Friday nights at the library

Books ·· More from October 2005

It’s not actually Friday, and I’m not in a library. This is in keeping with the spirit of the times. The books, however, are real. I won’t be talking about imaginary books. I’ll leave that to Stanislas Lem, not to mention Borges and Coleridge.

Including a day of the week in your rubric is a commitment. A commitment even stronger than something like “Today’s best”. Today, after all, is any old day; even if you miss a day, the next day is today too, and only the curious reader who examines the fine print at the end of an entry will notice a gap. But you can’t pretend that Monday is Friday. Most readers will know the difference. If you procrastinate you have to own up.

So today, Monday, I begin “Friday nights at the library”. No, wait—since I’m writing about books, I’ll translate this into book-blurb language.

In notes as wise, heartfelt, and uplifting as when they were written, DD integrates grounded narratives of personal experience in larger theoretical notions. The result is an important contribution, provocative, thoughtful, and illuminating, that wonderfully succeeds in suggesting a treasure trove of insights.

Pfew. I’m glad I got that off my chest. Nothing like a little self-revelation to refresh the soul. Now for a book.

Paris in black & white

Atget’s no secret. There are many collections of his photographs, monographs, colloquia. Atget Paris contains 840 pictures of Paris. The earliest are from the late 1890s, the last from the 1920s. My copy is beginning to fall apart: the binding is not up to the task of holding together 785 pages. Other than that, it’s a well-designed book (even if the new

cover lacks the austere charm of the one pictured here). On most pages there is just one photo, with only a place and date—there’s no intrusive commentary. In the same series are volumes on Doisneau, Marville, and (now out of print) Paris in the 30s.

For the last six months or more I’ve had this volume sitting on the dining room table. When I eat there alone I study a half dozen pages. The pictures, of a Paris that no longer exists, of ways of life that have passed away, transport me out of whatever distractions the day has had to offer. Atget took his photographs by preference in the early morning. The streets are almost empty; long exposures make ghostly figures of the few people moving about. In some plates there are cracks or masking (“vignetage” in French; the introduction says that it arises from the “de-centering” needed to bring the optical focus above the middle of the image). Atget was no postmodernist, but in the photographs the signs of artifice remind you that what you see is the representation of a view, not the view itself.

The result is a feeling of stasis, if not permanence—in some pictures you can see buildings being demolished; those taken in the outskirts of the city in Clignancourt and Charonne, with their wooden fences and wagon-cabins, convey rather the instability of the lives of the working class and those yet worse off. Central Paris, on the other hand, was built to last: walls of stone (which in other pictures you see being cut on the banks of the Seine), neo-Classical or Palladian façades, marble interiors. Before he became, around 1890, a photographer, self-taught, Atget was a not-very-successful traveling actor; that, perhaps, accounts for his photographs' seeming at times to be stage sets.

Appartenant encoreBelonging still, by virtue of his technique, to the nineteenth century, he is, by his vision, firmly in the twentieth. His gaze was frontal and frank, but he knew better than anyone else how to make the imaginary coexist with the real, and thus he invented modern photography. par sa technique au XIXe siècle, il est, par sa vision, de plain-pied dans le XXe. Son regard était frontal et franc, mais il a su mieux que tout autre faire coexister l’imaginaire et le réel, et il a ainsi inventé la photographie moderne.

—from the introduction to Atget Paris

But they remain actual. Even in those that include people, there is nothing of the theatrical. On the contrary, the actors tend to be absorbed into the scene (no doubt the exposure times have some part in this).

In photography an æsthetic of letting things be competes with one of capturing the moment. Both can be debased: the ad shot that purports to present an object unadorned and real, but which is in fact entirely arranged; the photo-op shot that “captures a moment” enacted solely for that purpose. On the whole I prefer the first. Atget arranged the circumstances under which he photographed his scenes of Paris; but he gives the impression thereafter of leaving things to themselves.

Atget Paris. Présentation de Laure Beaumont-Maillet. s.l.: Hazan, s.d. (Distributed by Gingko Press, who also distribute the Historic Folding Rule.) The quotation is from p. 18 of the introduction. A large collection of his photographs can be found at Gallica. Search for “lots d’images” with author ‘Atget’.

I like more trouble

Books ·· More from September 2005

The American Library Association has a list of the “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000”. The grey level indicates how sure I am that I’ve read the book.

• 5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• 6. Of Mice and Men
• 13. The Catcher in the Rye
• 22. A Wrinkle in Time
• 25. In the Night Kitchen
• 47. Flowers for Algernon
• 52. Brave New World
• 69. Slaughterhouse-Five
• 70. Lord of the Flies
• 84. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

It’s significant that in this list, unlike the list of “dangerous books”, I’m certain I’ve read all but one of them, and that I’ve read the entire book. Sendak’s book was published years after I’d grown out of its intended audience; I know I’ve seen it but I’m not sure I’ve read it. The same goes for many of the other children’s and young people’s books on the list. For Sex Ed, I went right to the sources: the Larousse Mythology, the Kama Sutra, Kinsey, Candy…

Why on earth are A Wrinkle in Time and Flowers for Algernon on the list? Don’t the meddling idiots of this world have better things to do? —Though I suppose that banning innocuous books is just the sort of thing a meddling idiot would do.

Both books are very much worth reading, by the way. Algernon is perhaps better known as the movie Charly with Cliff Robertson. Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle was where I first learned the word ‘tesseract’; not long after I read Hinton’s Fourth dimension and did a science fair project on it, building hypercubes and hypertetrahedra from bamboo skewers.

I Like Trouble

Books ·· More from September 2005

Human Events Online published a list of the Ten Most Dangerous Books a while ago. Majikthise has read four of them, plus two honorable mentions.

I’ve done pretty well, or badly. The grey level indicates how confident I am that I’ve read the book, and how much I remember having read of it.

Really dangerous books

• 1. Communist Manifesto
• 3. Quotations from Chairman Mao (I bought a copy)
• 4. Sexual behavior in the human male
• 6. Das Kapital (how much must you read to be endangered?)
• 8. Cours de philosophie positive (in French, no less)
• 9. Beyond good and evil (I’ve taught it, I’ve even read it)

Almost as dangerous

• On liberty
• Beyond freedom and dignity
• Origin of species
• Madness and civilization
• Second sex
• Silent spring
• Introduction to psychoanalysis
• Greening of America
• Descent of man

Clearly I’ve been depraved by reading all this toxic literature. I think that the Iraq war is a mistake, that the regulation of government by business is a bad idea, that I share ancestors with my cats, that censorship of political discourse is wrong, that women have often been systematically oppressed, that DDT is bad for birds, and that psychiatry has sometimes been an instrument for punishing deviance.

On the other hand, I’m inclined to hold that state socialism is a bad idea, that religion is not about to be replaced by a “cult of progress”, and that behaviorism à la Skinner was a scientific dead end.

So I must have dozed off a few times.

Archibibliophilia

Books ·· More from May 2005

John Emerson of Idiocentrism has put together an impressive list of bookseller sites (46 in all, at least three dozen languages, not counting multilingual sites like Schoenhofs). I would add Galaxidion for used and rare books in French, and ZVAB for German. If you’re a real glutton, I too have a list of booksellers and publishers, with a bias toward France and Germany (some of these are also listed on the Booklist page here).

The “Philosopher” and the “Sentimentalist”

Books · Literature ·· More from March 2005

On my way to Coleridge the other day I couldn’t help but notice the work whose front cover you see here. Could I resist? Of course not. It was that emdash between ‘love’ and ‘philosopher’. I have a soft spot for eccentric punctuation.

Marie Corelli was a prolific and extremely successful novelist. She combined an unconventional private life, including a female partner, with social conservatism—in her Free opinions, freely expressed, she takes on “unchristian clerics”, the “vulgarity of wealth”, “little poets”, and the declining attention-span of readers (↓). She published her first novels in 1886, and in all published over 30 volumes, many of them still in print. Love, one of her last anthumous works (↓), was published in 1923. The title character is an inveterate “sponger”, brilliant but verbally cruel; the “sentimentalist”, his foil, is the daughter of a rich old man who with the Philosopher’s help is completing his lifework, The Deterioration of Language Invariably Perceived as a Precursor to the Decadence of Civilization (↓). Needless to say, a young, intelligent woman, unmarried, with “such a charming curve to the back! […] and oh, dear me, such a very small hand,—as white as the dove that had settled upon it”, must fall in love with someone: but with whom?

(↑) The detailed bibliography at Violet Books, compiled by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, lists four works dictated by Corelli from beyond the grave. She has been silent, it appears, since 1969. Also by Salmonson: a biography of Corelli at the Victorian Web, a bibliography of works on Corelli, and a filmography. From the latter I learn that D. W. Griffith directed a version of The sorrows of Satan in 1926, starring, among others, the lovely but ill-fated Lya de Putti.

(↑) See p. 70. If this puts you in mind of Casaubon and Middlemarch, you’re right: the characters themselves note the parallel (35). The Deterioration of Language reflects one of Corelli’s own preoccupations: here and elsewhere she inveighs against slang and vulgarity, regarding it as symptom of cultural decline.

(↑) Of the public she writes that “their reading is of a most strange, mixed, and desultory order”. Why?

Simply because even the million do not know “how” to read. Moreover, it is very difficult to make them learn. They have neither the skill nor the patience to study beautiful thoughts expressed in beautiful language. They want to “rush” something through. Whether poem, play or novel, it must be “rushed through” and done with. […] They have time for motoring, cycling, card-playing, racing, betting, hockey and golf,—anything in short which does not directly appeal to the intellectual faculties,—but for real reading, they can neither make leisure, nor acquire aptitude.

This vague, sieve-like quality of brain and general inability to comprehend or retain imprssions of character or events, which is becoming so common among modern so-called “readers” of books, can but make things very difficult for authors who seek to contribute something of their utmost and best to the world of literature.

A hundred years before Coleridge was already lamenting the ill effects of reading the newspapers and reviews (Biographia litteraria, c3, ed. Engell & Bate 1:48). A hundred and fifty years before that, Pascal laid the scalpel to the human thirst for distraction (Pensées ed. Lafuma 1962, nos. 132–137). It’s possible that the public—that beast—has been in continuous decline the last two centuries, and that the laments of Coleridge and Corelli and Alan Bloom have all got something to them. But as Coleridge himself notes, reading novels of the trashy sort found in the circulating libraries of his time is an activity belonging to “that comprehensive class characterized by the power of reconciling the two contrary yet co-existing propensities of human nature, namely: indulgence of sloth, and hatred of vacancy”. If those propensities are innate, then the impression of decline must be a sort of illusion; only the means of indulging them have changed. Pascal would be closer to the truth in treating them as symptoms of original sin, transmitted ex traduce from Adam (or Lucy) onward.

Acres of books

Books ·· More from February 2005

Language Hat has some remarks on a piece in the New York Times on Kathie Coblentz, a librarian at the New York Public Library who has managed to fit 3600 books into a one-bedroom apartment (Carole Braden, “A Bibliophile, 3,600 Friends and a System”, New York Times 10 Feb 2005—this link may not last). Of course, this being the Times, there must be (i) a trend and (ii) an angle.

The trend is toward the traditional:

[…] home libraries are becoming more of a preoccupation, posing challenges for decorators as well as for book lovers. “Every room can have bookcases,” said Thomas Jayne […]

Buzz Kelly, a designer at Jed Johnson Associates, has devised a string of book-dedicated spaces in the last year. These days “a library is as standard as a master bedroom,” he said, citing one client’s recent decision to sacrifice a formal dining room for an eat-in kitchen and a cubby filled with leather-lined shelves for the family’s books.

In an odd way it’s comforting to know that even people who can afford the services of Jed Johnson Associates have to make the occasional sacrifice.

On the other hand, it’s disturbing to realize that for the Jed Johnson set, libraries are fungible with dining rooms. —Eat, read, eat, read… Which is it to be? Ah, but these days libraries are a “preoccupation”: that settles it! Buzz, build me a cubby filled with leather-lined shelves! Rich Corinthian leather!

The angle is that Coblentz has put together the NYPL Home Library System. It’s $40 from the NYPL. There are certainly less deserving outfits to send your money to. On the other hand, your own city’s library probably needs the money just as much (↓). Unless it’s in Monowi, Nebraska.

Modest obsessions

Aside from the amusement of seeing a Times reporter confuse Melvil Dewey with John, the article gave me a new (or newly reinforced) word: completist.

It turns out Ms. Coblentz is a voracious consumer of Clint Eastwood films and has a large category dedicated to him. […] “I’m a completist where Eastwood is concerned,” Ms. Coblentz said.

Some people have a “completist syndrome”: about Morgan Llywelyn, for example, or Williams and Elfman. You can also buy a completist toothbrush.

Des jouebs, des blogues, des blogs

Books · Language · Web/Tech ·· More from January 2005

• Cor ne edito
  Des citations presque exclusivement. On y lira par ex. Leibniz, Bacon, Héraclite. Matière à penser ou à se distraire.
• Ad Usum Delphinorum
  Comme “Cor ne edito”, à quelques notes personnelles près. Fontenelle, Nietzsche, Henri Corbin.
• La Bibliothèque du XXIe siècle
  Des livres et des auteurs, par ex. Nicole Loraux, Maurice Olender, Patrice Flem. Bonus: une centaine de textes classiques au CNAM. Pour d’autres textes, voyez ClicNet à Swarthmore.
• Bartlebooth
  M. Bartlebooth est le personnage centrale du roman La vie mode d’emploi de Georges Perec. Derrière son nom se cachent le Bartleby de Melville et le Barnabooth de Larbaud.

  

  Credit: Nathalie Tousnakhoff

  Dans ce journal on trouve des notes sur la littérature, la critique, et les mots; des photos aussi. Added 5 Mar 2005: The link above is to the new location, but I haven’t yet succeeded in reaching it.
• Calligraphie
  Le forum de toutes les écritures. Des avis techniques, des galéries.
• Le trésor de la Langue Française Informatisée
  Au CNRS. Comme l’OED en anglais: les définitions sont rangées dans l’ordre historique avec des citations. On peut chercher aussi par “domaine technique”, e.g. ‘épistémologie’. Voyez aussi l’ATILF (Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française).

I knew it would come to this…

Books ·· More from August 2004

Book List

Books ·· More from August 2004

One thing websites are good for is tinkering. I’ve added a Book List which will contain all the items that have been listed in the “Livres de chevet” section in the sidebar. (There’s no way to do this automatically in TypePad.) On that page also is a list of links to booksellers. Since I’m not interested in becoming an unpaid salesperson for Amazon (which is effectively what the defaults in TypePad do), I’ve listed a number of other places to buy the books listed.

Merz’s History of thought

Books · History of Philosophy · History of Science ·· More from May 2004

John Theodore Merz, History of thought in the nineteenth century (Edinburgh & London: Blackwood, v. 1–2, 1896; 2nd ed. of v. 1–2, 1907; v. 3–4, 1912, 1914; repr. New York: Dover, 1965.)

Volumes 1 and 2 deal with the natural sciences, 3 and 4 with philosophy. Merz restricts himself to authors in France, Great Britain, and Germany. Though he tends to favor the Germans, Merz’s work is a good place to start if you want to survey the intellectual landscape as it appeared to a well-informed intellectual historian at the end of the century.

Merz, an electrical engineer by trade, knows his science and mathematics, at least till near the end of the century. In physics, the concept of energy (at that time just half a century old), the laws of thermodynamics, and Maxwell‘s theory have completed the classical edifice. Atomism has still not carried the day: the phenomenalism of MachErnst Mach (1838-1916), author of Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung (1883), Die Analyse der Empfindungen (1886), and Erkenntnis und Irrtum (1905). and others was, in the 1890s, a tenable position. Merz’s coverage of biology (the name was coined at the very end of the eighteenth century, and becomes current by way of Cuvier) is very good. The transformation wrought by Darwin is fully in evidence. Defining the essence of the living remains an issue, but “mechanistic” explanations are gradually winning out over various versions of vitalism. In psychology, German authors predominate; at the end of the century, Brentano and James appear briefly, but Freud is absent.