Oh, what we endure for the sake of being unfashionably fashionable!

{Photo of the ol' seersucker in its natural environment by rocketlass.}

As anyone who's manned a counter in the book trade can tell you, some customers become visibly embarrassed when needs of one sort or another lead them to carry to the counter, say, books of very specific medical advice; handbooks for disorders of the mind, heart, or relationship; or luridly decorated volumes of plain, old-fashioned smut. This is, we must admit, not unreasonable: the bookseller may not judge, but oh, he notices.

I, on the other hand, will admit to having felt a tinge of embarrassment in St. Mark's bookshop in New York recently when, while wearing a seersucker suit on a sweltering day, I couldn't resist the lure of a front-counter stack of Honore de Balzac's Treatise on Elegant Living (1830).

It is, after all, one thing to wear a seersucker suit; yet another to wear it in Manhattan on a Sunday; and still a third to, while wearing it, buy a seminal tract on dandyism. As rocketlass said, or at least thought, in the matter of the fez, there are lengths to which one may go and there are lengths to which one, &c. And, it must be said, it is that remaining capacity, however minor, for recognizing absurdity in menswear that has kept me, thus far, out of plus fours.



So perhaps I was right to be embarrassed--but I was also right to buy the book! For what reader of sense would pass it up? It's a lovely little edition, whose translator, Napoleon Jeffries, acknowledges right off the bat one's immediate objection: that Balzac, as evidenced by the photo below, was no dandy. I think there is food on his shirt!--and that's far from the worst of his sins against fashion in this photo!



As Jeffries explains in his brief but solid introduction:

Even those familiar with Balzac's novels may be initially taken off guard by the notion of that giant presenting himself as an expert on elegance--let alone a self-proclaimed originator of, to use his own coinage, the new science of "elegantology." Even more surprising may be the fact that Balzac considered himself something of a practitioner of the science. He was an odd manifestation of early French dandyism: taking his cues in dress from friends such as Eugene Sue and Lautour-Mezeray (both of whom make appearances in this treatise), Balzac proved to be more of a part-time dandy. The dandy memorialist Captain Gronow provided a particularly amusing assessment of the man's elegance in practice: "The great enchanter was one of the oiliest and commonest looking mortals I ever beheld; being short and corpulent, with a broad florid face, a cascade of double chins, and straight greasy hair . . . [he] dressed in the worst possible taste, wore sparkling jewels on a dirty shirt front, and diamond rings on unwashed fingers."

Though he was obviously no Beau Brummell, nonetheless Balzac demonstrates in this tract that he did at least understand elegance. Take, for example, this brief definition, which feels a bit like Aristotle slurped through a bendy straw labeled Spinoza:

[E]legant living has its deadly sins and its three cardinal virtues. Yes, elegance is one, indivisible, like the Trinity, like liberty, like virtue. From this follows the most important of our general aphorisms:

XX

The constituent principle of elegance is unity.

XXI

Unity is impossible without cleanliness, harmony, and relative simplicity.

But it is not simplicity rather than harmony, or harmony rather than cleanliness that produces elegance: elegance is born from a mysterious concordance between these three primordial virtues. To create it suddenly everywhere is the secret of innately distinguished spirits.

When analyzing any instances of bad taste that taint a stranger's clothing, apartments, speech, or deportment, observers will always find that they sin through relatively perceptible violations of this triple law of unity

Now, aren't you grateful that I was willing to endure the (admittedly unexpressed) scorn of the St. Mark's clerk to bring you this? (To say nothing of the sweat--good god, seersucker, for all its charms, is far from proof against the diabolical team of Sol and asphalt that is a New York June!)

The pleasures of not staying focused on the goal, or, Fear not, for now, the grue!

On Tuesday I made two discoveries in the course of wandering away from what I was supposed to be doing that pleased me and, I hope, will amuse you.

1 What's better than an Invisible book? Surely it's a book that seems as if it ought to be invisible, but then turns out to be real! Which is what happened as I read Eric Kraft's lovely and gentle novel Herb 'n' Lorna (1988) and one of the characters consulted The Automobile: Its Selection, Care, and Use, by Robert Sloss. At first I assumed that Kraft had invented the handbook to suit his needs, but a quick check of Google books proved me wrong: The Automobile: Its Selection, Care, and Use was actually published, by New York's Outing Publishing Company, in 1910. Even better, the first lines of its opening chapter, "Buying an Automobile," are deliciously overwritten, offering a wonderful mix of high diction and chumminess:

Choosing a car is by no means so esoteric a task as choosing a wife, since, of course, there could never be as many nice cars in the world as there are nice girls. But there are enough of the former to quite bewilder any one who approaches the array of them for the first time with serious intentions. I venture to put it thus because of an apt illustration furnished by an acquaintance of mine who chose his wife and his automobile at the same time.

It strikes me that this opening is the early automotive equivalent of the scantily clad young lady draped over the car on the garage calendar. The friend, I probably need not say, does better with the wife than the snappy runabout he heedlessly picks up at the same time and eventually has to abandon on a Pennsylvania back road.

The book is remarkably readable and fun, for an instructional manual a century out of date. Take this bit, for example, from the same chapter about choosing a car:

In fact, as an authority said to me recently, "sometimes the best thing you can say about a car is that it has no talking points." In other words, the more closely your mechanism approaches the type which manufacturers are developing along standard lines, the more comfort and use will you get out of your selection. It is but common sense to avoid freak construction, for which the claim may be made that it will accomplish more easily what is already being accomplished in a way which experience has taught the skilled mechanicians of the industry to be the most reliable and worthy of dependence.

Advice that would have saved non-mad-scientist DeLorean buyers a pretty penny, no?

2 In the course of writing a piece of copy for work, I wanted to find a clever way to talk about the grotesque details of grave robbing, and my first instinct was to write about the "grue and gore." But wait, I thought: is "grue" even a word?

The Oxford English Dictionary said yes--and what a word it turns out to be! It has no fewer than five meanings as a noun and an additional pair as a verb--and rather than mere shadings of the same ultimate meaning, these seven definitions represent at least six fully distinct uses of the word.

The first noun meaning is the only one that's not at least rare:

With negatives: not a (one) grue, no grue: not an atom, not a whit.

Even for that one, however, the most recent citation is from 1939.

The second meaning, considered rare, is very straightforward: a grue is a crane. That usage is reflected in one of the meanings of "grue" as a verb, which is for a crane to "utter its characteristic cry." That meaning, however, is obsolete, as is Noun 3, "A kind of meal cake made in Cheshire"--or, one assumes, no longer made in Cheshire. Meaning four is also rare, which is sad because it seems to make grue a wonderfully useful word:

The action of GRUE; shivering, shuddering; a shiver, shudder.

That noun sense's counterpart on the verb side gives a nicely expanded account of what it means to grue:

1. To feel terror or horror, shudder, tremble; quake; to shrink from something; to be troubled in heart.

b. Of the body: To shiver, shudder.

c. To thrill.

2. it grues me: I shudder, tremble, quake; I shrink from something. Obs.

Then there's the last noun definition: in northern dialects, grue can mean "Ice in flakes, or detached pieces," such as, from the Leader of February 3, 1891, "The 'grue' floating down the Tweed."

Al of these definitions pleased me greatly--but they still left me unable to use the word the way I wanted--even as, it appears, almost no one is using it these days in any of the ways it is defined. Thus, feeling feisty, I offer you my own new, sixth noun definition of "grue":

The pulpy, red bits of flesh and brains that are the sometimes residue of an attack by zombies, werewolves, kraken, or other dangerous creatures; the cumulative feeling of queasy horror evoked by the sight of such bodily detritus.

If we do this right, by October, everyone will be talking about the grue and gore that surely awaits us as the days grow shorter.

Summer's here, sayeth the Quarterly Conversation!

The new Summer issue of the Quarterly Conversation is online and full of good reading to distract you from your work all week.

There's no review from me in this issue--though I'll soon be popping up with one of John Beer's The Waste Land and Other Poems--but that still leaves plenty more good pieces than I can highlight here:

• An impressionistic, elliptic review of Anne Carson's Nox by George Fragopoulos. "Family denies us the possibility of exclusion: one will always belong even if one belongs only in a sense of not belonging," writes Fragopoulos of Carson's book about her late brother. "But what happens when you alone are that center, you alone are the only one left to lay claim to that aspect of your identity? Can it even be said to exist anymore?"

• An essay by Gregory McCormick on Eileen Chang. McCormick argues that Chang's "tendency to emphasize the domestic over the national" has been borne out by the fact that "many of the overtly political novels from this period are largely forgotten, even in China."

• An excerpt from a new translation of Robert Juan-Cantavella's El Dorado.

• A review of Michael Marr's new Speak, Nabokov by Scott Esposito.

• A review of Christopher Ricks's new look at Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell, True Friendship, by Patrick Kurp, who recommends Ricks to those "readers uneasy with literary criticism, fearing they squander finite reading time when not attending to the objects of criticism (fiction, essays, poetry) but instead their parasitic offspring."

• And, as they say in advertising, much, much more!

Don't forget: a handful of TQC contributors and editors are also talking books every day at our still-relatively-new group bog, the Constant Conversation. Come on down and join in the conversation!

Neighbors

On a day when the grumble of lawn mowers drifted in the windows in the early hours, drowning out the birds, and when neighbors rumbled their vacuum all over the floor for what seemed sufficient time to suck up the Sahara, and I, in my turn, surely drove them near to mania with my repeated failures to master "A Foggy Day" on the piano . . . I was amused to open David Kynaston's Family Britain to the following evidence of distinctly un-neighborly feelings in early 1950s Britain:

I don't believe in talking to the neighbours; you have to be careful what you say.

I never have a neighbour inside. I am one of those who keep themselves to themselves. Mind you, I'm sociable, I say "Good Morning."

I'm not one for going into people's houses unless for illness.

We don't mix with the people round here. We're not gossips like they are: they're not too bad this end of the street but at the far end the people are always standing on the doorsteps gossiping.

It's just a question of knowing people over walls and through doors.

Researchers Mark Hodges and Cyril S. Smith pinpointed the crucial distinction between being "neighborly" and being "friendly," which still seems to suit the case, more than a half-century and one ocean away:

The former . . . was "based on willingness to give, or readiness to ask for and accept, help from others"; the latter implied "a close reciprocal relationship based on trust, affection and respect."

Or, as another interview subject put it,

A friend you can confide in, a neighbour you can't. What you say to neighbours over the garden wall might be passed on and you might get involved.

All of which is not to say that I have any real complaints about my neighbors--they're actually quite easy to live with, and I did choose to live in a city.

And there's no question that it could be much worse--I'm extremely glad never to have had a neighbor who could elicit this sentiment, found in the same set of interviews:

I never thought I'd come to hate anybody like I do her.

Grateful for being spared such trouble, I'll enjoy the small portion of privacy and seclusion that I'm allotted and be glad for those early mornings when I can temporarily find some silence.

Celebrating birthdays with Thoreau

Having recently celebrated my thirty-sixth birthday, I turned--as I have so often done in the months since I bought the book--to Thoreau's Journal to see what he was up to on his thirty-sixth birthday, July 12, 1853. He takes no notice of his birthday in the pages of the journal, and it seems he spent the day, in typically quiet fashion, paying attention to the woodland plants:

White vervain. Checkerberry, maybe some days. Spikenard, not quite yet. The green-flowered lanceolate-leafed orchis at Azalea Brook will soon flower. Wood horse-tail very large and handsome there.

Birthdays have been spent in far worse ways, and I find Thoreau's approach to birthdays congenial. A birthday seems best spent doing what one always chooses to do when free of obligation; in my case, that involves a stack of books and a pitcher of iced tea on the back porch, with perhaps a martini to welcome the dusk. My version of paying attention to the woodland plants.

Thoreau's forty-third birthday offers a bit more idiosyncrasy, in the form of some advice for hikers:

The best way to drink, especially in a shallow stream, or one so sunken below the surface as to be difficult to reach, is through a tube. You can commonly find growing near a spring a hollow reed or weed of some kind suitable for this purpose, such as rue or touch-me-not, or water saxifrage, or you can carry one in your pocket.

In Chicagoland, that advice takes on added poignancy this week, which has seen the local water authorities balk at the EPA's efforts to make it work to return the Chicago River to something more closely resembling water.

Speaking of rivers: in a wonderful interview with Christopher Lydon on Radio Open Source, Damion Searls, the editor of the new edition of Thoreau's Journal that has so entranced me these past months, offered a memorable passage from the entry for May 17, 1854 whose closing could serve, in a pinch, as a distillation of Thoreau's approach to the world:

Observed a rill emptying in above the stone-heaps, and afterward saw where it ran out of the June-berry Meadow, and I considered how surely it would have conducted me to the meadow, if I had traced it up. I was impressed as it were by the intelligence of the brook, which for ages in the wildest regions, before science is born, knows so well the level of the ground and through whatever woods or other obstacles finds its way. Who shall distinguish between the law by which a brook finds its river, the instinct by which a bird performs its migrations, and the knowledge by which a man steers his ship around the globe? The globe is the richer for the variety of its inhabitants.

Even better, in typical fashion, Thoreau immediately shifts from that well-turned phrase and flight of fancy to the particular, taking note of a humble squirrel:

Saw a large gray squirrel near the split rock in the Assabet. He went skipping up the limb of one tree and down the limb of another, his great gray rudder undulating through the air, and occasionally hid himself behind the main stem.

Oh, living things, hide not from Thoreau! It is pointless, for he will seek you out; it is pointless, for he is your dearest friend.

Dr. Johnson is picky, or, What else is new?

As I read a bit of William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity today, I enjoyed the following passage, which shows the similar, if, in this case, opposed, types of rigor brought to bear on poetry by Empson and Samuel Johnson:

It is usual, of course, for a poet to feel his subject is a good one because it throws light on matters of another sort, because it illustrates life, or what not; such an unexpressed ambiguity is a very normal feature of good poetry. Often what on a first reading seems faulty or irrelevant has been put in to insist on this feeling; that is not to say it is not genuinely faulty, because unnecessary. Dr. Johnson's objections to Gray's Cat can, I think, only be answered in this way.

Selina, the cat, is called a nymph, with some violence both to language and sense; but there is good use made of it when it is done; for of the two lines--

What female heart can gold despise?
What cat's averse to fish?

the first refers merely to the nymph, and the second only to the cat.

The Doctor complains here that the separation is too neat, which is true enough; but since cat and nymph have been confused in the first part of the verse,it is a relief to the reason (such as he would have been the first to admit into poetry) that they should be separated at the end of it. As to the violence done to language, it is justified by a sort of honesty, because we are meant to be so conscious of it; that we are asked to make that collocation is the point of hte poem; and Johnson's pretty distinction between merely and only is unfair, because both nymph and cat are the main subject.

I rarely spend time on thoughts of an afterlife, but I do enjoy imagining a heavenly coffee-house encounter between the two in which they--while agreeing with Gray that "one false step is ne'er retrieved," and that one should "be with caution bold"--could hash out their different opinions of his execution of his theme.

Eleventh-century Scots and . . . Anthony Powell?

I wouldn't be a good Anthony Powell obsessive if I didn't follow up Saturday's post on Dorothy Dunnett with a note highlighting the following unexpectedly Powellian passage that I noticed late in her King Hereafter:

The year changed, and then began to unroll, like a wheel in turbulent country; like an unreeling ribbon of Groa's weaving that once, long ago, he had spoiled with his blood. A spinning ribbon in which, peg by peg, the device switched without warning, producing a new assortment of patterns, a new set of boundaries, a new line of direction, a mischievous disorder of design that tested his strength to the limit through the most powerful tenet by which he lived: Adapt and survive.

The language isn't exactly Powellian, but the sentiment definitely is, reminding me of one of the most perceptive and memorable passages in A Buyer's Market, the second volume of A Dance to the Music of Time:

Certain stages of life might be compared with the game of Russian billiards, played (as I used to play with Jean, when the time came), on those small green table, within the secret recesses of which, at the termination of a given passage of time--a quarter of an hour, I think--the hidden gate goes down; after the descent of which, the coloured balls return no longer to the slot to be replayed; and all scoring is doubled. This is perhaps an image of how we live. For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.

So true, so familiar. "Life has begun in earnest," and "scarcely aware that any change has taken place," we are off on what will turn out to be--if for no other reason than that by the time we realize what's going on we will have come such a long way on it--our true course. On that subject, and the way it ramifies throughout our lives, Powell has no equal.

Falling for Dorothy Dunnett

{Photos by rocketlass.}

I've mentioned a couple of times recently that I've fallen for Dorothy Dunnett's historical novels, but I've not yet explained what it I find so compelling about them. I was put on to Dunnett byby Jenny Davidson at Light Reading, whose description of her novels made me realize that they might be able to sate a craving that had bedeviled me for months: ever since I finished my second reading of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall last fall, I'd sought total immersion in a similar world of deadly power politics and intrigue, a world where you have no choice but to pick your prince, and inattention to nuance can mean the loss of everything. I'd found that world before, in Ronan Bennett's Havoc, in Its Third Year and Halldor Laxness's Iceland's Bell, to name two--but where to go now?

Dunnett, it turned out, was the answer. While, as Jenny acknowledges, she doesn't quite measure up to Wolf Hall's brilliance, the two novels I've read, King Hereafter (1982) and Niccolo Rising (1986), have been incredibly satisfying, both historically convincing and psychologically perceptive, full of fascinating details of the past and of power, as casually delivered as they are wholly convincing.

Take this scene, for example, from Dunnett's novel of the historical Macbeth, King Hereafter, which finds young Lulach on the beach in Orkney awaiting the return of the ships of his father, Thorfinn (Macbeth):

From Trelleborg to Tonsberg, from Rousay to Rodel, there could have been few boys of the age of nine who had not stood on the shore of their fathers and watched the boats of the kindred come home from their viking. When, at fourteen, they buckled on the sword their father had bought and carried their box up the gangplank, they knew the worst and the best, and were prepared for it.

To Lulach it was unknown. The horns blew for the longships' arrival, and Sulien, his robe crumpled still from the riding, his fresh face unsmiling, took the boy by the shoulder and walked him downhill from the door of the hall, disregarding the others, men and women, who left their houses and, brushing by, made for the beach and the jetty before him. . . . Then the sails began to appear round the eastern headland and, like everyone else, [Thorkel, Thorfinn's foster-father], began to count. As the sails dropped and the figureheads were taken in and they began to work under oar to the beach, you could see the damage.

The grey-goose figurehead with the scarlet sail made for the rivermouth and the wharf, as Sulien had expected. He and the boy took the ford over the river to where the burned hall had once stood and the new building now looked down on the sweep of the shore. Far over the sea, the sun picked out the clear green of the Orkney island of Hoy, while here, behind the new hall, the eastern horn of the bay lay as if stitched in pink on the braided blue silk of the seascape.

Thorfinn's figurehead came down, bright against the stiff flaps of scarlet as the sail was roughly stowed. The lower strakes of the boat were foul with weed, and the timber above was chopped and shaved as if tooled by an adze. Three of the thwarts stood blank and empty, and the gunwales, with their careful gilding, were scuffed and gapped. . . . On board, there was a lot of talk and laughter and other sounds. Someone screamed once, and then a second time. The gangplank came down, and Lulach came slowly and stood by Sulien, along with the dozen or two others who had joined them by this time. The first man, carrying another over his shoulder, steadied himself and began to come ashore.

In Dunnett's hands, the scene is ancient, yet familiar, its antiquity belied by the mutated versions that persist in our time, which is far from free of the war dead.



Then there's this scene, which demonstrates as well as any the dramatic power of a blade suddenly unsheathed in the midst of diplomatic niceties and indirection:

Thorfinn said, " . . . I want the land west of Wedale and the south bank of the river Forth to do with as I please. I also want the rights to all other churches in the Lothians, now existing and to be established, which are not and have never been in the past dedicated to the shrine of St Cuthbert. The remaining Lothian lands and the remaining churches you may retain."

Silence fell. Even after Tuathal started to breath, Earl Siward still remained motionless. "And the Normans [whom you have invited onto the land]?"

Thorfinn said, "The land I have described is my land, and I shall place on it whom I please."

"Your land?" said Siward. "Your grandfather had Danes and Norwegians attacking both coasts and a Scandinavian earldom threatening to move up from Northumbria. Your father was dead. Your grandfather had lost the support of the Orkney fleet. He had to fight for Lothian. But after that, there was old age and an incompetent grandson and vassaldom under Canute and then a King of Alba who did half his ruling from Orkney. What makes it your land?"

"Take it from me," said Thorfinn.

Silence fell, briefly, again. To look at the six faces opposite was difficult. One looked from side to side, at the two speakers, or else down at the table or, fleetingly, at one's own side. The boy Maelmuire, who had started with a high colour like his father Duncan's, had gone very pale. His first experience of the conflict between two powerful men, tossing between them the idea of war. Two men who were his uncles.

If that scene gives you chills, as it did me, by all means seek out Dunnett. Two novels in, I'm with Jenny, who, on finishing the House of Niccolo series, wrote, "I have been living in the world of these novels, I do not want to come back to real life!"

Laughlin on the Beach

When I packed up ninety percent of my books this winter in homage to the gods of real estate (Surely blandness and beige shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Dull forever.), one book I was careful to leave on the shelf was James Laughlin's odd semi-memoir, The Way It Wasn't. For someone who writes regularly about books--and has a soft spot for literary gossip--the book's alphabetical entries on authors are indispensable: if a twentieth-century author had even a whiff of the modern about him, Laughlin was on the scene, friend and publisher, and the book, drawn from his jottings and notebooks and files, reflects that familiarity.

I drew on Laughlin the other day in writing about the Quarterly Conversation's Anne Carson contest (enter now!); today I'm back for another figure I happened to as I flipped through looking for Carson: Sylvia Beach,friend, supporter, and publisher of moderns and founder of the Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company. I've written a couple of times recently about the many pleasures offered by the collection of Beach's letters that Columbia University Press recently published, so it seems right to add to that Laughlin's portrait of her:

Sylvia was a birdlike little figure but she had the strength and energy of a racehorse. She was a chain-smoker and constantly in motion. I remember that quickness of movement as she darted about the shop, the brightness of eye, the sense of humor (she loved puns) and her gift for repartee. Never a dull moment at Shakespeare and Company.

As a former bookseller, I fixate on that image of Beach perpetually in motion: even after more than a decade in an office job, I find I still move with the speed drummed into me in retail, zipping around the cubicles as if I have a customer at the counter who needs a book right now.

After that description, Laughlin digresses a bit, turning to Gertrude Stein, a customer and friend of Beach, but the anecdote he relates is so good as to stand as a Tristram Shandy-worthy point in favor of digression in general:

All went well until Sylvia published Ulysses. Then a freeze descended and "the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded," to quote the famous Stein poem. I can vouch for this anecdote. I had experience with the literary monolith. The summer that I was working for her at Bilignan, her place in the country, all was going well till she caught me reading Proust. She was deeply offended. "J," she asked, "how can you read such stuff? Don't you know that Proust and Joyce copied their books from my Making of Americans?"

Having allowed myself to get sidetracked by Stein, it seems proper to give Beach the last word. She barely mentions Laughlin in her letters, so the obvious way to close is no good. Instead, I'll offer this charmingly playful note to Ernest Hemingway from August 8, 1923:

Dear Hemingways, How is the Book coming on? How is the group of Feather Cats standing the heat? Is it going to Anastasie's Stade this Saturday? We have a thatched cottage all to ourselves except for some cows in the next room. Our door opens into a field where we brush our teeth and everything. Adrienne sends her best love with mine
Sylvia

The "Book" seems likely to have been The Sun Also Rises; I trust it was coming on well.

Filling in the [adjective] blanks

{Photos by rocketlass.}

James Laughlin's not-quite-memoir, The Way It Wasn't, includes some notes about poet Anne Carson, whom he brought to New Directions back when he was still the press's director. Of his first encounter with her work, he writes,

When I first read the "God poems" in the magazine, I had a kind of pleasant and electric shock thinking that you were the poet I had been waiting for for some years.

And in another note, he describes her as

a Volcanist; she paints volcanoes that look like the sundaes we used to get at the drugstore counters exploding with chocolate sauce. I shouldn't be irreverent. She's obviously someone to be reckoned with.

Much as I agree, at the same time I can't help but be irreverent--and thus a contest! Over at the blog of the Quarterly Conversation, the Constant Conversation, I'm running an Anne Carson Mad Libs contest: fill in the gaps that time and carelessness have left in the fragments of Sappho that Carson translated for her book If Not, Winter, and you can win a copy of her gorgeous, strange, and moving new book-in-a-box, Nox.



What are you [adverb] waiting for? Get out your [adjective] pens and get to work!

Two bookish bits for your holiday weekend

{Photo by rocketlass.}

To send you into the weekend, I'll share a couple of passages of bookish appreciation that I've come across in my reading this week. First, from Lev Grossman's Codex (2004), a moment when the protagonist, charged with the task of cataloging a vast library of rare books, reflects for a moment on the volumes around him:

He went back for another stack of books: a three-volume English legal treatise; a travel guide to Tuscany from the '20s crammed with faded Italian wildflowers that fluttered out from between the pages like moths; a French edition of Turgeniev so decayed that it came apart in his hands; a register of London society from 1863. In a way it was idiotic. He was treating these books like they were holy relics. It wasn't like he would ever actually read them. But there was something magnetic about them, something that compelled respect, even the silly ones, like the Enlightenment treatise about how lightning was caused by bees. They were information, data, but not in the form he was used to dealing with it. They were non-digital, nonelectrical chunks of memory, not stamped out of silicon but laboriously crafted out of wood pulp and ink, leather and glue. Somebody had cared enough to write these things; somebody else had cared enough to buy them, possibly even read them, at the very least keep them safe for 150 years, sometimes longer, when they could have vanished at the touch of a spark. That made them worth something, didn't it, just by itself? Though most of them would have bored him rigid the second he cracked them open, which there wasn't much chance of. Maybe that was what he found so appealing: the sight of so many books that he'd never have to read, so much work he'd never have to do.

As someone who hasn't thought of reading as a duty, well, ever, and who just yesterday used the excuse of the Seminary Co-op's annual member sale to bring yet more books into the house, I think of the stacks of unread volumes differently: I'll get to all of these someday, and oh, the pleasures that await!

Which leads nicely into this passage from Gene Wolfe's "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" (1970):

The drugstore is as big as a supermarket, with long, bright aisles of glassware and notions and paper goods. Jason buys fluid for his lighter at the cigarette counter, and you bring him a book from the revolving wire rack. "Please, Jason?"

He takes it from you and replaces it in the rack, then when you are in the car again takes it from under his jacket and gives it to you.

It is a wonderful book, thick and heavy, with the edges of the pages tinted yellow. The covers are glossy stiff cardboard, and on the front is a picture of a man in rags fighting a thing that is partly like an ape and partly like a man, but much worse than either. The picture is in color, and there is real blood on the ape-thing; the man is muscular and handsome, with tawny hair lighter than Jason's and no beard.

Be it pulp or something pleasantly snootier, enjoy your reading this weekend. I'll be back here as normal on Tuesday.

"He lies under a world's weight of incubus and nightmare," or, Literary lassitude

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Emerging from ten days utterly absorbed in Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter--and thus in the drama and dangers of eleventh-century Scotland--I find myself, perhaps inevitably, a bit out of joint, troubled by a between-books feeling of the worst sort, one that is only compounded by a heat-and-humidity wave that would be more appropriate for August.

I think the apt word is "torpor," a word that always brings to mind Thomas de Quincey, and this description of the prostration brought on by opium addiction:

The opium-eater loses none of his moral sensibilities or aspirations; he wishes and longs as earnestly as ever to realise what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of proposing or willing. He lies under a world's weight of incubus and nightmare; he lies in sight of all that he would fain perform, just as a man forcibly confined to his bed by the mortal languor of paralysis, who is compelled to witness injury or outrage offered to some object of his tenderest love:—he would lay down his life if he might but rise and walk; but he is powerless as an infant, and cannot so much as make an effort to move.

Okay, so I'll admit that a between-books feeling, however frustrating, is nowhere near that bad--and, fortunately, it's also far more susceptible to remedy. A remedy that could perhaps be provided by de Quincey himself, even?

Let me turn to his anecdotal, gossipy Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets (1840), which recently entered my library through a bit of beyond-the-grave hand-selling by Sylvia Beach, and see what I can find . . .

Ah, yes: now that I look at the book, I see that its label clearly notes that the following "ludicrous instance" of the shortsighted absentmindedness of Parson Coleridge, father of Samuel Taylor, is indicated as an effective remedy for all literary lassitude:

Dining in a large party, one day, the modest divine was suddenly shocked by perceiving some part, as he conceived, of his own snowy shirt emerging from a part of his habiliments, which we will suppose to have been his waistcoat. It was not that; but for decorum we will so call it. The stray portion of his own supposed tunic was admonished of its errors by a forcible thrust-back into its proper home; but still another limbus persisted to emerge, or seemed to persist, and still another, until the learned gentleman absolutely perspired with the labour of re-establishing order. And, after all, he saw with anguish that some arrears of the snowy indecorum still remained to reduce into obedience. To this remnant of rebellion he was proceeding to apply himself— strangely confounded, however, at the obstinacy of the insurrection—when the mistress of the house, rising to lead away the ladies from the table, and all parties naturally rising with her, it became suddenly apparent to every eye that the worthy Orientalist had been most laboriously stowing away, into the capacious receptacles of his own habiliments—under the delusion that it was his own shirt—the snowy folds of a lady's gown, belonging to his next neighbour; and so voluminously, that a very small portion of it, indeed, remained for the lady's own use ; the natural consequence of which was, of course, that the lady appeared inextricably yoked to the learned theologian, and could not in any way effect her release, until after certain operations upon the vicar's dress, and a continued refunding and rolling out of snowy mazes upon snowy mazes, in quantities which at length proved too much for the gravity of the company. Inextinguishable laughter arose from all parties, except the erring and unhappy doctor, who, in dire perplexity, continued still refunding with all his might—perspiring and refunding—until he had paid up the last arrears of his long debt.

Should your symptoms persist, you are recommended to take this brief account of the "lisping Whig pedant" Dr. Parr, who, despite being "without personal dignity or conspicuous power of mind," was a frequent guest of Coleridge's friend Mr. Montagu:

Him now—this Parr—there was no conceivable motive for enduring ; that point is satisfactorily settled by the pompous inanities of his works. Yet, on the other hand, his habits were in their own nature far less endurable than Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ; for the monster smoked ;—and how did the "Birmingham Doctor" smoke ? Not as you, or I, or other civilized people smoke, with a gentle cigar—but with the very coarsest tobacco. And those who know how that abomination lodges and nestles in the draperies of window-curtains, will guess the horror and detestation in which the old Whig's memory is held by all enlightened women.

Those in need of a further medicament are probably, I'm afraid, beyond hope. 'Tis limericks and the limehouse for you, my friend.

The perils of friendship

{Photo by rocketlass, whose generally benign intentions I'm perhaps impugning by linking this photo to a post that's largely about the joys of misanthropy.}

In the most intense friendships of childhood, we want our friends to be just like us: we're looking for a twin, someone who reflects ourselves back to us with the added glow of both acknowledgment and appreciation. In adult life, however, we are willing to settle for--or, more accurately, prefer--significant, rather than total, overlap in tastes, opinions, and habits. More than that, and you get this:

I once had a friend who, over the long course of many years, gradually began to take on, as if by a process of osmosis, all of those quirks, opinions, and traits of character that I had always considered to be most deeply my own.

When I first made his acquaintance, for example, he had shown a marked preference for the sentimental excesses of the films of Hollywood’s so-called “Golden Age” over the headier intellectual pleasures that characterize Italian neorealist cinema. After several years, however, he began to espouse, with equal fervor, precisely the opposite opinion; that is, a preference for Antonioni and Visconti over Capra, Hawks, and Sturges—an opinion that I had myself defended against all comers on occasions too numerous to mention.

Indeed, it would not be exaggerating the point to say that my friend’s entire worldview incrementally conformed itself to my own.

That's from Joseph Clayton Mills's "Insult," which I published a couple of years ago at Joyland. I selected "Insult" from a sheaf of stories, all about difficult, wayward, and/or recently dead friends, and I'm pleased to announce that the whole batch has now been published in a chapbook, Zyxt, by Entr'acte. The stories, which are all quite brief, most of them running to less than a page, are reminiscent of Borges in their playfulness, Calvino in their precision and concision, and, most important, Bernhard in their wry misanthropy. For, like those friends we invented when we had to describe our symptoms to the school nurse, these friends have problems, and--because their problems lie less with themselves as individuals than with humanity as an excrescence, suicide is frequently the only solution. Yet nearly as frequently as they are attempted, these suicides are botched, though, for better or for worse, more often in some aesthetic sense than in their basic, and thus final, execution.

The very short story "Ennui" is a good example:

I have a friend who, having hurled himself from a great height, was annoyed to discover that, in marked contrast to what he had been led to expect, the brief moments in which the ground hurtled up with ever greater clarity to greet him were marked by neither a heightened intensity of sensorial experience nor by a mystical epiphany of the preciousness of life. Rather, the rapid seconds of his fall were quite as suffused with boredom and ennui--and passed just as slowly--as every other moment in his short, yet interminable, existence.

"Graduate School," on the other hand, despite beginning with all the frustration and failure embodied in its titular subject--

On the verge of earning a PhD in economics from one of the more prestigious of the second-tier universities, having assiduously devoted himself entirely to academic study for a dozen years to the exclusion of all else, and indeed having sacrificed any semblance of a so-called personal life for the sake of his scholarly pursuits, a close friend of mine was struck a severe blow when his mentor--to whose groundbreaking theories my friend had long been a fanatical adherent and to the defense of whom all of my friend's own work was slavishly devoted--committed suicide at the age of eighty-three by placing his head in an oven.

Compounding my friend's misfortune, his beloved mentor had left for posterity a lengthy suicide note in which he completely repudiated all of his former work,demonstrating with the aid of recent insights derived from game theory that the ostensibly groundbreaking work to which he owed his considerable fame in academic circles was completely nonsensical.

--ultimately ends on a note of successful defiance. That said defiance involves yet another suicide is, though perhaps deplorable from a human point of view, ultimately only to be expected.

The book fairly runs over with the under-appreciated joys of misanthropy mixed with a fundamental love of human strangeness. The Randall Jarrell of Pictures from an Institution would have loved this book.There is no escape: these are our friends, trouble though they may be, and what are we without our friends? "I once had a friend with whom I found myself in complete agreement on every subject," says the narrator, but you can trust that things don't end well. At the same time, the friend who "was regarded by even his closest acquaintances as a horrible specimen of misanthropy" feels misapprehended; like Swift, his misanthropy comes from the disjunction between his idealistic vision of mankind's capacity and

what he invariably characterized as "humanity's beastly propensity for the base and vile" so difficult to endure in silence.

The disjunction does not end well.

The back cover of Zyxt is taken up by an index. If I haven't yet convinced you to order a copy, perhaps the index's four subdivisions of "Suicide" or its nine subdivisions of "Murder" will. Or its entries for Spinoza and Preston Sturges--if those twin brilliants of the pantheon, wild opposites even at the same time as they are both utterly indispensable, don't do it, then perhaps the misanthropists have the right idea after all.

Lovecraft and loving New England

{Photo of the Giambi Zombie by rocketlass.}

One of the reasons I started this blog was so that I would be less inclined to read aloud, an activity which is only barely acceptable even in the presence of the most carefully chosen audience. Fortunately, that need not stop rocketlass, who launched me on tonight's post by reading aloud to me the following passage, which opens H. P. Lovecraft's "The Picture in the House" (1920):

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

A sentiment with which Hawthorne, our great chronicler of New England's secret desires and corruptions, would surely agree.

The Lovecraft passage also reminds me of a page from Thoreau's journals (the new edition of which, edited by Damion Searls, should be on every bedside table as we ease into summer). On October 29, 1857, Thoreau, then forty years old, wrote:

There are some things of which I cannot at once tell whether I have dreamed them or they are real; as if.they were just, perchance, establishing, or else losing, a real basis in my world. This is especially the case in the early morning hours, when there is a gradual transition from dreams to waking thoughts, from illusions to actualities, as from darkness, or perchance moon and star light, to sunlight. Dreams are real, as is the light of the stars and moon, and theirs is said to be a dreamy light. Such early morning thoughts as I speak of occupy a debatable ground between dreams and waking thoughts. They are a sort of permanent dream in my mind. At least, until we have for some time changed our position from prostrate to erect, and commenced or faced some of the duties of the day, we cannot tell what we have dreamed from what we have actually experienced.

This morning, for instance, for the twentieth time at least, I thought of that mountain in the easterly part of our town (where no high hill actually is) which once or twice I had ascended, and often allowed my thoughts alone to climb. I now contemplate it in my mind as a familiar thought which I have surely had for many years from time to time, but whether anything could have reminded me of it in the middle of yesterday, whether I ever before remembered it in broad daylight, I doubt. I can now eke out the vision I had of it this morning with my old and yesterday forgotten dreams.

My way up used to lie through a dark and unfrequented wood at its base,—I cannot now tell exactly, it was so long ago, under what circumstances I first ascended, only that I shuddered as I went along (I have an indistinct remembrance of having been out overnight alone),—and then I steadily ascended along a rocky ridge half clad with stinted trees, where wild beasts haunted, till I lost myself quite in the upper air and clouds, seeming to pass an imaginary line which separates a hill, mere earth heaped up, from a mountain, into a superterranean grandeur and sublimity. What distinguishes that summit above the earthy line, is that it is unhandselled, awful, grand. It can never become familiar; you are lost the moment you set foot there. You know no path, but wander, thrilled, over the bare and pathless rock, as if it were solidified air and cloud. That rocky, misty summit, secreted in the clouds, was far more thrillingly awful and sublime than the crater of a volcano spouting fire.

I'm surely not alone in having fallen for the New England of Hawthorne, Lovecraft, Thoreau, and Emerson, feeling it as home--ancient and corrupt as it might be--despite never having lived there?

Leonard, Lev, and the servants

After Tuesday's post about Lev Grossman's Believer article about Leonard Woolf, fantasy, and modernism, Ed Park (who was Grossman's editor for the piece) sent me to a post on Grossman's new blog where he offers some background to the article. It's worth reading the whole post, in which, among other things, Grossman reveals that the article's origin lies in a conversation with his mother from nearly twenty years ago. But what stood out for me was this admission:

I’m pretty tired of writing these truncated little 650-word nuglets for Time. It felt good to type knowing that I didn’t have to stop when I came to the end of the little box.

I've always wondered about that, about how someone as talented and well-read as Grossman adapts to hammering out the briefest of summaries week after week.There's an art to it, unquestionably; writing short and on deadline can in its way be as difficult as writing long. But I'm not surprised to find that it can also be frustrating, especially as more and more online options emerge, with their--theoretically--unlimited word counts.

Grossman's adept use of the material of Leonard Woolf's volumes of memoir having tempted me to seek them out, I returned to my bookshelves to see what I could learn about them. Anthony Powell, no friend of Bloomsbury, wrote of the first volume, Sowing, for the Daily Telegraph in 1966 (when, almost unbelievably, Woolf was still alive), that

The narrative of the early years which culminated in Cambridge is extraordinarily well done. . . . Woolf writes in an incisive, rigorous rose, suited to his own uncompromising view of life. He gives the reader a clear idea of his own upbringing and what he was like as a boy. . . . At the same time one has the feeling that the author's at times almost brutal directness conceals a good deal of sensitiveness that has suffered in the past some hard blows.

From there he moves to analysis of Bloomsbury that seems indisputable even for a reader who, like me, is more inclined to appreciate the circle:

Accordingly, like others of the group, he found, in what was perhaps a certain basic lack of self-confidence, support in becoming a member of Bloomsbury; that community which had about it something of a small religious sect in the attitude of its adherents towards each other and to the outside world.

All of which, in the disjointed way that blogs are, with the reader's forbearance, on occasion allowed to be, leads me to share a moment from Alison Light's book Mrs. Woolf and the Servants (2008). The whole book is fascinating--I can't recommend it too highly--but the moment that most stood out for me came in this account of the summer of 1929, when the Woolfs had just purchased a rural cottage:

With Nellie away, Annie came in the mornings and made lunch, often leaving a pie for Virginia to cook for dinner. By three o'clock the Woolfs were alone--a complete and utter novelty. It is worth emphasizing. They had never been alone before in their own home. Thus the life of the British modern couple was inaugurated.

They had been married for seventeen years at that point.

As I washed the dishes tonight after a long day at the office, I'll admit to having temporarily dreamed of a life with servants, but Light reminds me that such a life is far, far from the right one for me.

"We think of fantasy and modernism as worlds apart, but somehow they always end up in the same place," or, Lev Grossman and Leonard Woolf

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Fresh off Sunday's post about Virginia Woolf, today I'll direct you to Lev Grossman's article about Leonard Woolf, "The Death of a Civil Servant," in the May issue of the Believer.

The essay is built around Woolf's time as a young civil servant in Ceylon, and this description of what he found when he arrived will give you a good idea of how well Grossman makes use of interesting details from Woolf's autobiographical writings:

Ceylon was a giant step forward into adulthood and independence for Woolf, but it was also a great leap backward--backward in time. Ceylon had yet to enter the twentieth century, at least as it was known in the Western world. "Before the days of the motor-car," Woolf wrote, "Colombo was a real Eastern city, swarming with human beings and flies, the streets full of flitting rickshas and creaking bullock carts, hot and heavy with the complicated smells of men and beasts and dung and oil and food and fruit and spice." The alien heat and gargantuan insects appalled Woolf. The day after he arrived he was reunited with [his terrier] Charles at the docks. Charles promptly peed on a passerby, who seemed not at all troubled by this, then threw up from the emotion and the sun. Crows flew down to eat the vomit. Welcome to Ceylon.

Grossman tells of Woolf's awkward friendship with another colonial official, a policeman and would-be poet and intellectual, B. J. Dutton, and he uses that friendship--and Woolf's near-horror at Dutton's fairy-and-fantasy-filled poems--as the ground from which to argue a convincing, fascinating case for modernism and fantasy as dark twins, born of the same moment and reacting to the same changes in society. As Grossman puts it,

Fantasy is a prelude to the apocalypse. Modernism is the epilogue.

That Grossman has a deep knowledge of and interest in fantasy won't surprise any readers of his novel from last year, The Magicians, in which a young man who has long dreamed of escaping into a fantasy world gets his chance--only to discover that the problems and weaknesses and disappointments and betrayals of ordinary life are not, after all, particularly amenable to magic. As Grossman puts it in his Believer piece,

Much of fantasy literature arises from this essential truth: that magic is not the end of all your problems, it's the beginning. Travel deeper into the realms of gold--farther up and farther in, as Aslan says--and you leave reality behind, but only to re-encounter it in transfigured form.

Given Grossman's nuanced understanding of fantasy, what's odd about The Magicians is that the occasional frustrations in this otherwise very satisfying novel seem to come from Grossman's rejection of one of the now-standard characteristics of fantasy literature: the carefully balanced, multi-book story arc. It's as if, because there can be no truly heroic quest in The Magicians, because the world--even, or perhaps especially, the magic world--simply isn't like that, then the story itself can't be made to fit the same the heroic shape we're used to. The result is that portions of the novel feel compressed, bits of its impressively imaginative world-building more suggested than fully worked out: the relationship, for example, between the magic school of Brakebills Academy and the larger world; or the mostly alluded-to post-graduate careers of its alumni; or the faculty, who are so intriguing a group that you wish they were allotted more space. A sequel apparently is in the works, and perhaps Grossman will flesh out some of these aspects in its pages, but within The Magicians itself I felt the lack.

All of which is not to take away from Grossman's achievement: The Magicians is completely captivating, and it's absolutely crammed with creative, surprising ideas and inventions, nearly all of which cohere impressively. A magical ordeal that involves a transformation from human into animal is wonderfully rendered, convincing in its depiction of the physical and mental alterations alike. The admission exam taken by potential students is simultaneously jaw-dropping and totally believable in its context--it's hard to imagine anyone who remembers being a talented student not smiling at its challenges (and sort of wishing they could take a crack at it). And a scene where an evil creature unexpectedly emerges in a classroom is one of the most intense and frightening scenes I've ever read. I read the book soon after it was published last spring, and it's stayed with me; now I'm impatient for the sequel.

{While you're waiting, you could do worse than to pick up the May Believer--the Grossman piece alone is worth the price of admission!}

"What strange intoxication was it that he drew from books?"

From "The Pastons and Chaucer," by Virginia Woolf:

[S]ometimes, instead of riding off on his horse to inspect his crops or bargain with his tenants, Sir John would sit, in broad daylight, reading. There, on the hard chair in the comfortless room with the wind lifting the carpet and the smoke stinging his eyes, he would sit reading Chaucer, wasting his time, dreaming--or what strange intoxication was it that he drew from books? Life was rough, cheerless, and disappointing. A whole year of days would pass fruitlessly in dreary business, like dashes of rain on the window-pane. There was no reason in it as there had been for his father; no imperative need to establish a family and acquire an important position for children who were not born, or, if born, had no right to bear their father's name. But Lydgate's poems or Chaucer's, like a mirror in which figures move brightly, silently, and compactly, showed him the very skies, fields, and people whom he knew, but rounded and complete. Instead of waiting listlessly for news from London or piecing out from his mother's gossip some country tragedy of love and jealousy, here, in a few pages, the whole story was laid before him. And then as he rode or sat at table he would remember some description or saying which bore upon the present moment and fixed it, or some string of words would charm him, and putting aside the pressure of the moment, he would hasten home to sit in his chair and learn the end of the story.

I think most people who have briefly encountered Virginia Woolf's novels think of her prose as suffering from a lack of forthrightness, a wispiness--that, trapped by her efforts to reconstruct the tattered patterns of human thought, her writing never quite gets anywhere, leaving us where we started, in the undifferentiated fog of consciousness. And, despite being a Woolf fan and ready to defend her against such charges, I do understand how a reader who makes but casual acquaintance with her work could feel that way: her fiction is far from immediately welcoming, offering few of the comfortable footholds we have come to expect as we ease into a novel.

But her nonfiction, oh, that's a different story. Clear, balanced, precise, full of rich description and memorable scenes, yet, at its best, nearly as surprising in its approaches and conclusions as her fiction. The passage above comes from the opening essay in The Common Reader (1925), and its springboard was a six-volume collection of fifteenth-century letters of the Paston family. The Pastons lived on a manor that had been bought from a son of Chaucer, and from that--and Margaret Paston's continual complaints about her son's neglect of his duties in favor of his reading--Woolf spins out a detailed, lively vision of a lonely existence in "the most desolate part of England," where there is but a single road, with a hole in it "big enough to swallow a carriage," where the chimney smokes and the drafts wail, where

Tom Topcroft, the mad bricklayer, has broken loose again and ranges the country half-naked, threatening to kill any one who approaches him.

The desolation of her scene deliciously set, she brings on Chaucer--and, oh, if we've fallen into a habit of taking for granted the joy and escape found in reading, by the time Sir John is ensconced in his library as if in a fortress Woolf has made it impossible for us to do so any longer.

She moves on to do the same for the charms and surprises and humor of Chaucer:

To learn the end of the story--Chaucer can still make us wish to do that. He has pre-eminently that story-teller's gift, which is almost the rarest gift among writers at the present day. Nothing happens to us as it did to our ancestors; events are seldom important; if we recount them, we do not really believe in them; we have perhaps things of greater interest to say, and for these reasons natural story-tellers like Mr Garnett*, whom we must distinguish from self-conscious story-tellers like Mr Masefield**, have become rare. For the story-teller, besides his indescribable zest for facts, must tell his story craftily, without undue stress or excitement, or we shall swallow it whole and jumble the parts together; he must let us stop, give us time to think and look about us, yet always be persuading us to move on.

Having been myself in the clutches of a great storyteller--Dorothy Dunnett--all weekend, with that I will close this and return to sitting on my back steps with my book. What better way to spend these last few hours of sunny weekend daylight?

Rob a bookstore . . . get some books!

Usually, business owners want Parker to stay as far away as possible. My local bookstore, 57th Street Books, is inviting him in. Sort of. They're having a contest, calling for people to write and submit stories about Parker knocking over a bookstore--and because Parker hates wasted effort, they're only accepting stories of 350 words or less.

The winner will receive a set of the first twelve Richard Stark reissues from my employer, the University of Chicago Press. Second prize is a copy of Darwyn Cooke's graphic adaptation of The Hunter, and third will get you a Parker poster. You can find all the details here.

Oh, and I'm going to be one of the judges. Get writing, Parker fans!

Back to the Cardboard Universe

The announcement late last month that this fall Houghton Mifflin Harcourt would be publishing an edited version of Philip K. Dick's 8,000-page notebook of spiritual visions, Exegesis, sent me right back to Christopher Miller's Dick-based satire, Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K. Dank. I wrote about the new Dick and Miller's book for the Constant Conversation earlier tonight, but as I flipped through The Cardboard Universe, I kept finding more bits that I really wanted to share.

Like this sample of Dank's writing, drawn from F for Fatal, a novel about a murderous professor whose gradebook includes a column headed "Obnox," in which most students have at least one mark, and all the murdered students have ten:

In retrospect, the newspapers and other media would later come to wittily refer to this as the "Obnoxiousness Score," being as the students testified that the notorious professor never showed the least annoyment in the classroom, but, instead, that any time that a pupil said or did something in class that was obnoxious, the poker-faced professor would thoughtfully nod and, then, make a cryptical notation next to the offending scholar's name in his notorious grade book.

The guidebook is written by two Dank experts, one of whom--the one behind this entry--can't stand Dank or his work. He writes of the above passage:

Where to begin with such a sentence--such an embarrassment of poverties? The redundancy of "later" and "in retrospect"? The solitary "this," shipwrecked an ocean away from the homeland of its antecedent? The self-congratulating "wittily" with which Dank splits his infinitive? The clunky repetition of "notorious," or the even more ham-fisted effort to avoid a repetition of "students"? The way that those on the far side of the lectern--be they students, pupils, or scholars--know not only that the poker-faced professor's notation concerns the most recently obnoxious of their number, but also that it is "cryptical"? The annoyment of the non-words that made up so big a part of Dank's vocabulary? I could go on, but suffice it to say that F for Fatal is composed entirely of sentences, or "sentences" like the above, and so it's quite a slog--"like wading through glue," as Tennyson said of Ben Jonson.

The vitriol is bracing, no?

More succinct, but just as vicious, is the entry for "If Looks Could Kill":

Short-short story. Should be shorter. Title says it all.*

The asterisk, meanwhile, leads to a footnote by the guide's other editor, a fawning Dank apologist. The footnote gives an idea of the interplay that drives the plot that emerges from the guide as it moves through the alphabet:

* If my collaborator din't want to summarize the piece in question, he should have let me. "If Looks Could Kill"--inspired by my explanation of a game called Laser Tag to which I'd just been introduced by my students--imagines a terrifying world where people can kill one another just by glaring hard enough.

The book is long--522 pages--and it's a mark of Miller's inventiveness and humor that despite the constraints of its format it held my interest throughout. Between this book and Steve Hely's How I Became a Famous Novelist, last year was a good one for the comic novel.

"Descend the stairs of humility!" or, more on Jack Sheppard

Saturday's post about Jack Sheppard left out one important part: the role God played in Sheppard's jailbreaking exploits.

Kelly Grovier opens his account of Sheppard's career in The Gaol with a sermon that was delivered from a London pulpit soon after Sheppard's fourth and final escape:

Oh, that ye were all like Jack Sheppard! Mistake me not, my brethren--I don't mean in a carnal, but in a spiritual sense; for I propose to spiritualize these things. What a shame it would be if we should not think it worth our while to take as much pains, and employ as many deep thoughts to save our souls as he has done to preserve his body!

Let me exhort ye, then, to open the locks of your hearts with the nail of repentance! Burst asunder the fetters of your beloved lusts! --mount the chimney of hope! --take from thence the bar of good resolution! --break through the stone wall of despair, and all the strongholds in the dark entry of the valley of the shadow of death! Raise yourself to the leads of divine meditation! --fix the blanket of faith with the spike of the church! let yourselves down to the turner's house of resignation, and descend the stairs of humility! So shall you come to the door of deliverance from the prison of iniquity, and escape the clutches of that old executioner the Devil!

Leaving aside the silliness of the sermon's central conceit, I have to admire some of the imagery. For every one that doesn't work--"the leads of divine meditation," "the chimney of hope"--there's one that works beautifully, like "the blanket of faith" and "the stairs of humility." (Is it a mark of immaturity and prurience that when the word "mount" follows the word "lusts," it's not a chimney I expect to be mounted?)

Sheppard, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy invoking God's name throughout his public career. Of his wife, Bess, who at one point betrayed him to Jonathan Wild, he said,

There is not a more wicked, deceitful, lascivious wretch living in England. God forgive her. I do.

More brazen by far was Sheppard's testimony in the Old Bailey when he was offered immunity in exchange for testimony against his unknown co-conspirators. According to Grovier,

Jack refused to co-operate and took umbrage at the suggestion that his prison breaks were in any way staged. His only help, he exclaimed to gasps of horror from the bench, had come from God.

It wasn't confidence in God, however, that gave Sheppard at least an appearance of calm as he faced the gallows:

Hopeful that the resuscitation efforts that would inevitably take place immediately after the hanging might actually succeed, Sheppard turned down the opportunity to address the crowd at length and invited those in attendance to purchase the pamphlet entitled A narrative of all the robberies, escapes, &c., of John Sheppard, written by himself and printed by John Applebee of Blackfriars, which he said contained his final confession and which he stood to profit substantially from if he were to be revived.

The press of the crowd, however, prevented any real efforts at resuscitation, unlikely as their success might have been.

Within two weeks, however, Sheppard had been resurrected--with the help, though, not of any god, but of a mere dramatist. He was the main character in a play called Harlequin Sheppard; A Night Scene in Grotesque Characters that was "a bizarre balletic reconstruction" of his final escape, with the lead played by an actor who went so far as to visit Sheppard in Newgate days before his execution. To repeated questions about the details of his escape, Sheppard reportedly replied, "I should be glad to have it in my power to play my own part."

Jack Sheppard escapes . . . and escapes . . . and escapes . . .

{Portrait of Jack Sheppard by James Thornhill, 1724}

Feeling imprisoned by gray and gloomy weather, I spent the morning flipping through Kelly Grovier's recent popular history of Newgate Prison, The Gaol (2008). The best story I've come across thus far is that of thief and highwayman Jack Sheppard, who escaped from prison four times in seven months in 1724, including twice from Newgate.

His escape from St. Giles, a relatively pedestrian matter of digging through the ceiling of his cell, made him famous, but it was easily topped by his subsequent escape from Clerkenwell with his wife, a "pudgy cutpurse and prostitute" named Bess. Grovier's account reveals the lax standards of security that prevailed at the prison, as

a steady stream of visitors succeeded . . . in slipping Sheppard sharp tools--bits of broken-off saw and picks. Before long their cell was strewn with iron filings and oak shards as Sheppard cut his way through fourteen pounds of fetters and the nine-inch wood plank that barred the window. Strips from Bess's petticoat and ripped-up sheets were knotted into a makeshift rope down which the two abseiled into the adjoining exercise yard of the Bridewell House of Correction. What happened next would instantly enter local legend. Hoisting Bess--which was itself a challenge--on to his shoulder, his feet groping in the moonlight for a grip on the slippery bolts and hinges of a conveniently situated gate, Sheppard scaled the twenty-two-foot wall that separated the couple from freedom and whirled his rotund mistress down to the street below. . . . "It has been allow'd by all the Jayl-Keepers in London," one pamphlet would relate, an escape "so Miraculous was never perform'd before in England; the broken Chains and Bars are kept at New Prison to Testifie, and preserve the Memory of this extraordinary Villain."

Perhaps not quite as impressive on its face as Casanova's escape from the Doge's Palace over the leads, but then Casanova didn't have to bring along any of his lady friends.

Partly through the offices of the endlessly fascinating double agent Jonathan Wild (whom Fielding immortalized), Sheppard was soon recaptured, having returned to crime, as Defoe put it, "like a dog to his vomit." Remanded to Newgate, he quickly escaped yet again, this time dressed (with the aid of Bess, who remained free) as a woman.

Brought in one more time, placed in "the Castle," Newgate's central cell, and facing certain hanging based on perjured--if accurate in spirit--testimony cooked up by Wild, Sheppard proceeded to mount one last escape. Grovier's account delivers the full drama of the scene, alongside Sheppard's impressive determination. He jimmied his handcuffs with a nail, escaped his leg irons through some contortions, and climbed the chimney to the disused room above his cell. But he was still far from free:

The locks presented little challenge to Jack, nor did a series of others on his way to the prison chapel. Finding the chapel door bolted from the inside, Jack rammed the door repeatedly with the crow bar that he had [pried from the chimney and] brought with him. Eventually, he punched a hole large enough for him to slip his slender hand through and he was able to reach in and slide back the bolt. So he went, through door after bolted door without so much as a match to help him see in the darkness, anxiously expecting to hear the clatter of boots galloping after him at any moment. Eventually, Jack found himself standing on the ledge of the Upper Leads of the prison, too high above the roofs below to leap safely.

Teetering precariously on the brink of either freedom or death, Jack Sheppard made on of the most remarkable decisions of his short life. He climbed back inside the prison to retrace his footsteps to the Castle and retrieve the bedclothes from his cell, out of which to fashion a rope. Back down the chimney and up again, trampling broken door handles and bolts as he ran, Jack made it back to the ledge, tied the end of the riped sheets to a pennant hook and lowered himself down on to the roof of William Bird.

Now that escape does seem worthy of Casanova; Wild's determination reminds me of Casanova;s answer to a fellow prisoner the night he made his escape attempt:

He asked me my plans at once, telling me he thought I had taken my first steps too lightly.

"I only ask," I answered him, "to carry on until I find freedom or death."

Unlike Casanova, who escaped to Paris and a long life of debauchery, Sheppard found not one but both--or, rather, he found freedom, and death found him, as he was eventually recaptured and hanged before an enormous crowd at Tyburn.

"So many potty ladies, so many biographies!"

I wrote quite a bit about So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald when it was published in England in 2008, so I was pleased to discover today that it finally reached America officially last month, being published in paperback by Fourth Estate.

I wrote about the book for the Constant Conversation tonight, but no volume of letters worth its salt is ever exhausted, so I've got a couple of additional bits to share here.

First, this paragraph from a letter Fitzgerald sent to Colin Haycraft, her editor at Duckworth, on April 11, 1978, when she was in the midst of her ultimately unsuccessful attempt to write a biography of L. P. Hartley:

I did succeed in getting invited to LPH's childhood home, unchanged since 1900, with the old brass electric light fittings and baths &c., and by talking to his sister I got the psychological key to his novels, every novelist has one, I suppose, the situation his mind goes back to when he's alone--and I also discovered that his manservant was trying to poison him with veronal and that was why his bank manager locked him up and forced him to make a will, not in the manservant's favour--I was surprised when Frabcus [King, her friend] commented on this, that surely anyone would prefer to be murdered by someone they loved, rather than have them leave and blackmail you--these seemed to him the only alternatives, but I can think of so many other duller ones.

Good god, can I ever!

Then there's this line from a note she sent her editor, Richard Ollard, after a domestic accident that sent her to the emergency room:

The next case brought in after me was an O/D-M/D--overdose, marital disagreement.

DSo I Have Thought of You is so full of pleasures that no one who has fallen for Fitzgerald's brilliantly lean, piercingly perceptive novels should be without it.

The Glamorous World of Publishing, Revealed!

The press of work--which, for all its pleasures, Jules Renard was apt in describing as

a little like a prison: how many pleasant, passing things it keeps us from seeing!

--is rendering blogging difficult this week. So what better to do than, in honor of my employer's semi-annual sales conference, hew, however briefly, to a theme of publishing!

First, from David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2004), I offer you an awkward encounter between a vanity publisher and one of his authors, an unreconstructed British gangster who is upset that his book isn't being sufficiently promoted or appreciated:

I explained to him for the hundredth time how an author-partnership set-up like Cavendish Publishing simply cannot fritter away money on fancy catalogues and team-building go-karting weekends for sales forces. I explained, yet again, that my authors derived fulfilment from presenting their handsomely bound volumes to friends,to family, to posterity. I explained, yet again, that the gangster-chic market was saturated; and that even Moby-Dick bombed in Melville's lifetime, though I did not deploy that particular verb.

Being a gangster, the author quickly salvages the situation with a spot of spectacular violence, the resulting publicity from which sells out print run after print run.

Which leads nicely into this jotting from the notebooks of New Directions founder James Laughlin, published in his odd little posthumous semi-memoir The Way It Wasn't (2006), about an author who found a much more humane way to boost sagging sales:

WOW! Guess who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry! Our little old George Oppen. Totally a surprise, but nice . . . His sales on the book which won were negative for 1968, i.e.--more returns than sales. Salesmen begged me last year--"No more Oppen, please"--we just can't sell him. Waiting to see their Rosy Visages this Thursday at Sales Meeting in Phila.

And Oppen, a few of whose books are currently in a box in my basement while we wait (and wait and wait) to sell our condominium, leads me to a dream I had a week or two ago:

I woke to find Ruk, the tall, menacing android from the Star Trek episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"*, looming over my bed. "Come," he said, and then he led me into our second bedroom. Pointing to the bookcase--the one lonely bookcase, of twelve, that we've retained in our newly spare, depersonalized condo--Ruk shook his head and said, "Not one bookcase. One bookshelf."

Fortunately I woke for real before I had to begin the agonizing process of further winnowing, and Ruk hasn't paid any subsequent visits to check my compliance.

"Golden-skinned boys and girls playing roulette with highballs in every hand," or, Sunday morning coming down

Like the raucous seagulls circling Wrigley Field in the ninth inning of yesterday's game, preparing to scarf up the inevitable hot dog puke, Sunday morning waits patiently for the weekend reveler, knowing he will require its quiet for rest, regret, and recovery. For those readers who fall into that category, I offer this morning some dissipated selections from Edmund Wilson's journals of the 1920s.

I'll start with a scene, interpolated by Wilson years later as he re-read his notebooks, that is enough to strike horror into the heart of any man who can recall his first illicit visit to a certain carefully monitored drug store aisle:

I decided that I had now been innocent long enough and decided to buy a condom. I went to a drugstore on Greenwich Avenue and watched nervously from outside to be sure that there were no women there. I then went in and inquired. The clerk withdrew to the back counter and produced a condom of rubber, which he highly recommended, blowing it up like a balloon in order to show me how reliable it was. But the condom, thus distended, burst, and this turned out to be something of an omen. I soon got over my shyness with women, but I was a victim of many of the hazards of sex--from which I might have been saved by previous experience: abortions, gonorrhea, entanglements, a broken heart.

What I wonder is whether that druggist put on the same demonstration for every young man who asked for a condom, or if he sensed a particular susceptibility to embarrassment in Wilson? And, with that in mind: might it all have been a prank, the condom intentionally ruptured to throw a fright into the affected fop who'd had the temerity to inquire about it?

Along those lines, this account of Wilson's friend Ted Paramore, from 1921, is lively and ridiculous in its portrayal of uncertain young male sexuality:

The girl he got away from Donald Douglas. --"She wasn't very good. She wasn't very pretty but she had a good body." --She finally made him feel so ashamed, however, that he gave her up: "She said, 'You make me feel as if I were on a barren plain whipped by a bitter wind!' --And I ---!" --business of hanging his head in abasement. --But the first time he had been to see her, he was enormously set up the next morning--he came in to see me, beaming, and said it had restored his self-confidence. She had "made him breakfast and everything."

It strikes me that any woman who can come up with that image of the barren plain probably deserved better than the apparently feckless Paramore, who, elsewhere in the journal, is seen attending a ball as a "vulture,"

that is, he went as a stag and spent the evening trying to pass out old men and steal their young mistresses.

Now, in reverse of the way things usually progress, we'll move from sex to drink. Having expressed doubt about Ted Paramore, it seems only fair to let him offer a bit of irrefutable wisdom:

"At these parties they get absolutely soused, then they begin to get Ritzy, and at the same time they keep falling off the chairs. You can't try to high-hat everybody and fall off chairs at the same time."

Then, a brief look in on a 1921 party at the apartment of Cleon Throckmorton, a theatrical set designer:

I came in and found the room full of people whom I took at first to be the cast of Orpheus. I went over to Catherine Throckmorton and we sat down together--she was just drunk enough to be partly speechless and to have assumed, as she often does under those circumstances, a bogus foreign accent.

Finally, because a night of drinking with Edmund Wilson wouldn't be complete without Ring Lardner and Scott Fitzgerald, here's an early morning--following a late-night--scene at Lardner's house:

Zelda had gone to sleep in an armchair, and covered herself with a shawl. . . . Lardner read teh golf rules aloud. (This was a little book put out by the local golf club. Lardner read these rules at length with a cold and somber scor that was funny, yet really conveyed his disgust with his successful suburban life.) --Then we went back to the Fitzgeralds' Lardner and I started talkign abotu the oil scandal, and Fitz fell asleep in his chair. Lardner and I went on talking about baseball, Heywood Broun, Lardner's writing, the Americanized Carmen, the Rascoes, etc. Deep blue patches appeared at the windows. I couldn't at first think what they were--then I realized it was the dawn. The birds tuned up one at a time It grew light. It was seven o'clock. Scott asked what we had been talking about. Lardner said we had been talking about him. --"I suppose you analyzed me ruthlessly."

Am I wrong, when I picture the livers of that generation, in imagining something just sub-Lovecraftian in its inchoate horror?

Now that we've reached the morning after, lest you harbor hopes that your gentleman's gentleman might sidle quietly into your room with a restorative, you first might want to be reminded that not all servants are as reliably comforting as Jeeves:

At dinner, Mrs Murphy sat mumbling about the butler-they always did manage to have such sinister servants, don't you now? "I really feel there's something wrong about him--I'm really afraid of him--even though his wife is such a good cook, I really think I'll have to discharge him!" "Well, Mother, I really don't think you're very good if you allow yourself to be intimidated by your own servants!" "Well, but you don't have to be in the house with him continually as I do--I really don't think it's safe to be in the house alone with him--I really think I'll have to let him go!"

Perhaps, like Wilson himself, you're fortunate enough to need little restorative aside from the Sunday itself:

That vague and charming feeling of coming to (no doubt a dose of aspirin contributed to these sensations) after having been drunk the night before, very late in the day--of going out and finding the warm May day, the people out on the Avenue in their Sunday clothes and riding on the top of the buses; of lying inside and hearing, from behind the lowered shades, where a bright sun comes in through a hole, the cries of children playing in the street and the sound of boat whistles. We leave the windows up during the day and the shades up at night: we don't need to shut ourselves up any longer.

And, if you can make it through the fog-headed morning,

At night, the park in a warm obscurity plaited with the bright pearls of lamps, the taxis moving on their errands--they seem more genial, more attractive now--the first soft mysteries of the city summer.

Swozzled or sober, enjoy this first real summer Sunday of the year, secure in the knowledge that there are plenty more to come--maybe not that endless string that stretched before us in childhood, but a sufficient number for the more modest ambitions of adulthood.