Sample bias

At the TLS, Mary Beard considers two new books on the ancient Romans. Here, a description of Estelle Lazer's work on the bones of the dead of Pompeii:

Apart from some celebrity skeletons and plaster casts of dead bodies on display to the public, most of the human remains that survived the Allied bombing raids on the site during the Second World War were piled up in two main stores, each in an ancient bath building not normally accessible to ordinary visitors. Lazer spent most of her research time, months on end over seven years, in these depots – ill-lit (she worked for part of the time with a hand-held bicycle light) and infested by wildlife. The identifying labels once attached to the bones had long ago been eaten by rodents; many of the skulls had provided convenient nesting boxes for the local birds (covering the bones and what Lazer calls the key “skeletal landmarks” with bird lime); in one store a “cottage industry” had been established, which used the human thigh bones to make hinges to restore the ancient furniture on the site. “This has contributed”, as Lazer writes, with deadpan understatement, “a novel source of sample bias to the femur collection.”

Would be geniuses

From Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (required reading, in my opinion, for stylists aspirational and otherwise):

Before I decided to write this book my twenty-five years with Gertrude Stein, I had often said that I would write, The wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses. I have sat with wives of geniuses, of near geniuses, of would be geniuses, in short I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses.

Also: antique typewriters! (Courtesy of my father.)

Intuition and Pest Control

A Journey Round My Skull presents books from an imagined academic history concerned with the study of invertebrates and other animals as they relate to architecture and psychology, invented and designed by Julian Montague.

Making sense

At New York Magazine, Wesley Yang on Tony Judt.

The ambition "to do a big Frogs"

An obituary (in the old style!) for Sir Kenneth Dover, and an appreciation by Stephen Halliwell here.

"Grapes, Cherries, Plumbs & Apricots"

At the NYRB blog, Cathleen Schine on Austenolatry.

Workload breakdown

At the Times, a delightful piece by Alicia DeSantis on "This Progress" in light of its being done. Some very funny quotations in there, many of which I endorse (I was much less grumpy than usual on the last day because the break room was full of donut holes, mini-cupcakes and possibly the most delicious chocolate-chip cookies I have ever eaten in my life, baked by a teen who I happened to see on campus the next day as I hurried into Schermerhorn for a meeting - she was forlorn, the show was over!):

The schedule could be grueling even for much younger interpreters, who, unlike their elders, were unpaid. (They did receive a hat, bag and a museum membership; adults were paid $18.75 an hour, teenagers $7.25 an hour.) Solomon Dworkin, an 11-year-old sixth grader at the School at Columbia University who was one of the oldest children in the piece, said many of the younger ones had trouble with the pace of 40 to 50 interactions a day, 60 to 70 on weekends.

“They had a workload breakdown,” he said. “They would have liked more snacks.”

Some of the problem may have had to do with the intellectual rigors of the job. The younger children were “all pretty smart for their age,” he said, but “I’ve never met a 7-year-old who can match an 11-year-old in a conversation about philosophy.”

The young and the restless

A public service announcement...

The Dylan Thomas Prize is offered by the University of Wales to a writer under 30 whose published book (it can be a novel, a collection of poems, a travel book, a play, etc. but I believe it needs to have been published in the last year - go and look at the specs for more details) is deemed by the prize committee most worthy of recognition. It need not have anything to do with Wales, and is open to writers of all nationalities! It is a large cash prize, and they are eager for submissions, so please forward this announcement widely if you know of anyone who might be interested.

Entries must be received by 30 April 2010.

In the pipeline

The conundrum of light reading is that one always needs a good supply of it, but that the times when it would most be a balm (busy, stressful regular life) are also the times when one is least likely to have the attention to secure a sufficient supply, especially in times of frugality (i.e. no non-essential Amazon purchasing while on half-pay sabbatical)!

I am still harping on Dorothy Dunnett and the way that having those two series stacked on the floor of my living room, with many volumes left to read, made me feel calm and happy, so I figured I'd better sink a bit of attention in securing a really good supply of light reading for the next couple months. I have put out the call for suggestions, and got some good ones (I have always avoided Jacqueline Carey's books, for instance, due to trashy covers and the suspicion that they were perhaps not quite what I most enjoy, but Charlie Jane's recommendation has now caused me to obtain as much of the Carey oeuvre as I could lay hands on), but the really obvious thing to do was to go and trawl through the archives of Maxine's truly excellent crime fiction blog Petrona.

One of my favorite things in the world is the amazing Borrow Direct, which has basically been the gateway to all sorts of amazing reading for me since the service was initiated in 1999. I am in love with Borrow Direct! (And I feel certain that if they keep statistics, I must be in the top 100 users, if not top 10...) So I had an absolutely maniacal fit of BorrowDirecting the other night, and then on Wednesday I returned a cartload of books to the library and went to the circulation desk to pick up the volumes I had requested.

I told the girl at the desk that I had requested quite a lot of books (otherwise they don't know if they're just looking for one book for you or many), and she looked at my ID card and said "You sure did!" It was a good thing I had the cart with me - I had not quite imagined the sheer bulk...

Anyway, the first volume I read was one to which Maxine had given an especially good recommendation, Liz Rigbey's Total Eclipse. I found it absolutely gripping - it is not exactly like Tana French, but it has the same quality that French's novels do of being both very much like and at the same time infinitely superior to the common fare in the genre. Then I read David Levien's City of the Sun, which I also found excellent. Only trouble is, crime novels are mostly so short! But this pile will tide me over for the next month or so...

Sweat, dust, romance

At TNR, a stirring review by Anthony Grafton of Louis Menand's new book on the American university. Here's the bit I especially liked:

Menand describes the university in generalities. Many of them strike one as true, but some of them seem to reflect a much narrower experience even than he has had, and imply a surprisingly reductionist perspective. Early on he notes that, once upon a time, being a professor meant having a vast fund of esoteric knowledge that the ordinary person could not match--but now, Menand smugly observes, “most of that esoterica is available instantly on Wikipedia.” What?! If the esoterica in question have to do with Britain and America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and even there I have my doubts), maybe. But how many humanities professors and students are prepared to make do with Wikipedia’s “esoterica”? They interpret Chinese classics that have to be pieced together from bamboo strips, or they reconstruct Greek texts from fragments preserved in garbage dumps and mummy wrappings, or they record and interpret religious ceremonies in India and Nepal. You cannot do those jobs without esoteric knowledge. You cannot Wiki them.

Such slips are not minor. They are not even slips. They reveal an error of principle. Menand’s statement that graduate students do not need specialized knowledge is an astonishing and terrible concession: taken literally, it defines the humanities as a realm of simple problems simply solved. No sweat, no dust, no romance, no struggle. But the great humanists are furious, passionate giants who heave one mountain onto another as they stage their attacks on Olympus. At its Faustian and demonic peaks, the tradition of modern humanism includes Benjamin on the Paris arcades and Scholem on the Kabbalah, Fraenkel on Greek and Latin literature and Weinreich on the Yiddish language, Neugebauer on ancient science and Kantorowicz on law and political symbols and Klemperer on the language of the Third Reich, Wittgenstein and Curtius, Kristeller and Panofsky, Syme and Momigliano, Arendt and Colie. Merely to mention these names is to see the inadequacy of Menand’s analysis.

Most of us, and most of our students, are in no danger of performing at that august level. But when we enter on our studies, we take unto ourselves these and other masters, and we sprinkle ourselves with their dust. Anyone who has watched humanists work over the last generation or two has seen new masters take the places of the ones who came before them, and has marveled as they restored new ideas, voices, songs, and images to our records and our canons. We still climb the mountain, or at least we try.

(Link courtesy of Rohan Amanda Maitzen; an excerpt of Menand's book appeared last year in Harvard Magazine.)

Krabbatomania

Patrick Cates's amazing collection of outdoor mattress photos.

Nuclear minibreaks

"A unique piece of Cold War memorabilia that can be used on weekends."

Lipogrammatic

Franklin Bruno on HiLo hero Georges Perec.

Murder most gruesome

Exploding toad case solved.

Snippets

An arts-oriented day yesterday with my father, who was visiting from Philadelphia - we went to walk through Tino's Guggenheim show as visitors, then had a tasty dinner at O'Neal's (I had French onion soup and a delicious seafood salad [mussels, shrimp, squid, lobster over mixed greens with parsley and a lemon vinaigrette], my dad had Manhattan clam chowder and steak au poivre with scalloped potatoes and spinach, then we gluttonously shared a traditional ice-cream sundae - vanilla ice-cream, hot fudge sauce and whipped cream, with cookie-crunch topping) before going to see the rather excellent Shostakovich opera The Nose at the Met.

It is a minor opera, I think - the music is locally appealing (beautifully well-performed, and it's an attractive idiom) but it doesn't add up to anything much - certainly not a patch on the Gogol short story. But the Kentridge production is absolutely lovely! I do not think I have ever seen such a delightfully well-integrated visual spectacle on the operatic stage (well, I do remember a long-ago transparent illuminated cube in a City Opera production of Handel's Rinnaldo that I liked very much!) - quite beautiful.

I flew back from Cayman on Wednesday evening with an extravagantly purchased supply of light reading, having found over the years that travel passes very quickly if I have suitable books with me and not if not - first, Sara Gruen's Riding Lessons (purchase spurred by my feeling the loss of Dick Francis!), then Penny Vincenzi's trashy but highly readable An Absolute Scandal (her books are all the same as each other, and not exactly what I like - also I am sure that I have read at least one other novel about Lloyd's Names, but cannot now remember title or author - but you need good long books for plane flights, and hers are highly engrossing!), and finally (this one I finished when I got home) Thomas Perry's Silence.

In other news:

Sam Lipyste offers the aptest answer I've ever seen to the question about a typical day in one's writing life.

The Cinderella solution!

Mr. Cube says "Leave it to private enterprise"... (FT site registration required).

Theatrical things I'm looking forward to: A Behanding in Spokane (if you are a CU affiliate and haven't been checking out the Arts Initiative offerings, you should - I am always a skeptic about these institutionally sanctioned arts programs, but the discounts are really substantial and if you have flexibility on scheduling, they seem to have seats at pretty much all the big stuff you might want to see - the tickets for The Nose were only $25 apiece, and it was a sold-out show, with all the cheap seats gone very quickly and early on); and Jay Scheib's Samuel R. Delany extravaganza Bellona, Destroyer of Cities (I loved the previous piece in the trilogy, Untitled Mars (a few thoughts here)).