techies in California clearly like reading fantasy), once said at a dinner with a group of American academics that she loved The Faerie Queene. ‘Oh, are you a Spenserian?’ came the eager reply. When my mother said, no, she just liked reading Spenser and liked his fantastical imagination, the light went out in her dining companions’ eyes. Yes, academic disciplines are a wet sock to the imagination, but not everything we do is contained within their soggy outlines.
Thursday, October 30, 2014
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Teaching edition
Posting around here has been sparse due to excessive other demands, so I thought I'd just give a glimpse into what I've been up to. Yesterday taught a favorite novel, Amelia Alderson Opie's Adeline Mowbray: or The Mother and Daughter. Today, another really wonderful and underrated novel, William Wells Brown's Clotel: Or, The President's Daughter. (Titling coincidence merely serendipitous - but see Franco Moretti's argument about direct and indirect articles in "Style, Inc."!)
Here's the critical reading assigned in addition to the novel for tonight's lecture (which I am still in the process of writing):
#Ann duCille, “Where in the World is William Wells Brown? Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the DNA of African-American Literary History,” American Literary History 12:3 (2000): 443-462
#Jonathan Senchyne, “Bottles of Ink and Reams of Paper: Clotel, Racialization, and the Material Culture of Print,” in Early African American Print Culture, ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 140-158
#Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (2008): 1-14
And here's the assignment students will write for seminar this week. It is the last of four short assignments that they write as they build up to working on a final essay that will include both close reading and critical argument; it is designed to let students practice skills as well as coming to a deeper understanding of the novel itself.
Please write answers to the following questions.
1. One of the critical essays you read for this week offers this overview of critical assessments and interpretations of Clotel:
The runaway slave’s mastery of neoclassical diction, which some see as little more than a flaunting of his educational attainments, is for other readers a subversive deployment of the King’s English to tell the slave’s story. What one critic views as structural chaos, another sees as a creative appropriation of multiple forms – from the oral tradition of the slave narrative to the sentimental emplotments of women’s fiction. Where one sees only the bourgeois pretensions of the black middle class, another finds an “informed use of folklore” that offers an insider’s view of the plantation system[.] (Ann duCille, “Where in the World Is William Wells Brown? Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the DNA of African-American Literary History,” American Literary History 12:3 [2000]: 443-462; 456)
a. Make a list of three to five of the novel’s most conspicuous formal or stylistic traits (you can include the three that duCille isolates here, only I would like you to describe them in your own words and in as factual or descriptive a manner as possible).
b. Then offer at least two possible arguments concerning the way each particular trait works in the novel. Make sure that these arguments are formulated so as to satisfy the implicit expectations we have of interpretation: not just what the trait involves or how it works, but also what it’s for or why it matters.
2. Near the end of the essay, duCille writes: “When all is said, done, and disposed of—the borrowing, overplotting, preaching, and propagandizing—the real problem with Clotel lies in the particular slippery nature of Brown’s brand of realism, which both deploys and denies the documentary impulse that drives the reading, if not the writing, of African-American literature” (458).
a. Write a paragraph or two that first paraphrases and then amplifies or illuminates this critical assertion. What does duCille have in mind when she lists borrowing, overplotting, preaching, and propagandizing as crucial elements of Clotel? Give specific examples; you can refer back to your answer to question 1 if you feel you’ve already touched on some of the relevant details.
b. What does it mean to say that this novel’s “brand of realism . . . both deploys and denies the documentary impulse”? Pick that statement apart by explaining what duCille means by “the documentary impulse” and identifying where it can be seen in Brown’s novel – three or four examples will do. Then consider what it means to make a distinction between deployment and denial in this context.
3. One obvious oddity of Brown’s novel is that though it regularly invokes real historical incidents, the timeline/chronology is distorted: there are a number of internal contradictions as well as departures from real historical chronology. What are the effects of these contradictions and anomalies? What do they tell us about the novel’s mode of representation? Offer a thesis and support it with specific examples.
4. Jonathan Senchyne uses the phrase “strategically edits” to describe what one chapter in Clotel does to and with Lydia Maria Child’s story “The Quadroons” (“Bottles of Ink and Reams of Paper: Clotel, Racialization, and the Material Culture of Print,” in Early African American Print Culture, ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, 140-158; 157). That phrase itself represents a kind of argument about Brown’s fictional practice. Use the phrase “strategically edits” as the jumping-off point for a fuller description of what it means and why it matters when Clotel borrows and adapts another literary text.
5. When I lecture on Clotel on Tuesday evening, I will consider some questions about the advantages and limitations of close reading as a method for getting a grasp on novels. In some ways, Clotel is very different from, say, Emma (it’s more like Paradise Lost in the sense that it would be perverse to read it without considering questions of history and politics). But it remains important, I would say, to attend closely to the novel’s narrative voice. Find a two- to four-sentence stretch that you think can fairly stand in for the novel’s narrative voice more generally. Then write a paragraph characterizing that narrative voice. What do we know about the narrator? What are the predominant traits of the narrative voice? Make sure to consider intellectual, affective (emotional) and political dimensions as well as more narrowly stylistic ones.
Here's the critical reading assigned in addition to the novel for tonight's lecture (which I am still in the process of writing):
#Ann duCille, “Where in the World is William Wells Brown? Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the DNA of African-American Literary History,” American Literary History 12:3 (2000): 443-462
#Jonathan Senchyne, “Bottles of Ink and Reams of Paper: Clotel, Racialization, and the Material Culture of Print,” in Early African American Print Culture, ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 140-158
#Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (2008): 1-14
And here's the assignment students will write for seminar this week. It is the last of four short assignments that they write as they build up to working on a final essay that will include both close reading and critical argument; it is designed to let students practice skills as well as coming to a deeper understanding of the novel itself.
Please write answers to the following questions.
1. One of the critical essays you read for this week offers this overview of critical assessments and interpretations of Clotel:
The runaway slave’s mastery of neoclassical diction, which some see as little more than a flaunting of his educational attainments, is for other readers a subversive deployment of the King’s English to tell the slave’s story. What one critic views as structural chaos, another sees as a creative appropriation of multiple forms – from the oral tradition of the slave narrative to the sentimental emplotments of women’s fiction. Where one sees only the bourgeois pretensions of the black middle class, another finds an “informed use of folklore” that offers an insider’s view of the plantation system[.] (Ann duCille, “Where in the World Is William Wells Brown? Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the DNA of African-American Literary History,” American Literary History 12:3 [2000]: 443-462; 456)
a. Make a list of three to five of the novel’s most conspicuous formal or stylistic traits (you can include the three that duCille isolates here, only I would like you to describe them in your own words and in as factual or descriptive a manner as possible).
b. Then offer at least two possible arguments concerning the way each particular trait works in the novel. Make sure that these arguments are formulated so as to satisfy the implicit expectations we have of interpretation: not just what the trait involves or how it works, but also what it’s for or why it matters.
2. Near the end of the essay, duCille writes: “When all is said, done, and disposed of—the borrowing, overplotting, preaching, and propagandizing—the real problem with Clotel lies in the particular slippery nature of Brown’s brand of realism, which both deploys and denies the documentary impulse that drives the reading, if not the writing, of African-American literature” (458).
a. Write a paragraph or two that first paraphrases and then amplifies or illuminates this critical assertion. What does duCille have in mind when she lists borrowing, overplotting, preaching, and propagandizing as crucial elements of Clotel? Give specific examples; you can refer back to your answer to question 1 if you feel you’ve already touched on some of the relevant details.
b. What does it mean to say that this novel’s “brand of realism . . . both deploys and denies the documentary impulse”? Pick that statement apart by explaining what duCille means by “the documentary impulse” and identifying where it can be seen in Brown’s novel – three or four examples will do. Then consider what it means to make a distinction between deployment and denial in this context.
3. One obvious oddity of Brown’s novel is that though it regularly invokes real historical incidents, the timeline/chronology is distorted: there are a number of internal contradictions as well as departures from real historical chronology. What are the effects of these contradictions and anomalies? What do they tell us about the novel’s mode of representation? Offer a thesis and support it with specific examples.
4. Jonathan Senchyne uses the phrase “strategically edits” to describe what one chapter in Clotel does to and with Lydia Maria Child’s story “The Quadroons” (“Bottles of Ink and Reams of Paper: Clotel, Racialization, and the Material Culture of Print,” in Early African American Print Culture, ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, 140-158; 157). That phrase itself represents a kind of argument about Brown’s fictional practice. Use the phrase “strategically edits” as the jumping-off point for a fuller description of what it means and why it matters when Clotel borrows and adapts another literary text.
5. When I lecture on Clotel on Tuesday evening, I will consider some questions about the advantages and limitations of close reading as a method for getting a grasp on novels. In some ways, Clotel is very different from, say, Emma (it’s more like Paradise Lost in the sense that it would be perverse to read it without considering questions of history and politics). But it remains important, I would say, to attend closely to the novel’s narrative voice. Find a two- to four-sentence stretch that you think can fairly stand in for the novel’s narrative voice more generally. Then write a paragraph characterizing that narrative voice. What do we know about the narrator? What are the predominant traits of the narrative voice? Make sure to consider intellectual, affective (emotional) and political dimensions as well as more narrowly stylistic ones.
Sunday, October 26, 2014
Closing tabs
Rather grumpy about ongoing minor respiratory ailment. Had hoped I might be able to run for a bit today, but really I'm still hawking up huge gobs of disgusting phlegm, it will not do lungs any good to strain them with exercise! Behind on various work stuff, generally feeling rather low. (About to dig in on clearing some of these overdue tasks, which with any luck will lead to a feeling of considerable relief .)
Nice writeup of last week's Swift symposium. I had a very funny conversation afterwards with an elderly Irishman who was peculiarly vivid of conversation. He was excited to tell me that I was "a BORN LECTURER: BORN TO THE PODIUM" - also I used two words he was unfamiliar with, paratactic and hypotactic, which let him tell me a wonderfully complex multi-part anecdote about an alcoholic friend of his, now deceased, who was a great lover of language and once told this gentleman, when he used the word "creature" to describe a lady, "to refer himself to the discipline of the dictionary"! This is now a good new phrase in my repertoire. Said friend died in hospital of complications due to alcoholism, but on his deathbed sung this gentleman two songs which I promised I would go and hear online: one I think was "The Parting Glass," if I am remembering correctly, and the other was a Gaelic song whose title loosely translated into "Nobody knows her name" (various versions here). Some reciting of Yeats was also involved....
Fun to see this profile of an old friend in my Digg feed!
Jane Goodall's jungle.
The link B. sent me yesterday really did bring a smile to my face: the Shetland Pony Grand National!
Nice writeup of last week's Swift symposium. I had a very funny conversation afterwards with an elderly Irishman who was peculiarly vivid of conversation. He was excited to tell me that I was "a BORN LECTURER: BORN TO THE PODIUM" - also I used two words he was unfamiliar with, paratactic and hypotactic, which let him tell me a wonderfully complex multi-part anecdote about an alcoholic friend of his, now deceased, who was a great lover of language and once told this gentleman, when he used the word "creature" to describe a lady, "to refer himself to the discipline of the dictionary"! This is now a good new phrase in my repertoire. Said friend died in hospital of complications due to alcoholism, but on his deathbed sung this gentleman two songs which I promised I would go and hear online: one I think was "The Parting Glass," if I am remembering correctly, and the other was a Gaelic song whose title loosely translated into "Nobody knows her name" (various versions here). Some reciting of Yeats was also involved....
Fun to see this profile of an old friend in my Digg feed!
Jane Goodall's jungle.
The link B. sent me yesterday really did bring a smile to my face: the Shetland Pony Grand National!
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Bringing home the bacon
Fou lard.
In other news, I have a slight cold - perhaps 3 out of 10 on Davidsonian ailment scale. It is making me feel as though I would benefit from a full head transplant!
In other news, I have a slight cold - perhaps 3 out of 10 on Davidsonian ailment scale. It is making me feel as though I would benefit from a full head transplant!
Monday, October 20, 2014
Hot zone update
Sitting at my desk in New York and trying to gear up to write a letter of recommendation that's due today - fortunately I don't need to be on campus until three, as I still have quite a bit of reading to finish before class as well.
Dublin was excellent but phenomenally tiring - any time I was not actually seeing people and doing conference things, I was essentially huddled in bed in my hotel room (fortunately it was quite a nice room - I put up the Do Not Disturb sign and just left it up!).
Interesting interview with Richard Preston at the New York Times about current plans to update his thriller-like account of Ebola as of the early 1990s, The Hot Zone. I vividly remember reading this during my first year of grad school - my roommate LeeAnn had the hardcover and I devoured it! I have been following Ebola developments closely and with interest: my two main fantasy alternate careers are neurologist and epidemiologist, and I am a little sorry that I am not involved in planning and organizing ways to contain the epidemic.
I am relieved to see that Preston admits that one bit of the book is especially in need of correction (I always wondered!):
Dublin was excellent but phenomenally tiring - any time I was not actually seeing people and doing conference things, I was essentially huddled in bed in my hotel room (fortunately it was quite a nice room - I put up the Do Not Disturb sign and just left it up!).
Interesting interview with Richard Preston at the New York Times about current plans to update his thriller-like account of Ebola as of the early 1990s, The Hot Zone. I vividly remember reading this during my first year of grad school - my roommate LeeAnn had the hardcover and I devoured it! I have been following Ebola developments closely and with interest: my two main fantasy alternate careers are neurologist and epidemiologist, and I am a little sorry that I am not involved in planning and organizing ways to contain the epidemic.
I am relieved to see that Preston admits that one bit of the book is especially in need of correction (I always wondered!):
In the original “Hot Zone,” I have a description of a nurse weeping tears of blood. That almost certainly didn’t happen. When a person has Ebola, the eyes can turn brilliant red from blood vessels leaking and blood oozing out of the eyelid. That’s horrifying, but it’s not someone with tears of blood running down their face. I want to fix that.Here's his piece in this week's New Yorker.
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Closing tabs
I have that uneasy pre-travel feeling that I am forgetting something extremely important, and indeed I have a ton of stuff to do tomorrow morning (including packing), but I seem to have survived the frenzy of talk-writing and lecture-writing and so forth....
Have been spoiled with some very good light reading. When I read the good stuff it makes me wonder why I waste my time with second- and third-tier nonsense! On the other hand, the hours must be whiled away some way or another - but I do think I will have a year sometime when I will only read novels I really really want to read, and that the rest of my reading should be narrative nonfiction etc.
Anyway, Deon Meyer's Cobra is superb - hard to imagine a better book in this sort of vein. Then I read a delightful trio of books on the recommendation of Charlie Stross: Max Gladstone's Craft books. I was slightly skeptical at first - it's purely personal preference, but I really always like it best when urban fantasy follows a single character as either first-person narration or third-person limited, it's part of my affinity for character- and voice-driven fiction - but was utterly won over. These books are great! Interestingly Deon Meyer is using a very similar form of narration, in terms of pacing and following a set of characters, though the books are in most other respects about as different as you could imagine.
Just now halfway through a book I have been awaiting for a long time, Garth Nix's new Abhorsen installment Clariel. The original trilogy of Old Kingdom books, along with Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, were the inspiration for The Explosionist and sequel: I kept haunting the shelves of the Bank Street Bookstore looking for something like and as good as those two sets of books, and when I couldn't find them, I thought I would just have to try and make something like that myself....
Closing tabs:
Nobody knows what running looks like.
Metadata scarf and cowl!
Medieval pet names (courtesy of Rivka).
Puggle production line? (Wishful thinking edition.)
Four years later, a lost African gray parrot is reunited with its former owner:
Have been spoiled with some very good light reading. When I read the good stuff it makes me wonder why I waste my time with second- and third-tier nonsense! On the other hand, the hours must be whiled away some way or another - but I do think I will have a year sometime when I will only read novels I really really want to read, and that the rest of my reading should be narrative nonfiction etc.
Anyway, Deon Meyer's Cobra is superb - hard to imagine a better book in this sort of vein. Then I read a delightful trio of books on the recommendation of Charlie Stross: Max Gladstone's Craft books. I was slightly skeptical at first - it's purely personal preference, but I really always like it best when urban fantasy follows a single character as either first-person narration or third-person limited, it's part of my affinity for character- and voice-driven fiction - but was utterly won over. These books are great! Interestingly Deon Meyer is using a very similar form of narration, in terms of pacing and following a set of characters, though the books are in most other respects about as different as you could imagine.
Just now halfway through a book I have been awaiting for a long time, Garth Nix's new Abhorsen installment Clariel. The original trilogy of Old Kingdom books, along with Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, were the inspiration for The Explosionist and sequel: I kept haunting the shelves of the Bank Street Bookstore looking for something like and as good as those two sets of books, and when I couldn't find them, I thought I would just have to try and make something like that myself....
Closing tabs:
Nobody knows what running looks like.
Metadata scarf and cowl!
Medieval pet names (courtesy of Rivka).
Puggle production line? (Wishful thinking edition.)
Four years later, a lost African gray parrot is reunited with its former owner:
When Nigel vanished four years ago, he spoke with a cultivated British accent.
Little is known about where the African grey parrot went, what he did — or who he was with — in those missing years. But when he was reunited with his owner, Darren Chick, in Torrance last week, the British accent was gone and the bird was chattering in Spanish, often mentioning the name “Larry.”
Sunday, October 12, 2014
Marginalia redux
Strange to say, thinking about marginalia last week for class turns out to have been much more closely related to one of my current scholarly obsessions than I had quite imagined. I'm speaking on Saturday in Dublin (here's more information about the event) on Swift and commentary; been reading rather maniacally and now trying to put thoughts in order, but here is a funny bit from one of my favorite essays in a really excellent new collection.
One delightful but painful side effect of working on this talk has been that I am now absolutely consumed with the desire to spend some months sitting in rare book libraries with amazing tomes before me: I do have a sabbatical coming up, not next year but the following one (i.e. 2016-17), with the only problem being that I have two competing projects that I am equally excited about, The ten-week Clarissa and the new one for which I have just now created a folder on the hard drive titled "Ancients and moderns"!
So, Paddy Bullard, “What Swift did in libraries,” in Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book, ed. Bullard and James McLaverty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 65-84 (the quotation is on 72):
One delightful but painful side effect of working on this talk has been that I am now absolutely consumed with the desire to spend some months sitting in rare book libraries with amazing tomes before me: I do have a sabbatical coming up, not next year but the following one (i.e. 2016-17), with the only problem being that I have two competing projects that I am equally excited about, The ten-week Clarissa and the new one for which I have just now created a folder on the hard drive titled "Ancients and moderns"!
So, Paddy Bullard, “What Swift did in libraries,” in Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book, ed. Bullard and James McLaverty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 65-84 (the quotation is on 72):
[I]t is clear that Swift was an unusually active reader. This activity often involved a kind of conversation with the text written upon the printed page. The tone of that conversation was often indignant or otherwise aggressive--the anti-Scottish invective of his notes on Clarendon ('Cursed hellish Scots!'--'Greedy Scotch rebellious dogs'--'Diabolical Scots forever', etc.) is not untypically virulent.Also: "The regularity of Swift's anti-monarchical marginalia across several volumes gives it a ritual quality, as though he were leafing through his books looking for opportunities to perform it. . . . It seems that Swift found in the pages of his personal library a textual site just secure enough to bear anti-monarchical inscriptions that were too dangerous for him to make in any other kind of papers, either published or private" (74).
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