tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-204338422024-03-12T23:01:59.911-04:00Varieties of Unreligious ExperienceDon't talk to me about politics; I am interested only in styleConrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.comBlogger373125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-8452579428219618442009-11-17T23:32:00.008-05:002009-11-18T01:13:02.658-05:00Enigma of the Hour<div align="justify">Never underestimate London's ability to surprise you. It only takes a little trick of the autumn light to transform, say, <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=stroudley+walk,+london+e3&sll=51.526668,-0.017138&sspn=0.103168,0.220757&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Stroudley+Walk,+London+E3,+United+Kingdom&z=16">Stroudley Walk, E3</a>, into, say, pre-War Turin, on a Sunday evening, or perhaps a Monday morning.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSuwKqwiaGEBOLYPd-p63C9xxID1R2U7WyGyGj3wnHvRcISu3THyIeNJIMbfwNXH2881TsbAHmLTBwathU7-A0wZvDH0uuBBD96EIFl-_6r-EOuuo-zLuXQjWWmwb0GUpPKjJy/s1600/Bromley+High+St+%C3%83"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5405297236433733506" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 300px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSuwKqwiaGEBOLYPd-p63C9xxID1R2U7WyGyGj3wnHvRcISu3THyIeNJIMbfwNXH2881TsbAHmLTBwathU7-A0wZvDH0uuBBD96EIFl-_6r-EOuuo-zLuXQjWWmwb0GUpPKjJy/s400/Bromley+High+St+%C3%A0+la+De+Chirico.JPG" border="0" /></a><br />Oh, my dear readers, the light of London will astonish you: subfusc overhead, golden on the ground, with the raking beam of the sun askance. There are a million such metamorphoses on offer in the city. Presently it is almost five in the morning; there is no light outside, only the heavy winds, making the casements chatter. Still, a long shadow is cast before me on the piazza: a metaphysical entity. On the third of December, that is, in a little over two weeks, my son is going to be hacked out of my wife, and into my life. This sort of fact tends to stick in the mind when you'd rather be writing, or sleeping.<br /><br />My sister brought over her son's cot, no longer needed. It has been put together, and sits at the end of the bed, with garish toys, a cage, waiting. I am reminded of my childhood, when we were to embark on a holiday, <em>en famille</em>, perhaps to Italy, say, to Turin: the plane would be leaving at nine in the morning, and I would have packed the night before, leaving only the toothbrush out for my early ablution. I would sleep unsoundly, or not at all, for I'd be imagining the trip to come, and the bedroom would be in a state of disarray, all <em>undone</em> in anticipation: reordered and unfinished, suspended. To leave my bed, my house, my street, where I'd grown up, even for a week in the sun, seemed an enormous displacement, and already in the dawn taxi to Heathrow, shooting west through the strange wastes of Hounslow on the M4, long shadows before us, I would be seized with the desire to be home again. Do you remember these emotions? This melancholy of limbo, this bating of the breath?</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-73943838144391876252009-07-31T16:50:00.005-04:002009-07-31T17:09:24.492-04:00Rothschild<div align="justify">Mrs Roth, it seems, has been harbouring a boy. We saw it there on the screen, between his legs, sticking nonchalantly out, not a care in the world: horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. We can't be certain, said the woman; it could be a large clitoris. But there was no mistaking that member. His name, come four months, will be Owen. Owen Roth, 'tis a handsome name, is it not?</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-52922572657025933022009-07-21T17:38:00.013-04:002009-07-22T11:32:34.553-04:00Alexandra Park, crépuscule<div align="justify">I had been cooped all day at the Library. When I got home, against the night, I was restless, walkative. To see a place in the dark. Alas, so few places will <em>be</em> dark in the city, what with all the sodium lampadaires. Nothing is handsome in dun orange, nothing promissory. One has to find a natural darkness to obtain the possibility of promise. This can be achieved even in daylight. I had found it in the blank corridors and walkways in the weekend shadow of Tower 42; in the hard cavern under the Westway as it crosses Wood Lane, the sun overhead making the dark more spectral and unreal, a gasmasked youth spraying a wall—I had not courage enough to take a picture—and also beside Old Billingsgate, under a rickety jetty beneath Water Lane, at low tide, beyond the comfort of tourists, where the shingle gave way to debris, sand, quick and fungal underfoot, and the river lapped insouciantly at my shoes.<br /><br />But at night, a natural darkness is found only in the city's parks. Someday after midnight, jump a gate at Regent's Park, cross the boating lake, walk out onto the broad grasses to the north, where we played cricket at school, walk until the trees around the lake are black masses far behind, and the trees edging the Zoo are black masses far ahead. There is no comparable space in London, locked alone in the Park, the sky and the earth differentiated only in shade.<br /><br />I did not have the benefit of Regent's Park within walking distance. So I made for Alexandra Park, only ten minutes from my door—a space dominated by the palace at the top of the hill, but concealing a reasonable variety within its borders. It was not yet twilight. My path is always through the development, the <a href="http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=%22new+river+village%22&m=text">New River Village</a>. This is, of course, not a village. It is not even <em>like</em> a village. It is a series of contemporary apartment blocks in the young professional style: featureless surfaces, glass, lots of white, a few stilts, empty mock-modernist sculpture, awkward angles, sad stretches of grass, plastic windows and balconies in lime green and purple. They've added a gym and a minuscule art gallery, and built a restaurant into the old canal pumphouse, but still the place has no life. The whole very much resembles an architect's drawing, the sort you see on billboards outside construction-sites. There are a lot of these in the city. I am glad to have one here, at the edge of the park, to cleanse the palate. Walk five minutes into the Village, alongside the canal if you like, or on the tricky pavement shingle, and you are no longer in the redbrick Edwardian wastes of North London. You curve around the back of the Village, and find the old council houses of the Campsbourne Estate, and facing them the reservoir, a dilapidated playground, and then, the entrance to the park.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhufi607AmfBtituRtwKM3pd-qjRCIGKwuGzHbbrt2TSZ5TFFx6pyLUHo_d-yP4Due0eMG-A_NxCKMjlYcemVaQ7LmCuqvVgMPewMiYNKnY6UnSQ1ouELZ2rCrOFZHdt0h7jj-/s1600-h/Alexandra+Park,+evening+1.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5361041357847101330" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 300px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhufi607AmfBtituRtwKM3pd-qjRCIGKwuGzHbbrt2TSZ5TFFx6pyLUHo_d-yP4Due0eMG-A_NxCKMjlYcemVaQ7LmCuqvVgMPewMiYNKnY6UnSQ1ouELZ2rCrOFZHdt0h7jj-/s400/Alexandra+Park,+evening+1.JPG" border="0" /></a><br />The reservoir, in fact, is one of the park's secret attractions. Along the eastern edge of the slope down from the palace, hidden by trees. There are three openings to it, from the path (above) that leads up to Bedford Road on the hill.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjC4IJESVM1QqfPn79ypkJpcaBP0I2PLWGKHxodQBSnzOptAu698PzKB6ay1p9NxeP4ojUfs9wdqoJqSinkXGGmCPMs9aSKHNki48_MWH2QWlFMbl1XkFjJ1IYF6jfaHVdbHdns/s1600-h/Alexandra+Park,+evening+3.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5361041369878363682" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 300px; height: 400px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjC4IJESVM1QqfPn79ypkJpcaBP0I2PLWGKHxodQBSnzOptAu698PzKB6ay1p9NxeP4ojUfs9wdqoJqSinkXGGmCPMs9aSKHNki48_MWH2QWlFMbl1XkFjJ1IYF6jfaHVdbHdns/s400/Alexandra+Park,+evening+3.JPG" border="0" /></a><br />Each of these latent ways leads to a viewpoint onto the reservoir. I stopped at each, methodically. A man was walking his collies, allowing each off the leash in turn, to yap and frolic, each returning, conscientiously, in a few moments, to restraint, as would I, soon enough. I had a decent shot of a giant slug, the light was still enough, just.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDCnCuUKyVCoaNfHol4hrlGUnsVc7fdgCy4iqyT4J23qq-yf9GNd1DUkJWfDx1ADlR-mCwzt7dc1P8m2wovL22yq1vVfP48tuH-UuXfMqZshqsfxjVolqQ4ZlzbBMtLlnpIXX_/s1600-h/Night+Reservoir+2.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5361041353515323250" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 300px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDCnCuUKyVCoaNfHol4hrlGUnsVc7fdgCy4iqyT4J23qq-yf9GNd1DUkJWfDx1ADlR-mCwzt7dc1P8m2wovL22yq1vVfP48tuH-UuXfMqZshqsfxjVolqQ4ZlzbBMtLlnpIXX_/s400/Night+Reservoir+2.JPG" border="0" /></a><br />When I first came walking here, I was delighted to find these viewpoints furnished, behind the railings, with wooden frames, against which one can rest to look at the reservoir, and luxuriant with quisquilian foliage. I have long felt an affection for <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2007/12/stone-water-angel.html">reservoirs</a>, as against ponds and lakes, say those of the Heath. Man finds the basic forms of nature and recreates them; in the process those forms are made meaningful. Pyramids and temples gave purpose and meaning to the mountain, houses gave meaning to the cave, <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2009/03/on-textures-of-west-london.html">canals</a> to the river, and so reservoirs to the lake. The reservoir is not as grand or impressive as the lake, but it is more <em>significant</em>. It refuses to be beautiful or pretty; rather, its beauty springs from the possibility of meaning.<br /><br />The other great aesthetic appeal of a reservoir is its privacy. As part of the industrial landscape, you can only ever <em>approach</em> a reservoir, observe it through a fence or other barrier. You can never grasp the meaning of the water, and so never exhaust it. In this taste I find a reflex in myself of the ancient love of order, of hierarchy: the devout kept from the tabernacle. Better to have mystery, the awe of the invisible—subterranean, mechanical, hieratic—than to be left with an open society, bright surfaces, transparency. In such a city, nobody could experience a pleasure like <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulholmes/sets/72057594070422686/">this</a>, a sublime profanation.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3EO8SVzvZmAme9lM9fHyh3ZSCnGyGgppjhzC7L-921L6X8fu9SpeqbaqraxKWYMT8PXQFHy7fmKPXOFZrMu-_-KyiFhx8kblS8nXoV_hjkx3IxVcdsEd6lhw2ffj-LCp7GSHl/s1600-h/Night+Reservoir+1.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5361041001486996994" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 301px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3EO8SVzvZmAme9lM9fHyh3ZSCnGyGgppjhzC7L-921L6X8fu9SpeqbaqraxKWYMT8PXQFHy7fmKPXOFZrMu-_-KyiFhx8kblS8nXoV_hjkx3IxVcdsEd6lhw2ffj-LCp7GSHl/s400/Night+Reservoir+1.JPG" border="0" /></a><br />The new reservoir buildings, above, completed this year, are a great disappointment. The ideal reservoir architecture is castellar, like the Edwardian turrets around <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockwood_Reservoir">Lockwood</a>, or the brute concrete hulk (1955) on Siward's Howe, north of York. These are dismal, plastic barns, with bathetic curving roofs, which might have housed a furniture superstore out on the M1. I remember these structures still as skeletons, incomplete. Then they were terrific. Now they dilute and spoil the oppressive intimacy of the landscape.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3HR2HEVpC4fNtJtPRnPM3_lpZE0CCjoNTA4nj3Sp63WLeslBt6FcquZckMdFAGedm8jxXIqIeiJWr3yHDU3J_CUkruth9wbJp-uHsOwe-HQkGk5UtLdyB_gMKp9SRx-62M6j9/s1600-h/Alexandra+Park,+evening+2.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5361041364799003554" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 300px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3HR2HEVpC4fNtJtPRnPM3_lpZE0CCjoNTA4nj3Sp63WLeslBt6FcquZckMdFAGedm8jxXIqIeiJWr3yHDU3J_CUkruth9wbJp-uHsOwe-HQkGk5UtLdyB_gMKp9SRx-62M6j9/s400/Alexandra+Park,+evening+2.JPG" border="0" /></a><br />The sun finally set for good, 8.46 pm, behind another wall of trees ringing the pitches. Let the trees be dull, let the grass be dull, let the barn and stands be dull. Let us seek an aesthetic <em>equipollence</em> in the twilight. I find this an underrated mood. It is a shame, for the city, all cities, excel particularly in it. I hurry up the hill, approaching the palace from the east, through the rose garden—prim and clipped, as you would expect, so as to balance out the lower slopes. In the gloom I can see the inglory of North London spread out into the distance. 7.8 miles away, One Canada Square, the tallest building in the city, but soon to be usurped from this throne, winks sadly at me, as if in acknowledgement of impending senescence. The bus passes, empty, a lit cell passing up to Muswell Hill, through the unsung park. The dusk allows the palace none of the sham magnificence it enjoys during the day, leaving it shabby, ungainly, not sure what to do with itself, and so melancholy, magnificent. It is not beautiful, not like the other Victorian follies, and this cannot be disguised by pointing a camera cleverly. And so it has the park it deserves; or the park has the palace it deserves. The authenticity is commendable.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKshlGy9AqFx0aW3kS01QgVxbxVPv9oeTHB5iZh2X5nHzhscy61CPXApa6kyuloKXyB0Tga431rQMAL-5x2MSkfn4_9rF-PpgXoWpfpFZh3q-UdguqYydy3FHnXrAavZlntWfb/s1600-h/Alexandra+Park,+Night.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5361041379200130946" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 300px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKshlGy9AqFx0aW3kS01QgVxbxVPv9oeTHB5iZh2X5nHzhscy61CPXApa6kyuloKXyB0Tga431rQMAL-5x2MSkfn4_9rF-PpgXoWpfpFZh3q-UdguqYydy3FHnXrAavZlntWfb/s400/Alexandra+Park,+Night.JPG" border="0" /></a><br />Returning to Hornsey, down the western slopes, this was as close as I could come to the cricket fields of Regent's Park. The camera would not serve the scene, but you have the idea. The far lights of Wood Green add and detract in equal measure. It is a fair walk, not cold, and there is food on the table, and work still to be done. I do not count the two hours in my log of strolls; I saw nothing new, but only newly the old. The one is material to be memorised; the other, to be cherished and remembered.</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-23879924353005312032009-07-16T16:05:00.014-04:002009-07-18T20:17:28.602-04:00Shakespeare at Charlecote Park<div align="justify">Since Mrs Roth got out of hospital, I have been reading her <em>Baron Munchausen</em>. The first time I read this, I made the mistake of using one of the many modern bastardised editions—my copy had Ronald Searle illustrations, with a short but hyperbolic introduction by S. J. Perelman—but this time I returned to something like the original text, in a Dover reprint with the Doré plates. (The chapters are a little rearranged, but the prose is much the same.) <em>Munchausen</em>, written in English by a German, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Erich_Raspe">Raspe</a>, and first published in 1785, is rife with grammatical peculiarities. When the Baron is posted to keep the Sultan's bees, his duties are <blockquote>to drive the Sultan's bees every morning to their pasture grounds, to attend them all the day long, and against night to drive them back to their hives.</blockquote>'Against night'? That Middle English idiom was long dead; the OED's latest citation is Stansby's 1634 Malory, and before that, Lord Berners' archaising 1523 version of Froissart. Raspe, of course, knew it as good current German idiom—<em>gegen Abend</em>, 'as the evening approaches'. Raspe also seems to have had difficulty with preterites: 'In an instant I took my gun from the corner, <em>run</em> down stairs, and out in such a hurry. . .', 'My ball had missed them, yet the foremost pig only <em>run</em> away. . .' The third edition, much expanded, makes the same mistake: 'while the whale was running away with the ship she <em>sprung</em> a leak'. But this expansion, which contains most of the material plundered by Terry Gilliam for his film, was written by a different hand: the anonymous hack paid to continuate Raspe's adventures perpetuated his solecisms as well.<br /><br /></div><div align="center">*</div><div align="justify"><br />The modern reader who has already heard a few of the Munchausen tales will be startled by the casual brutality of the original narrative. A fox is literally flogged out of its skin, a wolf eats its way through a horse's body and becomes trapped in the carcase, another horse has its rear end dissevered by a falling portcullis, and keeps on running nonetheless—in the continuation, the Baron nonchalantly slaughters 'several thousand' polar bears: <blockquote>I had heard an old army surgeon say a wound in the spine was instant death. I now determined to try the experiment, and had again recourse to my knife, with which I struck the largest in the back of the neck, near the shoulders, but under great apprehensions, not doubting but the creature would, if he survived the stab, tear me to pieces. However, I was remarkably fortunate, for he fell dead at my feet without making the least noise. I was now resolved to demolish them every one in the same manner, which I accomplished without the least difficulty; for although they saw their companions fall, they had no suspicion of either the cause or the effect. When they all lay dead before me, I felt myself a second Samson, having slain my thousands.</blockquote><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrfV57uxaFP6K9_GoTKgshaVJ_tiH5kyMrbiH58xqaF-9jcxNp2lT5JvJJSD-m6rdDfqO_P1nXSoNOTF6nZqJQV9E-nRCy6PXAKTw9E_96Ps-uXJVhLkOJRD_5PO9P1og2Oek6/s1600-h/MUNCH.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359166694008822290" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 283px; height: 400px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrfV57uxaFP6K9_GoTKgshaVJ_tiH5kyMrbiH58xqaF-9jcxNp2lT5JvJJSD-m6rdDfqO_P1nXSoNOTF6nZqJQV9E-nRCy6PXAKTw9E_96Ps-uXJVhLkOJRD_5PO9P1og2Oek6/s400/MUNCH.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />Clearly, this is not a book most parents will want to read to their children. Later, the Baron finds himself with King David's sling in his pocket, and uses it to extricate his friends from a pickle. This episode gives rise to a digression on the sling. "You wish (I can see by your countenances) I would inform you how I became possessed of such a treasure as the sling just mentioned. (Here facts must be held sacred.)" (The insistence on probity and accuracy had been a motif of the outrageous fable since Lucian's <em>True History</em>; at the start of <em>Baron Munchausen</em>, the Baron's fidelity is testified at Mansion House, the Lord Mayor's seat, 'in the absence of the Lord Mayor', by Sinbad, Aladdin and Gulliver.) In this digression, the history of the sling intersects with another body of folklore: <blockquote>One of its possessors, my great-great-great-grandfather, who lived about two hundred and fifty years ago, was upon a visit to England, and became intimate with a poet who was a great deer-stealer; I think his name was Shakespeare: he frequently borrowed this sling, and with it killed so much of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Lucy">Sir Thomas Lucy</a>'s venison, that he narrowly escaped the fate of my two friends at Gibraltar. Poor Shakespeare was imprisoned, and my ancestor obtained his freedom in a very singular manner. Queen Elizabeth was then on the throne, but grown so indolent, that every trifling matter was a trouble to her; dressing, undressing, eating, drinking, and some other offices which shall be nameless, made life a burden to her; all these things he enabled her to do without, or by a deputy! and what do you think was the only return she could prevail upon him to accept for such eminent services? setting Shakespeare at liberty! Such was his affection for that famous writer, that he would have shortened his own days to add to the number of his friend's.</blockquote><em>Ho ho ho</em>, said the reader of 1786, by which time the Bard's reputation had been solidified; the literate gentleman knew this bit of lore, Shakespeare the Deer-Stealer, quite well. It was Rowe, in the seminal biography he prefixed to his 1709 edition of the <em>Works</em>, who had given the story popular currency: <blockquote>[The young Will Shakespeare] had, by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company; and amongst them, some that made a frequent practice of Deer-stealing, engag'd him with them more than once in robbing a Park that belong'd to Sir Thomas Lucy of Cherlecot, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that Gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill Usage, he made a Ballad upon him. And tho' this, probably the first Essay of his Poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the Prosecution against him to that degree, that he was oblig'd to leave his Business and Family in Warwickshire, for some time, and shelter himself in London.</blockquote>Exciting, eh? The Greatest Writer of all Time™ began life as a mischievous rebel: not wicked, just naughty enough for a little <em>frisson</em> of insubordinacy. <em>Mort aux vaches</em>, indeed. Only last week was I browsing my little 1903 octavo of the <em><a href="http://www.archive.org/details/essaysofdouglasj00jerr">Essays</a></em> of Douglas Jerrold, Bard enthusiast and author of the bizarre satire, 'Shakespeare in China', when I chanced across his prose vignette, 'Shakespeare at Charlecote Park'. <blockquote>One of the culprits was specially distinguished from his companions, more by the perfect beauty of his face than by the laughing unconcern that shone in it. He seemed about twenty-two years of age, of somewhat more than ordinary stature, his limbs combining gracefulness of form with manly strength. . . And as he doffed his hat to a fair head that looked mournfully at him from an upper casement, his broad forehead bared out from his dark curls in surpassing power and amplitude. It seemed a tablet writ with a new world.</blockquote>Shakespeare's escape, here as in <em>Munchausen</em>, is obscure: "The servants rushed to the cellar—but the birds were flown. How they effected their escape remaineth to this day a mystery, though it cannot be disguised that heavy suspicion fell upon four of the maids." And as with <em>Munchausen</em>, Jerrold insists that the story was corroborated, in this case by one 'John-a-Combes'.<br /><br />The legend has become something of a totem or shibboleth among Shakespeare scholars. Thus Sam Schoenbaum, one of the most influential of the poet's biographers, dismisses it as 'a picturesque relation deriving, one expects, from local Stratford lore passed on to Rowe's informant, the actor <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Betterton">Betterton</a>'. Schoenbaum notes that Lucy had no park at Charlecote until 1618, two years after Shakespeare's death; the apparent evidence of a pregnant pun in <em>The Merry Wives of Windsor</em> is dismissed as a coincidence, and not much of one. <blockquote>One wonders if the legend might not have originated in Stratford long after <em>The Merry Wives of Windsor</em> was written and its author dead, among locals who read the play, recollected jests about luces and louses, and interpreted the passage in accordance with their own resentment against a powerful neighbourhood family.</blockquote>"Time plays tricks," he concludes, sounding for a moment like a smug Iain Sinclair; "events merge." But he does not deny the story's romantic appeal, quoting Sir Thomas's descendant, Alice Fairfax-Lucy: "If it were ever authoritatively disproved, children of the future would be deprived of something that for centuries has made the poet live for them." And he allows that certain respectable scholars, including <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_L_Rowse">A. L. Rowse</a>, give the tale credence.<br /><br />René Weis, a Romantic at heart, when he came to write his own Shakespeare biography a few years ago, concluded that there wasn't much of interest still to be said on the subject, unless one simply accepted all the stories ever told about the Bard. <em>What if. . . ?</em> It is an original approach, in this sceptical age, to be sure. And a fun book. Weis has an entire chapter, not unexpectedly, on the Deer-Stealer. This passage is typical of the book: <blockquote>Though its credibility has been repeatedly impugned, this is the only account with roots reaching back into the seventeenth century to offer any explanation for Shakespeare's abandonment of his wife and family. At the very least it has the authority of a written source with links as far back as Shakespeare's lifetime, and unless there is a reason to think that Rowe, and with him Betterton and, possibly, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Davenant">Davenant</a>, aimed to mislead posterity, there is no good reason to distrust Rowe.</blockquote>The argument from authority comes into its own on the next page: <blockquote>Rowe had no interest in making up a scabrous piece of gossip. It is worth remembering that the greatest Shakespeare scholar and antiquarian of the nineteenth century, James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, and Sidney Lee, the author a classic essay [<em>sic</em>] on Shakespeare in the original DNB, both admired and trusted Rowe.</blockquote>We should trust Rowe's story, not for any intrinsic plausibility, but because two scholars of a century later admired his moral character. Sure, it's preposterous, but what else was Weis going to make of the afternoon he'd spent reading O H-P and Sidney Lee? About the deer, Weis has clearly done his homework, but his evidence never rises above the fabulously circumstantial. True, there was no deer park at Charlecote until 1618, but <blockquote>There was certainly a warren, with plenty of game in it for hunting, including hare, pheasants and roe deer—the roes of Charlecote <em>may have been</em> in Shakespeare's mind when he wrote 'fleeter than the roe' in <em>Taming of the Shrew</em>. . . As a game reserve, the Lucys' warren was patrolled by several gamekeepers; they were there for a purpose, and <em>perhaps</em> one of them arrested the young Shakespeare.</blockquote>Weis does himself a disservice with all this hedging. Let our leaps be unbridled! Let our baseless assertions at least be made with some deuced conviction, like in the good old days! Damn it man, the roes of Charlecote <em>were </em>in Shakespeare's mind when he wrote 'fleeter than the roe'; a gamekeeper at Lucy's warren <em>did</em> arrest the young Shakespeare. And he was subsequently freed when an old Monkhouse solved an itchy problem for Good Queen Bess. If we would embrace a legendary of Shakespeare, the latter story is as good as the first. No, better. We live in a gelded age, my friends. Munchausen is now only ever by proxy. We no longer have tall tales; only lies, and historians.</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-80238054344666397712009-06-07T18:26:00.012-04:002009-07-28T20:10:29.926-04:00Malcesine<div align="justify">Anthony Sutcliffe's <em>London: An Architectural History</em> (2006) is a useful book, if rather odd in some respects. Useful for providing a reasonable discussion of a wide range of buildings, both well and less known, and comprehensively illustrated. Odd for the sudden outbursts of scorn ornamenting its general level of dispassion. For instance, Sutcliffe interrupts a review of Victorian public architecture for a rant against the 'Outright Bad Design' of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lewis_Roumieu">R. L. Roumieu</a>, labelling him 'the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_McGonagall">McGonagall</a> of London design'. He sneers at Roumieu's often admired Dutch façades on <a href="http://img1.photographersdirect.com/img/18/wm/pd1428456.jpg">De Beauvoir Square</a> as 'crude Tudor detailing', and labels the architect's masterpiece, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:33-35_Eastcheap,_London,_United_Kingdom_-_Oct_2007.jpg">33-35 Eastcheap</a>, 'grotesque' and 'brutal'. (Incidentally, Ian Nairn does not 'condemn' the work, as Wiki claims; if you were familiar with the rhythms of that critic's thought, you would not reach that judgement of this passage— <blockquote>Victorian wildness can come from half a dozen causes, from mere fashion to cantankerousness. But this is truly demoniac, an Edgar Allen Poe of a building. It is the scream that you wake on at the end of a nightmare. Like Poe, and unlike Horace Walpole or a modern detective novel, the horror is no game. Acutely pointed arches shrink away in front of the windows, the wall shrinks back in half a dozen varieties of terrified chamfer. Demolition is in the air; but it must be preserved—not as an oddity, but as a basic part of human temperament, and one which doesn't often get translated into architecture.)</blockquote>So Sutcliffe has some character as a critic, even if he is no Nairn. But more interesting than Sutcliffe's quirks of taste is his candid reflection of his—our—age. From the introduction: <blockquote>It is now difficult to go inside most London buildings. Churches have been a problem for many years, but since 11 September 2001 security and general suspicion have made matters worse. My 'Stop and Search' by a City policeman near the Monument was entirely courteous and indeed informative but it took thirty minutes, by which time the light had gone. I often shied away from encounters with security staff and other employees.</blockquote>Sutcliffe's eye is therefore not the omniscient lens that one expects from an art-book; it is human and frail, clinging unabashed to chance and contingency. This was the real surprise of the book, and at moments the real pleasure. It means bizarre photographs like this one, transposing the glorious red brick of <a href="http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%82-%D0%9F%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%81_%28%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%BB%29">St Pancras</a> to a wintry 1960s Moscow:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmo5-Or27wY1MiFdu3egRMlAZglHEVBmEHGSQf6YdtJ4P7Ue4Mymb7ykAa_AZrlkC0AM_b56O99ciYN4fAGXnet2StErPlwY2c4i6LHkZt2DBLt7IrhHbwa_sr104frj1yrQGo/s1600-h/PANCRAS.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5345473522739888146" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 346px; height: 400px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmo5-Or27wY1MiFdu3egRMlAZglHEVBmEHGSQf6YdtJ4P7Ue4Mymb7ykAa_AZrlkC0AM_b56O99ciYN4fAGXnet2StErPlwY2c4i6LHkZt2DBLt7IrhHbwa_sr104frj1yrQGo/s400/PANCRAS.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />Elsewhere, a shot of the Caledonian Market clock tower is captioned: 'The threatening sky emerged mysteriously when this picture was developed.' Security paranoia, meanwhile, reaches its peak in the caption to a glorious old aerial panorama of Pentonville Prison: 'The author did not dare photograph the prison at a time of great tension.' This isn't at all ridiculous; stories abound. A <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/16/police-delete-tourist-photos">notorious instance</a> occurred two months ago, when an Austrian tourist was approached by two coppers (or possibly <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Community_Support_Officer">PCSO</a>s, as one blogger has <a href="http://crapwalthamforest.blogspot.com/2009/04/austrian-tourist-harassed-in.html">observed</a>) and made to delete his photographs of double-decker buses and a modern bus-station, because taking pictures of London transport allegedly contravened some anti-terror legislation. There is indeed a seeping fume of suspicion, and it did not immediately follow 9/11, nor even the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7/7_bombings">London bombings of 2005</a>.<br /><br />I myself, who take pictures every Sunday on my walks, have only encountered narrowed eyes once, and not those of the Met. I was up in Walthamstow—not far from where the Austrian tourists were shanghaied—examining the <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/7839903@N02/2930250730/">Town Hall</a>, which I can't quite decide if I like. It does at least have a fine interior, and a full complement of chunky mid-century relief sculpture on the fronting columns:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglBH2wp8K6J20nXXAh8HIpr96zGSj0xvUqphadnjQVVdaDROd8tZ-Ey62LXdiQPJsEBAe5AVoMa6YM6AW7CL5wEWgVfBHc8U4lMDjwBjCFkm_6Vr3T5AOb0-kZmqr7CKiY0y0u/s1600-h/Waltam+Town+Hall+Detail.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5345480228084685346" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 372px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglBH2wp8K6J20nXXAh8HIpr96zGSj0xvUqphadnjQVVdaDROd8tZ-Ey62LXdiQPJsEBAe5AVoMa6YM6AW7CL5wEWgVfBHc8U4lMDjwBjCFkm_6Vr3T5AOb0-kZmqr7CKiY0y0u/s400/Waltam+Town+Hall+Detail.JPG" border="0" /></a><br />Anyway, there I was, camera in hand, in the blazing light of day, the stone so bright my eyes were beginning to hurt, when a middle-aged Carribean woman approached me and asked 'if she could help me'. She was not, of course, asking if she could help. Her tone allowed no doubt: she meant, <em>You do not belong here, please leave</em>. This was officialdom shaking its suspicious stick. Nonetheless, she had, strictly speaking, asked if she could help me. I replied that I would love a cup of tea. She was not moved. <em>What did I want here?</em> I pointed at the building—a fine specimen, isn't it, I exclaimed with a false jollity. In retrospect, I should have taken a photograph of <em>her</em>, there and then. But she continued to watch me darkly until I sidled off, admittedly content with the pictures I had. I felt the thrill of having rubbed up against genuine oppression, but also a disappointment at the mildness, the <em>tameness</em>, of said oppression.<br /><br /></div><div align="center">*</div><div align="justify"><br />There is a historical precedent for all this. On September 13, 1786, a 37 year-old Goethe, in the course of his Italian tour, and in the face of strong winds on the road, stopped at Malcesine, near Verona in northern Italy. The next morning he went to visit the town's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CastleMalcesine.jpg">old castle</a>; he sat on a step next to a locked gate, and began drawing the castle's tower. As he sat, people began to appear, until <a href="http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/?id=12&xid=877&kapitel=5&cHash=2db3221edb2">at last</a> <blockquote>one man came up to me, not of the best appearance, and asked what I was doing. I replied that I was sketching the old tower, as a memento of Malcesine. Thereupon he said that this was not allowed, and I should stop it. This he said in the common Venetian tongue, so that I really could hardly understand him, and so I answered that I could not understand him. Then he seized my paper with a true Italian <em>Gelassenheit</em> [best translated into Anglo-French: somewhere between <em>sangfroid</em>, <em>nonchalance</em>, and <em>désinvolture</em>], tore it up, and left it lying on my board.</blockquote>The <em>podestà</em>, magistrate, is fetched, and asks Goethe why he is sketching the <em>Festung</em> or fortress; the young wag replies <em>ich dieses Gemäuer nicht für eine Festung anerkenne</em>, 'I don't credit these mere walls as a fortress'—'I prompted him and the crowd to consider the ruination of this tower and these walls, the lack of a gate, in short, the defencelessness of the entire situation, and assured him that I thought myself to be seeing and drawing nothing but a ruin.' Then comes the key passage: <blockquote>Someone answered me: If it be only a ruin, what about it could then appear worthy of consideration? I replied very anfractuously, seeking time and favour, that they knew how many tourists wanted to travel to Italy purely for the ruins—that Rome, capital of the world, laid waste by the barbarians, remained full of ruins, which were sketched hundreds and hundreds of times—and that not everything from antiquity had been so well preserved as the amphitheatre at Verona, which I hoped to see soon as well.</blockquote>Thus: Romanticism. The scene at Malcesine is suddenly transformed from an irrelevant squabble into a dramatised conflict between the aesthete, with his love of mediaeval ruins, and civic authority, which sees the fortress not as a beautiful work of architecture, but only as a site of <em>political</em> significance. It is observed to Goethe that the tower marks the boundary-line between the territories of Venice and the Emperor's Kaiserstaat, <em>und deshalb nicht ausspioniert werden solle</em>, and therefore ought not to be spied upon. The Italians worry that Goethe is an agent of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_II,_Holy_Roman_Emperor">Joseph II</a>, a 'restless' man. Our hero replies that he is in fact from Frankfurt and in no thrall to the Emperor; a local Malcesinesco named Gregorio steps in and everything is sorted out, but not before Goethe gets a chance to practice his Italian, waxing lyrical to the throng on the desolate glamour of the scene at hand. (Goethe was not in fact arrested, as Wiki <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcesine">claims</a>. Apparently that famous website is not always accurate.)<br /><br />The 1786 story neatly mirrors today's clashes between photographic scurriers, their eyes out for the beautiful, the delapidated, the unexpected, the recondite, the fascinatively hideous; and local officials who can understand the urban landscape merely in terms of its civic and political function. Deviance, no matter how undeviant when seen in the context of culture or history, must be barred and debilitated.<br /><br />[<strong>Update 05/07/09</strong>: I am stopped outside Crystal Palace station, during a routine Sunday stroll, by cops with sniffer dogs. Somehow, <em>mirabile dictu</em>, the hounds fail to detect the sizeable quantities of smack and blow stashed under both my oxters. Despite my (apparent) innocence, the officer requests my name, date of birth and address. 'Routine procedure, sir.' I ask if I am compelled by law to give my details, and he admits that I am not, but then tries to trick me. 'And what did you say your name was again, sir?' Could he not tell by my very <em>voice</em> that I am not one of his usual subjects, blasted and dupeable, with plenty to hide? He speaks into his walkie-talkie, in an attempt to intimidate me. I confess that I was a little intimidated. But I did not give. Still, at last—a police encounter with real menace! Another authentic London experience to cross off the To Do list. Jellied eels next week, <em>cum liquore</em>.]</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-69442879640471183682009-06-03T19:03:00.003-04:002009-06-03T19:35:23.681-04:00fauteuil de nuages<div align="justify">It is a little disconcerting, although perhaps appropriate, gruesomely, to our atomised age, to learn of a friend's death via Wikipedia. I had not seen <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Chapman">Stanley</a> around the Library recently, and a month ago he was doing very poorly; he had been in hospital, and was sluggish of moment, suddenly his age—eighty-three—after years, presumably decades, of sprightliness. He said that he felt it was the end, but I thought this simply a figure of speech. He said he would come to dinner, sample my wife's cooking; but now that will have to wait. Neither the <em>Times</em> nor any of its competitors seem to have run an obituary, which saddens me. It is not mine to write here. But I will remember fondly his widescreen disdain for almost everything: for A. S. Byatt, 'the big armchair', for Iain Sinclair, who 'insists on starting all his sentences with 'And'', for a play, for a poem, for all the poseurs of today's avant-garde. I was touched that he always expressed a warmth for me, taking me by the arm when we parted. For the last two years, when I knew him, he spent his days doing not much of anything at the Library, just reading, whatever came to hand, under his enormous beard, free.</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-82676715539107835752009-05-31T16:28:00.015-04:002009-05-31T21:27:48.380-04:00Squaquarinellus<div align="justify">In Book 21 of Teofilo Folengo's <em>Baldus</em> (1517), a spoof epic in macaronic hexameters—that is, half Latin, half Italian, the latter frequently provincial—the eponymous hero and his friends find themselves in battle with a dragon or serpent (<em>anguis</em>, <em>serpens</em>, <em>draco</em>, <em>drago</em>, <em>dragus</em>, according to taste); finally, after one warrior rides its back and punches it to the ground, on the verge of death, it transforms into a <em>formosa putina. . . cui nomen Smiralda fuit, de gente luparum</em>, a beautiful girl by name of Smiralda, of the race of she-wolves. Falchetto, the dog-man leading the attack on the dragon, is about to duff Smiralda up too, but she entreats him: <blockquote>Talibus ingannans, Falchettum porca carezzat<br />barbozzoque eius digitis putanella duobus<br /><strong>fat squaquarinellum</strong>, velut est ars vera piandi,<br />sive carezzandi menchiones atque dapocos. (ll. 446-449)</blockquote>The <em>putanella</em>, little whore, <em>fat squaquarinellum eius barbozzo duobus digitis</em>: she does something to his chin [<em>barbozzo</em> in dialect, see <a href="http://www.treccani.it/Portale/elements/categoriesItems.jsp?pathFile=/sites/default/BancaDati/Vocabolario_online/B/VIT_III_B_012227.xml">here</a>] with two fingers. The poem's recent translator, Ann Mullaney, renders the passage: <blockquote>Tricking him with such words, the pig caresses Falchetto; the little whore takes his <a href="http://www.treccani.it/Portale/elements/categoriesItems.jsp?pathFile=/sites/default/BancaDati/Vocabolario_online/B/VIT_III_B_012227.xml">chin</a> between two fingers and <strong>gives it a small tug</strong>, in accordance with the true art of getting and stroking dolts and low-lifes.</blockquote>In Emilio Faccioli's 1989 translation into modern Italian, this <em>squaquarinellus</em> is given as 'con due dita gli <strong>va titillando</strong> il barbozzo'. Folengo's own phrase derives from the Mantuan idiom <em>far squaquarin</em>, which <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AqgFAAAAQAAJ&pg=RA1-PA52&dq=squaquarin">Cherubini</a> paraphrases as <em>far vezzi</em>, that is, 'to fondle, caress, flatter'. The word seems to come in turn from the verb <em>squaquarare</em>, which appears three times in the poem: 1.144, 7.437, and 24.39, translated variously 'to sport', 'to live it up', and 'to soak up', where Cherubini offers <em>ciarlare</em> (to chat) and <em>gozzovigliare</em> (to carouse). The more usual meaning is 'to soften, quicken, loosen', also 'to shit, blurt out, reveal a secret', with connotations of both diarrhoea and <a href="http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&ei=MwgjSvfQGNWZjAfp8eXwDw&resnum=1&q=squaquerone&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi">soft cheese</a>, two Dalinian motifs that occur throughout the poem.<br /><br />At any rate, it strikes me that Smiralda's chin-pulling alludes to the well-known gesture made by Thetis when entreating Zeus at <em>Iliad</em> 1.501: she <em>dexiterēi d' ar' hup' anthereōnos helousa</em>, takes hold of his chin from below with her right hand, while at 8.371 Athena reports that Thetis <em>ellabe cheiri geneiou</em>, grasped [Zeus'] chin with her hand. (Compare 10.454, where the Trojan spy Dolon is about to do the same to Diomedes.) This gesture is illustrated in Ingres' rather garish and ungainly early painting:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2FR-DYjcjyHo6DfPo6poZD67W_eWLryJvOP_iTXMwmqG6jSqd5PMurHKVf3bmEvYmXl4fdNFZ3odA9QRUb6TI1QRmSAYMHVjyMDhSURKA8T5Daq_PU-El43ds6g8B-n0oWz9s/s1600-h/Jupiter_and_Thetis.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5342134079049096642" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 316px; height: 400px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2FR-DYjcjyHo6DfPo6poZD67W_eWLryJvOP_iTXMwmqG6jSqd5PMurHKVf3bmEvYmXl4fdNFZ3odA9QRUb6TI1QRmSAYMHVjyMDhSURKA8T5Daq_PU-El43ds6g8B-n0oWz9s/s400/Jupiter_and_Thetis.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />Samuel Butler, in a notorious 1892 lecture arguing for the poem's female authorship, remarks, <em>à propos</em> of this passage, that 'it is still a common Italian form of salutation to catch people by the chin. Twice during the last summer I have been so seized in token of affectionate greeting, once by a lady and once by a gentleman.' Butler's holiday reminiscences aside, Thetis is not making the gesture as an 'affectionate greeting'—she is indicating her suppliancy. For Walter Leaf, who, like Butler, translated the <em>Iliad</em>, with a little help from his friends, the action suggests a beaten warrior who 'can only clasp his enemy's legs to hamper him, and turn aside his face so that he cannot see to aim the final blow, until he has at least heard the prayer for mercy'. R. B. Onians, in his fantastical <em>Origins of European Thought</em> (1951), disputes Leaf's interpretation, arguing that the chin <em>(geneios</em>)<em>,</em> like the knee <em>(gonu</em>), is related to <em>genus</em> and generation: 'this would also explain why the chin, as if holy in the same way as the knee, was clasped by the Greek suppliant'.<br /><br />Folengo's Smiralda, whose name has already been misheard as <em>Smerdola</em> two hundred lines earlier, is not humbly entreating Falchetto. Her gesture is instead ironic, a two-fingered teasing or chucking of the chin, softening Falchetto's heart and brain: a solicitative trollop, Thetis in burlesque.</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-45743751936250022882009-05-24T20:46:00.015-04:002009-06-02T15:53:15.399-04:00Intercision<div align="justify">Imagine you're a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicography">harmless drudge</a>. You've been assigned the task of scouring the works of Sir Thomas Browne for new words, or new uses of old words, or antedatings, and so you sit in your bright-lit windowless cubicle, poring over <em>Urne Buriall</em>, and <em>The Garden of Cyrus</em>, and then it's on to <em>Religio Medici</em>, and finally the <em>Vulgar Errors</em>. In the last of these, not quite as lexically fecund as the other works, you stumble on this: <blockquote>What therefore may consist with history, by cessation of Oracles with Montacutius we may understand their intercision, not abscission or consummate desolation; their rare delivery, not total dereliction, and yet in regard of divers Oracles, we may speak strictly, and say there was a proper cessation.</blockquote>You have little understanding of what it means, since you are only a humble word-spotter. And the word you spot, in this case, is <em>intercision</em>. You check your lists, and those of your colleagues; nothing yet. The word, whatever it means, is contrasted with 'consummate desolation', so it must mean something less than a complete destruction, and it must correspond in some degree to 'rare delivery'. More than that is hard to say. You check <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Cockeram">Cockeram</a>, who says it means 'An intreating in ones behalf', clearly confusing it with <em>intercession</em>, which he has just defined as 'An intreaty in ones behalf'. You check <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Blount_%28lexicographer%29">Blount</a>, who has 'a cutting off in the midst', from Latin <em>intercisio</em>. Clearly, whatever <em>intercision</em> means, it has a lot to do with <em>intercisio</em>. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du_Cange">Du Cange</a> merely has 'injuria', which seems to help little. How about modern Latin dictionaries? <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_and_Short">Lewis and Short</a> offers 'a cutting through'. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Latin_Dictionary">OLD</a> has nothing.<br /><br />You are not stuck yet; <em>intercisio</em>, you reason, is clearly a nominal form of the verb <em>intercido</em>, which in turn is <em>inter</em> (between) and <em>caedo</em> (cut). So what do your lexica say on the verb? Here you strike gold. Lewis and Short list two <em>intercidos</em>: the first is 'to cut asunder, cut up, divide, pierce, cut through, part, divide, mangle, destroy', this clearly corresponding to the listed noun. But there is another: 'to fall between, to occur meanwhile, to happen, to fall to the ground, to go to ruin, be lost, perish'. This is promising. OLD, likewise, has 'to fall between, to be lost or wasted, go astray; to be lost from memory, fall into oblivion, be forgotten; to perish incidentally, to be destroyed during an action; to cease to exist, be lost, lapse, fail'. <em>Intercisio</em>, and therefore <em>intercision</em>, must have been formed from one of these verbs, each differing in shade. But which?<br /><br /></div><div align="center">*</div><div align="justify"><br />This is the classic problem of the <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2009/01/on-neologism-part-one.html">neologism</a>. Without an accepted context and range of meanings, a <em>consuetudo</em>, it can be impossible to determine the meaning of a word. It turns out, however, that <em>intercision</em> is not a neologism. In one context, in fact, it is common: the theology of grace. Lutheran doctrine held that it was possible for a member of the elect to fall from grace forever; Calvinism held that this was impossible, for a man's sin cannot override the divine act of bestowing grace. Thus Peter, who denied Christ, was nonetheless saved. This fall from grace is called <em>intercisio</em> or <em>intercision</em>; but even here the meaning is not clear-cut, at least in English. In 1626, the Cornish theologian Francis Rous published his <em>Testis veritatis</em>, writing: <blockquote>God is for the Saints all the way from the first foreknowledge, u<a name="page-20"></a>nto the finall glory; what <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Arminius">Arminius</a> or [Peter] Bertius can make any Apostacy to be against us, when God is throughly for us? God being stedfast with us from Election to glorification, no interloper can come in with intercision to cut off and put a sunder this continued chaine of happinesse, which God hath joynd together and guardeth all the way.</blockquote>In the same year, George Carleton, Bishop of Chichester, argues likewise: 'This is certaine, all is not gone, all is not cut off by intercision; here is a Seede of God abiding. . . If all be not falne away, then this man in whom it abideth can not fall totally.' In both of the above quotations, <em>intercision</em> sounds like something permanent. Carleton returns to the theme in 1629, claiming that 'Man cannot by any sinne make void any act of Gods', and arguing against the possibility of 'an intercision of justifying grace, caused by the sinnes of the flesh'.<br /><br />In 1633 George Downham, Bishop of Derry, thinks it 'ridiculous' that 'there should bee an intercision of justification (which I proved before to be a continued act) so oft as there is an intermission of the act of faith'. Here the <em>intercision</em> seems more temporary, as a phenomenon accompanying an intermission. A similar meaning is found outside a theological context, in 1641, when John Jackson notes, 'there hath beene of late an intercision, and interruption herein'.<br /><br />Ambiguous also is a line from a 1627 oration by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gataker">Thomas Gataker</a>: 'Their death is rather a departing, or a going out of this world, or a passage to heaven, or a returne to God, then a deceasing, or surceasing, or intermission, or intercision, yea, or diminution, either of life, or of their good or happy estate.' We are tangled up by conjunctions: the <em>or </em>cannot always be an 'or rather', but may be between <em>intermission</em> and <em>intercision</em>, or <em>intercision</em> and <em>diminution</em>. Trying to pinpoint the exact meaning of 'intercision' comes down to a morass of hard-to-determine textual passages of uncertain relations to one another.<br /><br />The OED lists the Browne passage under the meaning 'The action of cutting off the course of, stopping, or interrupting, esp. temporarily; the fact of being interrupted or ceasing for a time.' Immediately preceding the Browne is a quotation from one Richard Montagu—in Latin, Montacutius—Bishop of Norwich, Browne's home-town. The passage in full runs:<br /><blockquote>Doth ARMINIUS maintaine touching finall Perseverance, (you must tell mee, my good Informers, for I have not read him) that sometime the Called and Elect of God, the Chosen ones and Justified by Faith, such as S. PETER was, though they doe fall totally for a Time, shall yet recover necessarily againe, and not fall away finally, or for ever? If this be Arminianisme, and so his conclusion, then therein He holdeth with ARMINIUS. But I have bin assured, that ARMINIUS did hold as the Lutherans in Germany doe, not only Intercision for a Time, but also Abscission and Abjection too, for ever.</blockquote>This in fact is from Montagu's 1625 <em>Appello Caesarem</em>, against which Rous published his <em>Testis</em> the following year. The last line looks suspiciously similar to Browne's 'intercision, not abscission', and the entry's compiler must have thought that Browne was referring to this in writing 'with Montacutius'. Montagu's 'Intercision for a Time' is clearly the same intercision as Downham's and Jackson's: an interruption, rather than the permanent sundering of Rous and Carleton. If this is Montagu's <em>intercision</em>, then presumably it is Browne's too. In 1647, John Trapp seems to make a similar distinction when he writes that 'Happy for us, that we are kept by the power of God to salvation, <a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Peter%201:5;&version=31;">1 Pet. 1. 5.</a> for else it were possible for us to fall away and perish: an intercision there might be, nay an utter excision from Christ'.<br /><br />The problem is that the 1625 passage is <em>not</em> the origin of Browne's words, at least not directly. Browne is in fact translating another line from Montagu from Latin. This is from his 1635 refutation of the ecclesiastical history of Baronius, and glosses the word <em>cessare</em>, normally translated as 'cease': <blockquote>Cessare dicitur id, quod cum olim in usu frequentissimo fuisset, postea rarissime adhibetur: non penitus autem cessare, sed respectu prioris frequentissimi usus. Secundo, Cessare dicitur aliquid dupliciter: vel per Intercisionem ad aliquod tempus; vel per Abscisionem, et desolationem consummatam.</blockquote>To paraphrase: <em>cessare</em> is what happens when a frequent activity becomes much rarer, without necessarily stopping altogether. And <em>cessare</em> can mean either an <em>intercisio</em>, or an abscision or consummate desolation. It is clear, Montagu continues, that the <em>cessatio</em> of the oracles was not an <em>abscisio</em>, but only an <em>intercisio</em>, for the oracles continued to speak thereafter. The natural reading of this passage is that after the <em>cessatio</em>, the oracles were still delivered, only much less frequently; in other words, that they fell into disuse. One might compare Quintilian: 'verba intercidant invalescantque temporibus', 'words become obsolete or current with the lapse of years'. This is not only the natural reading, it is consonant with what many other people had written about the oracles. To understand the word this way, therefore, would necessitate not only knowing other uses of <em>intercisio</em>, but also the contemporary discourse about this rather arcane subject: and how many lexicographers would be capable of that?<br /><br />The 1625 passage, with its 'Intercision for a Time', seems to resolve the question in the other direction: presumably, though not necessarily, Montagu intended the same distinction in each case, and by <em>intercisio</em> and <em>intercision</em> meant a temporary interruption in proceedings. The oracles, then, would stop being given, but then later return. Nobody else, to my knowledge, ever argued this. And so the claim has a rather spectral quality to it: it rests on no <em>consuetudo</em>, and has no support other than the use of a similar word in a different language in a different work. If Montagu's <em>Appello</em> had been lost, we would have had, I think, to read differently his <em>intercisio</em>, and so Browne's <em>intercision</em>. All of a sudden, the meaning of this word, a museum-piece, looks highly contingent.</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-76335925176202866832009-05-19T19:50:00.006-04:002009-05-19T22:35:52.532-04:00The Shrine of Ammon<div align="justify">Upper Clapton, on the edge of the largest Hasid community in London, just north of the old Murder Mile, an urim's throw from the Lea, and from the cricket grounds alongside Springfield Park, on the corner of the Common, by the fountains, with children being children and the buses idling by, and the endless young women in long black skirts, with their remarkable faces, on a bright Sunday afternoon, presaging an evening of poetry, I find myself in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Clapton#The_Abode_of_Love">Good Shepherd</a>, originally erected for the Agapemonites, and latterly occupied by the Georgian Orthodox Church. I politely ask an elder lady, the only person inside, when the church was built.<br /><br /><em>Ahh</em>, she says, after a pause. <em>Tuesday Saturday</em>.<br /><br />— No, when was it <em>built</em>? The date, when built?<br /><br /><em>Ahh</em>. Easter!<br /><br />The lady's English is evidently somewhat limited. <em>The building, when built</em>? <em>Building</em>. It is curious that we should slip into this sort of bastard pidgin when dealing with those not so gifted with the tongue, as if we were talking to a small child or retard. Still, it is a natural reflex.<br /><br /><em>Oh</em>. Sixtin centry?<br /><br />I shake my head. No, I smile, it can't be earlier than the late nineteenth century. But never mind, it's not important.<br /><br />— And why you want know? You <em>Orthodox</em>?<br /><br />No, not that.<br /><br />— <em>Catholic</em>?<br /><br />No, atheist. I don't believe in God.<br /><br />— <em>You no believe God? Why you no believe God?</em><br /><br />I reply that I think the language barrier between us too great for that conversation. She tries to convince me that Britain was Orthodox before it was Catholic. In return I try to explain, with some patience, that this is not true, and that in fact Orthodoxy and Catholicism only became distinct religions about four hundred years after Britain was officially Christianised.<br /><br />— <em>You young pipple, you no understand history. You go read history book</em>.<br /><br />Come, she wants to show me something. In the dark recess of the church is an icon, painted or possibly printed on cloth, fraying authentically at the edges. The image is a rather gangrenous, Gothic Jesus, staring reproachfully out at me.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFFlsEMl5eDqx5HYYAIkwQmStJTMjGu66whRnHFYh_MNzVJLX9mjkrodm_8f9-hvSFEIQqqCOAa-sm2SOgMMKzRCnjhS0fIx3aH45cfDhNRdvVwGTOpna1oW82KNOr8tsfiObb/s1600-h/Christ+Icon.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5337693182732893714" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 300px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 400px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFFlsEMl5eDqx5HYYAIkwQmStJTMjGu66whRnHFYh_MNzVJLX9mjkrodm_8f9-hvSFEIQqqCOAa-sm2SOgMMKzRCnjhS0fIx3aH45cfDhNRdvVwGTOpna1oW82KNOr8tsfiObb/s400/Christ+Icon.JPG" border="0" /></a><br /><em>— You understand</em>, says the lady, when we have this, it all like this, white, dark. Then, last year, you see? She points to the area around the right eye. <em>Is red</em>. Is <em>blood</em>. This is <em>living</em> person here. Then, the day after, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_South_Ossetia_war">varr between Russia Georgia</a>, varr, you understand?<br /><br /><em>Oh</em>. It's magic, I say, somewhat startled. She gives me a stern look. It's a miracle, I repeat, nodding my head.<br /><br />— Yes, miracle. It's miracle. So now you Christian.<br /><br />Yes, yes, you convinced me. That's amazing.<br /><br />— Come, come, I baptise you. She takes me by the shoulder. Not today, I fear. I'll come back next week, I promise. I ask to take a picture of the icon. <em>Yes, yes</em>, she beams. I explain that I will bring news of the Orthodox Church, spread its message. We introduce ourselves; she's delighted. It seems a better solution to the situation than simply marching off, or, indeed, being baptised. I'm not ready for the font and aspergill quite yet. In the light of day the world is a little more magical, a little more miraculous; if I have not truly been converted, at least a strange corner of London has acquired that bit more mythical resonance—place made of a space, crisis memorialised in an artist's blood, the heart of a religion yet beating, even surrounded by civic indifference, cynicism, rationalism. I smile, tease, but do not sneer in earnest. I am too curious.<br /><br /></div><div align="center">*</div><div align="justify"><blockquote><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas-Claude_Fabri_de_Peiresc">Peiresc</a> explained his willingness to believe the unbelievable, such as the possibility of seeing through walls, because he had himself 'seen things, so incredible without having seen them, that I am, in faith, almost disposed not to be surprised by any other'. —Peter Miller.</blockquote>Had the Georgian lady seen such things, things incredible to you or me? Had she been victim of a fraud? Perpetrator? Was she insane, stupid? Did she simply allow herself to believe, because believing explained everything that needed explaining? The small accounts for the great, the dash of red on a picture for the reality of the Godhead, Christ, the Spirit, who proceeds from God the Father, and <em>not</em> the Son, thank you very much.<br /><br />Plutarch. 'Demetrius went so far as to say that it was ridiculous to try in this way to draw great conclusions from small data, not, as Alcaeus puts it, "painting the lion from a single claw," but with a wick and lamp postulating a mutation in the heavens and the universe.' Cleombrotus has just suggested that, since the lamp of the shrine of Ammon consumes less oil each year, so the years must be getting shorter. He responds to Demetrius: 'not to allow that small things are indication of great stands directly in the way of many arts; for it will result in taking away from us the demonstration of many facts and the prognostication of many others.' Proof and prophecy go together, deduction and induction.<br /><br />I wanted to ask her how, even if she knew it was a sign, she knew she had interpreted it correctly, and what sort of assumptions she had to have in place already before she could reach the conclusion she did. These are the very questions I ask of my scholarly protagonists, such as Peiresc or Plutarch; I fear she would have been just as unable to answer them as the long dead. I wonder, too, what questions <em>I</em> would be at a loss to answer.</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-69613413488431707932009-05-01T17:21:00.007-04:002009-05-25T09:36:24.129-04:00Flow gently, sweet Afton<div align="justify"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEig37mYmdyHdrKjTfnABK_GVVBYhj34dfFNNsKPjp52BbY8J60pTPG5396DVRhY57QASFt7c-GUev5qX1QzAXiXkREmuP1B1MJyk65H5tnX6zKS-wNaVbhyphenhyphenlQGvuIo2iqXRpa-e/s1600-h/No+Longer+in+Dedication.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5330976478073179282" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 258px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEig37mYmdyHdrKjTfnABK_GVVBYhj34dfFNNsKPjp52BbY8J60pTPG5396DVRhY57QASFt7c-GUev5qX1QzAXiXkREmuP1B1MJyk65H5tnX6zKS-wNaVbhyphenhyphenlQGvuIo2iqXRpa-e/s400/No+Longer+in+Dedication.JPG" border="0" /></a><br />You know when you haven't e-mailed someone for a while, and you feel you ought to, but the longer you leave it, the more embarrassed you feel about not contacting them, and the longer still you want to leave it? Well, so it is with the <em>Varieties</em>. Still I walk—a jaunt from Heathrow to London; a stretch in Waltham and Leyton, where the word <em>alright</em> has become a mere two schwas of rising intonation; a saunter through the campus at Imperial, where hard science and technology are symbolised architecturally by flat glass façades in royal blue and hot pink; East Finchley Cemetery, where the dead are erased from memory, as with poor Henry and Agnes Ritchie, above; and so on and so on. Still I read—<em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Girls">Lost Girls</a></em> in the Library this week, amid a sea of prim Courtauldians sharing out table-space between Foucault and Tiepolo, I relish the thrill of postmodern <em>fin-de-siècle </em>child-porn drawn <em>après</em> Beardsley, Mucha and Schiele. Still I write—my 15,000-word, rather Varietesque opus on the Golden Bough should be coming out in a month or two, and I am already several thousand into a new piece on tripod iconography. In the Roth household, life goes on, and even promises to increase in number. All is well. Sure, there is a certain void, where once were varieties. But this will pass. It always does.</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-89167851421193435702009-04-01T19:34:00.003-04:002009-03-31T20:56:26.987-04:00An Unbridled Tongue<div align="justify">The precise origin of the expression 'as happy as Larry', like those of almost all modern colloquialisms, not to say colloquialisms dead to the present, has been swallowed in the fogs of time. The OED, for one, cops out with 'Etym. uncertain', its earliest citation coming from the Australian writer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Furphy">Joseph Furphy</a>, aka. Tom Collins, writing in the newspaper <em><a href="http://www.bdtruth.com.au/">Barrier Truth</a></em>, local to the marvelously-named <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_Hill,_New_South_Wales">Broken Hill</a>, New South Wales, on the 29th of December, 1905. One website devoted to this variety of philological speculation manages to get it back further, <a href="http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/40850.html">remarking</a> confidently: <blockquote>Larry—certainly the best known character in the world of similes. The expression he instigated is most likely to be of Australian or New Zealand origin. The earliest printed reference currently known is from the New Zealand writer G. L. Meredith, dating from around 1875:<br /><br />"We would be as happy as Larry if it were not for the rats".</blockquote>The Antipodean origin looks clear, then, even if nobody is really sure who that Larry <em>was</em>. So imagine my surprise, when, perusing a little treatise entitled, <em>The vain religion of the formal hypocrite, and the mischief of an unbridled tongue</em>, penned by the Puritan theologian <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Baxter">Richard Baxter</a> in 1660, I came across this:<br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5319499487237728226" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 392px; HEIGHT: 229px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirxzXeT22EiGydygofHoqYyCqR1Ay2SWQsf_pDf0WdMIzfmsAfvZPWUoMnuD5Edg8pW3j_CSOq41oThyphenhyphenU0JXvchBuD78WgXzabsHGZKesXLoZJeAi_hN9KGspdWQSVfMmAm9oU/s400/larry1.PNG" border="0" />Immediately was paid put to the Antipodean theory; the expression must have been current already in seventeenth-century England, even if it reached print only seldom. My initial response to this discovery, naturally, was to enquire, with everybody else: Who was Larry? But the question seemed impossible to answer. Even if it was indeed Baxter who coined the happy Larry—obviously an unlikely scenario—we would have precious little way of knowing to which Larry or Lawrence, or even Laurens or Lorenzo, he was referring. But I was suspicious: the lone hit in Baxter was not enough to be sure, and would never lead to an answer. A cursory search of the printed text database on EEBO, indeed, turned up two or three more happie Larries; but it was a 'happy as <em>Laurentius</em>', in one of many anonymous broadsides of the 1640s, that got my nose twitching, for in the margin was the little note, <em>Vid. Erigena his Division of Nature</em>.<br /><br />I turned, therefore, to the <em>Periphyseon</em>, also known as <em>De divisione naturae</em>, of the Irish philosopher Johannes Scotus Erigena—or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eriugena">Eriugena</a>, as we now more correctly have him. Eriugena, pretty much the only serious philosophical mind between Augustine and Anselm, is best known for re-translating, for Charles the Bald, the mystical treatises ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite into good Latin. He thus played the same sort of function for Charles that Marsilio Ficino would play for Lorenzo de' Medici six hundred years later, and was favoured accordingly. One story, so often repeated in books about mediaeval philosophy that it even turns up on the Wiki page, is that Charles, teasing Johannes across supper with the question, <em>Quid distat inter sotum et Scotum?</em>, that is, <em>What is the difference between a drunk and an Irishman</em>, was met with the Wildean reply, <em>Mensa tantum</em>: 'only a table'. Books about mediaeval philosophy, I trust you will take my word, need every amusing anecdote they can get.<br /><br />Scotus's other work of note is the aforementioned <em>Periphyseon</em>, written in the 860s, and the first major introduction of Neoplatonism into Latin philosophy. It was condemned by the Church, like all good books, in 1210 and 1225, though it remained one of the most influential treatises in Western history: Henry Bett lists Hugh of St. Victor, Abelard, the Jewish <em>Zohar</em>, Meister Eckhart, Nicolas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, and even Hegel as its intellectual debtors. And it is here, in Book Three, that we find our happy Laurentius:<br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5319500384883714194" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; HEIGHT: 149px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFd0y-1XMXYWv3wwQsaGX7QjDJSR3qRyLep-6GojhUbvwZHrYRGR4yfERFegAtukFBStVfHrRgMs3jKuwedjpLxyd3-M7Q8gTLzVvLmd-9MiOKNNb-tfOvf77jXjeVZgVO67Ip/s400/tamlaurentius.PNG" border="0" /><br />To translate: 'Therefore, [if it hadn't been for that pesky Original Sin] all human society would have been as happy as Saints Lawrence and Stephen, who were troubled by no perturbations in their souls.' In the case of the martyr saints, their spiritual felicity or happiness was brought into greater relief by their physical torments. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_of_Rome">St Lawrence</a>, you will recall, was that carefree fellow who, when he was griddled alive under Valerian in 258 AD, managed to mutter 'This side’s done, turn me over and have a bite,' thus displaying equanimity in the face of torture. Eriugena, it seems, took a popular attribution of felicity to Lawrence (and Stephen, the first martyr), and expressed it in such a way that later writers could make it proverbial. Here, undoubtedly, and ironically, was the Larry of 'happy as Larry' fame.</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-87616150859601331542009-03-22T19:44:00.022-04:002009-09-14T06:11:00.324-04:00On the Textures of West London<div align="justify">Sure, it's been a while. Not that I've had nothing to say: but my intellectual energies have of late been directed instead towards the munificent footnotes of my <span style="font-style: italic;">opus</span>. I was going to return with an arcane disquisition on religion in the later Renaissance; I still have it planned, but after such a <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2009/03/perigesis-londinii.html?showComment=1237634640000#c4267969179710745971">charming request</a> for another 'of the same order' as my last post, I offer you this instead. It is about walking in London; I do hope you are not sick of the subject.<br /><br /></div><div align="center">*</div><div align="justify"><br />Today I returned to the Grand Union Canal, west of Scrubs Lane. The weather was fine, and cyclists pelted repeatedly past me on the towpath. Strolling the canal in London is unique: for one can see to the other side, but not attain it. Thus whatever the far bank has to offer must be enjoyed at a distance, almost as through a glass. One of the finest spots in the city, indeed, is the passage of the Canal through London Zoo: on the near side, a great modernist aviary filled with peacocks, and on the far, a stepped enclosure with antelopes. At seven on a weekday morning, with nobody about, one can imagine the whole world obliterated save for these stray exotics. West of Scrubs Lane, the mood is quite different. There are no zoos, no genteel back gardens opening onto the canal, no grand <a href="http://www.propertyfinder.com/objects/GB/9/o/c/502647357,19700101010101,p,400x300,photo1.jpg">Nash terrace</a> or <a href="http://media.winkworth.com/properties/11bec8da-ee09-4a92-be21-aee6117c0d8c/Listing/9Yu900s4h9.jpg">Elgood mansion</a> to stare one down from without, fewer houseboats; and instead, plenty of industry, old and new. Also, now and then, an uncategorisable oddity, such as this:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrtRnga2dgbKvAr6aPQtrFd6EbRvH7-IeBDN9eTKJeHR6oEif6dyC4AoHHQxpnXBZ1upcEdO_ncC8H4z903WycDkig_XBTfBUATCDN37dObAm-zzLSxhMtzynUNN4kVhC3zAVb/s1600-h/Park+Royal+Salvage.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5316177933808311586" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 301px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrtRnga2dgbKvAr6aPQtrFd6EbRvH7-IeBDN9eTKJeHR6oEif6dyC4AoHHQxpnXBZ1upcEdO_ncC8H4z903WycDkig_XBTfBUATCDN37dObAm-zzLSxhMtzynUNN4kVhC3zAVb/s400/Park+Royal+Salvage.JPG" border="0" /></a><br />Strangely, the woman's head<img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5316180361883538898" style="margin: 10px 10px 0px; float: right; width: 80px; height: 121px;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMNP0K5aKRTOlpgQj74Fst51wcSFGqUq0ABLSfzJ-bQdyWVcDLKNbQJ-2e2dogabjubKxpFqr9JudeAwhyphenhyphenkzrBsydbPnRu1VZnp9RHzfLalhIdm_76gdiKedZqtv5yswT-G9zQ/s400/Head+In.JPG" border="0" /> in the gold capsule (see details, right) rotated as I watched, such that I initially thought it a live person. I was unable to determine the mechanism of its movement: was it, for instance, electric? Nor could I ascertain its function. Perhaps simply to instill fear and awe in the beholder, an effect largely achieved in my case<img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5316180355955026418" style="margin: 10px 10px 0px; float: right; width: 82px; height: 122px;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ47r2V-0sAr1wG8_Bb2cFKgHHE3Vx3S34rn2TE0ADC-MVBHoV0BeSOl3ah8Mh8wNz6laJGam7xL6w6nmVQDIX_Gasy8oDd_ZxF9Ej2-Srhg_ZVnrf_8F0Ofltu6l4YSTSSBES/s400/Head+Out.jpg" border="0" />, due partly to its distance, which allowed the illusion to remain unspoilt, and partly to its physical separation across the water of the canal. I hope that Park Royal Salvage are sensible enough to light the head at night, and even to add smoke effects for the true Gothic horror experience. Still, she was strangely peaceful in the five o'clock sunshine, silent, with nary a soul about, just revolving merrily in a junkpile above the canal, on the edge of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Royal">least human area</a> of London. Right from Scrubs Lane, the towpath is full of sounds, present, but never invasive: the chug of occasional barges, the hum of toy planes flown over the copse in Wormwood Scrubs to the south, the whish of bicycles and cackle of the geese they fright up as they pass, and a two-note alarm you can hear for quite a distance, the same two notes, I think, chosen by John Cale for his acute production of 'Facing the Wind'. The canal is also haunted by a smell, warm and half-sweet, like a bakery. <blockquote>This should be one of the sights of London. Instead you have to slip on to it furtively from Acton Lane or Old Oak Lane. Cooling towers, steaming engines, chimneys, black corrugated-iron sheds: a new industrial excitement every few yards, mellowed and bound together by the water in the foreground and the grass on the banks. — Nairn, <em>London</em>.</blockquote>This texture I recalled from my last visit here, almost a decade ago. I have pictures from that trip, in sepia, some of the few photographs I took in the pre-digital age. They are scratched and muddy, but only appropriately so. I would not reform them.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS1ShPFf_X9oKwQc0FGw-Dz_uQOb9I5TTtLyS6R1JcWN_JyCofDbr1dVo8NRAwee2dEy1qrNmvsIjUFYoKZIf4s2FlBXTJPYNaHMzWZzVBJ_-jYf7usmGdgo1unZfOal-Nh5Jy/s1600-h/CANAL11.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5316195927416615954" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 269px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS1ShPFf_X9oKwQc0FGw-Dz_uQOb9I5TTtLyS6R1JcWN_JyCofDbr1dVo8NRAwee2dEy1qrNmvsIjUFYoKZIf4s2FlBXTJPYNaHMzWZzVBJ_-jYf7usmGdgo1unZfOal-Nh5Jy/s400/CANAL11.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi78RMZKDwnvxbBa3a0CzICnM3VQkcHBSPEfCyxBB9YlxtoLUTfn3GPGa_hSJheAZAYhKsngDYLrjOnX_IZ9Vf5tvRdeq4wAt3IfagKAbjXXag1EXEwd1_ftGXVWaZJUiLb990i/s1600-h/CANAL12.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5316195930364493202" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 270px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi78RMZKDwnvxbBa3a0CzICnM3VQkcHBSPEfCyxBB9YlxtoLUTfn3GPGa_hSJheAZAYhKsngDYLrjOnX_IZ9Vf5tvRdeq4wAt3IfagKAbjXXag1EXEwd1_ftGXVWaZJUiLb990i/s400/CANAL12.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />At that time, Butterfingers and I were overwhelmed by the darkness and brutality of the place. This was not the North London in which I had grown up: a crueller beast, and a thrilling one. Our urbanites are too flattered by their surroundings, allowed too easily to master their streets, pretty and neatly arranged at the human scale. We need, rather, a range of moods: the gentle, certainly, but also, as here, the harsh, alienating, monumental. As the Romantics knew, though they were able to find it only in the countryside, we need to experience subjugation at the hands of a landscape, to keep us humble, in lieu of a religion. For this reason I was relieved to find the same remorseless passages today, albeit in full March colour:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCXscKhQXaqdEyX7StcJ7hbPlWpdq6oTTcEp4QUY2h5VJdOSZlvBnFd3B5szqU4yLtStOP6vPJh6YE8x3bi21u2TB-mlELcv1xILQ7w-Sn4ekN5k3KCBcCxjzXucWgoPbi48sJ/s1600-h/Canal+Industry+1.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5316177942319200594" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 300px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCXscKhQXaqdEyX7StcJ7hbPlWpdq6oTTcEp4QUY2h5VJdOSZlvBnFd3B5szqU4yLtStOP6vPJh6YE8x3bi21u2TB-mlELcv1xILQ7w-Sn4ekN5k3KCBcCxjzXucWgoPbi48sJ/s400/Canal+Industry+1.JPG" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnvZIOlUHiuxz4vL-iOqp-30W0GCxNoatHBY7o6csFEguQ4pflQGsBpkOyMDlzcj6T9JlO5797WAZ3Ceh4lwmXhHkNtuYQqToaRyx5VWI_0aV43FDd4SyOQT6DlWMn33ial2C8/s1600-h/Canal+Industry+2.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5316177948187333170" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 300px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnvZIOlUHiuxz4vL-iOqp-30W0GCxNoatHBY7o6csFEguQ4pflQGsBpkOyMDlzcj6T9JlO5797WAZ3Ceh4lwmXhHkNtuYQqToaRyx5VWI_0aV43FDd4SyOQT6DlWMn33ial2C8/s400/Canal+Industry+2.JPG" border="0" /></a><br />But not all of my memories were intact. Here is another: the '57' on the side of the brick building behind the silos tells us what it is, namely, a Heinz factory.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8G1jiKt06ZtgNQg-mrIzTbFW-7ukzzcPccrhOl92Rwna_cHgI4Lz5eNJLr1AgShnWoLinRx75G_be_AhpazONtiVKMYYyisO8aD4Ox4nuP0SneqfsPhzdBv5y9Q6XhHlivc07/s1600-h/CANAL2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5316195939964491842" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 272px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8G1jiKt06ZtgNQg-mrIzTbFW-7ukzzcPccrhOl92Rwna_cHgI4Lz5eNJLr1AgShnWoLinRx75G_be_AhpazONtiVKMYYyisO8aD4Ox4nuP0SneqfsPhzdBv5y9Q6XhHlivc07/s400/CANAL2.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />Today I reached Abbey Road at Stonebridge with a start: I had not seen the old 57. Where was she? Gone, vanished, and in her place, simply endless rows of faceless grey boxes, walls without architecture, like <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/32413393@N00/244651779/">these</a>. Nairn's 'industrial excitement' is diminishing year by year; I presume that it had largely dissipated even before my first trip. Our architecture is tending away from these black chimneys, towards an absence of character, and particularly of <em>texture</em>. Dirt, grit and variety is bending to sheen and monotony. As an example, take the outer wall of London's new <em>über</em>-mall, Westfield, at the southern end of Scrubs Lane:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDHq29xsccTbeZXKK-tiG8BtNmrkXNmgL25aozKbiJRaGpwX8IDeEtfe0dElRy38QbcE-tHtvMHnZyHl7ry_KkPviESE63VzrwbVX6dJccwM8PdY0o8jAhylD92jxxm0GbSCmM/s1600-h/Exterior,+Westfield.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5316204094210823714" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 300px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDHq29xsccTbeZXKK-tiG8BtNmrkXNmgL25aozKbiJRaGpwX8IDeEtfe0dElRy38QbcE-tHtvMHnZyHl7ry_KkPviESE63VzrwbVX6dJccwM8PdY0o8jAhylD92jxxm0GbSCmM/s400/Exterior,+Westfield.JPG" border="0" /></a><br />Look closely: this is a wall upon which the sun is shining directly, as you can see from the concrete supports below, and by the polished metal strip running along the side towards the top. The supports have their shadows, and the reflected glow of the strip indicates the path of the sun's light. But the wall itself has no glow or texture: only colour. Light diffuses smoothly, immaculately, across it, and becomes invisible. And so the wall resembles a simulation. Inside, legions of immigrants labour to maintain spotlessness. I saw one girl at her post, in a free moment, take a cloth to wipe an imaginary mark from the glass above her till. The antiseptic cleanliness of the place is most impressive. And it has been very cleverly laid out: there are no dead ends, and at the conclusion of each row of merchants, another vista opens out suddenly, beckoning you forward. The lines are not straight and orthogonal, but sinuous and irregular, ergonomic. Even signs have the soft edges of a modernist sculpture, of an Arp or a Moore:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkHSlTb3U813qWzRRJIkMCHvU5XQwVBzKdx-40r0He0G2okjoLagR6CGOINPdY83F2eOIVypuwVIn7SguSXWNR6O2BA8fPVi2Ux-0WX9OQyMioae1fK4myy3RaLY_avSXQ9iNH/s1600-h/Sign,+Westfield.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5316204228841686642" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 300px; height: 400px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkHSlTb3U813qWzRRJIkMCHvU5XQwVBzKdx-40r0He0G2okjoLagR6CGOINPdY83F2eOIVypuwVIn7SguSXWNR6O2BA8fPVi2Ux-0WX9OQyMioae1fK4myy3RaLY_avSXQ9iNH/s400/Sign,+Westfield.JPG" border="0" /></a><br />(Hatherley, in his <a href="http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/2008/12/owens-comments-are-in-brown-title-of.html">account of Westfield</a>, says the signs remind him of 'prehistoric rubble'.) The tiny detail is utterly revealing. At every moment the aggression of commerce is masked and quieted, and the environment becomes instead cosy, childlike. The glass ceiling allows sunlight to penetrate every nook; there is no darkness, no possibility of the secret or occult, no possibility of 'slipping onto anything furtively'. One moves not by espying and following, not of one's own accord, but as if in a dream, automatically. The sounds are not chug, whish, hum, cackle, alarm, but consumer chatter and the reassuring strains of over-produced radio pop. The smell is not warm and nostalgic, but processed and global, expensive and indeterminate.<br /><br />Westfield is the future of London, of England—the latest stage in an evolution away from awe, away from brutality, monumentality, and towards cosiness. We are no longer to see the guts of our industry: the girders, pipes, valves, tanks, the bits that get dirty. Instead, smooth lines, matte surfaces, public art. The industry along the Thames, for instance at Chelsea Wharf and Nine Elms, is being swept away for shiny flats in the Westfield idiom, and one has to trudge out east of the Dome to see the desolate remains of the old, to experience the filthy sublimity of industrial scale, and of its continued operation. On the Canal, meanwhile, south side, just east of the Hythe Road Estate, where the towpath swings away from the railway lines, one discovers a puny birch grove, littered with rubbish. I took a few steps down into the grove, and espied an old gentleman by himself, in this most forgotten spot, haunting the trees.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE-Vg6GFcFsgh6iUV6vElfimS1qwsoinjrzRDkgw-Vyqw-Iq2ablf0Z_THbeW5cjS5XTp3h8Rej4TxuJRI_rhV_doKv05AbeAkaABN0Xmu24x7Af3EiXkGQF9zgJ5FBePxTao0/s1600-h/Mysterious+Man,+Grand+Union+Canal.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5316220627394158386" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 300px; height: 400px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE-Vg6GFcFsgh6iUV6vElfimS1qwsoinjrzRDkgw-Vyqw-Iq2ablf0Z_THbeW5cjS5XTp3h8Rej4TxuJRI_rhV_doKv05AbeAkaABN0Xmu24x7Af3EiXkGQF9zgJ5FBePxTao0/s400/Mysterious+Man,+Grand+Union+Canal.JPG" border="0" /></a><br />The sun was still coming down as it had been all afternoon, but the trees beat it back and made the place obscure. The old fellow was just standing there, not moving, for as long as I watched him. I was unable to determine the reason for his presence, or his stillness. Perhaps he was busy bringing to mind the canal as it once had been. I moved on, towards the factories.</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-51206545467329764672009-03-06T17:33:00.015-05:002009-03-07T04:48:43.372-05:00Periegesis Londinii<div style="text-align: justify;">So far this year I have been writing less, and reading less; and walking more. Already I have undertaken fourteen London walks, a full stretch every Sunday, and recently a little extra during the week, between academic pursuits. But I dream of walking as an art, or at least as a craft. So far I remain at the propaedeutic level, setting myself exercises, finding my way around the city, as I would around a canvas, or an essay. Of course, London has already been walked so much—Iain Sinclair and Patrick Wright, both of whom spoke at the LSE last weekend, are two of London's more distinguished <span style="font-style: italic;">flâneurs</span>. And so when I walk I cannot merely walk; I must walk <span style="font-style: italic;">as Conrad</span>, I must find my own way to walk, my own reasons to walk. This will take time, but even now I have managed a few quirks and motifs: the eye out for <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2007/07/to-date.html">datestones</a>, the prosifying ear, and the determination to walk until it grows dark, until the lampadaires spring into light, and then no more.<br /><br />I am drawn to places where I do not belong; to the feeling of not belonging. It is fortunate, then, that I am in London, for the city makes ample provision for such an emotion. I wander onto an estate, and try to look as if I'm actually headed for somewhere in particular, for the locals, like the <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicohogg/3068866246/#comment72157610721182416">filth</a>, little appreciate idle explorers, especially when they are waving cameras, and will take any opportunity to peer at me suspiciously, as if I were a nonce, a detective, or simply a dreaded bourgeois. Even a twee old version of the council estate, <a href="http://www.hgs.org.uk/tour/tour00014000.html">Waterlow Court</a>, warns non-residents away. When I trespass regardless, making a leisurely circuit of the court's fine cloisters, I am tickled with a <em>frisson</em> of lawlessness: a little, as they say, goes a long way.<br /><br />London's signages, for one thing, are ominously rebarbative. Where Agar Grove crosses the railway lines, a note on a lamppost barks, PROSTITUTES BEWARE. YOU ARE BEING WATCH BY OVERT CCTV. How much more overt could CCTV be? The bluntness of 'prostitutes' is mysteriously shocking. Couldn't they have been more euphemistic? The <em>inépatable </em>Londoner recoils instinctively, shewing his true, <em>Times</em>-reading nature. On Widdenham Road, N7, the porches of the terraced mansion blocks admonish, NO HAWKERS OR CANVASSERS. And on Leighton Road, Kentish Town, the old Victorian post-office offers a little found-poetry, in weathered bronze inscription-capitals:<br /><br /></div><div align="center"><u>NOTICE</u><br /><br />H. M. POSTMASTER GENERAL<br />THE OWNER OF THE LAND<br />AND FORECOURT<br />IN FRONT OF THESE PREMISES<br />HAS NOT DEDICATED AND<br />DOES NOT INTEND TO<br />DEDICATE AS A HIGHWAY<br />THE SAID LAND AND FORECOURT<br />OR ANY PART THEREOF<br />OR ANY WAY THEREUPON<br />OR THEREOVER<br /><br /></div><div align="justify">I particularly love those last lines: 'or any part thereof, or any way thereupon, or thereover'. This is, as I have come to appreciate lately, a Beckettian prose. It represents the defining feature of his early sentences, reaching climax in <em>Watt</em>, but most lapidary in <em>Murphy</em>: <blockquote>Some [patients] were at matins, some in the gardens, some could not get up, some would not, some simply had not.<br /><br />The anger that gave him the energy to begin again was gone before he had half ended. A few words used it up. So it had always been, not only with anger, not only with words.</blockquote>That last sentence actually brought joyful tears to my eyes when I re-read <em>Murphy</em> last month. It is an authoritarian prose: it cannot simply give, but must delineate exactly, permuting words within the syntax. It is a Platonic or scholastic prose: it always pushes away from the concrete ('A few words used it up. So it had always been—') towards abstraction ('—not only with anger, not only with words'). The commas, especially that between <em>anger</em> and <em>not</em>, unlike traditional prose commas, separate grammatically-distinct clauses: in other words they are <em>rhetorical</em>, and indicate the movement of a mind as it considers the broader consequences of a particular. Each thought is pushed, to see what will happen. The music, the rhythm of ideas, is perfect.<br /><br />So it is, in miniature, with the bronze tricolon of 'or any part thereof, or any way thereupon, or thereover'.<br /><br />Most remarkable of all, perhaps, is this, by the Chelsea river, far away from the monotonous suburbs of North London, and closer to those streets of heavy, columned porches, far more monotonous, which I am apparently the first to designate <em>Stuccovia</em>:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUWTiwwNicBIs7WjaBpx7LODBbMsu26uOe6CY4a0dYXAn_tUlrTbSVdsat6RjvOFMOZam6XbaXE39NELG5O-7gH9lCt8t0nsDklDHu1ud0NxW6zXXNFOfXrNam8pqmpqrBG-jm/s1600-h/Sign,+Chelsea+Gardens.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5310220488110971426" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 301px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUWTiwwNicBIs7WjaBpx7LODBbMsu26uOe6CY4a0dYXAn_tUlrTbSVdsat6RjvOFMOZam6XbaXE39NELG5O-7gH9lCt8t0nsDklDHu1ud0NxW6zXXNFOfXrNam8pqmpqrBG-jm/s400/Sign,+Chelsea+Gardens.JPG" border="0" /></a><br />The notice states, 'This park is open from 7.30am until dusk every day.' Assuredly, this syntax is a plain one, with neither the ingrammatic rudeness of Agar Grove, nor the baroque repetition of Leighton Road. But the surrealism of the scene, deadpan, is pure <em>Alice</em>, or Monty Python. In the latter case, the sign would be played by Idle or Palin, the walker by an irascible Cleese. <em>What d'you bleedin' mean, open from 7.30 to dusk? How d'you propose to shut it, then?</em> Both <em>Alice</em> and Python capture the absurdity of British authority, of the voice that declares a patch of grass 'open' only at certain times of the day. I would not have it otherwise. Let the city say <em>Keep out</em>, <em>Hop it</em>, <em>Piss off</em>, <em>Your kind not wanted here</em>, and say it in a thousand different voices, not only with anger, not only with words. Let it say <em>Begone</em>, and I will be all the happier to stay.</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-17058343276630266542009-02-26T08:48:00.009-05:002009-02-26T09:42:21.118-05:00Glebe Place<div align="justify">Glebe Place, off the King's Road, Chelsea: home of artists since the 1880s. Fine old houses, in a variety of styles, although not quite as beautiful as those on Old Church Road and its neighbours north of the high street. Next to the Open Air Nursery School, at the street's elbow, where it curves towards Bramerton Street, and then down to Cheyne Row and Cheyne Walk—number 50, a folly, done up in a patinate Mediterranean baroque:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF27eElpJVSarB9AC3xZawWjrgzWDk8MOHG9AI2VHNHdjQ2nBSZoz7G7yKHrXzo_oqrqNx6TBGWKWULJlr6nmZPE5AvWPSQvY9m2zKSTNPYpFAhkG4V42pm_JnyFh2K0FVKApD/s1600-h/50+Glebe+Place.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5307105469614671090" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 343px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 400px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF27eElpJVSarB9AC3xZawWjrgzWDk8MOHG9AI2VHNHdjQ2nBSZoz7G7yKHrXzo_oqrqNx6TBGWKWULJlr6nmZPE5AvWPSQvY9m2zKSTNPYpFAhkG4V42pm_JnyFh2K0FVKApD/s400/50+Glebe+Place.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />This picture taken not by me, but by <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/ddtmmm/">Jamie Barras</a>. Built, as Barras tells us, for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lowe_(advertiser)">Sir Frank Lowe</a>, advertising magus, and completed in 1987. The sheer ridiculousness of the facade! With its plaques, statues, ivies, metalwork, pink and green. And with a date on the gutter hopper, as became popular in the twentieth century, reading. . . <em>1723</em>! It would not be out of place at <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2007/08/arwyddbyst.html">Portmeirion</a>.<br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5307104426314848770" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 300px; HEIGHT: 188px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi91T9hh7uL8b0l13l_vxwVZ2PhvAFCZjzt2OjJRXz4EmchIUZRXy5h4TR-yMC05TDRXkGzFYGNK6Ba6oyXWU9g7_aBtXmuaE0usVtImMxwYq3jlH6GaVWLt_A8jelMsJD5E8ql/s400/(1723)-1.JPG" border="0" /><br />Nobody is about, except two georgeously posh old mums twittering a few doors up. The light is not much good, even at midday or so. In the entrance-way, just next to the large filigree-worked double doors, on the left hand side, this, most preposterously of all:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkjqlMYGFX93qtTW1mKDn7guAOPmvnsmdnr6E9RJwCSP382fzCMjI27wZoixOkwyhSQEV4Zor8iTMCwEilgt_7akJEMFEH0ve9nE0C4gctlVjuYU2PRjNC4RwDgVfziRlXB_LJ/s1600-h/Frank+Lowe.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5307104420550328770" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 302px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 400px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkjqlMYGFX93qtTW1mKDn7guAOPmvnsmdnr6E9RJwCSP382fzCMjI27wZoixOkwyhSQEV4Zor8iTMCwEilgt_7akJEMFEH0ve9nE0C4gctlVjuYU2PRjNC4RwDgVfziRlXB_LJ/s400/Frank+Lowe.JPG" border="0" /></a><br />Which either is, or very much resembles, a painting of Sir Frank himself, done in a pastiche Flemish-Renaissance style. I mean, isn't it? Heavy lids, generous nose, broad brow, the rest one can put down to a couple of decades and artistic licence. Only the painter has made him crueller and more calculative.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT6THYJ41Y6r87AtQDu6j35_1xd9tFrMEu2otacY8JVcjKGUZK-QMgBbW4IZ8yQD5kRlG98lUkYkEZxbUgYp3UfHkTIGRkbGFzXwzwLUVY6jDAntsN6RnvoSA85oOhksJLzI2e/s1600-h/threelowe.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5307112092593480530" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 159px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT6THYJ41Y6r87AtQDu6j35_1xd9tFrMEu2otacY8JVcjKGUZK-QMgBbW4IZ8yQD5kRlG98lUkYkEZxbUgYp3UfHkTIGRkbGFzXwzwLUVY6jDAntsN6RnvoSA85oOhksJLzI2e/s400/threelowe.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />The possibility remains that Lowe simply found an old burgher who resembled him, but I doubt it. There is a delight, after endless walking in the grit and grime of the suburbs northeast of the City, where there are yet pleasures in the efflorescences of penniless artistic statement, and in the fragments of the old ekeing amid the new and broken, in all the <em>undone</em>, there is a delight here, in Chelsea, in the decadent prettiness of it all, the comfort and the devil-may-care, in good money spent idiosyncratically if not well.</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-7281184658316571252009-02-17T17:35:00.012-05:002009-02-16T20:37:11.423-05:00On Neologism, Part Two<div align="justify">[Part One <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2009/01/on-neologism-part-one.html">here</a>.]<br /><br /><em>The Good Book</em>.<br /><br />Lily and I—and, indeed, the rest of you, from afar—are approaching the fifth anniversary of our first romantic entanglement. At times like these we enjoy reminiscing about that first date of ours, which culminated, <em>qua</em> date, with us sitting on the bed, me reading to her, in my sonorous English voice, from her favourite Edward Gorey tale, 'The Unstrung Harp'. This was my introduction to Gorey, and I was sufficiently intrigued to read through the rest of his collected stories. One which we enjoy recalling is 'The Beastly Baby'. It is difficult to forget this monstrosity, unable to sleep by virtue of its guilty conscience, and, as we see here, frequently abandoned by its unfortunate parents, in the vain hope of being rid of the thing:<br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5300187946885091362" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 369px; height: 400px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrcB9yWZlxeWTRZ0RfHmSVO0sCR-LpMOX3xGua-27w45sQEXtyQVJHLzzMRMbjPhdF0fbpIZBjCkqrx4Ni7zosQytzJrXN43obWoDyOcIEG9ocWVyC2o4S_iYsEftyHHRrFOV4/s400/Gorey1.PNG" border="0" /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5300192500523503586" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 370px; height: 336px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTiHQqC5-vMgic9mCiEMoewat-bYpnvxtRGhqaj-m-aRoMQoXDYLS_Y6yS1MIisryn0YOf74vMYgNaBiIdwjqD6YqD-0t6yQHE9zui9LuEIk_Q4Y8-m7MQJthFD3_VR_SNu_wV/s400/Gorey2.PNG" border="0" />One wonders if Gorey had in mind Stephen Leacock's story, 'The Inexplicable Infant', from <em><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/nsnvl10.txt">Nonsense Novels</a></em> (1911). He must have known it. Here we have the same idea, delivered in the same deadpan, dry and black:<blockquote>She had taken the baby and laid it tenderly, gently on a seat in the park. Then she walked rapidly away. A few minutes after a man had chased after Caroline with the little bundle in his arms. "I beg your pardon," he said, panting, "I think you left your baby in the park." Caroline thanked him.<br /><br />Next she took the baby to the Grand Central Waiting-room, kissed it tenderly, and laid it on a shelf behind the lunch-counter. A few minutes an official, beaming with satisfaction, had brought it back to her. "Yours, I think, madame," he said, as he handed it to her. Caroline thanked him.<br /><br />Then she had left it at the desk of the Waldorf Astoria, and at the ticket-office of the subway.<br /><br />It always came back.</blockquote>This 'nonsense novel' is not best of the collection: for my money, that would be '"Q." A Psychic Pstory of the Psupernatural'. It does, however, contain one brilliant joke. The poor farmer in his rural homestead, all clichés present and correct, is comforted by his wife:<blockquote>"Ah, John, you'd better be employed in reading the Good Book than in your wild courses. Here take it, father, and read it"--and she handed to him the well-worn black volume from the shelf. Enderby paused a moment and held the volume in his hand. He and his wife had known nothing of religious teaching in the public schools of their day, but the first-class non-sectarian education that the farmer had received had stood him in good stead. "Take the book," she said. "Read, John, in this hour of affliction; it brings comfort."<br /><br />The farmer took from her hand the well-worn copy of Euclid's <em>Elements</em>, and laying aside his hat with reverence, he read aloud: "The angles at the base of an isoceles triangle are equal, and whosoever shall produce the sides, lo, the same also shall be equal each unto each."</blockquote>Likewise, at the end of the story, Enderby has learned his lesson: 'Ah, my sons, henceforth let us stick to the narrow path. What is it that the Good Book says: 'A straight line is that which lies evenly between its extreme points.'' The comic potential of the confusing the Book with some other bible is a classic. One of my favourite instances is from an otherwise rather dull short story, by a literary overreacher, fool's gold: Alasdair Gray's 'Logopandocy', from his <em>Unlikely Stories, Mostly</em> (1983). In this dialogue, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Milton">'Cromwell's Latin secretary'</a> confronts a pro-Royalist Scottish aristocrat in his gaol-cell at the Tower in 1653, Midsummer's Eve. The secretary, <em>Paradise Lost</em> still but a gleam in his eye, says:<blockquote>When time is ripe for it, my verse will do far more than illuminate the best essence of Thomas Malory's text, it will translate, clarify and augment the greatest and most truly Original Book in the Universe.</blockquote>On which the aristocrat—the story's narrator—remarks to himself:<blockquote>Such is my aim also, and I am thunderstruck to discover in the Puritan camp one who admires the work of Rabelais as greatly as I do.</blockquote>The Scotsman is, of course, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Urquhart">Sir Thomas Urquhart</a>, whose translation of the first two books of <em>Gargantua and Pantagruel</em> was published that very year. Now Urquhart was the literary neologist <em>par excellence</em> of his century. And so, finally, we arrive again at neologism, having faffed and fumbled about for far too long with other matters of relative insignficance.<br /><br /></div><div align="center">*</div><div align="justify"><br />I doubt Leacock would have cherished Urquhart. In the last of the <em>Nonsense Novels</em>, 'The Man of Asbestos'—unlike the others a story without humour, a sermon on dystopia, <em>more <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._G._Wells">Puteicis</a></em>—the eponymous Man, a grey creature of the technological future, shows the narrator, to the latter's disgust, one of the scars where his education has been surgically implanted:<br /><blockquote>Here is the mark where I had my spherical trigonometry let in. That was, I admit, rather painful, but other things, such as English poetry or history, can be inserted absolutely without the least suffering.</blockquote>To appreciate Urquhart, and not merely to be quaintly amused by him, one has to be the sort of person who values spherical trigonometry over poetry and history. Urquhart's treatise on the subject, the <em>Trissotetras</em> of 1645, must rank as one of the least intelligible mathematical works known to man. In one of the three dedicatory epistles—'An Epaenetick and Doxologetick Expresse, in Commendation of this Book and the Author Thereof, to all Philomathets', written by one 'J. A.' but sounding suspiciously like Urquhart himself—it is claimed that 'the abstrusest difficulties of this science by him [are] so neatly unfolded' that we should rank the author with his hero, the great Scottish mathematician John Napier. We also get a preposterous panegyric to Urquhart's erudition by the well-known Scottish polymath, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Ross_%28writer%29">Alexander Ross</a>: 'Hoc duce, jam Lybicos poteris superare calores, / Atque pati Scythici frigora saeva poli.'<br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5303510599021940722" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 315px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglxiKSUlAM3QkyYpcA7okz3eW7Rit1iE9jT7bMD0qeeLo-U2dpWI5xyPrDzWXqoa9KhGOi7MxF61b35GbK3qgZ1rorM8zuHRHkEchWj6xlmxHVUBVVRdF4HOvG-dmy0N6x6eMz/s400/urq2.PNG" border="0" /><br />Within the fortress of the text itself, abstruse difficulties are merely manufactured. 'In amblygonosphericalls,' claims Urquhart, 'which admit both of an extrinsecall and intrinsecall demission of the perpendicular, nineteen severall parts are to be considered; viz. the perpendicular, the subtendentall, the subtendentine, two cosubtendents, the basall, the basidion, the chief segment of the base, two cobases, the double verticall, the verticall, the verticaline, two coverticalls, the next cathetopposite, the prime cathetopposite, and the two cocathetopposites.' Almost none of these words, of course, are listed in the OED. Urquhart comments on these 'Greek and Latin terms', which<br /><blockquote>for the more efficacy of expression I have made use of in this Treatise; in doing whereof, that I might both instruct the Reader and not weary him, I have endeavoured perspicuity with shortnesse; though, I speak it ingenuously, to have been more prolixe therein could have cost but very little labor to me. . .</blockquote>One will readily believe that additional prolixity would have cost Urquhart <em>very</em> little, as suggested by the ellipsis truncating the above quotation. At any rate, the 'Lexidicion' which follows thereon attempts to explain each of the barbarous coinages found in the work, including, among those not above, <em>obliquangulary</em>, 'of all angles that are not right', <em>poliechyrologie</em>, 'the art of fortifying townes and cities', and my favourite, <em>plusminused</em>, 'said of moods which admit of mensurators, or whose illatitious termes are the never same, but either more or less then the maine <em>quaesitas</em>'. At this point one has the sensation of being suffocated with verbal ivy, a riot of syllabic curlicues, involving the throat.<br /><br />In addition are the names of trigonometric figures; for these Urquhart deliberately follows his mediaeval forebears in logic (<em>barbara</em>, <em>celarent</em>) and music (<em>gammuth</em>, <em>fa-so-la-ti-do</em>), and coins words artificially stuck together from significant syllables. Thus, <em>dacramfor</em> is composed of <em>da</em>, 'the datas', <em>cra</em>, 'the concurse of a given and required side', <em>m</em>, 'a tangent complement', and <em>for</em>, 'outwardly'. <em>Dacramfor</em> is not in the OED; nor any of its myriad fellows.<br /><blockquote>The novelty of these words I know will seeme strange to some, and to the eares of illiterate hearers sound like termes of conjuration; yet seeing that since the very infancie of learning, such inventions have beene made use of, and new words coyned, that the knowledge of severall things representatively confined within a narrow compasse, might the more easily be retained in a memory susceptible of their impression. . . I know not why Logick and Musick should be rather fitted with such helps then Trigonometrie.</blockquote>So many words, words, words! It is a classic seventeenth-century argument, nonetheless, and all the Royal Society fellows would be at it soon after. But why no admittance to the hallowed Dictionary? You will say, I know: these words are only used once! What use could they be? Let them perish at the rockface! And to you I reply, lickety-split: <blockquote><strong>prostisciutto, n</strong>. <em>nonce-wd</em>. [Blend of PROSTITUTE <em>adj</em>. and PROSCIUTTO <em>n</em>.] A female prostitute regarded metaphorically as an item on a menu. Perhaps with allusion to MEAT and related slang metaphors. <strong>1930</strong> S. BECKETT <em>Whoroscope</em> 1, "What's that? A little green fry or a mushroomy one? Two lashed ovaries with prostisciutto?"</blockquote>A punning portmanteau from Beckett's Joyceolatrous juvenilia, used once in the history of the language, until the carrion scholars descended to feast on Beckett's early poetry, and had to quote him. Well, the OED likes to encourage young authors. How about older words? <blockquote><strong>scientintically, adv</strong>. A burlesque nonce-word, formed by a blending of <em>scientifically</em> and <em>tint</em>. <strong>1761</strong> STERNE <em>Tr. Shandy</em> III. v, "He must have redden'd, pictorically and scientintically speaking, six whole tints and a half. . . above his natural colour."</blockquote>But come now! Everyone knows and loves <em>Tristram Shandy</em>! Who, by contrast, cares for old Urquhart? <blockquote><strong>cidentine, a</strong>. <em>nonce-wd</em>. (See quot.) <strong>1653</strong> URQUHART <em>Rabelais</em> II. xxxii, "As we have with us the countreys cisalpine and transalpine. . . so have they there the Countreys cidentine and tradentine, that is, behither and beyond the teeth."</blockquote>A word for describing the location of countries within a giant's mouth, from a particular episode of <em>Pantagruel</em>: an integral part of the English language, no doubt. But stay, this is still somewhat Rabelais, 'tis in his book, even if it is not him <em>as such</em> ('. . . aussi ont-ilz deçà et delà les dentz'). What do you have in the way of <em>pure</em> Urquhart? <blockquote><strong>disobstetricate, v</strong>. <em>Obs. nonce-wd</em>. <em>trans</em>. To reverse the office of a midwife concerning; to retard or hinder from child-birth. <strong>1652</strong> <a name="hit2"></a>URQUHART <em>Jewel</em> Wks. (1834) 210, "With parturiencie for greater births, if a malevolent time disobstetricate not their enixibility."</blockquote>Too corny. Anything else? <blockquote><strong>epassyterotically, adv.</strong> [f. Gr. <em>epassúteron</em>, one upon another; cf. <em>chaotically</em>.] <strong>1652</strong> <a name="hit2"></a>URQUHART <em>Jewel</em> Wks. (1834) 249, "He killed seven of them epassyterotically, that is, one after another."</blockquote>Yes, that's better, yes. . . <blockquote><strong>hirquitalliency, n</strong>. <em>Obs. </em><a name="hit1"></a><em>nonce-wd</em>. [f. L. <em>hirquitallī</em>-<em>re</em> (of infants) to acquire a strong voice (f. <em>hircus</em> he-goat) + -ENCY.] <strong>1652</strong> <a name="hit2"></a>URQUHART <em>Jewel</em> 125, "To speak of her hirquitalliency."</blockquote>Ah-ha! You see, again and again the OED tongues words out of <em>The Jewel</em>, or, to give its more authentic title, as the 2008 draft revision does (s.v. <em>penitissim</em>), <em>Ekskubalauron</em>. There are dozens of these vocables in the dictionary, each with only one citation, and that from <em>The Jewel</em>. None was used earlier, none has been used since. They are, strictly speaking—at least until this very post—Modern English <em>hapax legomena</em>. Or, as the Dictionary's first great editor, James Murray, put it, <em>nonce words</em>. The OED lists <em>nonce word</em>—'a word apparently used only ‘for the nonce’, i.e. on one specific occasion or in one specific text or writer's works'—and, in a delicious <em>mise-en-abyme</em>, quotes itself.<br /><br />But not a single entry from the <em>Trissotetras</em>. Why is the one work slighted for the other? The one was surely known, as <em>The Jewel</em> is commonly cited from Urquhart's 1834 <em>Works</em>, which includes both treatises. Is it that the OED accepts such words only from 'literary' works, like <em>Whoroscope</em>, <em>Tristram Shandy</em>, <em>Pantagruel</em>, and, let us suppose, <em>The Jewel</em>? This cannot be the case: not only is <em>The Jewel</em> hardly literature in the same category as the others, being, among other things, a treatise on universal languages, and a panegyric to Scotland—but, as we saw in the last instalment, the OED is quite happy citing <em>blas</em> from technical books of the seventeenth century. So why?<br /><br /></div><div align="center">*</div><div align="justify"><br />Perhaps admittance into Murray's temple, or that of his descendants, is an <em>aesthetic</em> act. Or even an ethical one. <em>Prosticiutto</em>, <em>scientintically</em>, <em>hirquitalliency</em>: fine, bold, strong pieces, vivid, if a little rococo. What etymological <em>fantasias</em> they conjure! How they expand the language, as brooches pinned on the plainer stuff of a good prose or verse. And <em>blas</em>, too: a noble attempt, if ultimately in vain, to affix the vocabulary of a nascent and uncertain science. Into our society, along our finely-ordonnanced colonnades, we allow a hint of wonder, of the clamour of past voices, to prove we are not prudes, not puritans. We encourage diversity. As the people need their carnival or <em>Saturnalia</em>, the release of bottled energy, so the dictionary needs its nonce-words, to throw the <em>makes</em> and <em>thises</em> and <em>perspicuouses</em> into clearer relief, as good, upstanding members of lexical populace.<br /><br />But— but this, this horror: this <em>Trissotetras</em>. All puffed up with arrogant frankensteins, choked and garbled, a masturbatory mess of syllables. Like that other book— what was it, yes? Finnegan's something? No expansion of the society, of the literature, of the language, just halls of heavy mirrors closed off to the world. We cannot encourage <em>that</em> sort of thing. <em>Pantagruel</em> we allow; <em>The Jewel</em> we allow. But not this <em>Trissotetras</em>. It may not be admitted to the Law. Let us abandon this beastly baby on a doorstep.<br /><br />Will it be officious of me to observe that the <em>Trissotetras </em>is in danger of being left behind?<br /><br />I say again, perhaps this doorkeeping is an aesthetic or ethical activity. The <a href="http://www.languagehat.com/">descriptivists</a>, God bless them, want a grammar and a dictionary that do not prescribe, but only record. Who can blame them? As one of them recently <a href="http://wordsfollowme.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/an-english-of-our-own/">said</a>, 'how a language is used in the present is much more interesting than how it should be “properly” used'. Dealing with the fringes of the language—the neologisms, the portmanteaux and the nonce-words—we seem to see the necessity of choice. The lexical galaxy gets thinner, dimmer, as we recede from the centre; but it extends, in half-attested substance, to infinity. To admit <em>all</em> stray elements would be to admit typos, half-finished words, proper names, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dord">dords</a>, and in all languages. Some words attested only once are accepted; others not. Thus we are forced to observe the rôle of personal judgement, unanswerable to absolute reasoning. The arbiters of the language, when their voice wavers, tell us <em>why</em> they arbitrate; what they would see in the Good Book.</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-64273651004398763272009-02-12T05:42:00.011-05:002009-02-19T13:09:30.571-05:00High Table<div align="justify"><blockquote>And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves. </blockquote>Thanks to the internet, we can prove Socrates wrong. Yesterday Hayden White <a href="http://haydenwhite.blogspot.com/2009/02/wrath-of-conrad-h-roth.html">broke</a> a ten-month silence on his own blog, and added the same text as a <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2009/02/white-and-momigliano.html?showComment=1234367880000#c1007676291738941081">comment</a> to my last post, taking me to task for taking him to task for his presentation to the Courtauld Institute last week. Naturally I am honoured—and I'm not being ironical—by his presence. And here is my reply:<br /><br /></div><div align="center">*</div><div align="justify"><br />Many thanks for taking the time to comment on my post; if I had known you would turn up in the audience, I would have minded my manners more. But I didn't, and must live with my own rudeness. Now, it would be disingenuous for me to take back what I have written, and so I will not; but I should observe at least that, in the heat of making a particular argument, one's overall perspective may be obscured. Indeed, a friend of sorts, who enjoys patronising me, has already <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/79047/What-happened-to-then-We-passed-it-When-Just-now-Were-at-now-now">commented</a>, in light of this very confrontation, that 'Conrad is young and enjoys slashing attacks without much in the way of nuance'.<br /><br />It is not true that my opinion of your work (or you) is 'totally hostile'. I was critical of your 'speech'—I would not call it a <em>speech</em>, which I think of as a more formal oration—because I thought it lacked substance. It was certainly entertaining, which immediately set it above the vast majority of lectures or papers one hears. I have no problem with garrulity or with America or Americanity, as my wife's response above should make clear. Nor did I expect you to be more, nor would I want you to be more, still less would I want every academic to be, 'donnish' or 'quietly authoritative'. Donnish and adventurous, quiet and aggressive—both have their place, as I myself more mutedly suggested in my comment above, that "there is [a] place for Whites as well as Murrays." And I did like <em>Metahistory</em>: I appreciated its grandeur, and moreover, opined <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2006/12/poetics-and-curse-of-irony.html">here</a> that 'much of it is convincing'. Suffice to say, it would not be hard to find a less sympathetic, more hostile opinion of your work than mine. If I had found your views uninteresting, I would not have come to hear you at the Courtauld.<br /><br />I have no idea if the audience liked your speech; it is always difficult to get a measure of these things. One or two people I spoke to, certainly, seemed awed by your breadth of reference. I was also embarrassed—on your behalf—by the vacuous questions you were asked after you'd finished. But such, perhaps, are the inevitable dangers of these events. At any rate, whether the audience liked you or not makes no difference to the quality of your argument.<br /><br />As for Momigliano, I have no doubt that you are infinitely more familiar with his work than am I; and that he was a perfect gentleman both in person and on the page. What I wrote, however, was that he penned not a 'devastating attack' on you, but a 'rather damning review' of your work, which is surely compatible with a <em>politesse</em> of tone, and even with intellectual respect; furthermore, my expression, unlike yours, does not commit me to agreeing with him. The subject of Momigliano's fascism, while interesting, is not remotely germane to the discussion at hand, nor to your speech. But when you write, <blockquote>It is true that he believed that "Dov'e la rettorica, non c'e la storia," but if he really believed that he would also have had to deny that the whole of historiography written prior to the 19th century (from Herodotus to Gibbon) was real historiography!</blockquote>you are merely contradicting yourself. Either he did not believe it, in which case it is not true that he did, or he did believe it, in which case, either he <em>did</em> deny that pre-Rankean historiography was genuine—and I don't believe he did—or he would have rejected your reasoning. Is it not possible to argue that, for a Gibbon—in whom, let us assume, there is both <em>rettorica</em> and <em>storia</em>—the extent to which a particular passage is <em>rettorica</em> is the extent to which it is not <em>storia</em>? In other words, although rhetoric and history may be mixed together in a work, even indistinguishably, like hydrogen and oxygen in water, might they at least be conceptually distinct? Why must we deal in absolutes? <blockquote>My lecture at the Courtauld was in defense of returning historical research from its pretensions to the status of a "science" back to its service as branch of moral philosophy. . . on the grounds that a purely scientific or objective account of any set of facts can never be of any service to the "present."</blockquote>This is a laudable intention, and one that Momigliano could only have sympathised with: his own project was described in exactly these terms by Murray and others last week. Murray himself, moreover, defended your philosophy of history as having moral value. But I am surprised that you allow even the possibility of a 'purely scientific or objective account of any set of facts'; and I am not convinced that your own defense adds much to what we have already, for instance from the myriad authorities you yourself quoted, from Nietzsche to Oakeshott. The statement that a set of facts 'can never be of any service to the present' seems little more than a historiographical reiteration of the age-old <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is-ought_problem">is-ought problem</a>.<br /><br />Furthermore, it is pointless to argue that 'The idea of the "practical past" <em>would</em> turn historical inquiry to the service of reformist movements in historical thinking', since it is these very species of historiography—the feminist, post-colonial, and so on—that have dominated academia for the past two decades or more. Who needs a defense of the <em>status quo</em>?<br /><br />The real problem with the claims you made at the Courtauld is that they were not supported by any serious examination of actual cases. Which is not to say that they <em>could not</em> be so supported: it was a lazy speech because you expected your audience to take your word for it, ballasting your claims not with examples and evidence, but with references to previous philosophers who have said much the same, and devised terminology for the purpose. This is why the following assertion rings hollow: <blockquote>I am all in favor of leaving professional historians to do their work of excavating facts about specific parts of the past, and giving out information about this past that can never imply anything about how this information might relate to the efforts of present individuals and groups to derive some "knowledge" about human self-making.</blockquote>The impossibility that you describe is precisely what Murray achieved in his paper on Momigliano. Murray excavated facts about the eighteenth century, and in doing so could produce specific evidence of the flaws in his subject's efforts to comprehend man. Momigliano, he argued, misunderstood the process of history because he denied the intimate connections between 'fiction' and 'history'. Made baldly, this is is an uninteresting, or at least an unpersuasive statement. But made with reference to 'specific parts of the past', it begins to have authority and conviction. For a philosopher so fascinated with <em>rhetoric</em>, you must appreciate the value of winning the assent of your more critical listeners, and this requires not just names but <em>facts</em>, or if you would prefer, <em>fact-like things</em>.<br /><br />I hope the discussion will not end here.<br /><br />[<strong>Update</strong>: Discussion seems to have ended here.]</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-33567172122885017572009-02-07T18:25:00.010-05:002009-02-12T18:15:54.245-05:00White and Momigliano<div align="justify"><a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2006/12/poetics-and-curse-of-irony.html">Hayden White</a> spoke at the Courtauld on Wednesday night. Ken Clarke Lecture Theatre, a grand old room in pink, with white trim, like the inside of a wedding cake. A ghastly introduction from a <a href="http://publications.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/SchProfile.aspx?strLocalStaffID=5237&strLocalSource=SSL&strSchoolID=AHC&strUnitID=ARTHIST">fawning ex-student</a>, not redeemed, but rather aggravated, by its kitschy, self-conscious irony. <em>Hayden White is the king of irony</em>. Then we clapped her off stage to make way for the master himself. White spoke for three quarters of an hour, with the utmost geniality, casually sweating references—Wittgenstein, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Vico, Hugh Blair, Cicero, Dante, Winckelmann, Gombrich, Oakeshott, er, Toni Morrison, and so on, not to mention plenty of Hayden White. At the end of it, none of us was any the wiser. He was supposed to be talking about 'Novelesque Histories', apparently the (rather radical) notion that novels can be history too. I mean, just think of Walter Scott—Hegel thought him a great historian! After an hour he apologised for having no slides: this was, remember, at the <em>Courtauld</em> Institute, and he was lecturing to most of a roomful of art history graduates. Then he remembered he had some, and wheeled out some pictures of webs spun by spiders on drugs: an internet meme over a decade old. Still, it got the laughs. White said it was supposed to be a metaphor for the way literary history works, but it was a better metaphor for his own maundering, barely-coherent presentation. White, it seemed to me, was still trading off <em>Metahistory</em>, a book which had a few worthwhile ideas when he published it in 1973, even if it has been grossly overrated, then and since. Now he is a charming and erudite drunk*, still enjoying a meal of thirty years past, clean out of ideas.<br /><br /></div><div align="center">*</div><div align="justify"><br />None of which would have been worth writing a post on, if I hadn't attended a <a href="http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/colloquia/Momigliano.html">lecture</a> today by Oswyn Murray, its subject ostensibly being '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnaldo_Momigliano">[Arnaldo] Momigliano</a> and the Eighteenth Century'. Now, Momigliano wrote a rather damning review of <em>Metahistory</em> in his 1981 article, 'The Rhetoric of History and the History of Rhetoric: on Hayden White's Tropes'. White's basic point had been—and still is, apparently—that historiography is a branch of rhetoric, and that the way one writes history is governed by the same sorts of rhetorical tropes as are found in oratory and fictional literature. Style becomes more important than truth: what could be more postmodern? Momigliano, the old-guard Warburg philologian, objected: what sense can we make of history if we forget that it centres on facts and problems? He wrote: <blockquote>As the history of historiography is basically a study of individual historians, no student of the history of historiography does his work properly unless he is capable of telling me whether the historian or historians he has studied used the evidence in a satisfactory way.</blockquote>Amélie Kuhrt, in the discussion after Murray's paper, described Momigliano's response to White as a moral distaste: the aim of historiography should be an ethical engagement with the problems of the past in relation to those of the present, not mere games with words and ideas, as White, the formalist, wanted to give us. Murray himself was more sympathetic to White. His paper, as charmingly delivered as White's, and with ten times the content, wanted to reconfigure Momigliano's map of narrative historiography in the Enlightenment. The old Italian, Murray observed, had paid too much attention to Gibbon, and scorned, to his own detriment, writers of literature: John Gast, for instance, or Walter Scott, who, as Murray pointed out, had been prized as a historian by Hegel and Carlyle. Novelists will tell you what colour trousers people wore, so to speak: and that was most important to the historian sniffing for clues.<br /><br />What struck me was the contrast between White, American hero of the culture wars, and Murray, donnish, British, quietly authoritative. Both made the same point, or similar, and with the same example: the one rambling and blustering, bursting with comments on the Great Philosophers, the other excavating, methodically, a moment of history, letting the scholarship do its own talking, allowing the little to speak for the big. It has been a week to renew one's faith in the Murrays of the academic world.<br /><br />* Not literally, of course. He may be, as well—but that is not what I meant.<br /><br />[<strong>Update</strong>: Hayden White comments, <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2009/02/white-and-momigliano.html?showComment=1234367880000#c1007676291738941081">here</a> and <a href="http://haydenwhite.blogspot.com/2009/02/wrath-of-conrad-h-roth.html">on his own blog</a>. Greg <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/79047/What-happened-to-then-We-passed-it-When-Just-now-Were-at-now-now#2448527">links</a>. Steve <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/79047/What-happened-to-then-We-passed-it-When-Just-now-Were-at-now-now#2449133">sneers</a>. Greg <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/79047/What-happened-to-then-We-passed-it-When-Just-now-Were-at-now-now#2449271">defends my honour</a>. I <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2009/02/high-table.html">respond to White</a>. "Verstegan" <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/79047/What-happened-to-then-We-passed-it-When-Just-now-Were-at-now-now#2450812">defends my honour</a>. Steve <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/79047/What-happened-to-then-We-passed-it-When-Just-now-Were-at-now-now#2450888">sneers again</a>, with a dash of sanctimonious hypocrisy: my favourite kind! Thanks to all.]</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-27721351313005982182009-02-01T19:29:00.017-05:002009-02-02T09:26:36.648-05:00London Belongs To—<div align="left"><span style=";font-family:arial;font-size:85%;" >(In <em>homage</em> to, via intermittent pastiche of, the <a href="http://blog.urbanomic.com/tome/archives/2005/06/_barbican_with_1.html">long defunct</a>, and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Sinclair">funct</a>, too.)<br /><br />Woken by a saleswoman of uncertain ethnicity; voice sounds like a machine, Stephen Hawking. Five minutes go by before she tries to sell me something; I hang up. Band-aid has fallen off my thumb in the night, leaving the dried wound. Breadknife accident, after several beers; a flap of skin cut obliquely, in the shape of Osiris' crook, presaging death, gashed thumb as macabre totem of a journey curving back on itself. Today I will cut a gash of my own onto the London map, inscribe a V in footsteps through the city streets, from King's Cross to the Barbican, and up to Stamford Hill. It is lightly snowing as I leave, a scurrilous fag ash at best; no suitable hat; briefly wonder if I should turn back and ascend the stair (with a bald spot in the middle of my hair). But no; I shall not let myself be ruled by the vagaries of season. London belongs to me, among others. Noon.<br /><br />Euston Road<br />Gray's Inn Road<br />Britannia Street<br />King's Cross Road<br /><br />Bagnigge House plaque, well-noted by latterday Fleet River pilgrims. Someone, no doubt Thatcher, has thoughtlessly sited a bus shelter immediately in front, obscuring the view. Travelodge, murderer of London roads.<br /><br />Lloyd Baker Street<br />Amwell Street<br />Rosoman Street<br />Exmouth Market<br />Pine Street<br />Catherine Griffiths Court<br />Northampton Road<br /><br />Came to see Lubetkin's Health Centre, now that my attention has been <a href="http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/2009/01/finsbury-final-insult.html">adverted to it</a>. Who would ever even notice it? Not as arresting as the sleek, monochrome photographs make it look. More noteworthy is the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering, which seems to operate under the Health Centre's general auspices, and whose name suggests a Python sketch that never was. Not that Palin has or has ever had a stammer; just that he once played a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fish_Called_Wanda">character</a> with one. Slip round the back, into a bit of greenery, and then through a muset in the hedge, into a gated-off area, trying to get some sense of Lubetkin's <em>derrière</em>, but no luck.<br /><br />Bowling Green Lane<br /><br />A little swarm of coppers bombinating from two cars, lights flashing, outside the closed and oversize gates of <a href="http://www.czwg.com/">CZWG Architects</a>, housed in an old 1872 warehouse, dirty yellow brick banded with red, replete with free-floating terracotta tympana, and pulley equipment in period red iron. One of them crouches down to look under the gates; sees nothing; the coppers mutter discontentedly to each other and then disappear into their vehicles, the whole a shamanistic exorcism of deserted weekend Clerkenwell, come to nought.<br /><br />Farringdon Road<br />Farringdon Lane<br />Clerkenwell Green<br />Aylesbury Street<br />St John Street<br />Clerkenwell Road<br />Old Street<br />Golden Lane<br />Golden Lane Estate<br /><br />By this stage the sun has emerged, appropriately, and the old estate, with its saffron and primrose highlights, beams munificently from above. Sudden view into an apartment, with a bright and impressive roomful of books. Mother and daughter in the indoor pool below. Stains on one wall coalesce into a Leonardo phantasmagoria, faces of an older and more ancient London appearing again to haunt the estate's designer tenants.<br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5298012795108449746" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 300px; height: 400px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiROsrvUntN2QguW5jfzf5K41nc3JM-DKNtTN9tyUrV3TBkQQlnkqJb1jdimX7Y09oGO2d3Iu1yG1ngYb1rUXZ7Mfa9Rf0_4BH4ndRDhCAf97cuwciw6CU4PHaR4hEfp0wRawit/s400/GLE1.JPG" border="0" /><br />"The buildings themselves—a very high density housing estate for the City of London—are sometimes fussy and sometimes weather-beaten. But in a way they are unimportant compared with the spaces between them. Every trick in the book is brought in, and not for cleverness's sake, but to create a real place out of statistical units of accommodation. There are half a dozen ways of crossing the site: along corridors, under buildings, down steps and up ramps. And it is all meant to be used." — Ian Nairn, <em>London</em>.<br /><br />Fann Street<br />Fortune Street Gardens<br /><br />"Scuse me mate, can I ask you a civil question?" Old fellow, beard, well wrapped-up, bright eyes. "Er, yes, go on." "Now, I'm not beggin, I'm not a mugger, I'm not a terrorist, I just wanted to ask you, since I'm sleeping rough these days, if you might happen to have any small change on you." So you. . . <em>are</em> begging? "I'm sorry, I haven't got any change." It's the truth, this time. "Ah well, God bless you son." Sun still out.<br /><br />Errol Street<br />Dufferin Court<br />Bunhill Fields<br /><br />Defoe's big prick. IT REPRESENTS THE UNITED CONTRIBUTIONS OF SEVENTEEN HUNDRED PERSONS. Blake. Bunyan. "Please nominate this park for a £200k grant," or something to that effect. Let it be derelict and overgrown, I say; let our literary heroes be hidden under creeping weeds, unearthable by <em>dérive</em>-ing Sinclairian enthusiasts. Though they probably won't bother with Defoe or Bunyan; what could these dissenters say to tomorrow's visionaries? A Hoxtonite with a big camera, up on the bench, gets a long view of all the graves.<br /><br />City Road<br /><br />One of those transitions of which Nairn is so fond, from the bumbling tombs of Bunhill, and before them the back streets of Peabody Estates, onto City Road, with its distant edging of the City's glass and steel. Brief flick round the Wesleyan Chapel, where I have arrived in the nick of time, as the minister, who appears with a spectral suddenness, tells me the Chapel is closing in fifteen minutes. It is a relief to be out of the terrible cold, at least. The interior is pleasant enough, and its ornamental ceilings are especially fine. Traditional old-timey stained glass in the narthex, facing out into the courtyard, flanked by two windows, modern, painted rather than stained, with a sinister, end-of-days feel, as if a new-century channelling of the old Methodist spirit.<br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5297990852962571714" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 300px; height: 400px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH-7TL2q0f3ES5rDgXjaJRwzfWvrEdruytrldUmORUtjpiIi8c5oNHvKCsPZTromehcbs845ceRcbzUBw8Zn79n2iA8E57zVA5JKy0ovQZTBp72lUoPuiEYV3S0tLQbEgNy2Ye/s400/window2.JPG" border="0" /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5297990852555821314" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 287px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0RQvUDFg71b3nIDcWzkjuvmocnHkc1QqLUGzr4qE31Kik3nuYtV4I-vpk1yy1jFD76O3kQHL6O0-p2XseQVNKuW83JkluIauH75FjQq0vc1TrvzYf05EAqiuBz6ky46O73To2/s400/window1.JPG" border="0" /><br />The ship or ark, from which huddled masses stream (via parted waters) towards the foreground, reads -OGOS on the keel, which I take to be <em>LOGOS</em>. To the right, an old fellow fructifies the wanderers with a living river, and a kindly gent in spectacles toys with a branch. To the left, the cyclist's messenger-bag reads JESSEE COURIER, and at the rear of the ice-cream van is <em>Angelos</em>. The council-estate mum buying a coke from the ice-cream man has a child in tow, who is holding a palm-leaf. Rich with pregnant images, the cartoon on the glass is trying to tell us <em>something</em>. Back out into the cold, neither snow nor sun.<br /><br />Cowper Street<br />Tabernacle Street<br />Pitfield Street<br />Old Street<br />Kingsland Road<br /><br />I come across at least two hat shops, and consider making a purchase, since my head and ears are now burning. Endless onslaught of pretty girls, Hoxtonites, in outlandish fashions, even pencil-markings on their faces. I peer at the menu of every Vietnamese restaurant I pass, looking for soft-shell crab. An acquaintance informed me of this delicacy last week, and said this was the place to get it; now I am gagging to try it. But this is not the time. I don't want to sit down just for a single dish, nor to eat alone.<br /><br />Kingsland Road<br />Geffrye Court<br />Kingsland Road<br />Dunston Road<br /><br />Over the canal; I decide to call in on <a href="http://lovaganda.blogspot.com/">Butterfingers</a>, who lives in a warehouse with a bunch of gangly artists. Brilled hair, cream jumper, scuffed brown chelsea boots with pointy brogue toes. Stopping by unannounced, or in this case almost so, is a rare opportunity in this diffuse metropolis, and so I take a peculiar pleasure from it, a perfect half-hour caesura from the march. When I arrive he is cooking up a lovely rösti and fried eggs. Orange juice. Haven't eaten all morning, so it goes down a treat. The great communal room is littered with eccentric bits of furniture and half-realised artworks and statements. One of the gang thinks Federer won the tennis, which gives me cheer. The fag-ash blizzard has begun outside again, but this time we can see the sun still shining as a gangrenous spot through the grey, an image of faint triumph. I ask if I can borrow a hat. He rummages around, but turns up nothing. "It's alright," I say, "I've come this far and I can keep going without one."<br /><br />Kingsland Road<br />Kingsland High Street<br />Stoke Newington Road<br />Stoke Newington High Street<br />Stamford Hill<br />Lynmouth Road<br /><br />After an evening spent reciting and discussing poetry, mine and others', it is still snowing in Stoke Newington. He walks me to the bus-stop, past the marvelous Egyptian entrance to Abney Park, and I reminisce with him of my <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2006/12/san-francisco-another-photo-essay.html">walk in the San Francisco downpour</a>. The flakes are thickly glazing our coats, and now coat the streets, deliciously. The 67 takes forever to come, but it's fine, we are good to talk for as long as it may be.<br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5298046687073756610" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 300px; height: 400px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnDsiTLikSdkVQC_aoD_ajLH2O8Kgunffmoq4kYkpmutf8MVkNb1z9j5fx-aF4O9yU-f794G3Z4r2adWvg6rZgaxnrGOw0q7vnxyI8SHwQYGb_SDwLawT5KyFuOsm6vFt0MAMB/s400/night+snow.JPG" border="0" /><br />When I get back home, Aubrey is mewing with a pitiful vengeance, and he must have freshly laid, for the flat is saturated with an aroma of dung. The thumb is healing nicely; the pale white skin reattaching itself to the trunk, an almost alchemical process. Osiris' regenerative crook has been vindicated; life to death, and death back to life. London itself, with its range and sweep of light, textures, is itself an alchemical, regenerative city; never <em>mere</em> existence. Three in the morning, and the snow is still falling, still settling. Glowing in the dark. This must be the grandest city in all the world.<br /><br />[<strong>Update</strong>: Monday. The newspapers are right: snow is general all over England. My soul swoons slowly as I hear the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. I have the sensation of having walked London for the last time, before it is engulfed in the blizzard</span><span style=";font-family:arial;font-size:85%;" > forever</span><span style=";font-family:arial;font-size:85%;" >.]<br /></span></div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-57826874057047097832009-01-29T20:12:00.010-05:002009-02-16T20:37:56.263-05:00On Neologism, Part One<div align="justify">The Scottish physician Thomas Short, at the end of a parenthesis on diseases, in the middle of a long footnote, extending over several pages through a discussion of <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2006/06/chalybea.html">chalybeate waters</a>, from his 1734 <em>Natural, Experimental, and Medicinal History of the Mineral Waters of Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, and Yorkshire</em>, writes with a twinkle: <blockquote>The Causes we assign for these Diseases, we have borrowed from the ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphicks, as the incoercible <em>Flatus</em>, culinary Digestion, <em>Evestrum vitae</em>, <em>Peroledi</em>, <em>Archeus</em>, <em>Gas</em>, <em>Blas</em>, <em>Deulock</em>, &c. which we discourse of as distinct intelligent Beings in the human Body. These are things beyond the Ken of the present Age.—</blockquote>It is a rare moment of linguistic fantasia in an otherwise unremarkable text: a series of lexical gobbets from the natural science of Paracelsus and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Helmont">Van Helmont</a>, via his immediate source, William Simpson's <em>Hydrologia Chymica</em> (1669). Of all these charming arcanisms, only one has made it into popular currency, almost invisible in the cloud surrounding it here: <em>gas</em>. Of the others, only one, <em>blas</em>, has survived at all—revived a month ago, for instance, in the <a href="http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003345.php">languagey</a> <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=921">sectors</a> of the internet—thanks to a freak citation in the OED, handily cross-referenced in the etymology awarded its more famous twin: 'Van H. also invented the term BLAS'; although the OED's entry for <em>blas</em> rather bizarrely pairs it with an unrelated bit of Middle English dialect (sense 1), offering for sense 2 only, 'Van Helmont's term for a supposed ‘flatus’ or influence of the stars, producing changes of weather.' The OED clearly assumes no readers will come to <em>blas</em> except by way of <em>gas</em>: for while the latter entry clarifies <em>which</em> Van Helmont, the former does not. All the citations for <em>blas</em>, the phantom word, are Helmontian, except the last, a reference to Whitney's seminal <em><a href="http://www.archive.org/details/lifegrowthoflang00whit">Life and Growth of Language</a></em> (1875). This is cited without quotation; but for <em>you</em>, reader: <blockquote>Of the out-and-out invention of new words, language in the course of its recorded history. . . presents only rare examples. Sometimes, however, a case occurs like that of <em>gas</em>, already noticed as having been devised by an ancient chemist, as artificial appellation for a condition of existence of matter which had not before been so distinctly apprehended as to seem to require a name. Along with it, he proposed <em>blas</em> for that property of the heavenly bodies whereby they regulate the changes of time: this, however, was too purely fanciful to recommend itself to general use, and it dropped out of sight and was forgotten, while the other came to honor.</blockquote>The full text of <em>Life and Growth</em> is online, although one word seems to have puzzled the OCR: that word, of course, being <em>blas</em>, which it renders <em>Mas</em>. So the OED defines <em>blas</em> as an influence of the stars on the <em>weather</em>, and Whitney, the old American windbag, defines it as an astral property that regulates <em>time</em>. <blockquote>Stellae sunt nobis in signa, tempora, dies, & annos. Ergo patrant temporum mutationes, tempestates, atque vicissitudines. Quorsum opus habent duplici motu, locali scilicet, & alterativo. Utrumque autem, novo nomine Blas significo. . . Blas motivum stellarum, est virtus pulsiva, ratione itineris, per loca et secundum aspectus.<br /><br />The stars for us are as signs, <em>tempora</em>, days and years. Therefore they effect the changes<em></em>, <em>tempestates</em> and vicissitudes of the <em>tempora</em>. For this they require a double motion, that is locomotive and alterative. Both, however, I signify with the new name 'Blas'. . . Blas, the movement of the stars, is a propulsive power, by reason of their journey through places and according to their aspects.</blockquote>The problem comes in the definitions of <em>tempus</em> and <em>tempestas</em>, which can mean time, season, occasion and weather. Either way, the Helmontian stars play a role in the astrological mechanism of the universe, which was wholly within the regular laws of natural science. Now the interesting question is: why has the OED preserved <em>blas</em>? Sure, it makes a nice rhyming twin with <em>gas</em>, and, as in Whitney, the two nicely illustrate the divergent possibilities of two initial bedfellows, a lexical version of <a href="http://library.thinkquest.org/C0126626/fate/fate%20of%20universe.black%20hole.hawking%20radiation.htm">Hawking radiation</a>. That was the Liberman angle: 'it's too bad that 18th-century chemists couldn't find any real substance to which the reference of <strong>blas</strong> could be transferred, as the reference of <strong>gas</strong> was'.<br /><br />But <em>blas</em> has no real substance as an English word: it exists in the penumbra of the lexicon, teasing us as a little jewel of potential meaning, but never so well-defined (<em>time</em> or <em>weather</em>? '<em>Both</em> I signify. . .'), and never, more importantly, a true element in the inter-referential web of the vocabulary. It has no interaction with its fellows, except <em>gas</em>. It was only ever a parody of a word.<br /><br />See, if not <em>blas</em>, why not <em>peroledi</em> or <em>peroledes</em>? For this is another Helmontism: <blockquote>Habet ergo aer suos, non minus quam terra, fundos, quos Adepti vocant Peroledos. Invisibile itaque Gas, variis aeris stratis hospitatur, si aquae sua sint barathra, suae voragines, suae portae sunt in Peroledis, quas periti Cataractas Coeli, & valvas dixere.<br /><br />Therefore the air, no less than the earth, has its own grounds, which the adepts call 'Peroledi'. Thus the invisible Gas is a guest in the various layers of the air, if the waters have their abysses, their chasms, so its own gates are in the Peroledi, which the experts call the sluices and folding-doors of heaven.</blockquote>Oh, you want it in period English? It's only Margaret Cavendish, the second most famous English writeress of the seventeenth century, in a <em>Philosophical Letter</em>: <blockquote>But rather then your Author [Van Helmont] will consent to the transchanging of Water into Air, he will feign several grounds, soils or pavements in the Air, which he calls<a name="Hit1"> </a><em>Peroledes</em>, and so many Flood-gates and Folding-dores, and make the Planets their Key-keepers; which are pretty Fancies, but not able to prove any thing in Natural Philosophy.</blockquote>Is it purely in deference to the cute historical narrative of <em>gas</em> and <em>blas</em> that the OED likes <em>blas</em> and not <em>peroledes</em>? And why is it so much less generous to Van Helmont than to Paracelsus, who is awarded several neologisms in the dictionary? (In addition to the uncontroversial <em>gnome</em> and <em>nostoc</em>, Paracelsus gets <em>archeus</em> too, with a wholly unsatisfactory etymology section.) What are the criteria for formal recognition in the lexicon? What does it take to<em> be a word</em>?<br /><br />[Part Two <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2009/02/on-neologism-part-two.html">here</a>.]</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-2036221048032614192009-01-22T08:17:00.003-05:002009-01-22T08:27:47.300-05:00One mania after another<div align="justify">A frightful majority of our middle-class young men are growing up effeminate, empty of all knowledge but what tends directly to the making of a fortune; or rather, to speak correctly, to the keeping up the fortunes which their fathers have made for them; while of the minority, who are indeed thinkers and readers, how many women as well as men have we seen wearying their souls with study undirected, often misdirected; craving to learn, yet not knowing how or what to learn; cultivating, with unwholesome energy, the head at the expense of the body and the heart; catching up with the most capricious self-will one mania after another, and tossing it away again for some new phantom; gorging the memory with facts which no one has taught them to arrange, and the reason with problems which they have no method for solving; till they fret themselves in a chronic fever of the brain, which too often urges them on to plunge, as it were, to cool the inward fire, into the <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2006/09/history-of-nod-part-ii.html">ever-restless seas of doubt</a> or of <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2007/11/on-patriarchy.html">superstition</a>.<br /><br />— Charles Kingsley, <em>Glaucus</em> (1855). This is not <em>the</em> best sentence in the book, on a purely formal level—there are two or three better—but it is the most stinging.</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-77140936639814244642009-01-18T14:54:00.013-05:002009-01-18T21:15:31.357-05:00Patience<div align="justify">'Old stone to new building. . .' <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Dillane">Stephen Dillane</a> pauses. He scrunches up his eyes, and clutches controlledly at the air, like some Chinese master channelling his <em>ch'i</em>. 'Old stone to new building—' The repetition is hardly jarring in the context. How many of us knew it was a mistake? Not me. After all, Eliot was never afraid of pointless repetition. Then: <em>What's the line?</em> I have heard that tone before. (Where?) Neither patient nor impatient, neither calm nor irritated. <em>Old timber!</em> snaps his invisible prompt, a woman, this one as if impatient, like a wife. Nary a flicker from him. <blockquote>— Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,<br />Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth,</blockquote>And so on. That was the only obvious mistake in Dillane's rendition of 'The Four Quartets', aside from pronouncing <em>eviscerate</em> (4.2) with a hard c, and, worse, <em>figlio</em> (3.4) with a hard g. But <em>darling</em>, this is <em>Eliot</em>, one doesn't quibble with the details! Well then. What of the whole? Nicholas de Jongh, lustily guzzling clichés, <a href="http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/theatre/show-23589571-details/T.S.Eliot+Festival:+Four+Quartets/showReview.do?reviewId=23621110">calls it</a> an 'extraordinary performance', in which Dillane 'holds the audience in rapt silence'. I'm not sure if he was expecting conversation in the back rows. Remember, budding journalists: every stressed noun must have its adjective: 'It is a performance of <em>riveting purity</em>, under Katie Mitchell's <em>inspired direction</em>, which ought to restore the <em>lost art</em> of speaking poetry in public to a <em>proper eminence</em>.' Is the art of speaking poetry in public lost, indeed, or simply ineminent? Dillane has a 'voice of <em>meditative calm</em>, all <em>extraneous emotion</em> drained from it'; his hands 'weave' neither '<em>distracting patterns</em>', nor, thankfully, '<em>flamboyant gestures</em>'. And so he 'allows the <em>philosophical ideas</em> and <em>lyrical beauties</em> of The Four Quartets to speak for themselves.' You can see how de Jongh's mind turns: once the faucet is open, the water will follow a prepared course. De Jongh will never surprise you.<br /><br />Dillane was in fact calm, but not meditatively so. He spoke, rather, much in a tone of explanation, patiently, breaking now and then into reverie: 'And the lotos rose, quietly, <em>quietly</em>' (1.1). A dry light, full of measure. Then the tone was the tone of a sermon: 'Who then devised the torment? Love.' The tone was that of a sermon, because the words were those of a sermon. Oh, Eliot wants to <em>tell</em> you something, damn it, and he doesn't care if you know it. <blockquote>A people without history<br />Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern<br />Of timeless moments.</blockquote>Just try reading that aloud: see if you can read it and sound <em>meditative</em>. I defy you. You will not sound meditative, you will sound like a bird who has swallowed a philosophical plate. When De Jongh writes that Dillane has let the ideas and beauties 'speak for themselves', he is not only verbally taking the road more travelled, he is repeating without consideration the myth that a plainness, or even, in this instance, a <em>quietness</em> of delivery, necessarily gives the sense better. (Ivan Hewett, in a possible coincidence, had <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3648197/Magical-marriage-of-music-and-verse.html">said</a> the same about Dillane's Quartets back in 2005: 'The lack of any "manner" meant that Dillane became a transparent vessel for Eliot's often complex tangle of philosophy and imagery to shine through.') It is the story that style is mere unnecessary ornament on substance. Same goes for the words themselves: Eliot could, after all, sell us his mystical profundities in simple language, for the people, without recourse to pompous archaisms like 'eviscerate', or pompous foreign cuckoos like 'Figlia del tuo figlio'. Or could he?<br /><br />At any rate, we all agree that Dillane gave us a naked Eliot. Sam Marlowe, whose trend-bucking credentials are confirmed by his <a href="http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article1957609.ece">admiration</a> for the 'Lord of the Rings' musical, nonetheless <a href="http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/article5525628.ece">rates</a> the Dillane as 'an austere expression of compressed passion'. (Marlowe clearly an alumnus of the same prose school as de Jongh, his own music clunkier but at least more varied.) Some more Marlovian adjectives—by which you will easily allocate Dillane's performance to the appropriate box—'chilly yet compelling control', 'uncompromising directness', 'a contained figure', 'focused intensity'. We were all listening. We all heard our Eliot. Dillane did not giggle when he had to say 'In order to arrive at what you are not / You must go through the way in which you are not'. We got what we came for. So that's Dillane done. But what did we come for?<br /><br /></div><div align="center">*</div><div align="justify"><br />My mother said, afterwards, 'What's it all about, then?' Let de Jongh tell you: 'Eliot. . . writes in terms very difficult to grasp. [<em>But de Jongh grasps them</em>.] Yet [why '<em>yet</em>'?] these four poems—inspired by faith, by the history of places personal to Eliot, by the seasons of the year, by each of the four elements and the busy flux of time past and time present—arrest the emotions with their visionary strangenesses.' No, alright, that didn't tell you. Let Marlowe tell you: the poems 'are dense meditations on the implacability of time and humanity's struggle to find meaning in the flux of existence, couched in the rich language and symbolism of Christianity and mysticism'. Ah! Also: 'A complex picture of the self-perpetuating, ever-changing patterns of life emerges from his spoken words and from Eliot's plethora of literary and religious references.'<br /><br />My father said, afterwards, in response to a request for his opinion, 'Sententious rubbish.' Certainly, it is hard for a cynic to take seriously all this zennish mumbo-jumbo, filched from St John of the Cross or the <em>Bhagavad Gita</em> or wherever. 'Time past and time future / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present.' When Eliot wrote 'Prufrock', he sounded like a clever poet. When he wrote 'Burnt Norton' and the rest, he sounded like a poet trying to sound like a clever philosopher. It is a gambit that <em>never</em> works, unless you're Lucretius and can write a good, rough Latin hexameter. Why do poets do this? And painters too. Fine sound and composition is no longer enough: our artists must strive for something more than art. This shift seemed to happen between the wars. What is true of 'Prufrock' is true of <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonium_%28poetry_collection%29">Harmonium</a></em> and <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bridge_%28long_poem%29">The Bridge</a></em>. What is true of the Quartets is true of <a href="http://ofmerebeing.wordpress.com/the-poem/">'Of Mere Being'</a>, and parts of <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Zukofsky">"A"</a></em>. Eliot's poetry quickly lost its wit, a misunderestimated virtue. Contrast, for instance, two thoughts of superficial similarity. From 'Prufrock': <blockquote>It is impossible to say just what I mean!<br />But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:<br />Would it have been worth while<br />If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,<br />And turning toward the window, should say:<br />'That is not it at all,<br />That is not what I meant at all.'</blockquote>But from 'Burnt Norton': <blockquote>Words strain,<br />Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,<br />Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,<br />Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,<br />Will not stay still.</blockquote>Likewise, from 'East Coker': <blockquote>So here I am. . .<br />Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt<br />Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure<br />Because one has only learnt to get the better of words<br />For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which<br />One is no longer disposed to say it.</blockquote>(That got a laugh, the slightest of laughs.) In 'Prufrock', Eliot can tarry with the difficulty of precise expression, in essence the most banal of concepts, and make it humane, charming. We do not believe him here; the irony is pleasant. In his Quartets the same banality becomes so much the more sincere, and the more pitiable. It is particularly pitiable for the fact that Eliot is, no, not a philosopher, but a <em>poet</em>: we are paying him for words—come on Tommy, give us some lovely words, won't you? A nice rhyme? No? A bit of onomatopoeia? No? Make it <em>dance</em>, can't you?—and certainly <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> to be told he can't do words. There is an indignity to it, as if we were to turn up at the football and hear Ronaldinho moaning about the difficulty of scoring goals, only moaning <em>in the medium of missed goals</em>; or as if we went to a gallery and found no nice paintings but only <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ycswyd/409406615/">a bunch of flies stuck to a canvas</a>. Up yours, Beauty! Indeed. This irony is hardly pleasant, only grating, and I have no patience for it.<br /><br />Hewett, writing on Dillane's earlier Quartets, makes a preposterous claim about the poems: <blockquote>What this performance proved is how, in a mere 60 years, the Quartets have woven themselves into our consciousness. Every line had that feeling of a half-remembered quotation. . .</blockquote>I cannot imagine why anyone should want to claim such a thing for the Quartets. Is it true for you? (The only part that has woven itself, or grafted itself, into <em>my</em> consciousness is that wretched doggerel about 'knowing the place for the first time', which has wound up as an epigram for every other self-regarding science or history book.) Then comes the great cliché: 'Never before had I realised just how "musical" the quartets are. They're full of recurring refrains, variations on themes, contrapuntal weaves.' Hewett later remarks that 'Eliot tries to get beyond words'. Why do we want our poetry to be musical? Why would we want a confection of words to get beyond words, in Hewett's sense of it? <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Babbitt">Irving Babbitt</a>, ironically one of Eliot's own mentors, thought that desire a result of the modern romantic disease, and I am inclined to agree. The Quartets are full, not of 'refrains' and 'weaves', but simply of repetitions. Some of these repetitions ('And a time for living and for generation / And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane') are those of a sermon: they have the rhythms not of music but of oratory. Others ('where you are is where you are not', 'In my (end/beginning) is my (beginning/end)') have no rhythm, only the flat mock-wit of a koan.<br /><br />Our stage journalists are too soft. They are slightly in awe of this new thing, these words of a Great Poet, bare and direct, or apparently so, and have no calculus for judging it. They call the Quartets complex, but they mean only that the Quartets are long. Perhaps the Quartets are complex, and perhaps their complexity does not make them any good. It is not hard to write a few hundred lines of verse, with a slew of repetitions, and a slew of quotations from, or allusions to, the Bible, the <em>Mahabharata</em>, Dante, and so on. What is the use of your 'philosophical ideas', your 'meditations on the implacability of time', if you reach no conclusions of interest? If your lyricism cannot rise above the humdrum of rose-gardens, <em>yawn</em>, of twittering birds<em>, yawn</em>, of the yew-tree, the 'womb, or tomb', the 'parched soil' of mid-century <em>ennui</em>? If you have to rhyme 'food' with 'blood' and 'good', like you're Shakespeare or something? On Eliot's grave should be inscribed, <em>Poeta, ne ultra verba</em>. Poets, do what poets <em>can</em> do.</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-35812679765617633422009-01-11T15:10:00.016-05:002009-01-22T18:24:54.518-05:00Lens Grinding<div align="justify">In <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2009/01/cryography.html">Skye</a> I snapped away at the ice and frost quite happily, and at my comrades, who themselves snapped, with their crappy iPhones, at tree and face with wanton abandon. Only one of us demurred. <em>Some of us</em>, he snorted, <em>prefer to use our minds</em>. I was not unsympathetic to his response. After all, it was only a few years ago, at sunset, on one of the bridges from Cambridge into Boston, that I had said the same to another friend, only not, I hope, with such preening pomposity. The essential complaint is given loudest voice by one Becca Bland, founder of <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5121856.stm">'No Photography Day'</a>, who seems to have required a few books about Zen Buddhism to reach her <a href="http://www.nonphotographyday.com/why.html">conclusion</a>, that photographers are <blockquote>missing out on so much of the given moment through their obsession, an act of possession—of wanting to own the appearance of the place, as if this was all it had to give and photographs were their way of taking it.</blockquote>Richard at Castrovalva <a href="http://www.logopolis.org.uk/weblog/2006/05/non-photography-day.html">comments</a> (almost three years ago, mind): <blockquote>Originally, I felt that photography was a mechanical way of viewing the world, which only served to dim the immediacy of experience. Since then, I've come to see it as a way of slowing experience and regaining observation of intricacy and detail. I'm thinking of how <a href="http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/journalism/ns02.htm" target="_blank">neuroscience has come to describe consciousness as a series of individual moments</a>, which like a flickbook are asembled to create the illusion of a continuous stream; photography or painting return us to the moment that lies underneath the illusion.</blockquote>As I believe I replied at the time—though since Richard has blanked out the comments, damning dialogue to the memoryhole, it is hard to be certain—this sort of aesthetic would strongly favour a photography of people, of living, or at least of <em>moving</em> subjects. But Richard is the <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/castrovalva/">snapper of buildings</a> <em>par excellence</em>: he has even published. Even with a bit of sophistry, it isn't easy to defend the photography of architecture as 'a way of slowing experience', or as a recapturing of moments beneath the <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_%28illusion%29">maya</a></em> of continuous phenomena. Nor is it obvious how a good clean shot of, say, the <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/castrovalva/40513060/in/set-246231/">Victoria Tower</a> is 'as contrived a representation of reality as impressionist or cubist painting'. These are the sorts of things, in my own experience, that photographers have to say to defend and justify their own activity as an Art Form.<br /><br />I find myself reaching for the camera, now, to photograph buildings, like Richard. Only I do not wait for the sun, and have neither a good camera, nor any interest in adding yet another image of the Victoria Tower or other London icons to the world's collection. So I walk the back streets of the city, in that grey with which all its architectures must compete, and take down anything which strikes my fancy; rarely the pretty or the glamorous, but rather that which <em>speaks</em>, and usually the incongruous, in particular—<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1EultthaHGe7UHvMQPIMp2awiDkj8nLQQRLo0ML221DfcNQzfjNI3cCd0100vHlG2-HyZDrQ0vwiO2Aik1XlJIcX9Ae2nPZo3dLtam8eDpOf-wlxUY4fVpPkZDZNYuanOCDq9/s1600-h/Georgian+Porch,+Metal+Door.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5290166653758494002" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 300px; height: 400px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1EultthaHGe7UHvMQPIMp2awiDkj8nLQQRLo0ML221DfcNQzfjNI3cCd0100vHlG2-HyZDrQ0vwiO2Aik1XlJIcX9Ae2nPZo3dLtam8eDpOf-wlxUY4fVpPkZDZNYuanOCDq9/s400/Georgian+Porch,+Metal+Door.JPG" border="0" /></a><br />You will see here, probably, that I have made some attempt at framing the picture for aesthetic effect. The first-floor windows snuggle neatly against the frame, the door is trig in the middle, indicated most obviously by the proximity of its flanking windows to either edge of the image, and the gates in the foreground provide a sense of depth. Moreover, the whole result has been tweaked to lessen the blue, so as to give you a better sense of how I <em>seemed to see</em>, or perhaps <em>wanted to see</em>, the subject in question. A Richard will say, <em>There</em>, your impressionist painting, your picture contrived straight out of reality.<br /><br />But I think this is to attribute too much to the adjusting hand and eye. I deny that this is art; it is simply artisanry, at best. Something in my soul—is it a Platonism?—wants to safeguard the category of art. I cannot explain the mood, cannot give good reason for it. Still, it is there. I want to reserve art for the Rembrandts and Picassos—and for the <em>bad artists</em> too, the Renoirs and Rothkos—but not for the Richards and Conrads out for a jolly day around town with the old SLR. To efface that distinction, to deny any barrier between <em>tekhnē</em> and <em>empeiría</em>, science and knack, art and craft, is to have become blind to the value inherent in each. A programmer once said to me, quite unguardedly, that he was creative, but not artistic, an admission in which I find a very admirable modesty: and by <em>modesty</em> I mean not the false humility of so many intellectuals, but a true understanding of the nature and the limitations of one's own endeavours. Photography, and especially the photography of the static, like programming, is a creative activity, but not an artistic one: it aspires to be elegant and to give pleasure—but not to genius.<br /><br /></div><div align="center">*</div><div align="justify"><br />So I bring the above picture to your attention, and of course it is only an example, not so that you can admire my flair for composition, but only because I wanted you to see what I had seen, and wanted you to see it <em>well</em>. The beauty or interest in the image is entirely the work of other men. I aim for a handsome record of experience. But what of this aim? Is it worthwhile?<br /><br />I try to avoid the false pride of the photographer: to retain my admiration or concern for the subject, not the image; but this is not always easy. I had long wondered why <a href="http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/">Owen Hatherley</a>, who spends much of his time online writing about architecture, should offer his readers photographs of such poor quality: ill-framed, ill-lit, and unedited. It could not be a lack of talent, though he seems to suggest just that at the end of a <a href="http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/2008/09/buildings-for-blairism-4.html">post on Paternoster Square</a>. No, I think he has deliberately given us bad pictures to remind us that they are pictures, not artistic <em>end</em> but utilitarian <em>means </em>within an argument. (I once <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2007/03/innocent-stratagem.html">recommended</a> clunky translations for a related purpose.) Perhaps this is a more honourable choice for the purpose of recording an engagement with the world. I have praised the beauty of pylons, impossible to photograph elegantly: experience resisting formulation, sublimity transcending façade.<br /><br />Moreover, the snapping process contributes to the slow but alarming devolvement of human faculties onto technology: the <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2007/09/technology.html">Thamus Effect</a>. Just as we now let our Wikipedia remember facts for us, so we have long let our photographs remember experiences for us. In making our inner life communicable to others, whether by alphabets or cameras, we lose a little of it. For the pleasure of public admiration one sacrifices the pleasure of walking high and alone. And my memory, indeed, becomes fragmented; more precise in places, but perhaps a little less rich, or less <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2007/06/infinitas.html">sublime</a>. The hand inside my pocket for the camera has come to be, I confess, too automatic. I press the button, in the immoral hope of obtaining a fine composition, but I do so with misgivings, like the recidivist smoker peeling the plastic from a new pack of fags, or the child with his fingers in a jar of candies, clever enough, but fat nonetheless.<br /><br />It is only when I find a subject that will <em>speak</em>, not only for itself—for that it will do without the lens—but for <em>me</em>, that I seize it with impunity. When with words I can give a thing life it has not in the wild, domestication is an ennobling act. It is the rarest of chances.<br /><br />[<strong>By the way</strong>, lots of photographs better spotted than mine, and much better taken, at my colleague M. W. Nolden's project, <a href="http://rabbitmeetshat.blogspot.com/"><em>Rabbit Meets Hat</em></a>. <strong>Update 17/1/09</strong>: James Sligh also <a href="http://jimsligh.wordpress.com/2009/01/17/bonfires-san-anton/">comments</a>.]</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-30258807055049845702009-01-04T10:39:00.017-05:002009-01-04T15:18:56.242-05:00Cryography<div align="justify">Well, a happy arbitrary point dividing two periods approximately corresponding to orbits of the Earth about the sun to all my readers, and I trust you all enjoyed yourselves in the appropriate, or at least appropriately inappropriate, manner. I returned from Skye on the second, to my treasured city; wife's loving arms; restless and neglected cat; white shirt turned lavender by careless lavendry, that is, ruined in the wash; two chapters of a book still to edit; and a postcard S. kindly sent me from Varanasi, bearing on it a rather painterly photograph of two <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghats">riverside crematoria</a>. On the drive home—eleven hours in the back seat of a car, followed by three and a half on a bus—I struggled to read Jacques Roubaud's <em>The Great Fire of London</em>, a book aiming for Oulipian wit and playfulness, and perhaps for a fragmentary approach to encyclopaedism, <em>à la Perec</em>, but in fact monumentally boring, mired in the enumeration of banal detail, <em>à la Robbe-Grillet</em>. My last creative act at the cottage in Skye was a stoking of the hearth fire, a process of fadging, progging, scraping, jiggling, variably-sized lumps of coal, sticks of wood, and firelighters, without burning my hands, though leaving my fingers black enough to require two bouts with the sink and soap. On December 31, as our cellphones beeped midnight, in the black wastes of the countryside, under constellations bright and enormous, a celestial scurf—not unknown to the Londoner, but at least utterly unfamiliar—we experimented with fireworks. What with the pyres, the Roubaud, the hearth, the rockets, one might think the dominant motif of the holiday was <em>fire</em>. But it was not.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEmDgOZzckfnTvmwvXC854Fu1WCgnpTAWp2U4bOicjrQbtjglF3vesa8iIXiYkmO3zkFaPA5OVrd1yEKQGpvyR5bqKb3L7ScXgKp1LmrlxZ8dGHZkXZe30X4DAavKYYUvs4UgX/s1600-h/Ice+needles+abstract+3-1.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5287472336317053714" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 300px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEmDgOZzckfnTvmwvXC854Fu1WCgnpTAWp2U4bOicjrQbtjglF3vesa8iIXiYkmO3zkFaPA5OVrd1yEKQGpvyR5bqKb3L7ScXgKp1LmrlxZ8dGHZkXZe30X4DAavKYYUvs4UgX/s400/Ice+needles+abstract+3-1.JPG" border="0" /></a><br />It was the ice. O, the most marvelous ice you did see, friends. White and dark, in frost and hoar, on rocks and grasses, in tendrils and stars, razor-straight and sinuous, anfractuous, fragile tendons and crude unbreakable masses, whole and fragmentary: the ice of royal treasuries.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfz0ytVZQUEPtCm7IBIVdE9rGUce_IT0po33po86xK2oA8ll8IR_kwow7Whz_3MBjmrPxETKmuSuqYBwQp3y-qUwYgy17OolImYYn1CT9b1IWSXEKABsf3b2_PSoondmN_jJV4/s1600-h/Frost+on+Rock+at+Portrigh-1.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5287471733963638786" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 300px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfz0ytVZQUEPtCm7IBIVdE9rGUce_IT0po33po86xK2oA8ll8IR_kwow7Whz_3MBjmrPxETKmuSuqYBwQp3y-qUwYgy17OolImYYn1CT9b1IWSXEKABsf3b2_PSoondmN_jJV4/s400/Frost+on+Rock+at+Portrigh-1.JPG" border="0" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVccou4a-4HOB8hox3xKUOaiBX_wsh2jWzdkii2znnzu9LWySTQmvULYYEKl-EXToYXU1MZF_v0jFOCdyDRzQlzB1pkPtIPhBrVLI9KqW_mcwevJGY-NbCUyf4purBEQ2sWfUs/s1600-h/Icicles-1.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5287472339629994498" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 300px; height: 400px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVccou4a-4HOB8hox3xKUOaiBX_wsh2jWzdkii2znnzu9LWySTQmvULYYEKl-EXToYXU1MZF_v0jFOCdyDRzQlzB1pkPtIPhBrVLI9KqW_mcwevJGY-NbCUyf4purBEQ2sWfUs/s400/Icicles-1.JPG" border="0" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx-lq1ZCaDMCRJCekLEVhj5k0W54OaiyCJbszTYT-1ijYmw0XHwkevUwn1KFypp4_oxEWLADaHel4frSxnpH7GkUkd9iBGq1dQx0jRnfsAXTpK5k2lxdi9KnUo_AFDIcgWpNUE/s1600-h/Ice+swirls-1.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5287472353096713618" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 301px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx-lq1ZCaDMCRJCekLEVhj5k0W54OaiyCJbszTYT-1ijYmw0XHwkevUwn1KFypp4_oxEWLADaHel4frSxnpH7GkUkd9iBGq1dQx0jRnfsAXTpK5k2lxdi9KnUo_AFDIcgWpNUE/s400/Ice+swirls-1.JPG" border="0" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh52H-12vr-17WQVz0jQDAuQSyZWryJFQSgAtFUDkM48BQbylrH7jyBTpYvA3Sodi5DQot1630_l9-1tQduxpi_iQdSgQgSra-0XKcO3DxlwEycNLpHr86u6VRjqaFArMt-ZZQN/s1600-h/Grey+Carpet+of+Ice+2-1.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5287472337856467266" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 300px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh52H-12vr-17WQVz0jQDAuQSyZWryJFQSgAtFUDkM48BQbylrH7jyBTpYvA3Sodi5DQot1630_l9-1tQduxpi_iQdSgQgSra-0XKcO3DxlwEycNLpHr86u6VRjqaFArMt-ZZQN/s400/Grey+Carpet+of+Ice+2-1.JPG" border="0" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEio0NwUOnt4rDlcOeYhFQh4TrdGeYhbOoDQJcF0HeELFsvMYtzC8id9jrNiK6A5SsdwIPFe5sU3pc01AzMpSygHKkohoTymAISL0shZWYlqc6jgKd3UYwH7Ep4ty-vzICYLUsMs/s1600-h/Froth+Pattern+on+Ice-1.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5287472351221493362" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 300px; height: 400px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEio0NwUOnt4rDlcOeYhFQh4TrdGeYhbOoDQJcF0HeELFsvMYtzC8id9jrNiK6A5SsdwIPFe5sU3pc01AzMpSygHKkohoTymAISL0shZWYlqc6jgKd3UYwH7Ep4ty-vzICYLUsMs/s400/Froth+Pattern+on+Ice-1.JPG" border="0" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgm4wVmuTDguDtVbFXEDVdbgLPPRwUrQfIihmf8Iegq47yaNJ_1BLPRZJ8kz5LKiczwrSpMPSYIendVH5tlm_HwZIhZq2I-MyrjMdGlRtuo_rHidSr2jREOFcP2WUNamESNfEw/s1600-h/Pale+Ice+Patterns-1.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5287471751176726658" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 300px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgm4wVmuTDguDtVbFXEDVdbgLPPRwUrQfIihmf8Iegq47yaNJ_1BLPRZJ8kz5LKiczwrSpMPSYIendVH5tlm_HwZIhZq2I-MyrjMdGlRtuo_rHidSr2jREOFcP2WUNamESNfEw/s400/Pale+Ice+Patterns-1.JPG" border="0" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRfu1gNHYYOfYZsmiJqMqvC4NDdIKERaGGbgFmPQ84023dA6O_8vHUq-tHhZNWPNKlyCDm8RxCf6z6eu4JDFGheXAW7gTr8_NWmx9JOVwWMaj24Ec5nPoJ3lwhnnuxq2yxyrmC/s1600-h/Egg+Rock+in+Ice-1.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5287471728111216386" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 300px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRfu1gNHYYOfYZsmiJqMqvC4NDdIKERaGGbgFmPQ84023dA6O_8vHUq-tHhZNWPNKlyCDm8RxCf6z6eu4JDFGheXAW7gTr8_NWmx9JOVwWMaj24Ec5nPoJ3lwhnnuxq2yxyrmC/s400/Egg+Rock+in+Ice-1.JPG" border="0" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgtAD23BtLZAeSpEqAwNBsHE3awjE0wfaQiAiusv1CIX8BayMJy-VLVfur3keIXncDQysKuA5DJzg707xOdr1zcWZe07ftJEP2rq7tbwraS5SW7lPuMpq1lnTYpbVZsDU5uWEL/s1600-h/Sparrows+on+Ice-1.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5287471728401050578" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 300px; height: 400px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgtAD23BtLZAeSpEqAwNBsHE3awjE0wfaQiAiusv1CIX8BayMJy-VLVfur3keIXncDQysKuA5DJzg707xOdr1zcWZe07ftJEP2rq7tbwraS5SW7lPuMpq1lnTYpbVZsDU5uWEL/s400/Sparrows+on+Ice-1.JPG" border="0" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5fCeAjjQp7GRFnEtPgqu_j51szYC3Fw3FDfNgVjrrYQxZ69jeaTKlpFTNx5IUTHczx9ekKmG__hAQR2MRBXdjPQoJSaAhRQa_e1u9LS8T3j9eRGo0AjtROMCZHHjHvpua5E0w/s1600-h/Smashed+Ice+at+Lake-1.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5287471743237366562" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 300px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5fCeAjjQp7GRFnEtPgqu_j51szYC3Fw3FDfNgVjrrYQxZ69jeaTKlpFTNx5IUTHczx9ekKmG__hAQR2MRBXdjPQoJSaAhRQa_e1u9LS8T3j9eRGo0AjtROMCZHHjHvpua5E0w/s400/Smashed+Ice+at+Lake-1.JPG" border="0" /></a><br />On the third day, after following the tourists up to the ruined Duntulm Castle on the northwest coast of Trotternish, and before joining the tourists again at the Kilt Rock waterfall, we drumbled upon a little lake secluded by low mountains and frozen over: it was not enough to walk on, and the sheets of ice were broken up at the shore (above), and littered with discarded wheels and engine parts, moulded and solidified into the surface. We cast rocks against and along the ice, and made the most remarkable sounds thereby, like pinball, or space invaders: </div><br /><div align="center"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dwSzgW-Lty_NZ98jxqExO3cZfPYI0feFCsuq142cmZcYS2xPKFwnXPORT-kWPQmAy8b9pwBKQStvDE' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><br /><div align="justify">Early on in the trip we discovered the icicles hanging under a ridge by the road, hundreds of them, and, like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellow_of_the_Royal_Society#Fellowship">FfRS</a>, began to experiment with force and resistance, carving ice with rock, calving ice with ice. Eventually two of our number broke off specimens large enough to fence with. Gloves doffed, I took pictures as long as I could manage before my hands went numb and started to burn. It was so cold you could have pissed snow. At the end of our session the ridge resembled Shane MacGowan's mouth, and we sped off, the violence of youth expended harmlessly on Nature's most transient objects.<br /><br />On the journey home we paused in the car on the mountains just above the clouds of mist obscuring a loch beneath, a floor of vapours burning spectrally in the naked sun. Then we drove down into the haze, through the forest at Achadhluachraich, all grey five metres from your face, and clambered down the slope on foot, to the lake, a ringed and perfect carpet of ice in three shades. (Fifth picture, above.) Alas, the surface was still too frail to walk upon, but we skimmed stones again, and watched them vanish, imperceptibly, from one grey into another, the ice into the water, or simply into the mist. Further still, out of the basin, in the highlands near Fort William, we found another frozen loch, and this one—finally—was deep and thick enough, several inches, at least at the lines of fracture between plates, to tread safely. On this we walked and slid out to the islands, and played with shadows in the clearer ice, and the sky was empty, a cold blue, and the car seemed a hundred miles away, and the dreadful voyage impending, forgotten; it was our last call of freedom, as our collective friendship, fissuring underneath, had begun to show its lines of stress at the surface, little kingdoms delineated translucently: unaided by sun or stamping feet above, we moved apart of our own accord.<br /><br />And onward, into year four of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Varieties</span>.<br /></div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-24375430716447424872008-12-23T14:35:00.010-05:002008-12-23T17:47:44.939-05:00Macaronic Frühneuhochdeutsch, anyone?<div align="justify"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6AQX1o8pmhID_zX7nXohuSN_fhp264Q47GJPugfyNmdtkxbNBEwgLYnHs_DDP48uM0kIgc1vUytdOpa0XKPzBkGsYIKYiVd1x04fq1XlcMfOg4vVcX4DS176wnrDZFoBEq5hI/s1600-h/Luther.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283072028653751090" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 172px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6AQX1o8pmhID_zX7nXohuSN_fhp264Q47GJPugfyNmdtkxbNBEwgLYnHs_DDP48uM0kIgc1vUytdOpa0XKPzBkGsYIKYiVd1x04fq1XlcMfOg4vVcX4DS176wnrDZFoBEq5hI/s400/Luther.JPG" border="0" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4D9PNw3qgwuGeSpxQ8sTgROJytdm56dhCZQ9WNzwFCpI0lUctsaaKxNZ0xF1sRxE_g2BBmps0SYH_d_JqrvHRkpCpiJkd-3qbzsSArEUMnM50pjTyCeGx0YGoW2lNfmHS7B2P/s1600-h/Luther22.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283079925628532626" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 400px; height: 73px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4D9PNw3qgwuGeSpxQ8sTgROJytdm56dhCZQ9WNzwFCpI0lUctsaaKxNZ0xF1sRxE_g2BBmps0SYH_d_JqrvHRkpCpiJkd-3qbzsSArEUMnM50pjTyCeGx0YGoW2lNfmHS7B2P/s400/Luther22.JPG" border="0" /></a>One passage of many such, from the 1883 Weimar Luther, volume 34 of 127; in this instance, from the 'text' of a sermon delivered on the evening of 11 April, Easter Tuesday 1531. <blockquote>Audivimus de poenitencia et remissione peccatorum. Das hab ich umb der kurtz wyllen uberlauffen et tamen clare, expresse. Das wyr aber das fest bschlissen, wollen wyr ein stuck odder ii vor uns nhemen. Der Her hat uns vorgemalet, was er vor eyn geberde furet unter seynen jungern, quod in medio illorum progrediatur et salutet illos ita, ut terreantur discipuli. Die selbige erschreckung wyl er nicht leyden, quia non vult estimari spiritus, qui non habet carnem et ossa. Er bekennet, das die geyster alßo erscheinen, tum non habentes carnem et ossa. Diß ist eyn sonderlich bylde pro impiis conscienciis. Der teuffel hat auch die arth, das er offentlich zw uns durchs worth odder heymlich durch gedancken zw uns kumme, uff das er hoc malum, das man heist ein falschen Christum. Satan hat auch die art, quod venit ad nos offentlich und heimlich, 1. per praedicationem, 2. per cogitationes potest etiam dicere: 'bonus dies' et 2. conscientiam terrere et sic hominem irr machen, ut nesciat homo, Christus sit necne, semper vult simia esse dei.</blockquote>A translation of which would look something like this: <blockquote>We have heard about repentance and the remission of sins. I wanted to run over that briefly and yet clearly, expressly. To conclude the feast, let's have a look at one or two passages. The Lord has shown us what gesture he makes among his disciples, for he goes among them and greets them thus, as the disciples are frightened. He does not want to suffer the same fearfulness, for he would not be thought a spirit without flesh and bones. He acknowledges that the spirits appear thus, not having flesh and bones. This is a peculiar image for impious consciences. The Devil is of like disposition, that he comes to us openly through words, or secretly through thoughts, such that, on account of this evil, one calls him a false Christ. Satan is of like disposition, that he comes to us openly and familiarly, 1. by spoken words (or, more specifically, 'by preaching, prophesying'), and 2. can also say 'good day' by thoughts alone, and 2. can frighten the conscience and thus make a man mad, so as not to know if Christ exists or not; always would he be the ape of God.</blockquote>Luther is alluding to the narrative in Luke 24.36-39, where Christ appears to his disciples after the resurrection. In the Vulgate: '<a name="24:36">Iesus stetit in medio eorum et</a> dicit eis pax vobis ego sum nolite timere / <a name="24:37">conturbati vero et conterriti existimabant se spiritum</a> videre / <a name="24:38">et dixit eis quid turbati estis et cogitationes ascendunt</a> in corda vestra / <a name="24:39">videte manus meas et pedes quia ipse ego sum palpate et</a> videte quia spiritus carnem et ossa non habet sicut me videtis habere.' And in the KJV: 'Jesus himself stood in the midst of [the disciples], and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. / But they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit. / And he said unto them, Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? / Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.'<br /><br />The function of Satan is always to burlesque God, that is, to imitate him in reverse; he is found as the 'ape of God' (<em>simia dei</em>, <em>Gottes Affe</em>) throughout Luther's sermons and commentaries. (Alfred Adam traces the motif to the Cistercian hagiographer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesarius_von_Heisterbach">Caesar of Heisterbach</a>.) Like Christ, Satan strikes awe into the soul, but where Christ makes his presence manifest, Satan makes a man forget whether Christ exists.<br /><br />So that's the theology taken care of. But what's going on with the languages? It seems highly unlikely that Luther should have delivered a sermon in hybrid German-Latin, even to a small circle of intellectuals. Some of the Latin fragments play on the Vulgate, but they are not direct quotations, and others have no obvious provenance. Malcolm Parkes writes: <blockquote>The evidence indicates that the scribes [in Luther's circle] translated the essentials of what they had heard in German immediately into Latin, and then set down the discourse in Latin in order to use the customary <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tironian_notes">methods of abbreviation in that language</a>, which enabled them to record spoken discourse more quickly. Only when the process of instantaneous translation was too difficult, or when the German phrases were particularly striking, did the scribes write down Luther's own words. Subsequently the "reportator" translated the text back into the original language, expanding both the simplified forms and abbreviated thought in such a way as to make the record more readable.</blockquote>Did the scribes omit to re-translate, in this instance? Or was the Weimar editor using an odd source-text? In any event, the German and Latin seem to play against each other, the one sometimes half-repeating the other, or elaborating upon it, like the interaction between a God and his Ape.</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20433842.post-20841297118073403682008-12-19T14:52:00.009-05:002008-12-20T07:22:35.003-05:00Two Plays in One Fitts<div align="justify">In 1955, Dudley Fitts published a translation of Aristophanes' <em>Frogs </em>for Harcourt & Brace; in 1957, of the <em>Birds</em>. The two versions were issued separately by Faber in London, and, in 1959, paired in a new edition for the Heritage Press; the matching pale red and pale blue original Faber octavos have graced my shelf for years now. I bought the one on the basis of the other, and the other—the <em>Frogs</em>—on the basis of a single verse: <blockquote>Ah the logotomy! Verb breasting adverb, the cristate nouns<br />plunging 'gainst pavid pronouns. Let the bull stylistic<br />(husband of cows) rise up and whirl his whiskers!<br />Ah the lambent raiding of verse, the (my God!) tripsis<br />of boant anapests leaping in lucent line<br />against the skiaphagous luculent ululant<br />phalanges of the foe!</blockquote>At the time I had been sipping Nashe and books on Joyce; you will readily understand the flash of recognition here. (Fitts himself compares <em>Frogs</em> to Joyce: it 'is almost as rich as <em>Finnegans Wake</em> in literary allusion and rhetorical parody—indeed, it is a haunted text'.) Fitts' passage bears little resemblance to the original: <blockquote><em>estai d'ippolophōn te logōn koruthaiola neikē<br />skhindalamōn te paraxonia smileumata t' ergōn,<br />phōtos amunomenou phrenotektonos andros<br />rhēmath' ippobamona.<br />phrixas d' autokomou lophias lasiauxena khaitan,<br />deinon episkunion xunagōn brukhōmenos hēsei<br />rhemata gomphopagē pinakēdon apospōngēgenei phusēmati.</em></blockquote>The mock-Homeric grandeur of which, in some dull sense, is better captured by the clunking hyphenese of Matthew Dillon's <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0032">translation at Perseus</a>: <blockquote>There will be the helmet-blazing strife of horse-crested phrases;<br />Axle-splinterings as the chisel-working fellow defends himself<br />against the horse-galloping utterances of the mind-building man.<br />Bristling the shaggy-necked mane of his natural-hair crest,<br />Knitting his terrible brow, bellowing, he will launch<br />bolt-fastened utterances, ripping them apart board by board<br />with gigantic blast of breath.</blockquote>To depart so radically from the original takes balls. But Fitts knew what he was doing. This was a gold still moment in the self-realisation of late (American) modernism, a full ripening on the tree, before the pecking sparrows and necrosis of postmodernism. Nothing new arrived between 1955 and 1960; but the dust settled. When Fitts and his friends turned to criticism, they could write with an air of authority, of a Matthew Arnold, only their accepted truths were now those of formalism and the New Critics. The mood was erudite, philological, good-humoured, word-oriented, and concerned, most of all, with the nature of poetic <em>authenticity</em>. In his little bookling, <em>The Poetic Nuance</em> (1958), Fitts dismisses Nabokov's violently-annotated prose translation of <em>Eugene Onegin</em>—a popular bugbear of the time, at least among poets: <blockquote>A tireless writer of footnotes, I find this concept endearing; but I am not sure that it is anything more. The trouble is that such a translation, though it might give the prose "sense" of the original together with an explanation of whatever goes to lift the prose sense above itself and transmute it into a form of art, might also provide no evidence beyond the saying so that the art was art in the first place. . . We need something at once less ambitious and more audacious: another poem. Not a representation, in any formal sense, but a comparable experience.</blockquote>How Nabokov would have sneered at such cant! Fitts is merely reproducing Cleanth Brooks on the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heresy_of_Paraphrase">'heresy of paraphrase'</a> [NB: please to observe the Wikipediast's literalistic wit, bottom]. Like a good on-message poet (or critic) of his age, Fitts assumes that poetry is <em>irreducible</em>, that a poem without the Poem is nothing, or, worse, a betrayal. Like so much modern dogma, this is essentially a romantic absolutism. The same thinking leads him to equally conventional remarks on the translation of jokes, conceived as the most difficult of idioms: <blockquote>A joke can be a nuisance. Nothing is more inert than a witticism that has to be explained. Topicality, the recondite allusion, special jargon—these are matters that can not be handled even in Nabokovian footnote without inviting the embrace of death.</blockquote>To illustrate this point, Fitts discusses one of his own choices, from his <em>Frogs</em> of three years past. The cowardly Dionysus is being taunted by his servant Xanthias, on the existence of the hellish monster Empusa, before the latter winds down his prank, assuring his master that the beast is gone: 'As Hegelochos would say, <em>ek kumaōn gar authis au galēn horō</em>.' The Greek means, literally, 'After the storm I see again the polecat.' Here comes the Nabokovian death-embrace: Aristophanes is alluding to a line of <em>Orestes</em>, mispronounced by the actor Hegelochos: the word <em>galēn</em>, depending on stress, can mean either 'calm at sea' (from <em>galēnē</em>) or 'polecat' (from <em>galeē</em>). The translator is therefore faced with a classic untranslateable pun: what to do?<br /><br />The dread hand of Nabokov would translate, 'After the storm I see again the polecat', and spend half a page in 9-point explaining the allusion. Such, precisely, was the pre-Romantic approach. Thus a 1785 version by the cleric Charles Dunster offers: 'I see a weasel rising from the storm', and, true to form, clarifies the joke in a footnote. By the time we reach Benjamin Rogers' 1914 <em>Frogs</em>, Romanticism has already set in, and the pun is not preserved but re-imagined: 'Out of the storm there comes a new fine wether.' The only problem is that 'wether' cannot be a mis-pronunciation of 'weather': as a satire on Hegelochos' delivery, it fails. Fitts, at any rate, offers a similar solution: 'After the storm I see the clam again'. (Dillon, straining, has 'calm-ari'.) He justifies his decision thus: <blockquote>It is a hoary one, certainly, but only a cad would object to it. . . there are still customers who will suspect the whole thing of being an enigma or a typographical error, and these people must be led through some such process as the one we have just traversed.</blockquote>And so we get, if we look in the back, unprompted by any little digits, an explanatory note. A Fittsian modernism is therefore a softened and saleable doctrine. He would preserve the art <em>qua</em> art, and gloss it still, so as to reassure the sceptic that it is, after all, art. Proust had written 'une oeuvre où il y a des theories est comme un objet sur lequel on laisse la marque du prix', a literary work with theories is like an object with the price-tag still attached. He had written this, a bit of theory, in his great literary work, the <em>Recherche</em>, thus contradicting himself even as he wrote. But this dictum remained the essence of High Modernism, whether or not it reflected practice. A poem should not <em>mean</em>, but <em>be</em>. By the time of Fitts there is some forgiveness.<br /><br /></div><div align="center">*</div><div align="justify"><br />Fitts dedicates his <em>Frogs</em> to his younger friend John Ciardi, the great translator of Dante. Ciardi was a card-carrying New Critic, editing an annotated anthology of verse in 1959 with the almost cartoon-formalist title, <em>How Does a Poem Mean?</em> In the introduction he insists, smelling of Empson, against a 'high-minded appreciator', that poetry is to be understood as a feat of engineering and formal invention. The ultimate modernist-romantic, he asserts, 'The pretty, by a first law of art, is never the beautiful. The two cannot coexist. . . all greeting cards are pretty and therefore no greeting card is beautiful.' For his dedication, appositely, Fitts chooses a sliver of Dante, the conclusion of <em>Inferno</em> VI: <blockquote>Ed egli a me: 'Ritorna a tua scienza,<br />Che vuol, quanto la cosa è più perfetta,<br />Più senta il bene, e così la doglienza,<br /><br />Tuttochè questa gente maledetta<br />In vera perfezion giammai non vada,<br />Di là, più che di qua, essere aspetta.'<br /><br />Noi aggirammo a tondo quella strada,<br />Parlando più assai ch'io non ridico:<br />Venimmo al punto dove si digrada:<br />Quivi trovammo Pluto il gran nimico.</blockquote>Ciardi himself has this, in his 1954 <em>Inferno</em>, on which Fitts remarked, 'This is our Dante. . . a shining event in a bad age': <blockquote>And <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergil">he</a> to me: "Look to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelianism">your science</a> again<br />where it is written: the more a thing is perfect<br />the more it feels of pleasure and of pain.<br /><br />As for these souls, though they can never soar<br />to true perfection, still in the new time<br />they will be nearer it than they were before."<br /><br />And so we walked the rim of the great ledge<br />speaking of pain and joy, and of much more<br />that I will not repeat, and reached the edge<br /><br />where the descend begins. There, suddenly,<br />we came on Plutus, the great enemy.</blockquote>The context is this: Dante and Vergil are discussing the judgement of the damned at the Second Coming. Dante wonders if those in Hell be better or worse off after this point: 'When the great clarion fades / into the voice of thundering Omniscience, / what of these agonies?' His master replies that since they will recover their flesh and bodies, they will, <em>secundum Aristotelem</em>, be more perfect, and so they will feel more pain.<br /><br />For the dedication of his <em>Birds </em>to his disciple and collaborator, Robert Fitzgerald, more famous for his <em>Aeneid</em>, Fitts chooses a morsel not of Vergil, but of Erasmus, from the Lucianic colloquy <a href="http://www.intratext.com/IXT/LAT0674/_P2G.HTM">'Charon'</a>: <blockquote><em>Alastor</em>. Sed quid opus est triremi? <em>Charon</em>. Nihil, si velim in media palude rursus naufragium facere. <em>Al</em>. Ob multitudinem? <em>Ch</em>. Scilicet. <em>Al</em>. Atqui umbras vehis, non corpora. Quantulum autem ponderis habent umbrae? <em>Ch</em>. Sint tipulae, tamen tipularum tanta vis esse potest, ut onerent cymbam. Tum scis, et cymbam umbratilem esse.</blockquote>To translate: <blockquote><em>Al</em>. But what use is the trireme? <em>Ch</em>. Nothing, if I want to wind up shipwrecked in the middle of the swamp again. <em>Al</em>. On account of the throng? <em>Ch</em>. Naturally. <em>Al</em>. But you transport shades, not bodies. And how little must the shades weigh? <em>Ch</em>. They are only crane-flies (<em>tipulae</em>)<em>,</em> but crane-flies can have enough weight to sink a skiff. You know, too, that the skiff itself is shadowy.</blockquote>In neither instance is explanation given: the reference is hermetic, like in the good old days of Pound and Stevens. One might reasonably suspect, given the chthonic setting of both passages, that Ciardi and Fitzgerald were dead. But both were in the prime of health, dying within a year of each other, just under thirty years later. In each case we have a dialogue, a guide and a pilgrim. Surely Fitts claimed for himself the role of the cicerone in hell, a role at the core of the modernist worldview. Pound had begun his masterpiece by translating a translation of Odysseus's <em>katabasis</em>; Williams booted his own career with a work entitled <em>Kora in Hell</em>; Eliot guided his reader not through hell but through the Wasteland, its fertility latent but real; Leo Bloom is given a whole chapter for his own <em>nekuia</em>, and H. C. E. an entire book; and before them all, the forefather of modernism, James Frazer, had turned his own opus on a symbol representing safe passage through the underworld. The poet is the acknowledged legislator: the trireme weighed with the tipulary souls of men, not only the true dead, but those still feeling of pleasure and pain. Fitts, conservative 'in a bad age', explicitly shares the pain of a conservative Aristophanes, who, in the <em>Frogs</em>, 'now regards the War, desperate as it is, as only another symptom of the disease of his time'. This from a man who, according to <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=sA02qcRy2x0C&pg=PA6&lpg=PA6&dq=%22dudley+fitts%22&source=web&ots=FjUWCnBBel&sig=pHSyPefzxF6WXIH5fBLTfpy0QRY&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA8,M1">David Slavitt</a>, rated student papers 'PB (pretty bad), NTB (not too bad), NB (not bad), and NAAB (not at all bad)'. Only a very few, the last generation of American modernist-humanists, were eligible to walk with Fitts himself.<br /><br />[<strong>Update</strong>: <a href="http://nnyhav.blogspot.com/">Dave Haan</a>, on a forum thread on translation, <a href="http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/literary-translation/103-art-translation-3.html">links</a>. A respondent calls my post, bizarrely, a 'paean to etymology': no wonder he finds it unpersuasive! Said respondent also seems to believe that I argue that 'one person or group has a monopoly' on knowledge, and that I have something against Nabokov's <em>Onegin</em>, or even Nabokov in general. I do not, I do not, I do not.]</div>Conrad H. Rothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01916542057749474124noreply@blogger.com9