30 June, 2008

Languagey odds and ends

Earlier English had a fair number of words with short vowel in the context [f_____k]; cf. (38). Except for the well-known taboo word (not listed in (38)), none of these have survived as independent words, presumably in large measure because they sounded too similar to the tabooed word. Dates given in parentheses refer to the last attestation of given items.

(38)

fuk (a sail) (1529)
fac 'factotum' (1841)
feck 'effect, efficiency' (1887) (now only 'Scots Engl.' feckless)
fack/feck (one of the stomachs of a ruminant) (1887)
feck(s)/fack(s) '(in) faith, (in) fact' (1891)

— Hans Hock, Principles of Historical Lingustics (1991). Striking, the lengths to which even such a recent scholar will go to avoid a taboo word.

ΕΧΠΛΗΚΗΘ ΛΗΒΕΡ XV
ΑΜΑΛ
ΦΕΛΗΚΗΘΕΡ ΔΩ ΓΡΑ
ΒΕΡΤΟC
ΚΗΑC ΑΜΕΝ ΦΗΝΗΘ
ΜΕ ΦΕ ΚΗΘ
ΦΗΝΙC ΙCΘΑ ΓΑΟΔΙ
ΟΜ ΜΑΓΝΟΜ Ε

— From Chartres MS 152, St Augustine De Trinitate, 10th-century: a Latin explicit in Greek characters. Transliterated: Ekhplēkēth Lēber XV / Amal / Phelēkēther Dō Gra / Bertos / Kēas Amen Phēnēth / Me Phe Kēth / Phēnis Istha Gaodi / Om Magnom E. In Latin: Explicit [note that Latin 'x' has been wrongly written with a chi] Liber XV Feliciter D[e]o Gracias Amen Finit / Amalbertus Me Fecit / Finis Ista Gaudium Magnum E[st].

Talking of bad Latin, a recent Hollywood blockbuster has been advertised with a poster of its leading lady, her arm bearing the tattooed words 'TENEO VESTRI VOX'. This is ungrammatical and meaningless. And so assorted internetizens plug away in vain. I couldn't help but wonder if the phrase was chosen specially for its meaninglessness: as I put it to Steve, 'Get them talking and arguing—they'll never stop, because it doesn't mean anything to begin with.' A bizarre method of viral marketing?

(Two new Continental words, both usable in English. French abracadabrant, 'preposterous', and German Urdummheit, 'primordial stupidity'.)

Neologism, in revolutionary times, is not an infirmity of caprice, seeking (to use the proverb of Cervantes), 'for better bread than is made of wheat', but is a mere necessity of the unresting intellect.

— Thomas de Quincey, 'Language', date uncertain.

nigri manus ossea Mauri
et cui per mediam nolis occurrere noctem,
clivosae veheris dum per monumenta Latinae


The bony hand of a blackamoor
Whom you'd not want to meet in the middle of the night
As you drove past the monuments on the hilly Latin Way

— Juvenal. The ancestor of our 'Wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley'?

24 June, 2008

Lutus Lutetiae

Squit, squit, squit, all weekend. Ten times a day, or more. It was horrible. Must have been something I ate—bad salmon or prawns, maybe. At least I could read as I squote, a small consolation. Other consolations were denied me. Normally in this condition, one's cul is easily torché, so wet and dilute is the dung. But this time—oh! I had a rich macerate umber paint with every swab. This morning the smell of a regular session was enough to put me off my imminent pain au chocolat. My arse, in fact, was itself like a huge pain au chocolat, after a minute in the microwave. (Georges Perec taught Harry Mathews the expression, avoir le pain d'épice au bord des lèvres.) I clench; I suffer.

Dali, in his Passions, which I purchased last week at a bouquiniste opposite the Île de la Cité—a worthy addition to my burgeoning collection of Daliana—tells the story of the Caca Dauphin. 'In the presence of dignitaries and the best artists of the realm, the divine child freed his bowels. There were collected coppers, ochres, greens, browns, and the Court was clothed in the colours of the Dauphin-poop. I know nothing at once more traditional and more subversive, nothing more legitimate and more scandalous, nothing more nobly alive.' Dali, of course, loves shit, scybales, sir-reverence, ordure. And he adores the thick palette of Moreau (detail, right): 'Gustave Moreau, the most glorious of erotic and scatalogical painters, pursued only one aim, but that fanatically: to make gold appear at the end of his brush. It is with excremental colours, ochres, burnt umbers, that a good artist succeeds in suggesting the matter of gold. Gold, as with Moreau, is born of the shadows, of the abysses of dark matter, and this is why our civilization, lacking grandeur, is that of fresh, gay colours—that is to say, inhuman and indivine. See America.' Moreau's hues are, as Dali puts it, antibonbons.

I did not visit the Musée Moreau. I meant to. But I wound up beat from all the skiting. I barely got to the Louvre without passing out from the sun and the din of tourists not even trying to parlay frongsay. But I did get to the Louvre. It was a necessity. Unfortunately I was really only there to see the Italian Renaissance, and that meant wading through all the run-off from the Gioconda. It was all creaking floorboards and Ah, Botticelli! Oh, Giotto! More interested in the name-plates than the paintings. March swiftly through the Tuscan Trecento—'don't like this stuff'—Raphael, check; Titian, check. Snap snap snap at the Veronese Cana. Peer appreciatively at the speck of the Leonardo. 'It's a self-portrait, you know.' For some reason they didn't want to flow out the back of the room to see the Ingres Roger and the rest of the famous French rubbish. So I was stuck with them.

Clearly, the Trecento was the room for the Moreauiste. The Trecento is the excremental century par excellence, with its defecund gold and ochre, the superb and unromantic brutality of its figuration. Who can fail to enjoy the Master of the Rebel Angels with his tumbling nasties—


What image could be more stercorine? Let us allegorize the fall of Lucifer and his infernal host as an expulsion of congurgitated matter from the white celestial vaults of the buttocks. Likewise, we discover Christ recast as a dung-beetle, with a stylised carapace for a chest, wrapped in a torchecul, and mounted on iconic gold, a classic Catholic gilt complex:


Dali says of Catalonia: 'The passion of God, of gold, and an erotics of non-consummation go together in the mystical soul of my country.' But it is not only Catalonia, as this Tuscan crucifix testifies. No wonder all the American tourists, accustomed to their deodorised, puritanical pastels and primaries, fresh and gay, walk right past this stuff, their glazed bored eyes hiding an unconscious dread. The Trecento room also contains Quattrocento primitives, including a very fine little Sano di Pietro predella with a St. Jerome comic-strip.


We are in the same world as the St. Anthony I wrote about here: a St. Anthony tempted by gold, mysteriously vanished, or metamorphosed into the brown landscape. Here Jerome has cast off his cardinal's hat, to reveal the aureate radiance of a halo, among trees studded with gold; his excrement has been transformed into vipers and scorpions. The vermilion towns sketched in each top corner are gorgeously charming, aren't they?

*

Oh, enough of shit. I've had enough, believe me. My wife, as always so pharmaceutically astute, has just given me a couple of Imodium tablets, chewable, mint-flavoured, and literally nauseating. I don't think they have taken effect yet. I continue to suffer.

Strangely, there are some marvelous paintings in the Louvre of a wholly inexcremental nature. In the long corridor of Italian Quattro- and Cinquecento proper, it is Mantegna who really holds my interest, as he generally does. For instance, look at his astonishing treatment of marble as a decorative element in the magnificent Virgin of Victory (1496):


And contrast this, in terms of technical skill, to the treatment of marble by an earlier generation, for instance Castagno's very fine Last Supper of 1447:


In 1497-1505, Isabella d'Este commissioned a number of matching works for her first studiolo in the Castello di San Giorgio; Mantegna painted the first two, Perugino the third, and Lorenzo Costa the last two. Mantegna, again, creams the competition. In my post on Quattrocento painting, I showed a mysterious cipher-text from a 1453 manuscript attributed to Mantegna; and here, fifty years later, the old bastard is at it again. A long scroll is entwined around a dryad-like figure to the far left: the topmost involution has some Latin, but below it are two visible faces containing nonsense-scripts of a Voynich variety, the second rather resembling (but not, in fact, being, at least not entirely) square Hebrew forms.



This thrill of obscurity recurs on the Paris streets, in a very rare moment of mystery. Just south of the Seine, at the entrance to the Jussieu campus, currently under re-construction, one finds high thin twin walls of graffiti, or possibly art of a strange urban sort, utterly illegible and incomprehensible:


Greg Afinogenov, a jolly nice chap and fellow blogger whom I met over beer near the Bastille last week, thinks Paris a dead city, replete with bobos and lacking all remnants of authenticity. I am inclined to agree. The city fills me with a slight horror, and yet I can't put my finger on quite why. Perhaps it is the visual monotony, or else the surfeit of grand architectural statements begging to be photographed, just like the Gioconda. Paris hardly allows you to find out for yourself. Everywhere is known, or not worth knowing. In London, the most known is also ripe with opportunities for new knowledge. Walk down Tottenham Court Road, looking not at the electronics stores but at the rooftops. At Buckingham Palace, walk around the corner to Lugsmoor Lane and the back streets of Pall Mall. Head north off Oxford Street and stroll down pre-Regency ways still intact. But Paris is without respite: it retains the totalitarian aesthetic of Haussmann. Consequently, its only successes are in the monumental, and for me, only in the modern monumental, or in other words, the monumental not betrayed by endless ornamentation. Thus the crystal city of Les Halles:


Or the oppressive and hieratic interior of the Bibliothèque Nationale (the reason for my visit), which a friend of mine rightly compared to Karnak:


But very little of the quiet succeeds in this city. We read about, and so desire to retrouver for ourselves, the quiet and cloistral streets of Maldoror, of Eugène Sue, of the Surrealists. This is why I took, to read on the train, the Williams translation of Soupault's Last Nights of Paris. But it is no good; and even Soupault is dull in the light of day. Dali writes: 'My entire mental life is made up of the recording of visions, with a view to total orgasmic superposition. There is a stretch of the Rue de Rivoli that I find sublime, from the Hôtel Meurice to the Place Vendôme. And, well, I always make it 'come out' at the last moment.' But I ask you: is this, said stretch now, sublime?—


When I at last return home to my wife, only the second woman to whom I have ever remotely mattered, cut off from telephone or internet contact for six painful days, and two of raw squitting, the relief on both sides is palpable.

16 June, 2008

Monday cat blogging

Aubrey is a discerning little catlet. When he's not chasing shadows or gnawing up Lily's finger, he goes for my books. And his favourites, evidently, are Joyce and Rabelais. I regularly find my 1946 Cape Portrait, and my Pléiade Oeuvres—he scorns translations—tossed out on the floor. Not for Aubrey the Lewis or Stein sharing shelf-space with Joyce, nor the Walküre zu zwei Händen score, or back-issues of the JWCI, next to Rabelais. Who could have expected such fine literary taste in a beast not yet old enough to read?

Rabelais would not have approved. He was evidently no great lover of cats, for neither of the two felines in his work are very attractive. The first of these, and the more famous, is Raminagrobis, an old poet who fobs Panurge off with some silly verses. Sainéan deciphers the name for us:
The name antedates Rabelais. One finds it first, with its primary meaning of 'tomcat', in a manuscript of the fourteenth century in the Mazarin Library: we see here two superb pen-drawn cats with the legend, Raminagrobis. . . This name, like its root grobis, is in fact the vulgar or provincial label for a male cat, and means literally a cat who has arched his back [fait le gros dos], or a cat who purrs, from raminer, to murmur with satisfaction, when speaking of a cat.
The other cat is the monstrous Rodilard, who makes Panurge conskite himself with fear. Rodilard, according to Sainéan, is properly ronge-lard (gnaw-lard). Both of these cats reappear in La Fontaine. As Sainéan points out, cats are also associated with furcollared lawyers as the chats fourrés (punning on chaffouré, a bit of argot for 'bruised, blotted')—the animal, being 'at once cruel and greedy', becomes a token for 'hypocritical and presumptuous magistrates'.

Joyce, likewise, was probably aware of the cat's demonic nature when he sent the beast headfirst into the devil's arms, in his children's fable, The Cat and the Devil. But in Ulysses another moggy excites Bloom's sympathies:
The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.

—Mkgnao!

—O, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.

The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my head. Prr.

Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his knees.

—Milk for the pussens, he said.

—Mrkgnao! the cat cried.
In The Apes of God (1930), which reads as a pastiche of the marmoreal prose of Ulysses, Lewis would choose a cat as his very first image:
A cat like a beadle goose-stepped with eerie convulsions out of the night cast by a cluster of statuary, from the recesses of the entrance hall. A maid with matchless decorum left a door silently, she removed a massive copper candlestick. She reintegrated the gloom that the cat had left. The cat returned, with the state of a sacred dependent, into the gloom.
For a modernist there is something beautiful in the désinvolture of a cat: it is to be matched with a désinvolte prose, careful and steady. The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, and so on. Myself, I find little to admire about Aubrey's grace and poise, little of the Ulyssean prose. He has a tendency to tumble inflexibly from furnitures, scratching or tearing the surface as he slips. His claws got two damned holes in my Portrait, the bastard! God help him if he does any damage to my 1946 Random House Ulysses—the prettiest edition of the masterpiece, at least for those of us who can't afford this.

*
"Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it." — Darconville's Cat (1983).
Alexander Theroux is looking on with amusement from the next shelf. Theroux, you see, was an aelurophile like his bellamy Edward Gorey, and would no doubt have approved of Aubrey's antics, as he would have approved the heteroclite but authentic orthography of aelurophile. Theroux is heir to the marmoreal proses of Joyce and Lewis, and to the bare erudition of Rabelais. He is an aspiring DWEM (not long to go now), and is therefore unlikely to feature on any trendy freshman reading-lists.

Spellvexit, the cat in Darconville's Cat—Theroux's Ulysses—is, on the face of it, a minor presence. He is a token, an opportunity for a few passages of désinvolte prose in the key of Theroux's modernist masters. We meet him early:
Darconville's cat leaped onto the windowsill and peered up, as if calculating the thoughts of his master: where were they? How had they come to be here? What reason, in fact, had they to be in this strange place?
Spellvexit continues to be associated with Darconville's thoughts. Isabel, the hero's love and trahiseuse, watches his house at night:
All are not abed that have ill rest, and one of them, lacking most because longing most, begins to pace out notions. Of these notions one lodges itself finally in her mind with cautious exactitude as the very thing indicated by the occasion. It's a cat's walk, a little way up and back. Then it's not a cat's walk. The figure is gone.
That second sentence—read it again. Theroux never wastes words. So why the pleonasm of 'cautious exactitude', why the apparently clumsy 'thing indicated by the occasion'? We want to see, and so will see: cautious exactitude, the thing indicated. The cat, which is there and is not, announces itself in the text, as a prelude to its actual half-appearance. Elsewhere he affords moments of quiet and elegant, semiperceptible musical comedy:
Darconville quickly rolled up and forward, bouncing Spellvexit in a high bumbershot from the top of his chest into a hollow of the blanket where he lay low and pouched for safety. A little vimbat of a face slowly appeared, with whiskers twitching. "Swowns!" squeaked the cat, who'd been brought up better than that.
Nobody alive writes like this. I have no idea what 'vimbat' means, and neither do any of the resources I've checked. It sounds right. Bumbershot is a portmanteau of bumbershoot, 'umbrella'—describing the cat's arc—and bumble, shot. Swowns reinterprets the core vowel of Mkgnao to suggest swounds, ie. 'God's wounds'. This is clever writing: but its words sing for themselves, and so can be enjoyed without interrogating a lexicon.

John Leonard, in the first and more complimentary review of the novel offered by the New York Times (the other is here), remarks: 'Perhaps you were wondering about that cat. That cat is art, vision, the erotic, Jesus, jealousy, memory, conscience and everything else that is silent and black and vanishes'. The cat, indeed, vanishes, out of his owner's hands in the courtyard of Adams House, Cambridge, MA: 'A cat never says goodbye. It just walks away.' But is Leonard right: is the cat of Darconville's Cat less a cat than a multivalent Symbol? On one level the cat serves to defuse romantic gestures:
Spellvexit, who despised philosophy, showed an utter disregard for Darconville's neautontimoroumenotic pain and preferred to stay outside clacking his teeth at birds until all this blew over.
The rhythm of the prose says it all: 'stay outside clacking his teeth at birds until all this blew over' is the classic riposte to the ausserweltlich Greek coinage that it follows. The coinage itself is a mistake. It should be heautontimoroumenotic, from Terence's Heauton Timoroumenos, 'The Self-Tormentor'. Shall we attribute the error to a printer, a copy-editor—or to Theroux himself? It seems to matter little. The cat is also, at times, highly symbolish. In the second chapter we are told:
At six, [Darconville] won the school ribbon for a drawing of the face of God—it resembled a cat's—and illustrated a juvenile book of his own dramatic making which ended: "But wait, there is something coming toward me—!"
While at the end of the antepenultimate chapter, as Darconville reaches his death in a Venetian palazzo near the Corte del Gatto:
Groping blindly, he made a motion with his hands as if something were coming towards him and stumbling forward, just before he fell, reached up in a last fatal moment of blindness to cry out inexplicably and desperately and loud, "My cat! My cat!"

Then something came towards him at last.
So here the cat is definitely a Cat: God, Death, the Nameless, whatever. Thus Theroux's title can salvage its claim to high literary dignity.

*

But all this is getting ahead of myself, isn't it? You don't want to read a thesis on 'The Portrayal of the Cat in Theroux's Darconville's Cat', surely one of those awful and imaginary monographs, 'of which necessity was hardly the mother', that Theroux awards to the mediocrities of a Southern university faculty:
"English Nose Literature"; Stephen Duck: More Rhyme Than Reason; "The American Disgrace: Overabuse of the Verb 'To Get'"; "Fundavit Stones in Crozet, Va."; Much Ado About Mothing; "The Psychopathological Connection Between Liquid Natural Gas and Agraphia"; The Story of Windmill Technology; "The Significance of Head Motions in Peking Ducks"; "Infusions as Drinks"; "Abraham Lincoln, Quadroon?"
No, you want to know what the book is actually like, and why Theroux's erudition is more worthwhile than Eco's. The simple answer is that it is more varied: it is a tool which is put to use, although it can be enjoyed for its own sake. Compare the above passage, for instance, to Eco's reuse of imaginary titles (De optimitate triparum) from Rabelais. Theroux knows that it is better to invent in a traditional style than simply to steal outright. And unlike Eco, he is not afraid of bad or pretend erudition when it suits him. For instance:
"Elbow room," repeated Prof. Wratschewe, interlacing his fingers. "Do you realize, Miz McAwaddle, that Shakespeare was the first person ever to use that expression?"

Mrs. McAwaddle was utterly adsorbed.
This joke is written for the connoisseur. Not only is Shakespeare (King John 5.7) not the first attestation of 'elbow room'—the OED offers a 1540 quotation and, uncharacteristically, ignores Shakespeare—but even if he were, we know that the first written attestation is rarely going to be the first actual use. The punchline is the killer, and it too plays with the truth. 'Adsorption' is the 'process by which specific gases, liquids or substances in solution adhere to the exposed surfaces of materials, usually solids, with which they are in contact'. But here the word is obviously used as a dry, easily-missed antonym of 'absorbed'. It has the decided ring of an off-the-cuff folk coinage, like pointful. The fact that Theroux, who knows his dictionary back to front, feels free to invent, and invents well, is what marks him out from the Ecos of literature. He is a master of, not a slave to, his (linguistic) erudition. To bring home the point, here is another snatch of the wretched Wratschewe in action:
"Potato," observed Prof. Wratschewe, graciously bowing a cup of punch to his colleague. "Did you ever stop to think that if 'gh' stood for 'p' as in 'hiccough'; 'ough' for 'o' as in 'dough'; 'phth' for 't' as in 'phthisis'; 'eigh' for 'a' as in 'neighbor'; 'tte' for 't' as in 'gazette'; and 'eau' for 'o' as in 'beau'—he snapped out his ball-point and scribbled on a flattened cup—"then the correct spelling of potato would be ghoughphtheightteeau?" He looked up smiling. But Mrs. McAwaddle was already on the other side of the room.
This is erudite in the broad sense that its force derives from its reference, although that reference is not high but popular. Theroux is playing on the well-known 'ghoti' joke, but prodding it, reshaping it, seeing what he can do with the material. Again, he is in control, but having fun. It rather reminds me of the scene in Nabokov's Ada where the protagonists work out the highest-possible scoring word in Russian Scrabble ('TORFYaNUYu').

So Theroux can be funny with low-level popular reference. He can do high as well: sometimes subtle, sometimes aggressive. Here's a bit of subtle: Darconville stumbles on a classroom of six narcoleptics snoozing to a lecture by one 'Floyce R. Fulwider':
This [tap] is a pot-walloper of the Flemish rubricator who called himself Pieter De Hooch, the grandfather of American gin. You may or may not be disheartened to know that he wanted nothing heroic [tap] in his art. His dry, domestic, explicit-as-arithmetic masterpukes [tap] tend nevertheless to narrative. Now let us look at this bit of scrumpy [tap]: Courtyard of a Dutch House.
Stylistically, Theroux is making subtle allusion to an early section from Finnegans Wake ('Floyce' is suggestive, isn't it?), in which the reader is shown around a 'museyroom' (museum): 'This is a Prooshious gunn. This is a ffrinch. Tip. This is the triplewon hat of Lipoleum. Tip. Lipoleumhat. This is the Willingdone on his same white harse, the Cokenhape. Tip. This is the three lipoleum boyne grouching down in the living detch.' (And so on: it goes on for a bit.) Now, I could be completely imagining the Joyce in the Theroux: but there is a fine, or possibly non-existent, line between exegesis and projection. It is always a danger. Darconville's Cat is full of tantalising suggestions like this, dreams and plays on earlier works.

There are plenty of more forthright displays of learning in the novel. Perhaps the most spectacular example is chapter 68, which consists solely of nine pages, listing misogynist books and parts of books end to end, from 'Burton on Infidelity' to 'The Eroticon of Paul the Silentiary'. When I first read through this list, several years ago, I took copious notes and hunted down some of the items, such as John Knox's First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, and Aretino's Ragionamenti. It's the idea, more than the execution: the idea that an entire personality or character can be formed by an accumulation of texts, especially if chosen laterally. I thought this was wonderful. Darconville's Cat manages to combine a linguistic and literary playfulness with a genuine gravitas: Theroux is not afraid to confront the obsessive, either in love or in erudition, and so he is not betrayed, as Eco always is, by a failure of nerve. He remains, in this respect, engagé.

*

At least, he is engagé in Darconville's Cat. I have read only the first chapter—available online—of his latest book, Laura Warholic, but it is enough to put me off the rest of the novel. The writing is, frankly, embarrassing. I don't know what has happened in the intervening 26 years to take the edge off Theroux's pen; but I disliked this from the very first words.

DC prefaced each chapter with an epigraph, which was fine, because the passages were quirky and well-chosen. Laura begins with five epigraphs, from R. Buckminster Fuller, Anne Carson, Kafka, Eluard and Stephen Crane. The Eluard is a cliché, and the Bucky is Bucky cliché: at least, it feels superficial, and present only for the impact of contrast. At any rate, putting five disparate epigraphs at the beginning of your novel is trying too hard. It lacks wit. Lacking wit, also, is the first chapter title: 'Womanifesto'. This is woefully inelegant as a portmanteau: the rhythm is all wrong, the sort of thing you'd find in an MA dissertation from UC Irvine. Lacking wit, also, are the first two sentences: 'One lover is always murdered in the act of love. A man poetically "dies"—Elizabethan slang for orgasm—at the moment of crisis.' This, from an ex-Trappist classicist? It is insultingly hackneyed. The fact that it is presented as the writing of the novel's protagonist, a sex columnist, does nothing to mitigate the squirm. I am only asking, in the final detente of coupledom, who survives and why? This is a poor rendition of Norman Mailer doing Carrie Bradshaw for Playboy. It is certainly not what I signed up for.

In the first narrated paragraph, we are offered a bit of ekphrasis:
He glanced out of his office window to a sky the color of pewter. It was the kind of late September afternoon, dark and rainy, smelling of fog and old quilts, that reminded him he lived in a seaside city.
Contrast this to the opening of Darconville's Cat, chapter 2:
SEPTEMBER: it was the most beautiful of words, he'd always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret. The shutters were open. Darconville stared out into a small empty street, touched with autumnal fog, that looked like the lugubrious frontispiece to a book as yet to be read.
The latter passage is descriptive but oblique, evocative without being too sentimental: the zeugma of 'swallows and regret', and the 'lugubrious frontispiece', have just the right light touch of surrealism. The former passage, from Laura Warholic, is autopilot: nothing more.

The chapter continues at the same miserable level. The onomastic fantasias of the earlier book ('Hypsipyle Poore', 'Xystine Chapelle', and so on) have been replaced by leaden caricatures crying out for profundity, notably in the hero's name of 'Eugene Eyestones'. There are issues, such as racism, indelicately broached. And there are terrible, terrible sentences like 'Staring in at her face, pure and meltingly lovely, he wondered was E. M. Cioran correct when observing, "The hermits of the first centuries of Christianity were saints at grips with the dearest of all their possessions: their temptations"?'—or 'What lines of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa had he once written down and kept under his helmet?', preceding some Pessoa lines. Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa?? Never show thy face again, Theroux!

10 June, 2008

ergo hoc melius

I was planning, and am still half-planning, to write a post on Alexander Theroux this week. But then my doctoral work got interesting again, and I am wrestling to finish the first chapter of my thesis, which already amounts to a quarter of the whole, just about. For the moment, then, I leave you this to chew on.

*

Here's what happened. Last Friday, an anonymous man living in New York—let's call him X—was looking at Wikipedia's page on Alphonse Toussenel. From here he navigated to my translation of Toussenel on mole-rats, and from there, began exploring other Varieties. He alighted on 'Surrealissimo', my post about Salvador Dali and André Breton, where he left an outraged comment, under the moniker 'A. Toussenel', suggesting that I rename this venue 'The Onanarium'. (Not a bad name, in some respects.) The next day he returned, despite his outrage, and commented on my post 'Prescriptivism', this time a little more ambivalent with regards to my opinions. He concluded:
At the end of the day, descriptivism, to me, is merely another manifestation of Nietzsche's concept of slave morality, which is the dominant morality of our day. It reflects a frantic race to the bottom, a form of the disease of neophilia; or, to put it another way, of that great logical fallacy of modern times: Post hoc, ergo hoc melius.
I replied to some of X's points, but ignored his conclusion. Now, in this post I had cited a piece at Language Log, 'Evil', as an example of that site's approach to prescriptivism. X read this piece, and explored that site for a while, but was evidently dissatisfied, because he sent a private communiqué to its author, Mark Liberman, this time under the soubriquet 'Kevin S.', and concluding:
At the end of the day, Descriptivism appears merely to be another form of Nietzsche's concept of slave morality, which is the dominant morality of our day. Emily Bender's remarks, as quoted in your post of 10/28/06, offer a typically tedious, humorless, and self-righteous example of this type of morality. Descriptivism, like most such ideologies, merely reflects the values and tendencies of the society it serves. In this case, those tendencies are a frantic race to the intellectual bottom, where language and the Humanities are concerned; a perversion of the concept of democracy; a mutation of the virus neophilia; and a telling instance of that great logical fallacy of modern times: Post hoc, ergo hoc melius.
Liberman, being the sort of man he is, blogged this and demolished its reasoning, including in his new post a rather dull attack on Nietzsche for racism and bad etymology. Language Hat was intrigued by the affair, and posted on it in turn, commenting at the end of his piece:
Personal to "Kevin": if neophilia were a virus name, it would not be italicized according to AMA style, and "Humanities" should not be capitalized and your Latin is ungrammatical and says the opposite of what you want it to say.
Mr. Hat was picking nits. I picked them back in the comments, with no desire to defend X from Liberman's substantive mauling. The Latin is fine, I observed: 'hoc' ['hōc'] is the ablative of comparison, and the entire phrase means 'After this, therefore better than this'. Later:
I might add, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, that it makes rhetorical sense to italicise 'neophilia' both as a non-naturalised word and for speaker-emphasis, regardless of AMA conventions; and even the capitalisation of 'Humanities' serves the purpose of ironic hypostasis. I appreciate that LH and his readers may not like "Kevin's" sentiments, but these stylistic and linguistic nitpicks are simply not very forceful.
I was also curious about the origins of 'post hoc, ergo hoc melius'. Google turned up nothing, until I put the apodosis into its more expected order, 'post hoc, ergo melius hoc'—compare the phrase upon which it is based, 'post hoc, ergo propter hoc'. Now I turned up these:
Antoine Augustin Cournot (1801-1877) avait coutume de définir par une maxime latine: post hoc, ergo melius hoc. Ce qui vient après est toujours meilleur que ce qui précède.

'Concours d’entrée ENS Cachan 2006' [doc]

Il s'agit là bien sûr d'un sophisme, d'un sophisme ordinaire constitutif de la mentalité proprement moderne, dont Louis Weber [Le Rythme du progrès, pp. 22-24], en 1913, a donné la formule: "Post hoc, ergo melius hoc"—"Après cela, donc mieux (ou meilleur) que cela".

— Pierre-André Taguieff, 'L'idée de progrès' [pdf] (2002).
Thus, in all likelihood the most bloglike piece I have ever written.

[Update: James Ashley comments.]

04 June, 2008

Yet the sea is not full

In my youthful days, I never entered a great library, suppose of one hundred thousand volumes, but my predominant feeling was one of pain and disturbance of mind—not much unlike that which drew tears from Xerxes, on viewing his immense army, and reflecting that in one hundred years not one soul would remain alive. To me, with respect to the books, the same effect would be brought about by my own death. Here, said I, are one hundred thousand books, the worst of them capable of giving me some pleasure and instruction; and before I have had time to extract the honey from one-twentieth of this hive, in all likelihood I shall be summoned away.

Furthermore, I had myself ascertained that to read a duodecimo volume, in prose, of four hundred pages—all skipping being barred, and the rapid reading which belongs to the vulgar interest of a novel—was a very sufficient work for one day. Consequently, three hundred and sixty-five per annum—that is (with a very small allowance for the claims of life on one's own account and that of one's friends), one thousand for every triennium; that is, ten thousand for thirty years—will be as much as a man who lives for that only can hope to accomplish. From the age of twenty to eighty, therefore—if a man were so unhappy as to live to eighty—the utmost he could hope to travel through would be twenty thousand volumes,—a number not, perhaps, above five per cent* of what the mere current literature of Europe would accumulate in that period of years. Now, from this amount of twenty thousand make a deduction on account of books of larger size, books to be studied and books to be read slowly and many times over (as all works in which the composition is a principal part of their pretensions)—allow a fair discount for such deductions, and the twenty thousand will perhaps shrink to eight or five thousand.

— Thomas de Quincey, 'On Languages' (1823)


* De Quincey estimates that 20,000 is 5% of the number of books published in Europe during a period of sixty years. In other words, in 60 years, there would be 400,000 new books: a rate of 6,667 per year. In 2007, according to theBookseller.com, 115,420 new books were published in the UK, and a projected 276,649 in the US—not including print-on-demand. Thus, at the current rate of publishing, and at De Quincey's pessimistic final figure of 5,000 books really possible to read in a lifetime, a Briton like myself can estimate his total accomplishment as 0.000722% of the number published at home during his adult life—possibly about the percentage of those books worth reading. But what chance freedom now?