Of The Minor Characters in Middlemarch

The one that I would most like to write a novel about, set mostly during his dashing early years, is Cpt. Lydgate: “He had, moreover, that sort of high-breeding which consists in being free from the petty solicitudes of middle-class gentility, and he was a great critic of feminine charms” (Ch. LVIII).

Norman Mailer remarked that he couldn’t get past the bananas in Gravity’s Rainbow. I have now passed the equivalent point in Against The Day. We are too accustomed to Pynchon, I think, to appreciate him.

Success in Croaker Fishing; Lem's Chain of Chance

I did happen to catch and release a croaker considerably larger than the one pictured below, but I chose not to photograph it so as not to compromise the considerable dignity of that aged fish. It was then caught and eaten by a mocking otter.

I’m also catching up on the Litvinenko news and theories, and I have wondered what the odds are that it was a situation similar to that described in Lem’s book. Given the origin of polonium-210, I’d suppose that’d be nearly impossible; but that’s just the kind of one-thousandeth of a percent doctrine Lem invoked. Perhaps there’s been research into applied tychomancy. I also enjoy the logical abyss of spiraling motivations brought on by this case, which I should separate from the quite-real horror of both how he died and (if true) that which he wrote about.

Delightful Wallpaper

I recently finished this entry in the most recent Interactive Fiction competition. The game, written by Andrew Plotkin, noted IF auteur, under the pseudonym Edgar O. Weyrd (anagram of “Edward Gorey”), has two section: the first is the best IF-implementation of a Rhem-like game I’ve ever played. While nowhere near as complex or difficult as the aforementioned graphical puzzlers, which I first learned about from Plotkin’s reviews of, it is tricky. The game has a unique feature of keeping track of all the changes your movements make through the house, which is both nifty and difficulty-reducing.

Now is the Time

A textual note about “Matinee D’Ivresse”: “ASSASSINS dans le ms est en plus grand caracteres et souligne” (Pleiade, 1963).

You can also learn, at least in this edition, about the then-recent vogue for Robert Faurisson’s topo-typo-erotic interpretation of “Voyelles,” along with some suitably apoplectic remarks from Etiemble. Perhaps the unhappy fate of that controversy is what turned Faurisson mad; perhaps he always was. Granting his premise, his reading of “O”’s “l’extase finale,” however, given what we know of Rimbaud’s tastes, might have been a bit off the mark. I wonder how long it took someone to point that out.

Mallarmé's Preface to Vathek

Borges cites this approvingly in his essaylet, “On William Beckford’s Vathek,” and he also notes that it is almost impossible to read because of Mallarme’s “etymological dialect.” Belloc also called Beckford one of the “vilest men of all time,” which is quite a compliment, considering.

Also, Borges’s remark about the distinction between the atrocious place and the place of atrocity in versions of hell is nice.

A Fine Anecdote

You remember Tennyson reading an unpublished poem to Jowett; when he had finished, Jowett said, I shouldn’t publish that if I were you, Tennyson. Tennyson replied, If it comes to that, Master, the sherry you gave us at lunch was downright filthy.

As told by Philip Larkin in his Paris Review interview.

I also recommend Larkin’s “Who is Jorge Luis Borges?”

And I suppose this, also:

I suppose everyone has his own dream of America. A writer once said to me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast; the rest is a desert full of bigots. That’s what I think I’d like: where if you help a girl trim the Christmas tree you’re regarded as engaged; and her brothers start oiling their shotguns if you don’t call on the minister. A version of pastoral.

I Use The Book of Ephraim As An Oracle

Will Adam Morrison average more than 15 pts. a game this season?

Had left heredity, Narcissus bent
Above the gene pool. As at a thrown stick
Still waking echoes of that give-and-take
—Repercussions dire in the event—

I would interpret that as a yes, though with perhaps historically low rebound and assist figures. Who are other players who tend to score a lot and do nothing else?

Some of My People, Viewed by An Irascible Frenchman, A While Ago

fryday 15th. Set out from the vessel with my servant and portmantle on his Sholder. we walked 7 miles to where there were some whale fishers tents, and got one of them to Cary us over the Sound [Core Sound] in their boat to Beaufort, a Small vilage not above 12 houses, the inhabitants seem miserable, they are very lasy and Indolent, they live mostly on fish and oisters, which they have here in great plenty. (733)

Azoth

Bombastus kept a devil’s bird
Shut in the pommel of his sword,
That taught him all the cunning pranks
Of past and future mountebanks
(Hudibras II.3)

Browning quotes this in the heroically pedantic notes to his Paracelsus.

First Words

I’m increasingly interested in the work of Paul Laffoley (and hope to see the exhibit running between Jan 4 and Feb 17 at the Kent Gallery). One of the bits of lore that Laffoley tends to repeat in interviews and his writings is that his first word, spoken at six months of age, was “Constantinople.” He then purportedly remained silent for several years afterwards.

Thinking perhaps that the meaning here may be to change the world, not interpret it, I noticed the following from Stefan Collini’s Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain: “Trawling through the literature on the Dreyfus affair, I eventually discovered the original of General Mercier’s remarks: ‘At the moment when the Turkish army forced the ramparts of Constantinople, the so-called intellectuals of the capital of the Lower Empire were debating theological quibbles. We, too, are undergoing our acute paroxysm of intellectual Byzantinism’” (25).