John & Belle Have A Blog

Not Like Last Time

An acquaintance of mine gave me three Raymond Chandler books today (The Simple Art of Murder, Trouble Is My Business, and Killer in The Rain). I had mentioned to him that I was reading the title essay in The Simple Art of Murder just a few days ago, when I spotted it in his car. This makes the giving of the book mildly silly since he knew I had it, right? But nonetheless, it was thoughtful. He is the kind of person who voraciously reads mystery novels and then just discards them. That this behavior should seem shocking while throwing magazines away is perfectly normal is a cultural peculiarity. Surely the magazines, with their glossy pages, were more expensive to produce?

My friend is a Singaporean in his 50s and was born right around the corner from my house. In those days there were more shophouses on the thin triangle of land between Kampong Java road and Bukit Timah. An adjacent few blocks of them remain behind my place, some already slated for destruction. They will all be replaced by glass towers of condos.

When my friend was young there were really kampongs all along Bukit Timah road by my place; raised walkways running between little huts on stilts, roofs made of corrugated iron or even nipah thatch. He learned to swim in the water of the canal that runs along here. I wouldn't really want to go in it now, although it's clean enough to see to the bottom when there hasn't been much rain, and there are tadpoles and fish in its shallow water. Back then it was filthy, with dead chickens floating past and a good bit of raw sewage in there. He said they were thrilled when the Farrer Road public swimming pool opened. Nowadays he is a well-off engineer with a Mercedes and gold chains. A bit "buaya" but not so bad, lah. (Buaya is Malay for "crocodile"; it means "womanizer.") And who doesn't love free books!

Check Out The Realistic School Uniforms!

Zoë recently drew herself dancing with her new best friend F. She is totally rocking out, there (that's F.'s little sister looking on and obviously thinking "they're so coool!"). I'm really proud of the 3/4 profile thing she's got going--ancient Egyptian people took like 3000 years to not figure that out.

He was a very convincing Harry Potter for Halloween.

In less successful representational news, I've been reading The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, which is illustrated throughout in what is generally a pretty convincing noir-ish style. But here, dear reader, something has gone badly wrong. So wrong, in fact, that I'm not even sure what should be happening. And no, the story isn't about a mutated hunchback gunsel with eight-foot-wide shoulders.

New Crobuzon

I've been trying to draw a picture of New Crobuzon. This is equal parts Pudong and termite mound; what do you think? More fruiting bodies? Doing the google image search for fruiting bodies has been hard for me already.

 

'Russian' Estoti Commingles Granoblastically With 'Russian' Canady, aka 'French' Estoty. Let's Start There

I know MY commented on this re: Congresspedia before, in a note I'm too lazy to look up now, but there is something silly in the NYT Magazine article about how s33krit blogs will revolutionize intelligence gathering. It's actually a good idea, although the prospect of CIA/DIA flamewars looms large. The thing is, they're calling their 'open-source' spy wiki 'Intellipedia'. Obviously they're echoing Wikipedia, but they've chosen the wrong part. What they're making is, in fact, a wiki, so it ought to be Wikintellia or something.

Tangentially related, the internet let me down today. I wanted someone to have drawn a map of Antiterra from Nabokov's Ada. But Wikipedia met me with the sad words: "This article about a fantasy book is a stub." Peter Lubin sniffs in an otherwise good article that "it would be unfortunate if, as with Tolkien's boring hobbits, a cute little cult of Antiterra developed (with maps, and vocabulary, and sinchilla mantillas). That is not likely to happen." On the contrary, it would be awesome, although maybe no one should be allowed to bring their 10-year-old daughter to AntiterraCon. (Finally, why when they make movies of Lolita do they insist on having her played by a 16-year-old? She's twelve. It seems to me to betray an unseemly sympathy with Mr. Humbert.)

The Wizard of...Albion?

How did I not know before that the Sci-Fi channel filmed a version of Wizard of Earthsea a few years back in which they make Ged (and a number of other important characters) white? Ged. White. That is so incredibly messed up that I can't believe it happened recently (in 1994 2004! brainfart). Read this excellent essay to learn more (I too wondered as a young person about why everyone on the twin-sunned desert planet of Tatooine was so...white.) Read'em and weep:

Robert Halmi, Sr. said this:
"Legend of Earthsea, the miniseries, was cast completely colorblind, as any of my productions have been. We searched for the right actors for the roles and brought in diversity to the cast as a result. There was no decision to make Ged blond and pale-skinned."
— Interview on Scifi.com's Ask Robert Halmi, Sr. feature on its 'Legend of Earthsea' website, July 20, 2004

Bastard. Unmitigated bastard. 

It Writes Itself

Zoë has a stuffed bear with cherries on his bib, so he's named Cranbeary. He looks like a warning about the dangers of thalidomide; he's getting seriously worn at the seams. She won't sleep without him. Now Violet has a stuffed lamb named Grey-Grey. She picked him out at IKEA by screaming when Belle walked by the shelf. Now she won't sleep without him. Which brings you pretty much up to date ...

I was at IKEA today. They still have more Grey-Grey lambs. We could buy one ... in case anything ever happened.

Oooh, sort of The Velveteen Rabbit meets The Island, is what you're saying?

We're Back

Well, Bali is a very nice place. The sort of place to make you think (to quote Belle's brother) 'sometimes I don't care what people write on the internet.' There is wisdom in that sort of lofty other-worldliness, if you can sustain it.

The most exciting moment came when the freak high wave hit and my excellent two-in-one edition of Paul Park's Soldiers of Paradise and Sugar Rain got whirled and spun and filled with sand, which took some time drying and brushing out later. The deck chairs floated. Belle grabbed Zoë, so she wasn't washed out to sea or anything. (But she was surprised to wake up under such turbid circumstances.) My flip flops were washed up about ten feet and my glasses on the little side table ... well, I like my new frames better. Getting new glasses in downtown Bali is a very reasonable economic proposition.

Henry Farrell gifted us the Park, which is tremendous. I'm stunned by the glory. I'll write a review later. It's out of print, but I gather his new book, A Princess of Roumainia, is getting good attention. The edition we have, thanks to Henry, is one of those cheap Fantasy & SF book club hardback editions. The cover art is dreadful; invasive sand and surf hardly wreaked especial improvement in print quality. But I realize I'm nostalgic about these editions, since I used to borrow stacks of a friend's dad's club hardbacks back in the late 70's.

See here for a very interesting interview with Park, plus sample cover art. Would you voluntarily read a book covered with this? Well, you should. Buy them used from Amazon for a penny. But buy them.

Sweet Home Singapura

Just got into lovely Changi Airport. 4 AM Singapore time. Belle and girls will be flying East from LA to see her folks right about now. No way she'll have time to blog in the near future, so it's up to me - reduced to functional bachelorhood - to uphold our blog's honor and (dwindling) traffic.

Watched Kung Fu Hustle, The Last Samurai, Million Dollar Baby and Miss Congeniality on the flight. Obviously by the time I got to that last item I was too out of it to figure which button to push to change the channel. Kung Fu Hustle is huge good fun. And - above and beyond the winning sartorial incidentals and amiable wirework fightplay - very neatly plotted. Turn-on-a-dime firecracker to cosmic Buddha Palm plot arc. (Did Hustle get a big stateside release? It was big out here. I highly recommend it.) Samurai was just awful. Baby was fine, but why all the fuss? Then a film with Sandra Bullock and Michael Caine? Eh. Better than a sharp stick in the eye or a cold bath with someone you despise. Really it's like nothing, like anaesthetic. Then two hours of your life you wanted removed are gone. Like cosmetic surgery performed on the dimension of time - a little temporal tummy tuck. No muss, no fuss. Of course, sleep is an old folk cure that works just as well.

Read Michael Swanwick, Stations of the Tide. Fantastic. The Bureaucrat is a great character. Like if Dashiel Hammett had written the Continental Op as the Galactic Op. Maybe I'll pen a serious review later. (Thanks so much, Henry, for sending the book.)

So I'll conclude this little update with some quick scans of Smith Family Book Store cover silliness acquisitions. Vardis Fisher (to complete the previous post). And W. Somerset Maugham.

What I read on my summer vacation

The missus and I are on vacation. (We should have left a note for you before now, explaining the dearth of posts.) Showing off the kids to the folks in the old country, Ameriky.

They've got real selection in films on the plane now. I watched "Caddyshack". It holds up well, but I think comedy technology has, in objective, absolute terms, improved since then. What do you think? Are humans getting better at being funny, just like they are figuring out how to make smaller phones?

I read Iain M. Banks, The Algebraist. Cracking good space opera.

Jetlag pretty bad.

But went to see "Batman Begins". Very satisfactory.

One of the things I love to do whenever returning home - HOME-home: where I grew up, Eugene, OR - is go to Smith Family Bookstore and buy old paperbacks for the camp covers. We collect. It's hard to do this in Singapore. The supply was never large, and - no kidding - the jungle reclaims. Climate very hard on paperbacks. Anyway, there were still samples from our last expedition, couple years back, in a box in the hallway of my parents' home. Vardis Fisher on top. The Passion Within; original title. "Peace like a river", from the "Testament of Man" series. Can't find a scan of the exact cover, but this and this should give some not erroneous notion. Normally it wouldn't cross my mind to actually read these things. But, why not? Vardis Fisher + google = hey, he's, like, the Napoleon Dynamite of mid-20th Century Idaho letters. Go ahead, poke around. Here, for example.

The Harper Prize for Children gave Fisher the first financial cushion he had ever known. He resigned from the Writers' Project, married his third wife, Opal Laurel Holmes, built a house and modest ranch on a choice piece of Idaho land near Hagerman, and turned his attention to the project that he thought would be his most enduring contribution to American literature. He was convinced that in the tetralogy he had not fully understood Vridar's (nor his own) problems. To tell his story aright, he would need to explore the breadth of all human history, especially the evolution of the religious instinct. He envisioned a series of novels based on rigorous research in anthropology, psychology and history that would begin with prehistoric man and proceed to modern times. Children of God and his work on the Writers' Project had affirmed his dedication as a researcher. He knew that religious themes would invite scrutiny from many quarters, not just from the Mormon world. Expecting more modest sales from books in the series, he planned to alternate them with novels about the early American West. The Americana, he felt sure, would enable him to carry the series to completion and repay the publisher for standing with him.

In time he named the 12-volume series The Testament of Man. Eleven novels prepared the way for the final instalment, a retelling of Vridar's story as Orphans in Gethsemane (1960). The modest attention that Orphans received revealed how much Fisher's fame had declined since the 1930s and how much he had miscalculated in his plan to assure Testament success with Western novels. Darkness and the Deep (1943) and The Golden Rooms (1944) opened the series ably enough; non-verbal humans took readers to unfamiliar ground and invited a good deal of sympathy for the characters. But as the series progressed Fisher increasingly let the weight of facts overpower the imaginative dimension – a tendency that he had been warned against as the tetralogy neared its conclusion. ( No Villain Need Be had especially been faulted for didactic emphasis). Continuing the pattern in the Testament, Fisher tended to tell rather than to show. Few readers who purse all twelve volumes of The Testament leave it concluding that its chief merit lies in its creation of characters. Increasingly, the novels recount versions of a protagonist who talks with a companion about religious errors that pervade his society. The novels become novels of ideas more than novels of character or action. Fisher desires, it is clear, that his readers will decide that his protagonists (always ahead of their time) see to the heart of the matter.

After the publication of the fifth volume of the series, the publisher bailed out. Another small house published six and seven, but when Fisher moved to the Christian era, no publisher could be enticed to take on the series. Four years later, Alan Swallow of Denver signed on to take the series to the end, ending the deep despair that had overtaken Fisher.

Yeah, it's not very good, turns out. But it's mediocre in a way no book would be today, probably. Chapter 1 opens with Hareb, unhappy father, trying to track two of his children - Piamon and Peta - having incestuous sex in a dank cave. (They're gnostics, or something, and Peta is a sophisticated fop with a theory that you have to mortify the flesh with vice, or something.) Wife Takuda is all misery, since Hareb does nothing but remind her that she is evil for having taken his godhead, his virginity. Hareb's son, David, needs to save beatiful Helene from the Antioch brothel into which she has been sold. (He gets no sympathy from Hareb.) David saves Helene, despite his distracted worrying about whether Helene has been forced to provide 'boyish' favors, and if so, which, and to how many. He is caught. To the mines with David, probably. Daughter Soulai is trying to trick her large-jawed jailor, Markos, into giving her poisoned wine so she won't have to be burned alive as a Christian. Her trick works. Hareb is resolved to flee into the desert alone and pull off his own genitals, or something. That takes us up to p. 17. Like Homer says: "So far as anyone knows, we're a nice, normal family." But even Homer nods. And so, I fear, does Fisher. The book is actually quite boring, being mostly too much philosophy and theology. It reminds me of pre-revolutionary French pornography, minus the pornography. And no jokes. And with a rather incongruously impressive patina of genuine historical and scholarly erudition over the whole. I don't think I'll keep reading.

Books

OK, so, we definitely don't have enough shelves. And, I left lit crit for last and now there's all this $%#@%^ Stanley Fish piled up on top of the graphic novels shelf, which doesn't seem like a long-term solution. (Though it might promote healthy reading habits in John. He's look at the forbiddingly cheerful blue spine of Is There A Text In This Class?, and then he'd notice all those issues of Alias down there, and then...) Also, I bought five books today: Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate; Naomi, by Junichiro Tanizaki; Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather, by Gao Xingjian; R.K. Narayan's The Guide, and Miss Marple's Final Cases, by Agatha Christie. I've read the Golden Gate before. It seems like just yesterday I was thinking, why do I have all these damn Agatha Christie novels, when they aren't actually good? Maybe I have a problem. On the plus side, I got some really cheap, nice, blue-and-white Chinese porcelain jars to hold the books up where I left the empty spaces. You know, in case we ever get more books, later. Sometime.

The Young Spindrifteers

I'm reading that 40's Boy's Adventure book Belle picked up. The Phantom Shark, a Rick Blane electronic adventure, by John Blaine. So I figure google will have a few hits. Great phantom narwhal disporting! Is there nothing that doesn't have it's own fansite? Soon every object in the universe will have its own Cafe Press product line.

Chapter 1:

Rick Brant was aware that events frequently hang on small, obscure incidents, but he had no idea that a mental image of his sister Barby holding an envelope to the light, trying to see what was in it, would eventually lead to one of the most unusual adventures of his young life.

It began in Washington, D.C. Rick, Don Scott, Hartson Brant and Hobart Zircon, two of the Spindrift scientists, were preparing to return to Spindrift, the island laboratory and home of the Brandts off the New Jersey coast.

The Whispering Box Mystery had been solved, to the entire satisfaction of the scientists, the boys, and the United States government. The Spindrifters were tired. For weeks they had raced against time to create a counterweapon for the Whispering Box.

While they waited for final word that the case was closed, Rick read them a letter from Barby, his pretty blond sister.

Other nice sentences in the first couple pages:

Little Julius Weiss, the mathematics genius of the Spindrift group, leaned forward.

Rick was proud of his sister. In situations where most girls would be a burden, she could more than hold her own.

His name, he said in wonderfully bad English, was Henri. He pronounced it 'On-ree'.

Do you agree that French is just wonderfully bad English? If not, what is it exactly?

I'm having sort of indifferent luck with Barbie/Barby-based fiction these days. Maybe I should try to cut down.

Word and Object

Here, earnest reader, I am in the same position as once before in these pages when I was relating certain early and happy experiences with the sweets of life and I added a warning not to confuse an act with the name it goes by, or to make the elementary mistake of dismissing something living and specific with a general term. For if I now set down the fact that for a number of months, until my departure from Frankfurt, I was on intimate terms with Rozsa, often stayed with her, secretly superintended the conquests she made on the street with those slanted, shimmering eyes and the gliding play of her underlip, sometimes, even, was there in hiding when she received her paying customers (occasions that gave me small grounds for jealousy) and did not disdain to accept a reasonable share of the proceeds, one might well be tempted to apply a short, ugly word to my way of life at that time and to lump me summarily with those dark gallants about whom I was talking above. Whoever thinks that actions make people equal may go ahead and take refuge in this simple procedure. For my own part, I am in agreement with folk wisdom which holds that when two persons do the same thing it is no longer the same.

From Thomas Mann, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. Maybe people don't realize what a great comic novelist Mann is. "And yet the word 'refine' can claim a place here, which I withhold only in order to clarify my meaning." That's just it, you see. You should read The Holy Sinner, too.

Narwhal disporting

I'm reading Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era at the rate of a page a month. I should be done in Winter 2050. Of young Pound apprehending Henry James: "He liked James, he wondered at James, as at a narwhal disporting."

Earlier, a longer characterization, nested within a description of an aged Pound mimicking James; not the elephant straining to pick up the corner-wedged pea, derided by H.G. Wells, but a magnificent Horton hatching an egg (to pursue my Seussian theme of the evening), who somehow is both egg and elephant in the plenitude of his person: "the lifting, after an intent showman's pause, of some unforeseen syntactic shell to disclose not the pea last gimpsed but ("Mr. Pound is shocked at my levity") an Auk's egg on the point of hatching (with patience) yet further wonders. To what Keatonian risks did James not commit himself, risks of immobilization in mid-chaos, as he essayed for the thousandth time yet one more construction; and with what wit each impasse becomes a node, as the arrested line strikes out of it in an unforeseeable direction, seeking new points of suspension!"

Why do you fellows pull this stunt?

A new moth poem (to add it to the two I've already collected; see here, here & here). It's suddenly obvious that moths are nature's English Romantics, what with their self-destructive ways. There are probably dozens of moth poems.

Who Owns Bruno Schulz?

Interesting article in The Boston Review (couple months old now) about Bruno Schulz - fights over frescoes and authority and pride and ownership of artistic heritage.

The dispute is narrowly over frescoes removed to Israel from Drohobycz, Schulz' home town. The problem is that here we have a writer who is profoundly rooted in a place, whose story compels people to locate him outside that place. I can't find any images of the disputed murals. I would be curious to see them.

The scene of their discovery in the article is - as the writer notes - Schulzian:

The frescoes at the center of this controversy are slight and unassuming. Seen for the first time in Benjamin Geissler’s film, they are faintly visible on the wall, peeking out from behind old jars and cans in an apartment whose current residents, an aging couple with poor eyesight, never noticed the faint shadows of Schulz’s handiwork. Alfred Schreyer, one of Schulz’s last surviving students and a dedicated participant in efforts to preserve his memory in Drohobycz, is so overjoyed that he appears he might disintegrate in one of the paroxysms Schulz describes so fondly in his stories.

If you have never read Schulz, well you should. Start here, where someone is very kindly providing extensive translations.

From Cinnamon Shops: "Many a time one of those forgotten rooms was opened by chance and found to be empty; the tenant had long ago moved out, and in drawers untouched for months unexpected discoveries were made."

One of my favorite novels, I have mentioned before, is David Grossman's See Under: Love, in which Schulz appears as a character. You should read it. It seems there is a minor literary cottage industry of fictional Schulz insertions. Cynthia Ozick and others have made him their own, after a fashion. It is a very understandable urge, if only it didn't come to grief over a few meters of plaster.

It is the wittiest partition that ever I heard discourse, my lord

The Little Professor proposes sensible linguistic reform - term limits. She objects to 'interrogate'. That's one of my pet peeves, too. More specifically: 'interrogating the boundaries'. Someone with too much time on their hands needs to rewrite the first part of the play within a play in Midsummer Night's Dream - "O wicked wall" and "Cursed be thy stones for thus deceiving me!" - so it's about a bunch of idiot graduate students writing a hermeneutically suspicious paper about 'interrogating the boundaries'.

Just plain 'interrogate' is good enough for comedy. Shakespeare in the little room, looking nervous, tapping the table. (Alternatively, just a book on the table.) Critics watching him through the one-way glass. Lots of gritty, cynical banter as they sip coffee in styro. Hardboiled Walter Benjamin: 'You think he's the guy?' 'Hey, even if he isn't, no guy's so civilized he ain't a testament to barbarism. He wouldn't be here if he didn't have somethin' to hide. Just look at him.' Maybe a good-critic/bad-critic routine. One posing as a sympathetic humanist. 'I know you're a good guy and this is all a misunderstanding. But my partner here -' Then the bad critic explodes into a stream of foam-flecked jargony abuse. Then a third critic bursts in, kneecaps and tasers the Bard, who starts bawling and confessing to everything. Alternatively, a version of the Nite Owl interrogation scene from L.A. Confidential. Two famous authors in different rooms and the critic shuttling back and forth, expertly, getting the suspects to cough up dirt about each other, reducing them to blubbering crybabies. Later, over drinks: 'Why'd you become a critic?' 'I guess every kid wants to be a critic. I guess I wanted to help people, do some good, make a difference.' 'So do you? Make a difference, I mean?' 'I dunno. Sometimes it just gets crazy. But I get tenure in two weeks. Then I don't gotta worry about nothin'.' Of course the author escapes from his cell and kills the critic just before he gets tenure. So the critic's partner has to track down the the author and avenge the critic's death. Ah, the function of criticism at the present time. To be the thin blue line between the reading public and the text.

Oh, I know, Jonathan, it's not as bad as that. But it's still funny that people say 'interrogate'.

Don't Read These Books

Last week I read two of the worst books ever. They had a kind of epic grandeur of badness. I think maybe John found this book on the ground or something: Robert L. Forward's Dragon's Egg and Starquake (two books for the price of one!). Now, given that the second one is a sequel, you may wonder why I read it. In short: because it was there. (I read the unutterably bad book Studd three times, just because it was in the bathroom of my apartment.)

Forward writes "hard" SF, on account of he is a physicist. This seems to have unduly impressed a number of people. Hence, the blurbs:
"Knockout...One of a handful of books that stretch the mind." --Arthur C. Clarke
"This is one for the real science-fiction fan." [is this unambiguously positive?] --Frank Herbert
"Never in the history of science fiction, I think, have so many of the most exciting contemporary scientific concepts played a role in a book." [again, does this amount to an endorsement of the book, qua book?] --Frank D. Drake. Director, National Astronomy and Ionosphere Ceter
"Dragon's Egg is superb. I couldn't have written it; it required too much real physics." --Larry Niven
Oddly enough, another reason Larry Niven couldn't have written it is that Forward is approximately 1,000,000 times worse that Niven at creating plausible characters (just think about that for a minute. Two words: Teela Brown.)

Of course, Larry may have been swayed by this little, totally incomprehensible piece of brownnoserei: "the story of the Dragon's Egg and its inhabitants is covered in great detail by Nobel Laureate P.C. Niven in Reference 4. To date, this is the only book to win the Nobel, Pulitzer, Hugo, Nebula and Moebius prizes in the same year (2053)." Um, riiiight.

Here are two of my favorite quotes:
"And, inevitably, the years passed..."
"As Clear-Thinker flowed onto the pad and tasted the picture, the specialist said, 'that is a close-up of Amalita's left breast. Fortunately, she was not wearing a brassiere so that when she landed on the window her breasts came forward and we were able to get a highly detailed image of the entire mammary gland complex.'" Yeah, fortunately.
What I'm saying here is, don't read these books. When I re-read them in a few years I'll remind you not to again.

Why is there something, rather than mothing?

We count on nnyhav to feed us lines when we go-a-Nabsblogging. His latest to our latest mothblog (about this poem) sends us round a Bend Sinister to here : "Twang. A good night for mothing." As fruitful an unexpected semantic squelch of insectine intervention as the fly in the Tuttle/Buttle ointment. And in Speak, Memory we encounter an almost metaphysical impatience with the existence of anything but these creatures. We gaze, as through the protagonist's eyes in Bishop's poem, through another obsession-engendering bright hole of light. This time square and solar. "From the age of seven, everything I felt in connexion with a rectangle of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion. If my first glance in the morning was for the sun, my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender."

Moth-Manners and Morals

Follow-up to my Man-Moth post [right below]. So start there.

His shadow dragging like a photographer's cloth behind him

This used to be my all-time favorite poem about a supernatural moth. But now I think that if you read two supernatural moth poems this year, Q's should be second. First comes Elizabeth Bishop's "Man-Moth" (via wood s lot.)

Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for "mammoth."

          Here, above,
cracks in the buldings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to records in thermometers.

          But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.

          Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer's cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt ...

I think Jim Henley would probably like this poem. He's getting back into all that smart superhero comics as dreamworks stuff. Gregor Samsa awoke to find himself transformed ...With great power comes great responsibility. That stuff. I think this poem would make a very fine one-issue comic, don't you? Obviously you need the right artist.

Due to the mystery of mothman, there are possible artistic sources to turn to for visual inspiration. I think this may be my favorite. Nor should we neglect the possible Bluedar connection. Zoë says they are overall straps, but they could be moth wings. The possibility was enough to inspire at least one daughter of at least one reader to produce this. (Thanks, W. Kiernan & Delilah.)

It seems like there were more superhero bugs in the 60's. And earlier. Michael Chabon has Luna Moth in Kavalier and Clay. Bendis jokes in Alias about how Jessica is reluctant to date Ant Man. But on their date he is a perfectly nice guy. (I haven't read past volume 2, so I don't know whether their romance blooms.) Admittedly, a lot of bug books from back then failed to strike a properly frantic, gloomy, obsessive mood.

Vile Veen?

Will Baude has been debating whether Van Veen, Ada's hero/anti-hero, is evil or not (he thinks not; co-blogger Jeremy Reff thinks yes.). If Will is not convinced by the more obvious considerations, I remind him that at one point Veen reminisces about visiting some decaying brothel full of child prostitutes. I also remember thinking as I read it that there is some suggestion this was not a one-time thing (I don't have the time to search through the book now for the quote...). Two words, Will: E-vil.

Pattern Languages

It's a matter of whether you're content to focus on everyday events or whether you want to try to encompass the entire universe. If you go back to the literature written in ancient Greece or Rome, or during the Middle Ages and much of the Renaissance, you'll see writers trying to write not just about everything that exists but about everything that could exist. As soon as you open yourself to that possibility, you're going to find yourself talking about things like intelligent robots and monsters with Gorgon heads, because it's becoming increasingly obvious that such things could indeed exist. But what fascinates me is that the ancient Greeks realized these possibilities some five hundred years before Christ, when they didn't have the insights into the biological and physical sciences we have today, when there was no such thing as, say, cybernetics. Read the story of Jason and the Argonauts - you discover that Crete was guarded by a robot. Somehow the Greeks were alert to these possibilities despite the very primitive technology they had, and they put these ideas into their stories. Today, it's the SF writers who are exploring these things.
- Gene Wolfe

... For although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons non-existent things can be more easily and irresponsibily represented in words than existing things, for the serious and conscientious historian it is just the reverse. Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things bring them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.

Albertus Secundus
tract. de cristall. spirit.
ed. Clagor et. Collof. lib. I, cap. 28
(in Joseph Knecht's holograph translation

I recently reread Hesse's Glass Bead Game back to back with William Gibson's Pattern Recognition; they seem to me to be part of ... an overall pattern. Let's start with the fact that both can be classified as science fiction, but somewhat uncomfortably.  What makes the classification uncertain is the absence of the generically-familiar focus of technology.

Alibi

Is it likely Divine Apollo
That I should have stolen your cattle?
A child of my age, a mere infant
And besides, I have been here all night in my crib.

Ezra Pound channeling Homer.

Clueless in Academe, Part II

I've reread Gerald Graff's Clueless in Academe [see part I] and come away strongly confirmed in my initial impression that Graff is preoccupied with a much narrower band of the academic spectrum than his title suggests. That's not a big deal, and Graff more or less admits it in comments. But let me illustrate this point by way of moving on to something related and a bit more consequential. I will be quite critical but let me first thank prof. Graff for showing up so unexpectedly the first time and having a nice little discussion with us. He will be an exceptionally good sport if he puts up with it a second time.

Graff narrates a bit of autobiography: "I had classmates who excelled at schoolwork and would later have been called nerds, but these without exception were science or mathematics whizzes, technical geniuses rather than masters of argument or cultural analysis" (p. 215). The implication is that science, math - in general technical disciplines, e.g. logic - aren't concerned with argument. 'Arguing' is what one does in the liberal arts, in places like English departments. I am sure Graff will say this was just a silly slip if he shows up in comments again. I quote it as symptomatic of the degree to which - while apparently discussing 'argument' - Graff is in fact focusing on something quite narrow: the crisis of what counts as an argument in literary studies. At other points similar confusions about scope lead to serious confusion.

Late Nite MLA Notes

I finally got around to thinking about Richard Byrne's Chron piece on the MLA. (Henry posted about it at CT. And Scott "no permalinks" McLemee correctly notes it's a hell of a lot more interesting than that damn NYT piece.) This will relate to my Graff post below but mostly I'm just reading and taking quick notes:

Mr. Scholes's presidential speech, "The Humanities in a Post-Humanist World," was equally damning. Tracing divergent critiques of the humanities from Mr. Guillory, Mr. Eagleton, and the critic George Steiner, Mr. Scholes argued that they agreed on one point: The humanities' "renunciation of responsibility" has led to "a loss of authority and respect." He argued that the humanities should resist the temptation to label texts as "sacred" and return to an emphasis on promulgating methods of interrogating literature, which he called "the roots of our enterprise.

Clueless In Academe, part I

UPDATE: Amardeep has a long post up in response. (Since I don't have time to write part II yet, go read what he has to say.)

I'm working up a little something (but never you mind about that.) I think it might do me good to work up to it via close readings of parts of Gerald Graff's Clueless In Academe. I just realized that chapter 1 is available online . That's convenient. Let's have a little seminar, shall we? I remember Timothy Burke said he quite liked Graff's book. I don't, but I don't hate it. I think a lot of it is right, but in a sort of 'I already knew that' way. Some of it seems absurdly wrong, but in a sort of diagnostically useful way. And the man makes a few good points. I think it will be useful to discuss, especially since there may be a momentarily generous collective mood to the effect that MLA bashing has gone about as far as it can go, and then some. Let us take advantage of this spot of sunshine.

A few groundrules.

1) Let's be civil, but no need to carry it to excess. (The occasional twinkle of sarcasm and superiority is fine. No need to forego necessities.) But:

2) Don't be excessively snarky in your attacks on literary studies. (Yes, I know, I know. But only Nixon could go to China. Perhaps this is my destiny.) So:

3) Don't be absurdly thin-skinned in your defenses of literary studies. (I am linking not to accuse the post in question but to say I agree, in case that isn't perfectly obvious.)

I've basically come around to the view that what whither literary studies? studies needs most is an unusually heavy dose of utter frankness. Everyone should say what they think everything is worth, how everything presently stands, honestly. No whistling past the graveyard. No hiding the pea under the other cup. No feigning excess shock and horror. No pretending you think your opponent hates and fears the truth, or else is locked into a shame-spiral with the truth. Even if it's fun to pretend that.

It sounds naive, I know, to suggest that if everyone would just be frank we might even budge an inch. I'm not suggesting we will all turn out to agree. But as it stands the attacks tend to tip over into broken record jeremiads of the cultural apocalypse. The defenses tend to hyperventilate into ludicrously uncritical puff pieces. Putting it another way, I do feel that there is presently a sort of 'who's going to give in first?' dynamic, where 'giving in' would mean: being reasonable. Critics of literary studies are used to having their prima facie reasonable criticisms ostentatiously ignored rather than seriously debated. Defenders are used to being abused and mocked. (Not that I am saying there has been equal wrong on both sides. Just that - looking forward - it would be better to cut it all round, no matter who started it. Declare a general amnesty for past culture war crimes.)

Oh, and 4) if you want to participate, please consider reading the Graff, so as to be able to discuss. (I do hope the effect of laying down these conditions is not the sound of crickets chirping in the comment box.)

Golden Gist

Ezra Pound, from "Pastiche The Regional 1", The New Age, 21 August 1919:

All religions are evil because all religions try to enforce a certain number of fairly sound or fairly accurate or 'beneficial' propositions by other propositions which are sheer bluff, unsoundness, will-to-power, or personal or type predilections, regardless of the temperament or nature of others.

Well, yes, except for the bit about how it follows that they are all evil. After all, you might say this passage suited literature and poetry, mutatis mutandis. Except poets are under no obligation to offer up sound, accurate or beneficial propositions. They can skip straight to the bluff and will-to-power, bless their good hearts.

I have no idea why the piece from which this is extracted is "Pastiche The Regional 1". Is that grammatically parallel to Up the Academy (which never had a sequel so it doesn't need a number 1?) Google returns no hits; I figure what phrases google doesn't know God didn't intend man to understand.

As I was saying, I got the passage from "Gists from Uncollected Prose", a collection of Ezra Pound tidbits, from the back of Agenda, An Anthology. Here is another: "She was so fine and she was so healthy that you could have cracked a flea on either of her breasts,' said the old sea captain bragging about the loves of his youth. It seems a shame that the only man who could have made any real use of that glorious phrase in literature is dead." Now wouldn't that make the basis for a question in that infernal quiz? (You really can't answer a priori, just by thinking about the concepts involved. Just try it.)

But I am not getting to the point (you object). Well, it's because I'm trying to track down the provenance of the term 'golden gist', which I had thought was somehow due to Pound, but which returns this google hit. A poet, Bliss Carman, who therefore is not Pound. 'Gist' is a kind of minor keyword for Pound, no? I am sorry for my ignorance. I am not a Pound scholar, nor shall be one. But this tiny drop of the honey of knowledge I bleg of thee.

Lavatic Strata of Hazzard's Prose

I've been meaning to post a long review of Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire. But I don't seem to get around to it. Perhaps you will oblige? Read the passage below. Do you think you would like this sort of thing, supposing a whole bolt of the stuff were upholstered around an actual and basically sturdy story? One in which even the young characters are stipulated to be unusually mature, since the author clearly likes people to act her age?

Where traceable, his paternal ancestors had been, while solidly professional, enlivened by oddity. His grandfather derided by relatives as an impecunious dilettante, had spiked all guns by inventing, at an advanced age, a simple mechanical process that made his fortune. Aldred's father starting out as a geologist whose youthful surveys in high places - Bhutan, the Caucasus - produced, first, lucid articles, had soon followed these with ludid harsh short stories. The subsequent novels, astringently romantic, brought him autonomy and fame. Renouncing geology, he had kept a finger, even so, on the pulse of that first profession, introducing it with authority here and there in his varied narratives: the Jurassic rocks of East Greenland, the lavatic strata of far islands; these played their parts in the plot. In Oliver Leith's house in Norfolk there hung a painting of the youthful geologist prowling the moraines on his shortish legs. A picture consequential yet inept, like a portrait by Benjamin Robert Haydon.

Benjamin Robert Haydon, eh? Well, I dunno. But do you like it? Ept yet inconsequential, I would have said. I actually liked the novel, I finally decided. But passages like this one verge on Earbrassian absurdity. More chain than clank. Or more clank than chain. I'm not really sure.

Plato's Quarrel With William Gibson

A pair of passages. First a handy condensation, by Iris Murdoch, of 'Plato's quarrel with the poets'. It states what Plato thinks is wrong with mimetic, i.e. representational art. (Murdoch, a philosopher and a novelist, does not really agree. She's just passing this stuff along.)

Take the case of the painter painting the bed. God creates the original Form of Idea of bed. (This is a picturesque argument: Plato nowhere else suggests that God makes the Forms, which are eternal.) The carpenter makes the bed we sleep upon. The painter copies this bed from one point of view. He is thus at three removes from reality. He does not understand the bed, he does not measure it, he could not make it. He evades the conflict between the apparent and the real which stirs the mind toward philosophy. Art naively or wilfully accepts appearances instead of questioning them. Similiarly a writer who portrays a doctor does not possess a doctor's skill but simply 'imitates doctors' talk'. Nevetheless, because of the charm of their work such people are wrongly taken for authorities, and simple folk believe them. Surely any serious man would rather produce real things, such as beds or political activity, than unreal things which are mere reflections of reality. (p. 5-6) The Fire and the Sun

And here's a bit of an interview with William Gibson, in which he pretty much grants all that stuff about 'imitating the talk' without having any idea what the talk is actually about.

I'm looking for images that supply a certain atmosphere. Right now science and technology seem to be very useful sources. But I'm more interested in the language of, say, computers, than I am in the technicalities. On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the way it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision. When I was writing Neuromancer, it was wonderful to be able to tie a lot of these interests into the computer metaphor. It wasn't until I could finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there's a drive mechanism inside - this little thing that spins around. [This was back in the 80's, mind you. Gibson isn't a luddite pauper obviously.] I'd been expecting an exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old record player. That noise took away some of the mystique for me; it made computers less sexy. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize them.

Here is a question I asked my 'philosophy and film' students: we generally take it for granted that Plato is seriously wrong about art (or, at best, not really serious when he says that crazy stuff.) But what is the best Platonic case you can make against William Gilbson? There is plenty of room to plant the thin edge of the dialectic wedge. (In what sense can you really be interested in the language, not the technicalities, when the language is about the technicalities - is part and parcel with the technicality?)

He had a good war: a literary how-to guide

As the boy says: "War is neither glamorous nor fun. There are no winners, only losers. There are no good wars, with the  following exceptions: the American Revolution, World War II, and the Star Wars Trilogy."

This is interesting, first, because Mark Kleiman's reader seems to take it for granted it's easy enough to find high quality pro-war matter pre-1700. Yet there were no good wars in that period! Something to think about. (Yes, yes, 'a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away'. Still. Looks futuristic to me.) So I think Mark should start by looking at the extensive selection of Star Wars novels Amazon lists. It is not true MLA members are ashamed to be seen reading such stuff. I myself have only read one. Greg Bear's. It wasn't very good. (Not that I'm an MLA member either.) In general it is much easier to launch a fundamental assault on the notion of 'literary merit' than it is to defend a lot of senseless slaughter. Defining literary excellency up rather than defining martial deviancy down, if you will. The main ingredient of a rigorous assault is a pun in the title. For example: "I Sing of Arms And De Man." Then you write about how Star Wars novels illustrate themes discussed in Blindness and Insight. (How Vader fails to appreciate that by striking down Obi Wan, etc.. And the boy is dangerous, etc.)

More seriously? Watership Down? From Here To Eternity?

There is an ambiguity in the category 'pro-war'. War is seldom presented as straightforwardly and uncomplicatedly, inherently desirable - like love or friendship or happiness. Conan: "To drive your enemies before you and hear the lamentations of their women." That view is the exception, not the rule, and is generally not expressed at novelistic or epic poetic length.

War is often presented as terrible but necessary. The terrible unavoidability of it may be a means to the end of glory. Possibly this just boils down to, "to have a perfectly sound excuse, since they started it, to drive your ememies before you and hear the lamentations of their women." But it can also mean: war is an occasion for exhibiting virtues like physical courage, loyalty, self-sacrifice. War can be terrible and unnecessary, yet glorious. That is, an occasion for those not to blame to show their quality. War can be a learning experience, and can be presented as such. You might learn that 'war is hell'. A valuable lesson. But books about characters learning such lessons are not pro-war, plausibly. In general, as we move out along this line of possibilities, war becomes more and more equivalent to accident, hardship, obstacle, disaster, conflict. These are the engines that turn the wheels of character and action, i.e. the novel. But mostly novels aren't explicitly pro-accident, pro-hardship, etc. But this just gets us to the Nietzschean question: is the honest thing to say that we really are pro-all these things, because we demand that the wheels turn? (He who wills the wheels to turn must will the engine?) Ergo, almost all - perhaps all - good anti-war novels count as pro-war novels. Because whoever writes and reads such stuff is Conan, with a touch of pacifist on top. Part of you loves war, part of you hates it. So both parts get to sit back and enjoy a good anti-war novel, chock full of warry goodness.

Heaving ourselves up out of the existential abyss of our guilty Conan-ness, perhaps 'pro-war' should be defined, for literary purposes, as: expressive of the view that, without war, certain moral goods would be rendered unavailable; goods which are essential to the good life, or basic ingredients in it, or particularly tasty.

Conversely, the following would not be sufficient to qualify a work as 'pro-war': war is terrible but not perfectly preventable and sometimes conduces to moral goods. This is not sufficient because the same thing could be true of a novel about the aftermath of a bus accident, e.g. The Sweet Hereafter. I take it that novel is not classifiable as pro-bus accident.

But this just casts us back down into the Nietzschean abyss. Life without conflict would not be worth living. Being pro-conflict in general means being pro-war now and again. Here is a test case: Is Brave New World a pro-war novel, because Mustafa Mond's methods of preventing war, among other things, are morally abhorrent? It's not a war novel, obviously. But it's not clear why a pro-war novel should need to be a war novel You can have a pro-peace novel with no peace, hmmm yes?

(via Matt.)

Recalled To Life

I'm gratified that Kip Manley says he'd sort of like to read A Tale of Two Cities now. Yes, the style of the 'needles and the damage done' scene with Pross and Defarge is addictive. Dickens is at his best when he is minding his knitting; one sort of yarn he knits well is the stuff of childish imaginings. Two samples.

Linky linky

In case you can't get enough Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell blogging, I forgot to mention Kip Manley's post from a few days ago.

Fella name of Jonathan left comments. He's some kinda academic lit guy. Has a blog that looks like it could get interesting, so let's encourage him. He has a post up about Gene Wolfe. Please go leave comments, if so inclined. (We'll have to get back into the Wolfe thing ourselves sooner or later.)

And I never link to the little professor. She's wondering whether to read Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Everyone else liked Snowcrash and I loved The Diamond Age. That's all I know. Anyway, I fell off the cycle halfway through Confusion, though not because I wasn't paying attention to where I was going. It's interesting to watch a supreme geek mind colonizing history in this imaginative way. The diminutive prof worries about the style. As Henry says, Stephenson is a Whig. And, as Ray wrote a while back, "outside a historical context, terms like "craft", "good story", and "experimental" are little more than Whiggish fertilizer." Of course, that doesn't help us here. It's quite interesting to watch such a rational machine-loving mind at work, conjuring ambitious historical visions for the sake of understanding humanity. I think Stephenson towers up there with H.G.Wells. His Slashdot interview is interesting and entertaining (Henry sent me the link.) His typology of writers; his fight with William Gibson.

Don't miss Teresa Nielsen Hayden's squick and squee. Postcards from the id, as the guy in Forbidden Planet might have said. This all relates to Matthew Yglesias' post on art and whatever.

Tonight I'm reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. What did you think of it?

If those eyes of yours were bed-winches and I was an English four-poster, they shouldn't loose a splinter of me

A month ago I reviewed the first 50 or so pages of Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. (I believe it is in fact common practice for reviewers to read only the first 50 pages. Who has time for novels, after all?) Today I shall finish what I started.

WARNING: I'm going to spoil the plot wantonly. For good measure, I'm going to spoil the plot of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. (I figure if you haven't gotten around to reading it yet, you probably aren't.) Plus the plot of Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies, for good measure.

I want to talk about a sense of an ending. This should complement my earlier discussion of beginnings. 'Once upon a time' - it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Also, unusually long, even for me, with too many long block quotes. In a sense the following is just notes for a possible essay. Possibly quite wrong-headed. You tell me. Maybe you'll find it interesting.

Emerson (not that Emerson) on Melville (on Emerson)

I see that John "Zizka" Emerson has been reading The Confidence Man, as I make a point of doing once or twice a year (and see just below; also with reference to Zizek.) "Even in the least virtuous product of the human mind, if there can be found but nine good jokes, some philosophers are clement enough to affirm that these nine good jokes should redeem all the wicked thoughts, though plenty as the population of Sodom." Discuss. (In retrospect this is what I don't like about Zizek. He doesn't have nine good jokes.)

Those monstrously huge swollen ugly things. Let us pass over this unseemly subject.

...how it brings to the fore one's recent torments at the dentist's! One must perforce disclose one's most private crannies to this oral Torquemada...

Nothing nearly so pornographic, I assure. Merely cake and statuary. Merely Cynthia Ozick's interview with Henry James in the latest 3p. And David Mamet, in a 'would you, could you, in the dark?' Freudian mood.

Goldilocks is active, Baby Bear is active, but Mama and Papa are mere ciphers, existing only to complain. How is it that they are blind to the problem? Because they are the problem.

Please amuse yourselves in comments by rewriting fairytales and children's story in Mamet's style.

The Confidence Man, His Two-Box Problem

One line from my Kenneth Burke post has set me all a philosophizin': "if they cannot have religion, they should have lotteries." The basis for a reverse Pascal's Wager. Argue for the utility of religious belief on the instrumental ground that certain brands of holy-rolling may encourage a healthy taste for high-rolling long-shot gambles, e.g. lotto. (What are the odds that any one possible one true jealous God is the one true one true jealous God, after all?) Lotto is good because it boosts state revenues in lots of jurisdictions.

I fear this approach is likely to fall foul of potentially mixed strategies of religious belief, however. Mysticism, health-mindedness, the sick soul. Saintliness, sacrifice and confession. See William James on The Varieties of Religious Expected Returns. As Brian Weatherson suggested a few days ago, the same may be true for the original Pascal's wager. (Falls victim to mixed strategies, that is.) But perhaps Pascal suspected as much. James quotes a prayer from the great theological gambling man: "I know not which is most profitable to me, health or sickness, wealth or poverty, nor anything else in the world. That discernment is beyond the power of men or angels, and is hidden among the secrets of your Providence, which I adore, but do not seek to fathom."  The trouble is understanding how you can really go through life regarding every choice as ... well, not quite a canonic two-box problem, but a situation in which the values of all things are enclosed in an opaque evelope of Providence and potentially vary widely.

At this point I am compelled to quote from Melville's Confidence Man, His Two-Box Problem:

a doll which, by an inexpensive mechanism, could be made to act insolently

Some good Kenneth Burke stuff (via Scott McLemee.) I like some bits from his novel, Towards a Better Life, although the title would be better for an essay. The opening of chapter 1 would be better if it were the opening of an essay. (I see a pattern forming.) The Testamentum Meum chapter, on the other hand, seems a serviceable common book of clear-eyed ressentiment, whatever the overall narrative context:

the liver gnawed by vultures, though you brought fire to no one.

if they cannot have religion, they should have lotteries.

I was but a harmless moth, made by its markings to look ferocious. I was a pumpkin to frighten children. Yet for this they have punished me.

if I could contrive some toy, such as a doll which, by an inexpensive mechanism, could be made to act insolently. Then I could take it to a man of enterprise - and if I were careful as to how the contract was worded, I might get substantial returns from the foolish thing.

they must train themselves in ingratitude, since they can live only by taking alms from the enemy - and how is the enemy to be vanquished unless they are prepared to bite the hand that feeds them?

I like the insolent toy best. It seems very red-blooded American, a good thing in my book.

Scott links as well to a Chron piece he wrote on Burke. I'm not up on my Burkology enough to judge the state of academic play, so I'll defer to his judgment.

A sample, for example

I really like Joseph Moncure March's "lost classic", The Wild Party, especially as illustrated by Art Spiegelman. (Go ahead, look inside.) I guess after something has become a fairly successful broadway musical, and stayed that way a couple years, it isn't so 'lost' anymore. But it can still be good clean fun.

Oh, yes - Burrs was a charming fellow:
Brutal with women, and proportionately yellow.
Once he had been forced into a marriage.
Unlucky girl!
She had a miscarriage
Two days later. Possibly due
To the fact that Burrs beat her
     with the heel of a shoe
Till her lips went blue.
For a week her brother had great fun
Looking for Burrs with a snub-nosed gun:
At the end of which time, she began to recover;
And Burrs having vanished, the thing blew over.
Just a sample
For example:
One is probably ample.

But I'll give you one more. From the malicious playground jingle quality of 'possibly due ... with the heel of a shoe/Till her lips went blue' to a sort of Robert Frost-as-decadence thing:

Some love is fire: some love is rust:
But the fiercest, cleanest love is lust.

It doesn't really work out for Burrs or Queenie, the star of the story. If only these people listened to Hugo and got themselves tested. But she'll bounce back. ("Queenie was a blonde/ And her age stood still/ And she danced twice a day in vaudeville.") I think this handsomely illustrated little edition would make a fine stocking stuffer for the love in your life.

Death of the Novel Open Thread

Interview:

PHILIP ROTH: Your role is to write as well as you can. You're not advancing social causes as far as I'm concerned. You're not addressing social problems.

What you're advancing is... there's only one cause you're advancing; that's the cause of literature, which is one of the great lost human causes. So you do your bit, you do your bit for fiction, for the novel.

JEFFREY BROWN: Why do you think it's become one of the great lost causes of our time?

PHILIP ROTH: My goodness. Um, oh, I don't think in twenty or twenty-five years people will read these things at all.

JEFFREY BROWN: Not at all?

PHILIP ROTH: Not at all. I think it's inevitable. I think the... there are other things for people to do, other ways for them to be occupied, other ways for them to be imaginatively engaged, that are I think probably far more compelling than the novel. So I think the novel's day has come and gone, really.

JEFFREY BROWN: I would imagine you would think this is a great loss for society.

PHILIP ROTH: Yes, I do. There's a lot of brilliance locked up in all those books in the library. There's a lot of human understanding. There's a lot of language. There's a lot of imaginative genius. So, yes, it's a great shame.

Perennial prophecy: death of the novel. To what degree do you think it will come true this time?

(I predict this thread won't get half the comments the Buffy one did.)

I have my doubts. I mean: we won't ALL turn transhuman cubical watermelon, surely.

Via Golden Rule Jones.

Magic As Vocation

I'm a few hundred pages into Susanna Clark's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell; bit early to be writing my review. But the opening is a soft-pedal philosophical satire, or allegory, distinct from what follows. Yet a kind of keynote to what follows. Not a key to the plot but to the tongue-in-cheek (but not parodic) aesthetic of the overall subcreation. Why turn Jane Austen into J.K. Rowling? Indeed, gentle reader, why?

Reviewers - Henry Farrell, for example - have already tried their hands at expressing what is new and admirable about this. See John Clute for more qualified praise than Henry offers. (Bits of plot spoilage, too - be warned.) I'll say what I have to say about the opening.

The setting is late 18th Century England. Once upon a time, there was real magic, but no more. Hence such comedy as the York Society Of Magicians:

They were gentleman-magicians, which is to say they had never harmed any one by magic - nor ever done any one the slightest good. In fact, to own the truth, not one of these magicians had ever cast the smallest spell, nor by magic caused one leaf to tremble on a tree, made one mote of dust to alter its course or changed a single hair upon any one's head. But, with this one minor reservation, they enjoyed a reputation as some of the wisest and most magical gentlemen in Yorkshire.

Oh, sweet ursinality of lifelessness

Well, I can't just keep staring at those election returns. It's not healthy.

"Well, ahem!" was that suave individual's rejoinder

I just finished rereading Nathanael West, A Cool Million. Subtitled "The Dismantlement of Lemuel Pitkin", it did for Horatio Alger in 1934 what I suppose Team America: World Police has done for Jerry Bruckheimer in 2004.