Discretion

Posting will continue light through the end of the week--but in the meantime, you might go and read Alice Boone on Nicholson Baker and the question of what it means to write history in small chunks.

Logbook poetry

At the Guardian, Veronica Horwell has a lovely piece on Margarette Lincoln's Naval Wives & Mistresses:

True, the upper strata of society and the service were habitual letter-writers in the period of her book, the mid 18th century to the end of the Napoleonic wars; although what survives tends to be incomplete correspondence, a single voice of a duet and not always private, since the gold-braided classes jostled in social networking. Lady Amelia Calder, wife to a rear admiral, fluttered at the Admiralty: "I do desire that you will not be such Savages tomorrow as you have been hitherto, and let us have proper letters by Tuesday's Post." How Lady Elizabeth Collins badgered for her son's advancement can be deduced from the First Lord of the Admiralty's reply: "Madam, It would be very gratifying to me if I had the power to comply with the innumerable applications that are made to me for promotion, and particularly so with your Ladyships . . ." It wasn't that the spouses of the grandest had little to do but chivvy for glory, since many had to manage estates while their husbands were on the far side of the world and the furthest end of a fouled chain of mail deliveries for years at a time. Admiral Codrington dispatched what sound like Post-it notes to his wife instructing her when to paint the garret floors; Mrs Admiral Boscawen filed business reports to her husband (her barley was the best in the parish) and remembered to send a framed print of him to the Corporation of Truro. This was the Penelope side of being "a hero's wife", interrupted on no notice when she had to set out in a chaise in hope of a short port rendezvous. Often enough, the beloved had already heaved off with the tide and the hamper of tender provisions never reached him.

But aside from Admiral Rodney, whose financial worries were legendary, status and money were not the nagging concern in the highest echelons that they were among the middling sort, for whom going to sea as an officer in this period was one of the few possible fast tracks not just to income but prize money, everything that Sir Walter Elliot sneered at in Persuasion as "the means of bringing persons of obscure birth into undue distinction and raising men to honours which their father and grandfathers never dreamt of". Fictional Captain Wentworth came back from the wars with £25,000 to rescue Anne Elliot and Jane Austen's plot, but nonfictional rewards were less sure; Austen's brother Charles didn't do that well from prizes and he shipped his family aboard to live economically, which likely caused the death of his wife after childbirth. Finance niggles through the middling stories, the prospect of reduction to half-pay come peace or illness; even in fighting-fit years, a man's shipboard expenses could absorb so much income that a couple might not be able to afford to meet or to pay postage. William Wilkinson, ship's master, told his Sally that everything he owned was hers, and sold his flute for two and a half guineas to settle their bills until the Copenhagen prize money should be paid out.

"The body is female"

At the Telegraph, Matt Ruff is skeptical about Richard Baer's account of a patient with multiple personality disorder.

The classics

The literary tastes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Hmmm, lots of overlap there with the Davidsonian shelf...

Sentence I most whole-heartedly endorse (on Raymond Chandler): "I often re-read his novels when I don’t have any new materials that measure up"!

(Courtesy of the proprietor of the Dizzies, whose novel Personal Days can be ordered from Amazon!)

Gobbeting

I've been thinking recently, in the wake of an interesting set of conference talks on reading, about the relationship between discontinuous reading (of the kind notionally fostered by the internet) and discontinuous writing (perhaps initially the natural response to writing on a word processor rather than by hand or on a typewriter, but now becoming a dominant mode of composition with its own routines and forms).

In a totally different context, Mary Beard has a very good piece in this week's TLS on what it means to read in lumps:

A century or so ago, the English word “gobbet” was given a new lease of life. This obscure term for a small lump of something unsavoury (mud, raw meat, snot) was reborn. It now referred to a short extract of text, one that was often set as an examination exercise for students to identify and analyse. Who wrote these lines? What is their context? What is their historical significance?

The OED finds its first use in the new sense in March 1912, in a poem in Punch satirizing those who promised quick routes to classical learning: “He’ll gorge you with gobbets of Homer” (meaning, you won’t have to read the whole thing). But the examination exercise went back well into the nineteenth century, and the word must have had currency in university jargon long before the Punch satirist picked it up. You certainly find it several years earlier in donnish letters and diaries. R. W. Livingstone, for example, the best-selling author of The Glory That Was Greece, was full of complaints in a letter to an Oxford colleague written around 1910 that, while the students could do their gobbets in the examinations well enough, they did not seem to have much clue about classical literature and culture as a whole: “The shocking thing is that real understanding of the classics counts for so very little side by side with the gobbets”.

Like most nineteenth-century innovations in pedagogy and testing, the gobbet originated in Classics, and took a particularly strong hold in the study of Greek and Roman history. But it soon spread to the study of history more generally and to theology, where the Bible proved a prime candidate for “gobbeting”. It has a remote descendant in the I. A. Richards school of practical criticism in English, which (whatever Richards’s original and loftier aims for the exercise) now boils down to throwing an unidentified piece of poetry at students, and expecting them to identify it and say something sensible about it.

The rest of it is very interesting too--this meta-conversation about close reading seems to be happening across a number of humanities disciplines, the name of I. A. Richards has been invoked many a time in my hearing this last year or two!

Eco-friendly, carbon-neutral

The four-guinea-pig-power lawnmower. (Courtesy of Maxine.)

"Ya wanna see the Rauschenberg?"

Phil Nugent falls eye-first into a Rauschenberg...

A lyric speaker

A piece of amazing good fortune yesterday morning: I found on my doorstep, unsolicited, a book that I did not yet know was exactly the book in the world I most wanted to read!

In the usual chaotic way of dealing with stream-of-books-entering-apartment-as-I-am-trying-to-exit, I tore open the envelope from FSG and made a mental note of its contents and then dumped both envelope and book on the floor for later dealing-with....

But as I tidied up yesterday evening (I do not understand why it is so much psychologically easier to dump things on the floor rather than leaving them on a table, rack or shelf, except that tables, racks and shelves are of course already overloaded with books, papers and the detritus of triathlon training!), I found myself opening the book (which I had fully intended to stow somewhere in a to-be-read stack) and reading the first paragraph, and the next thing I knew it was an hour and a half later and the only thing I had stopped to do was send an outraged e-mail to Ed Park which I will quote for full effect though the information it contains reduplicates what I have already said here:

Date: Mon, 12 May 2008 21:15:01
From: Jenny Davidson
To: Ed Park
Subject: but...

...this book of sarah manguso's is quite extraordinary!!!! it arrived on my doorstep this morning, i picked it up just to put it away really, and have found myself mesmerized--it is exactly the book i did not know i needed to read this evening?!? hmmmm, this was fairly miraculous, i am just going to go and read the rest of it now, but it is so well-written and actually wise, it is good for my soul!

The Two Kinds of Decay is Sarah Manguso's memoir of the years of the mysterious illness that hit her in her early 20s. It should be read by anyone interested in contemplating the ways a life may be wrenched off course by calamity--more than that, though, it's a poet's book, and the prose has a distinctive quality (quality in both senses of the word) that makes me think of my short list of utter indispensables (Primo Levi, Georges Perec, W. G. Sebald). Plain and ornate at the same time, like the poems of George Herbert....

I will eat my hat if this book does not win a lot of prizes and sell a lot of copies, it should be on writing class syllabi and on medical school syllabi and generally just pressed into the hands of everyone I know!

Instead of giving a sensible description of it, I am going to take the liberty of transcribing my favorite chapter. (Links to some of Manguso's other writing can be found here.) Do yourself a favor, buy yourself a copy of this book as soon as possible...

Paralyzed

A spinal cord injury can paralyze you in a moment, but the paralysis of my disease is a long story. Worse, then better, then worse, then better. For years.

A woman rides her motorized chair up a ramp and onto a stage. Ten feet away from the podium, she parks her chair, gets up, and walks a few steps, very slowly, to accept her award.

What a sickening prop.

But people forget a woman in a chair is strong enough to walk a few steps each day and has saved this day's steps for the acceptance of her award.

Chair or no chair: a binary relation. But the vicissitudes of moving the body around are infinite. You never know what a person in a chair can do.

I saw two young women at a lecture once, one of them in a wheelchair that looked like a piece of expensive Italian furniture. Her girlfriend sat down and said You want to do a transfer? and the girl in the chair said Yeah and maneuvered her chair next to the bank of auditorium seats, placed her hands on the arms of the first seat, and swung herself into it with her ropy upper body. Then she reached over and folded up her hot little wheelchair.

Other than the ones I used in the hospital, I never got my own chair. When I couldn't walk I stayed in bed, because it was always assumed I'd get better soon, and the chair was for people who were done forever with walking.

I was afraid of the chair. It would indicate I wasn't going to get better. And my doctors didn't want to believe that any more than I did.

Chair or no chair: a binary relation. Bad or good, sick or well, hopeless or hopeful.

This is how I described paralysis to my friends: Sit down right next to me on a bench or a sofa, me on the left, our four thighs in a row. Lift your right thigh and put it back down. Then the next thigh over, lift it and put it down. Then the next thigh after that.

That feeling of trying to lift some else's thigh with your own mind is how it feels to be paralyzed.

Though my worst relapse paralyzed me from the thighs down and weakened me everywhere else, most of my paralysis was always in the process of getting either better or worse. The state of my health changed daily.

During a week of plasma exchanges, I'd be able to move a little more each day. that's how quickly the myelin regrew. If I were waiting at home to get sick enough to be readmitted to the hospital, I'd be able to move a little less each day. That's how quickly the myelin was destroyed by my anxious blood.

My feet were often completely paralyzed, because they'd go first and weaken the most. To this day, scratching my arches, even lightly, is excruciating, but the toes and the rest of the sole can take pins. There was some permanent damage, either to the axons or to the myelin or both. Now my feet are both hypersensitive and hyposensitive.

I was always being moved around, given physical therapy and having my bedsheets changed under me, so most of the big parts of my body got at least a little movement each day.

But the toes, when one is lying down, do not get a lot of attention. After a week or more with paralyzed feet, my toes needed to be moved right away. I couldn't bear the stillness anymore. It was like a full bladder. When my parents visited that afternoon, I asked my father to move my toes. He grasped one set of toes in each hand and bent them up and down and all around in a bunch for a few minutes. And either he or my mother did this every day they visited until I was strong enough to sit up and reach my toes myself.

There are many reasons I like this chapter, but one reason is the way it stabbed me with a memory of my grandfather in the nursing home where he spent the last couple years of his life. He lived too long, that is the long and the short of it--he was trapped in his own body by Parkinson's, and his sheer stubborn physical sturdiness kept him alive past the time when it would have been better to have died. One of the things that most afflicted him, aside from his helplessness and despair, was this sensation of numbness and tingling pain in the feet. It was not a symptom the doctors seemed to know how to deal with. In general I felt quite helpless to do anything to improve his situation, I lived far away in another city and even when I was in London a visit only seemed to serve as a strong reminder to him of the misery of his condition. The one thing I ever thought of that helped was when I brought him some peppermint foot lotion from the Body Shop and rubbed his feet with it. It was a small thing; it made a small but important difference...

Havey-cavey

There is no clear and rational sense in which my life would be improved by the addition of a guinea pig, but I must confess that I had several moments over the weekend where I felt a sharp pang of longing for one of these little creatures, they are so lovely and placid and sleek and plump--the short-haired ones are particularly dear to my heart, I think they are aesthetically preferable to the fluffy ones....

(Good Wikipedia entry!)

(A number of other guinea pigs passed through my life during the years of childhood, but the two that were particularly important to me were a delightfully sleek and solid brown-and-white short-haired guinea pig called Linda, when I was five or so, and then a few years later a fluffy black one called--inevitably--Fluffy. I regret to say that to the best of my knowledge, both names were chosen by me--and properly speaking, the spelling should have been "Lynda," because I am thinking that this was my inspiration. More pictures here--although they now look very dated, I suspect that I am not alone in retaining from my 1970s childhood an implicit notion of Wonder Woman as the pinnacle of female beauty! Sort of hybridized, a few years later on, with Erin Gray in Buck Rogers!)

All of this thinking was prompted by the absolutely enchanting chapter on guinea pigs in Jim Endersby's A Guinea Pig's History of Biology: The plants and animals who taught us the facts of life.

On which note, courtesy of Endersby's book, a list of delightful guinea-pig-related facts:

In 1664, the natural philosopher Henry Power described the cheese mites he spotted under his microscope as looking "like so many Ginny-Piggs, munching and chewing the cud"

The fashionable ladies at the court of Elizabeth I were often followed by servants who carried a pet guinea pig on a silk pillow

George Eliot describes a character in Daniel Deronda as having "a pair of glistening eyes that suggested a miraculous guinea-pig"

The US Department of Agriculture, established by Lincoln in 1862, soon had a "substantial colony" of guinea pigs that were used to test vaccines, a colony that in the early twentieth century became the means of conducting extensive experiments on inbreeding in which brother and sister guinea pigs were crossed for more than two dozen generations

J.B.S. Haldane and his sister Naomi Mitchison bred guinea pigs as children so that they could (in Mitchison's later account) "try out what was then called Mendelism on them":

One of JBS's friends remembered that in 1908 the lawn of the Haldanes' house was entirely free from the usual upper-class clutter of croquet hoops and tennis nets; instead, 'behind the wire fencing, were 300 guinea-pigs. . . . 'The guinea pigs were a mine of information,' Naomi recalled, 'we had to arrange marriages, which sometimes went against the apparent inclinations of the partners, though I rather enjoyed exercising power over them.'

(This era came to an end when one of J.B.S.'s school friends let his fox terrier crawl over the front gate...)

Geneticist Sewall Wright was absolutely devoted to guinea pigs, though he also worked with Drosophila, and it was this quotation that most vividly brought back to me the satisfying heft of a guinea pig in one's hands:

Despite the necessity of using Drosophila in experiments, Wright would bring guinea pigs into the classroom whenever he could justify doing so; on one occasion he brought one in to show his class some interesting variations in its coat colour. 'This particular guinea pig was somewhat more fractious than usual and was scurrying around on the desk and was not about to be quiet,' a student recalled, so Wright picked up the restless cavy and tucked it under his armpit, where he usually kept his blackboard eraser. A few minutes later, running out of space for the next equation, he reached for his eraser 'and started to erase the blackboard with a squeaking guinea pig'.

Egg season

The motto for the week is that when Life is Troublesome, Literature provides Consolation!

Wendy Townsend's Lizard Love is an exceptional novel, I fell utterly in love with it as I read it this weekend. Colleen Mondor reviewed it a month or two ago for Bookslut, and I knew at once that I had to get it. It more than lived up to my expectations--it's a modest and understated but beautifully well-written and moving coming-of-age story about a girl who loves lizards.

(It is not in a literal sense my story, I am fond of lizards and snakes also but I think that as a child I was especially captivated by furry creatures; I strongly identified with the main character, though, and remembered myself in second and third grade as an intensely devoted member of the early-morning Animal Care Club in the lower-school science room...)

Not a lot happens in this book, in terms of plot, but the beauty and aptness of the descriptive language and the emotional force of the connections the novel makes are both remarkable. I hope it makes the nomination lists for the big children's book prizes, it deserves the most widespread attention and praise...

Here is a passage I particularly liked (Spot is the narrator Grace's much-loved iguana, and both of them are suffering from the onset of sexual maturity):

After school I went home to see Spot. I climbed the ladder and sat down in front of his cage. From his branch he watched me with wide-open eyes, as if I was the enemy. His dewlap was pushed out as far as it would go. A bruise ringed his nose from when he'd tried to force it through the chicken wire. I felt terrible--he was hurting and he wanted out so bad.

I held blueberries in my hand. His gold lizard eye followed my other hand as I opened the cage door. The round black pupil dilated. I reached in cautiously--his teeth were sharp. He bobbed his head some more, ignoring the berries. I put them in his dish, then slowly reached up and put my hand on him. His jowls swelled under my touch. He turned his head, tongue-flicking my skin again and again, and then he opened his jaws and leaned toward my hand. I pulled away and shut the cage door. He had slept beside me every night for so long. My throat closed up. I looked at him with tears running down my face, and he bobbed his head at me furiously.

Spot's teeth had cut into my leg like knives the night before. I tried to pry him off, but his claws dug in and his scales scraped my skin raw. When he finally let go I threw back the sheet. In gray morning light I saw that the scales had turned orange around his head and shoulders. His eyes were wild and wide open, and he stood with his tail arched. He licked blood from his lips, making the soft clicking sound he always made when he cleaned his teeth.

Pressing a sock against the bite, I hurried to the bathroom to splash peroxide on the V-shaped wounds. Pink bubbly streaks ran down my leg. In the mirror I saw my body with its swellings and blemishes and dark hair beginning to grow in places. That was when I saw the other blood.

I must also single out the cover design as one of my all-time favorites! And now that I have read it, I am going to send it to Wendy, who lost a dear companion last year.

(There has been very upsetting iguana news recently--do not click on that link unless you want to make yourself sick with despair about human nature and the fragility of some of the most beautiful members of the animal kingdom!)

In the Light Reading alternate universe, about 65% of all novels are narrated by hard-boiled and intelligent female protagonists with loose crime or SF genre affiliations, so I was very much pleased with James Alan Gardner's Expendable. (Recommendation courtesy of Brent.) It's science fiction, but it works as a young-adult novel too. And as a bonus, it has an egg collection--for no good reason, it has been egg season round here recently!

Blips

At the NYRB, Francine Prose on the novels of Patrick Hamilton:

Hamilton's novels are unlike anyone else's, though at moments you catch glints of other writers: Charles Dickens, William Trevor, Henry Green, Patricia Highsmith. In their simultaneously purposeful and almost giddy malevolence, some of his characters recall the principals in Jacobean tragedy, which seems fitting since, in addition to his novels, Hamilton was also the author of two popular melodramas, Rope and Gaslight.

The latter may be one of the few literary titles to have become a verb. "To gaslight" is now commonly used to mean the willful undermining of someone's sense of reality in order to drive that person mad, a malign scenario often enacted in Hamilton's fiction. Along with alcohol, loneliness, and romantic obsession, the abuse of power—the small but all-important degrees of dominance conferred by class, gender, status, and beauty—is Hamilton's great subject. For Hamilton's heroes, falling in love entails surrendering their autonomy to undeserving women who mistreat their abject suitors, partly because it is the only power these women will ever have, and partly because they enjoy it.

At the start of The Siege of Pleasure, the second novel in the Twenty Thousand Streets trilogy, Jenny Maples has just finished breaking Bob's heart and blowing the last of his savings. Now she looks back on the social and moral descent that began when—poor, alone, dependent on her so-called betters—she worked in the suburbs as a live-in servant, entombed with two ancient sisters and their gaga brother. How little she would have sold her soul for, or, for that matter, her body. A car ride seemed exciting. Tea in a tea shop! A movie! A drink! Especially a drink. Jenny blames her downfall on a single glass of port, which led to another glass of port. Here is how Patrick Hamilton describes alcohol's seductive and ultimately successful assault on her virtue:

A permeating coma, a warm haze of noises and conversation, wrapped her comfortably around—together with something more. What that something more was she did not quite know. She sat there and let it flow through her. It was a glow, and a kind of premonition. It was certainly a spiritual, but much more emphatically a physical, premonition of good about to befall. It was like the effect on the body of good news, without the good news.

Much of Patrick Hamilton's fiction was loosely based on personal experience, a biography that involved considerably more alcohol than good news.

What I want: the fullest possible list of other literary titles that became verbs!

Squeak!

Shades of Peter Pan's crocodile-swallowed alarm clock:

Any artificial hip can occasionally make a variety of noises. But until Stryker, a medical products company, began marketing highly durable ceramic hips in the United States in 2003, squeaking was extremely rare.

Now, tens of thousands of ceramic hips later — from Stryker and other makers that entered the field — many patients say their squeaking hips are interfering with daily life. One study in the Journal of Arthroplasty found that 10 patients of 143 who received ceramic hips from 2003 to 2005, or 7 percent, developed squeaking. Meanwhile, no squeaks occurred among a control group of 48 patients who received hips made of metal and plastic. “It can interrupt sex when my wife starts laughing,” said one man, who discussed the matter on the condition that he not be named.

Showers of blood

At the Telegraph, a nice extract from Jim Steinmeyer's new biography of Charles Fort:

In May 1911, the New York Public Library had been reopened in its new Beaux-Arts marble temple at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Now diligently working on his next project, Charles Fort walked to the library every morning, five days a week. He trudged up the flank of white polished steps, took a seat at one of the wide oak desks in the reading room beneath the gilt and coffered ceiling, removed his coat and slid it carefully over the back of his chair.

He read meteorology, natural history, shipping reports and science journals, squinting through his glasses as he turned page after page. With some regularity, he turned to the sheet of paper on the table and scratched a pencil note of some neglected phenomenon. All his notes were written on various grades of pulpy paper that were then ripped against a ruler into small rectangles. Some slips were torn from old correspondence; some were thin onion skin. Each piece was about 1½ by 2½ inches. Fort's handwriting was on a severe diagonal, lower left to upper right, tightly capturing the essence of each report with abbreviations. When he needed extra room for his pencil scrawl, a slip was torn long, then folded to match the dimensions of the other notes. An extremely elaborate note might require an entire sheet of paper, pleated and fixed with a paper clip so it ended up the same size. He managed to assemble 40,000 notes, by his own estimate, deliberately seeking information of the widest possible diversity: 'astronomy, sociology, psychology, deep-sea diving, navigation, surveying, volcanoes, religion, sexes, earthworms'.

Syllabub in a martini glass

At the FT, Rosie Blau lunches with Sebastian Faulks. She seems to have found him rather unforthcoming, partly because of a press embargo on the forthcoming James Bond book Faulks has penned. I must read that--I am a great admirer of Faulks, and I grew up reading Ian Fleming, although I am ashamed to contemplate in adulthood the books' naked prejudices (this text is from the article's sidebar):

Initially a distraction (“They fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around.”), Bond gradually warms to the prospect of female company.

In Quantum of Solace (1960), he says: “If I don’t marry an air hostess, there’ll be nothing for it but marry a Japanese. They seem to have the right idea, too.” And in Goldfinger (1958), he encounters Pussy Galore: “Bond liked the look of her. He felt the sexual challenge all beautiful Lesbians have for men.”

Clubs of Quidnuncs

At the Guardian, John Mullan on the joys of Alexander Pope's Dunciad:

In the 1740s, near the end of his life, Pope went back to The Dunciad, changing the "hero" from Tibbald to a new foe, the poet laureate Colly Cibber, and adding a long and brilliant fourth book. The early versions of The Dunciad were ebullient poems, in which the denizens of Grub Street disported themselves. The new Book IV presented "the Goddess coming in her Majesty to destroy Order and Science" and was an all-embracing anatomy of a culture fallen into banality and ignorance. From opera-going to the art collecting of virtuosi to new fashions in philosophy, all the rages of the day are shown as mad. Pope manages to imply that fashionably atheistical philosophy is somehow related to the vogue for French cookery among the wealthy. The Dunciad is, among other things, the first English satire on celebrity chefs and the greedy foodies who adore them. The chef is a modern "priest", performing strange transformations of animal flesh.

The board with specious miracles he loads,
Turns Hares to Larks, and Pigeons into Toads.

The wealthy have spawned the poem's "young Aeneas", an aristocratic youth whom we follow on his pleasure-seeking Grand Tour. "Europe he saw, and Europe saw him too." Heroic only in his hedonism, he samples not the cultural glories of the Renaissance, but the fleshly pleasures of the warm south.

The Stews and palace equally explor'd,
Intrigu'd with glory, and with spirit whor'd;
Try'd all hors-d'oeuvres, all liqueurs defin'd,
Judicious drank, and greatly - daring din'd[.]