Life in the asylum

This article makes me want to write a novel!

(A relief, since I have been feeling in recent months as though I would never want to write another novel again - partly I am steering internally towards non-fiction - but it occurs to me it may be a function of mood rather than judgment? I am definitely Amazoning Dolkart's Morningside Heights book, though...)

What I saw last week

The circus...

(And there was a magical tent - the tastelessly named Tapis Rouge! - with a fellow carving slices of ham to put in little sandwiches, and custard and ladyfingers in martini glasses on a conveyor belt during the intermission, and glasses of champagne pressed into one's hand!)

When I was little, I liked all of Noel Streatfeild's books very much - I was more strongly drawn to theater than to dance or tennis or figure-skating any of the other things she would now and again write about - I could not, in all honesty, fantasize about joining the circus, since gymnastics was second only to baseball as absolute most-hated least favorite gym-class activity - but I certainly read Circus Shoes many a time, checking it out again and again from the library....

(The female character Santa lies about her ability to play the violin, but turns out to have a talent for gymnastics - I thought that probably if I needed to make a living at the circus, while I might not have the background for animal training or the wherewithal for acrobatics, I could almost certainly play the clarinet in the band!)

Thinking about

the vague possibility (which would seem heretical given my non-expertise, but which has been prompted by teaching bits of Wordsworth and Shelley and Byron this week) of possibly, in future, teaching a class on Romantic poetry...

My two favorite lines from Shelley: first, of course, "Hell is a city much like London"; second, the famous stanza from "Adonais":

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awaken'd from the dream of life;
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

"?" "!"

At the Guardian, Stuart Jeffries on the use and abuse of the exclamation point in the age of e-mail. (It is an overly clever/snarky piece, to my taste, but there is much of interest also.)

On laziness

At the Science Times, Adele Conover profiles Anna Dornhaus:

Dr. Dornhaus is breaking new ground in her studies of whether the efficiency of ant society, based on a division of labor among ant specialists, is important to their success. To do that, she said, “I briefly anesthetized 1,200 ants, one by one, and painted them using a single wire-size brush, with model airplane paint — Rally Green, Racing Red, Daytona Yellow.”

After recording their behavior with two video cameras aiming down on an insect-size stage, she analyzed 300 hours of videotape of the ants in action. She discovered behavior more worthy of Aesop’s grasshopper than the proverbial industrious ants.

“The specialists aren’t necessarily good at their jobs,” she said. “And the other ants don’t seem to recognize their lack of ability.”

Dr. Dornhaus found that fast ants took one to five minutes to perform a task — collecting a piece of food, fetching a sand-grain stone to build a wall, transporting a brood item — while slow ants took more than an hour, and sometimes two. And she discovered that about 50 percent of the other ants do not do any work at all. In fact, small colonies may sometimes rely on a single hyperactive overachiever.

Why do some worker ants lean on their shovels and let the rest of the workers do all the work? “It’s like students living together — you’ll always find one will have a lower threshold for doing the washing up and will end up always doing it all,” she said.

Indiscretions

Proust, as quoted by Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method: "Hence the temptation for the writer to write intellectual works, which is, however, a gross mistake. A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price."

The republic of letters

In the latest NYRB, G. W. Bowersock had a nice piece about Anthony Grafton (subscription only - I must get hold of a copy of Worlds Made By Words...). This bit especially caught my eye:

From Momigliano perhaps Grafton learned how to make an attractive essay out of a scholarly debate, although his own curiosity and wit probably provided the basic intellectual resources. In his essay on the Warburg seminars he writes that Momigliano "saw style as central to the history of scholarship." By this he meant "style of collection and argument" as represented among the antiquarians, and he rightly observes that this mattered as much to Momigliano as the subject matter of the scholars he was studying.

But what was not important to Momigliano was literary style, and that is probably why he became so vexed by Hayden White's emphasis on rhetoric in the writing of history. His tin ear when it came to literary style led to a memorable debate at Lausanne in 1976 on the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Momigliano claimed that Gibbon had not made up his mind whether the poems of Ossian were a forgery or not. But Gibbon's ironic style had misled him. Already in March 1776 David Hume had recognized what Gibbon was saying and, in a letter of congratulations, wrote that he was "certainly right" to doubt the authenticity of the poems.

Life after potential

Decca Aitkenhead interviews Kazuo Ishiguro for the Guardian.

Gulliveriana

At the Blue and White, Columbia's undergraduate literary magazine, Samuel Kerbel has written a very nice review of Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century.

He makes several thoughtful criticisms of the book.

One concerns what I think of as a certain temperamental unwillingness to argue for or against, or to articulate what may be controversial conclusions; this I am not sure I can do anything about!

The other concerns the level of knowledge I assume among my readers, and this seems to me in many respects the more pressing question, an interesting challenge I will need to tackle in the next non-fiction book I write.

When I first started working on Breeding, I was thinking very seriously about trying to make it a more general history - a narrative-oriented work of scholarship designed to reach the broadest possible audience.

(Historians tend to produce these more easily than literary critics, as the narrative mode is part of what makes this possible and narrative is more central to most history-writing than it is to literary-critical interpretation; but at least in this book, I'm definitely writing something close to cultural and intellectual history, so it's not necessarily a disciplinary sticking point...)

I realized, though, after drafting a couple chapters, that at the level of intellectual development I was then at (this sounds intolerably pretentious, but really it was just realistic self-assessment!), it still was going to be better for me to write a more traditionally scholarly book, with extensive quotations and footnotes, rather than to try slightly prematurely to make the transition to a more generally accessible mode. I thought I would learn more about the eighteenth century writing it this way - that I was still at a stage where I needed to immerse myself in the nitty-gritty rather than making the move to generalize...

That said, I tried to write as engagingly and accessibly as possible - and in my next academic projects (I regretfully observe that it is increasingly clear to me that I have two quite different - and in certain respects complementary - academic books pestering me to write them, one to do with forms of culture that cannot be transmitted through language and one to do with the history of the novel and the development in the European tradition of widely shared conventions of notation for human behavior in prose fiction), I am definitely going to try and take that next step away from quotations and footnotes and the other apparatus of academic style. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn is my aspirational model...

Islomania

At the Guardian, Robert Macfarlane on islands (the whole piece is well worth reading, but here is the opening paragraph):

Nineteenth-century British admiralty charts included more than 200 islands that are now known not to exist. Think of that - an imaginary archipelago, a scatter of dream isles, that sneaked past the sober men at the Hydrographic Office and on to the world's most definitive sea maps. It's easy to imagine how the mistakes were made. A dark band of sea fog is mistaken for an atoll. A distant alto-cumulus seen through heat is taken for a sea cliff, towering over a bronze sea. A hydrographer jots down the discovery, before the ship gets veered away by weather. The data is returned to Greenwich's cartographers - and so the geological and the chimerical get mingled.

Brilliant/hungry

Ed Park interviewed at the L Magazine:

Have you ever been a Starving Artist, and did it make you brilliant, or just hungry?

In my twenties I memorized the prices of the cheap meals I regularly ate — the lunch special at Taj Mahal on 4th Street, for example, or the big roast chicken at the now defunct Cuban Chinese place near 100th. I would make sure I had the exact change necessary for the tip, so that I could put the money on the table and leave quickly. I don’t know that this had any value beyond contributing to my ability to tell you this story now, years later.

Reminds me of a line a student of mine wrote a very long time ago now, in a creative writing assignment (for the Daily Themes class as taught by Wayne Koestenbaum, probably spring of 1996): "When I'm hungry, I memorize well." Hmmm, I wish I could remember that student's last name, I would think she's probably still writing...

Getting past the bouncer of Club Normal

Colson Whitehead interviewed at The Rumpus.

I am very eager for a copy of Sag Harbor...

The other future

Lev Grossman on the Star Trek franchise.

Impedimenta

Samuel Johnson, from the Life of Pope, on why it took Pope five years to translate Homer:

When we find him translating fifty lines a day, it is natural to suppose that he would have brought his work to a more speedy conclusion. The Iliad, containing less than sixteen thousand verses, might have been despatched in less than three hundred and twenty days by fifty verses in a day. The notes, compiled with the assistance of his mercenaries, could not be supposed to require more time than the text. According to this calculation, the progress of Pope may seem to have been slow; but the distance is commonly very great between actual performance and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose, that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow – but on the morrow some difficulty emerges, or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure, all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker’s mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualties.

Punctuality

This is incredibly ingenious! (Via SMCISS.)