Engineer's Daughter

passing the dormouse test

I discovered my affinity for dead languages in grade school already, so by high school I had inevitably bloomed into a full-fledged Classics Nerd and of course an active participant in my school's Latin Club.  At the end of every year all of the international clubs would come together for an evening of edibles and performances from our chosen cultures, which meant there was usually a can-can from the French Club and Monty Python sketches from us Junior Classical Leaguers.  Ancient Roman cuisine being questionable at best, my mom came up with the brilliant idea of making faux dormice out of radishes and toothpicks, and they always proved a huge hit at the Latin Club booth.  They also winked at the so-called "dormouse test", a term coined by classicist Mary Beard, basically the idea that the sooner a story set in ancient Rome mentions that most stereotypical of Roman delicacies the more likely the rest of it has very little basis in actual historical fact.  I think HBO's Rome made it to the second episode before referring to dormice, which seems about right given its overall respect for history and detail but still allowing a salacious diversion here and there.  Tom Holland says that Beard's new book Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town similarly dispels commonly-held misbeliefs about the doomed city while filling in many fascinating details:

Yet if Beard's book is a vivid demonstration that sceptical scholarship can provide as gripping a read as sensationalism, that does not mean that the author shrinks from providing her own exploration of what life might actually have been like. In many ways, it is an extraordinarily vivid one. Her Pompeii is a city in which dogs howl, late-night drunks carouse, and everyone has bad breath. It is a city in which, as Beard points out with some glee, a household of perhaps some 30 people had only a single lavatory between them, and the crowds at the amphitheatre not even that: "20,000 people and nowhere but the stairs and corridors to take a piss." Above all, it is a city that is infinitely messier and less systematised than the guide books ever allow: where the presence of sexually explicit graffiti on a wall does not necessarily suggest a brothel, and where the baths, as well as providing a bather with "a place of wonder, pleasure and beauty", were so polluted that "they might also have killed him".

And no mention of dormice until three-quarters of the way through, apparently.

clowning around

I have never been a fan of circuses, especially ones that use (and sometimes badly mistreat) animals.  However, one of my favorite books of all time, Amanda Davis's Wonder When You'll Miss Me, is a novel about a young woman who literally runs away to the circus, and the picture that Davis paints of life with the itinerant performers matches in my head what I see in the gorgeous images in Taschen's massive new book The Circus, 1870-1950.  There are glamorous, strong women and acts of bravery, but above all the performers seem to exhibit a sense of real belonging to their very unusual family.  Nell Gifford, owner of the Gloucestershire Giffords Circus, weighs in with her perspective:

The people in these photographs have rough hands and swollen ankles, but they squint into the sun and show us their trained snake, their hand-stitched costumes, their acrobatics which are not fearless but fear overcome by skill - with a pure, golden glamour.

I have to admit I can see the attraction.  No trained snakes for me though, on account of my severe phobia.

where are the good vibrations?

I have never had any freakin' clue how to write about music.  I can dissect lyrics, I can tell you what instruments are being played and by whom, but when it comes to describing why a certain track crosses that ephemeral barrier from pretty good into utterly sublime I'm often reduced to something along the lines of: "Wow this song rules!"  At least in his review of new books by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said about music Peter Conrad acknowledges that I'm not the only one who has this difficulty.  Both Barenboim and Said attempt to convey the power of music in their writing, but Said's Music at the Limits is plagued with typos and misspellings while conductor Barenboim tends toward the ridiculous in his Everything Is Connected: 

Barenboim, who says that he reads Spinoza in his dressing room during intervals, worries about 'musical ethics' and fusses over 'the moral responsibility of the ear'. I'm not sure that a sense organ can carry such a burden; we don't ask our penises to possess a conscience.

My ear definitely doesn't concern itself with morals or ethics, but it sure knows what it likes.  In terms of capturing in words the magic that music can weave, two things spring immediately to mind.  The first was an ad for the SF Opera that ran ten years ago that merely contained the phrase, printed large: "Designed to go in one ear and rush directly toward your soul."  I cut that out and tacked it to my wall.  The second, a phrase from T.S. Eliot's The Dry Salvages:

...music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.  

the sex life of plants

No one does fixation quite like the British, and the attention they pay to gardening is no exception.  Andrea Wulf's recent book The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession attributes the beginnings of this national pastime to a trio of early eighteenth century botanists - Peter Collinson, Philip Miller and Sir Joseph Banks.  Banks is the most famous of the three, and was well-known for both his generosity and his insatiable thirst for knowledge.  Wulf contrasts him with Carl Linnaeus who, for all his brilliance and his similar love of plants, was kind of a mean-spirited and manipulative jerk.  Linnaeus also had a particular sense of humor, writes Mark Cocker in his review:

Opposing Linnaeus' ideas became a point of chauvinist honour for most British botanists, but much of the joke was on them. One of the Swede's brilliantly simple ideas was to classify plants by counting their sexual parts, the pistils and stamens. Linnaeus took a salty delight in drawing parallels between the sexual lives of plants and humans. For instance he referred to the calyx, the green petal-like parts at the bottom of a flower head, as the "bedroom" (and, elsewhere, as the "lips of the cunt"). This earthy language was anathema to the prudish Britons, and one condemned his system on the ludicrous grounds that it was "too smutty for British ears". American botanists had no such qualms, and eventually commonsense prevailed. Even men like Miller and Collinson had to accept the growing Linnaean orthodoxy.

As for me, despite my own genuine interest in plants, my various attempts at gardening over the years have led me to admit I have the blackest of thumbs.  This is exactly why I get my fresh produce from Eatwell.  I let the professionals do the growing.

jamie hewlett: designs past and present

How in all hell did I not know Jamie Hewlett did a comic adaptation of Pulp's "Common People"?  I was even living in England at the time, heavily obsessed with both Jarvis Cocker and Hewlett's comics, so that was a huge miss on my part.  You can see a page from it in the gallery here along with a brief taste of Tank Girl and several pictures from Monkey: Journey to the West, the opera Hewlett designed that also features music by Damon Albarn.  Hewlett of course also worked with Albarn to form Gorillaz and created the cartoon members of the band.  I have always found his characters dead sexy, snaggle teeth and all, and yes I even dressed up in costume to go see the Tank Girl movie when it came out lo those many years ago.

So 8/8/08 is officially over as I write this.  Los Angeles and New York?  Got a new iteration of the Boredoms's fucking awesome BoaDrum performance today.  San Francisco?  Got World Hoop Day.  Suffice it to say I wish I had been in LA again this weekend.

I also skipped the reception for this year's Altered Barbie show tonight in favor of hanging with friends and watching The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, but the exhibition will be up until August 17th if you'd like to see Barbie and Ken doing multitudes of things Mattel never intended.

alexander solzhenitsyn 1918-2008

Just a few quotes from the plethora of stories online this morning about Solzhenitsyn, following his death this weekend of heart failure.  From his wife Natalya, who refers to his time in the Soviet gulag system:

"He wanted to die in the summer, and he died in the summer," she said. "He wanted to die at home, and he died at home. In general, I should say that Alexander Isaevich lived a difficult but happy life."

Solzhenitsyn revealed his experience in the prison camps in his thinly fictionalized novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published against all odds:

For many years he had little expectation that his writings would see the light of day but the daring One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich caused a sensation. Its revelations about Stalin's policies and the evils of the labour camps were described as "a literary miracle". Within weeks his name was known all over the world.

It's striking to me that after completing some short stories and a draft of a novel about the October Revolution in college (where he studied math and physics) it was while he was imprisoned that Solzhenitsyn really threw himself into writing, committing his own work to memory in case his papers were confiscated.  He was also quite vocal later on about the complicity of the Russian people in the horrors perpetrated by Stalin:

"Suddenly all the professors and engineers turned out to be saboteurs - and they believed it? ... Or all of Lenin's old guard were vile renegades - and they believed it? Suddenly all their friends and acquaintances were enemies of the people - and they believed it?''

May his life and his books remind us that sometimes the most important thing we can do is speak out.

the death of life writing

I love sinking my teeth into a good biography, whether it's a birth-to-death story of a fascinating individual like James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips, or a memoir told in a unique way as in Alison Bechdel's graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.  However, Kathryn Hughes, Guardian contributor and author of such biographies as George Eliot: The Last Victorian, is worried that the golden age of biography has officially passed.  She cites Amanda Foreman's book about Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (pictured as painted by Joshua Reynolds above), as the root of the problem, not that the book itself is bad, but that its runaway success encouraged the new crop of quickly-researched tomes about one mistress and socialite after another.  On a more practical level, the best subjects have already had their lives written, sometimes multiple times over.  Nigel Bates of my own Warwick University offers hope that biography is merely going through a paradigm shift as authors are forced to find new ways to tell familiar stories.  He offers fine recent examples like Charles Nicholl's The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street and Frances Wilson's The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, and Hughes adds even more of her own, including Alexander Masters's Stuart: A Life Backwards.  Despite some initial misgivings she is willing to give new biographical techniques a chance:

None of these aforementioned books on its own represents Bate's "paradigm shift", but taken together they do suggest that something significant is astir. Nor should we be complacent that, when the biographical future does arrive, we will necessarily like or even recognise it. The first time I heard about Stuart from Masters's publicist, I thought it sounded glum and dull - a view shared by Masters's then agent, who refused even to take the manuscript out of the Jiffy bag (he was soon replaced). All one can hope, really, is that a small but growing band of writers are financially and intellectually brave enough to strip biography back to its first principle - the recording of lived experience - and consider that brief in the widest possible terms. And even if we don't at first enjoy their efforts, perhaps finding them tricky or strange, at least it means that we will be spared too many more visits from those royal mistresses with their come-hither smiles.

All I know is that Hughes's article has given me a huge pile of books to add to my reading queue.  Maybe not the Georgiana bio though.

the day of judgment

Having grown up in a conservative church and private school in Orange County, California, I understand the lure of end-days theology.  I read every word of Revelation, heard the preachers who thought they'd cracked its code, checked in with Jesus every few months to make sure he knew I still accepted him as my lord and savior so he wouldn't miss me during the rapture.  Fortunately I outgrew the desire to take that final book of the Bible literally and much prefer Patrick's web-comic interpretation Apocamon: The Final Judgment, a glimpse of which you can see here.  Author Ian McEwan wrote a thoughtful piece published in the Guardian this weekend that nicely encapsulates a thousand years of apocalypse thinking, using Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium as a guidepost.  He sees discomforting parallels in current thinking, especially in America, to the superstitious beliefs of times gone by, and it's the radicals' startling lack of curiosity or uncertainty that really freaks him out.  He argues for some clearer vision:

Have we really reached a stage in public affairs when it really is no longer too obvious to say that all the evidence of the past and all the promptings of our precious rationality suggest that our future is not fixed? We have no reason to believe that there are dates inscribed in heaven or hell. We may yet destroy ourselves; we might scrape through. Confronting that uncertainty is the obligation of our maturity and our only spur to wise action. The believers should know in their hearts by now that, even if they are right and there actually is a benign and watchful personal God, he is, as all the daily tragedies, all the dead children attest, a reluctant intervener. The rest of us, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, know that it is highly improbable that there is anyone up there at all. Either way, in this case it hardly matters who is wrong - there will be no one to save us but ourselves.

In other words: quit watching the heavens for an advancing angel army, and do some good here on earth while you still can.  Death is the one thing about which we can be certain.  A Biblical apocalypse, not so much.

a thriller in ten chapters

When Robert McCrum started as the literary editor of the Observer in 1996 Amazon was still trying to gain traction after just having launched the year before and no had yet heard of Harry Potter.  Needless to say, the literary landscape has changed quite a bit since then.  On the occasion of his retirement from the newspaper McCrum has boiled his tenure down to 10 major events, from the astronomical advance Zadie Smith (pictured) received for her debut novel White Teeth (which I confess I still have not read, though On Beauty was an absolute delight to someone who spent her formative years literally soaking in E.M. Forster) to Amazon's recent introduction of the Kindle electronic reading device.  We have seen by now that despite some lofty predictions the printed page is not threatening to die out any time soon, and McCrum points out the ever-growing amount of written material that can be found on the Web simply offers another option to readers:

This, perhaps, explains the paradox that despite more book activity than ever, the book itself seems less central than before. Actually, what I have described are the birth pangs of a golden age. The market for the printed book is now global; the opportunities for the digital book are almost unimaginable. To be a writer in the English language today is to be one of the luckiest people alive.

Personally I know that for all of the reading I do online, from blogs to newspapers and everything in between, I would be loathe to replace the library books I read on the bus to and from work with a small screen of text.  Of course, I'm also dead curious to try a Kindle.

swimming in a sea of death

I have been a huge fan of Susan Sontag ever since On Photography cracked open my brain in college, and I was very saddened by her death several years ago after what sounded like an intensely painful battle with cancer.  When Annie Leibovitz published her photos of Sontag laid out in her coffin in Newsweek I was shocked, owing to my extreme personal discomfort with death, at the same time that I understood the photographer's impulse to document in the midst of her grief.  Leibovitz's recent show at the Legion of Honor helped put those images in context, as you could see in her snapshot-style pictures that she has been devoted to capturing Sontag as well as her entire family at all stages of their life.  However Sontag's son David Rieff has chosen to commemorate his mother in a different way, and earlier this year published the book Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir.  In a piece published in the Guardian on Sunday, he grapples with the decision he made after Sontag's diagnosis of myelodysplastic syndrome at the age of 71 to go along with his mother's insistence that she could beat this illness like she had two cancers before despite all evidence to the contrary.  He talks about why he lied but also what it cost him, and about why he eventually decided to write this memoir:

I still believe that I would not have done so had I been able to say goodbye to my mother properly. I am not talking about what in the United States is called 'closure', the idea that somehow there is a way of drawing a psychological line under an event and, as the expression goes, of 'moving on'. I don't believe there is any such thing and, if there is, it is not available to me. But I do not pretend to have served anyone but myself. Memoirs, like cemeteries, are for the living.

Rieff has very publicly disavowed Leibovitz's last photographs of Sontag, and I understand his feelings.  But death is such a confusing and world-shattering experience that I firmly believe there is no "right" way to deal with it, and we all just make it through any way we can.  Both Rieff's book and Leibovitz's photographs stand as a monument to a truly remarkable woman.