I have been reading the comments on news sites, and find it informative but really discouraging. Every crime report brings out cries of "scum"! as though some people (not us, heaven forbid! always "them") are irredeemable. Many people seem to want to believe this for some reason -- probably because it absolves everyone else of responsibility.

Helen Epstein gives a fascinating criticism of claims (like the one in 1992 by the US National Research Council) that there are genetic reasons why blacks are statistically more likely to be involved in violent crime in the US:

...wide fluctuations in murder rates occur much more rapidly than changes in the human genome, which may take thousands of years. Today homicide is more common in America than in Western Europe, but historians estimate that in the fourteenth and fifteen centuries, murder rates in London, Amsterdam, and Stockholm were just as high as they were in New York at the peak of the US crime wave in 1990. Until the 1960s, murder rates were generally lower in Africa than they were in Europe,so a race-specific 'violence gene,' if one existed, is unlikely to have come from Africa....

("America's Prisons: Is There Hope?" NYRB, June 11, 2009).

Album which I'd never heard before and can't believe I'd missed it:

Karma Sutra, Daydreams of a Production Line Worker (1987).

Oh, and despite not having read A Tale of Two Cities before, in my reading of the serial just last week I think I have now guessed at Sydney Carton's fate (obviously the residue of having the plot spoiled by references in previous reading over the last thirty years). It's heartbreaking not to be surprised; but I guess, with 150 years of hindsight, there really is no way to come to a work truly fresh.

George Gissing's New Grub Street is more than just my favourite Victorian novel -- it might be my favourite novel, full stop.

And from the VICTORIA list, someone notes that a British company selling consumer goods (don't know which one) spent ten thousand pounds on advertising in 1855. For those of us who think that mass advertising campaigns are a purely modern phenomenon....

Wish I had here a picture to share of Carlyle's ten-foot perambulating hat.

Band which you (and I) would be very surprised to find that I think is totally great to listen to:

Earth, Wind, and Fire.

So, in the interest of continuing to educate myself in Film, and really enjoying being fascinated by the material cultural and settings of old movies, and being in the mood for a little Cold War Paranoia, I watched The Manchurian Candidate (1962) for the first time. Its racism is certainly more nuanced than I expected, for instance. I loved the contradictions on that subject throughout: where the assassin demurs, for instance, "We don't need a translator -- everybody in this country speaks the same language" but later on while the Major (Sinatra) is in the police station someone in the background is holding a long jovial conversation in Spanish.

That is, I found it really funny as well as suspenseful. For instance: the marvellous bit at the convention in Madison Square Garden, where, y'know, the Future of the Free World Hangs in the Balance, and the two uniformed officers who Are The Only Hope are forced helplessly to stand at attention from the opening notes of "The Star-Spangled Banner," their eyeballs roaming frantically, their arms cocked in salute. How I laughed! (Was I supposed to?)

And that was a great performance by Angela Lansbury; it's her charisma as much as anything else that makes the object of the final assassination so unpredictable.

So last night my dream included watching the coronation of the Prince of Wales. The most impressive part of the dreaming process was that somehow my subconscious had the historical presence of mind to label him King Charles III.

Album I had forgotten about, but which really impresses me upon re-listen:

Throbbing Gristle, 20 Jazz Greats.

Just been watching (oh, the internet!) Angelo Mathews destroy the middle of the Indian batting order; having taught in Scarborough, and being a big fan of Sri Lankla's bowlers, they have become my favourite international cricket team by far.

Lots of fun; but I was also struck by one of the advertisements, for a subcontinental chain of hardware stores, and specifically by their promise of "More choices! Less prices!" My first thought was, "Wait, what? That's not idiomatic, is it?" In this I have been programmed by my reading of student essays (their constant mistaking of "less" for "fewer" and vice versa. "Less people," forsooth!).

But in fact, "Less prices" is probably quite right, and even more apt. Our own ads would say "Lower prices!" which lacks the perfect parallel of "more" with "less," both in logic and in number of syllables. Just because it's not idiomatic doesn't mean it's not a better way of saying things.

In fact, this is another thing I've discovered grading student essays; students for whom English is not their first language are capable of coming up with very elegant and felicitous phrases, in a way that the rest of us, schooled in common phraseologies, most often will not.

I am interested to find Coleridge's characterization of Hazlitt's manners as "singularly repulsive; brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange."

I wonder if that is the earliest occurence of the "shoe-gazer" in our English idiom?

Lately I have been running up hard against the classic problem of the bibliophile:

Not enough bookshelves.

But last night, with half a bottle of good red wine in me, coming back from dinner at Ian and Wulf's, I find a very serviceable wooden bookcase abandoned lonely against a hedge on the sidewalk just a few doors down from my place. Serendipity! So I tip it over on its side and, with a grunt, begin the process of single-handedly solving my bibliophilic dilemma.

Now, this is not an Ikea bookshelf, though it's about that size (around my height); it's made of sturdier wood, for one thing, and the shelves don't come out. This makes it sturdier, heavier, and more awkward to carry. Taking balance into consideration (because I could certainly lift heavier free weights), it's just about precisely at the upper limit of my strength. I get the thing through the screen door, and rest at the bottom of the stairs.

I live in a garrett, basically -- at the top of a very windy narrow staircase that also contains my bike. But by wiggling my arm into the space between the second layer of shelves, palm upward on the bottom of the second shelf, I can lift the bookcase vertically, much like a waiter carrying a tray, and that's how I get the bookcase up the stairs, under some rather low ceilings, around the railings, and past the bicycle, resting periodically at each landing. The thing was a beast, though, and doing all this alone and kinda drunk was probably the second most macho thing I've ever done in my life.

So anyway, now I've got it into my apartment, to my great satisfaction. But all of a sudden I have discovered that all of the available wall space where I could possibly put it is full, mostly of bookshelves; indeed, I have already been forced to use a small bookcase as a kind of space divider in the middle of the living/bedroom. So the new bookshelf is out in the middle of the room, still looking for a place. And I have discovered the bibliophile's second dilemma, after not enough bookshelves:

Not enough walls.

A post by sizztheseed reminds me that I just read a review of a new book on Prince Bandar by Patrick Tyler, who describes how George Tenet, visiting Bandar's palace in Riyadh in 2004,

suddenly aware that he is the designated scapegoat for the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and not adequately sedated by a sleeping pill, allegedly emerges from his bedroom in his underclothes, drinks half a bottle of scotch, denounces his enemies in Washington in unbridled terms, drinks more scotch, and then, to Bandar's alarm, throws himself into the swimming pool, where, grasping a large Havana cigar, he does imitations of Yasser Arafat and Omar Suleiman, the Egyptian intelligence chief.

Whoever leaked that story is surely getting into heaven.

Whilst ladies persist in maintaining the strictly defensive condition, men must naturally, as it were, take the opposite line, that of attack; otherwise, if both parties held aloof, there woud be no more marriages; and the two hosts would die in their respective inaction, without ever coming to a battle. Thus it is evident that as the ladies will not, the men must take the offensive. I, for my part, have made in the course of my life, at least a score of offensive attacks upon several strongly fortified hearts. Sometimes I began my works too late in the season, and winter suddenly came and rendered further labours impossible; sometimes I have attacked the breach madly, sword in hand, and have been plunged violently from the scaling-ladder into the ditch; sometimes I have made a decent lodgement in the place, when--bang! blows up a mine, and I am scattered to the deuce! and sometimes when I have been in the very heart of the citadel--ah, that I should say it!-- a sudden panic has struck me, and I have run like the British out of Carthagena!

One grows tired after a while of such perpetual activity. Is it not time that the ladies should take an innings? Let us widowers and bachelors form an association to declare that for the next hundred years we will make love no longer. Let the young women come and make love to us; let them write us verses; let them ask us to dance, get us ices and cups of tea, and help us on with our cloaks at the hall-door; and if they are eligible, we may perhaps be induced to yield and say, "La, Miss Hopkins--I really never--I am so agitated--ask papa!"

Thackeray, The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon (1844), chapter 1.

Ah, yes, Carlyle's Past and Present. It's a pretty remarkable, sprawling book, an excoriating piece of social criticism, written in a Hell of a Prose Style, which you will either adore or be bewildered by. But essentially Carlye's book has two parts: "The Ancient Monk" contrasted with "The Modern Worker," bookended by a "Proem" and "Horoscope."

For your purposes, looking at how the past survives into the present and troubles us, you might look at the opening chapters of each section. That is, "Jocelyn of Brakelond," where Carlyle recovers a relatively obscure medieval chronicler and casts him as a real historical person, and "Phenomena," where he talks about some crazy modern things that seem totally abstracted from reality, like the "seven-foot perambulating hat" (the ancestor of those modern urban ad-trucks which just drive around town all day doing nothing but wasting gas and being essentially mobile billboards). Also you might note in the latter chapter what Carlyle thinks of modern survivals of past customs, like the King's champion knight riding into Westminster Abbey at the coronation.

If you read those two chapters, you'll get a sense of whether Carlyle is worth grappling with for you, and whether you want to read the rest of each section. For me, the historiography is the most interesting part, and the descriptions of the everyday concerns of the medieval abbey of Bury St. Edmunds are fascinating. But for the Victorians, the social criticisms were the essential thing, and indeed some of what he has to say still has more than mere historical interest.

Past and Present should be readily available online, in a Gutenberg e-text if not better-edited somewhere. You'll want notes, though; so the best print edition is the one edited by Richard D. Altick.

One of my students, whom I encouraged to do a book-history kind of essay on a modern illustrated edition of Dracula, emails me saying:

I really shouldn't have done this project — I fear I may be addicted to
bibliography. I spent the entire night reading Paratexts and have been
enjoying research all day.

My response:

"Addicted to bibliography"? Excellent. It reminds me of the old horror movie Freaks, where the circus freaks all chant "One of us! One of us!"

I have no idea how one would eat sushi with a fork. I have been working on the notion that, just as we use different spoons for tea, dessert, soup, &c., chopsticks are just better for some things. Noodles chief among them.

I am always uncomfortable tackling a plate of linguini with a fork. At one of Stuart's dinner parties a while back, his appetizer was some sort of spring roll (Stuart apparently got heavily into Asian cooking when he had a roommate with a tendency to eat his food, so he tried to search out the most unfamiliar things in Chinatown so that his roommate wouldn't be tempted). The subsequent linguini-blue-cheese-tobiko thing that made up the main course was more accessible when I could hang onto the chopsticks from the appetizer.

Oh, that was the dinner where I brought the partridgeberry-apple wine that Steph had brought back from Newfoundland; while it was awfully sweet to get drunk on, it was the perfect dessert wine, especially after all that blue cheese.

sizztheseed's post on the subject of making kimchi and subsequent comment about "face" reminds me of a time when I was teaching ESL in Vancouver, and started tutoring the son of a woman, Janie, whom I had given English lessons to (her husband was a visiting professor from Seoul at UBC); she quit taking lessons from our agency, but quietly hired me to work with her son. During our lessons, she'd always talked about how proud she was of him, how bright and interesting he was, and I always smiled and nodded, since mothers are like that, but you know -- she was right. Jun Ho was indeed very creative and smart. I wonder how he's doing; I lost touch with them. He must be into his twenties by now.

Anyway, they were really generous and kind to me, and had me stay for dinner on occasion. One night they ordered sushi.

I had eaten (and made) a lot of sushi with Suzanne's grandmother (born in Canada, educated in Japan, but of the internment generation), and she had sort of instilled in me the idea that when picking up sushi off a communal plate to put on your own, the polite thing to do was to reverse your chopsticks and use the non-eating ends to pick up the food. So at dinner with this family, Janie spotted me doing that and very kindly asked me if I needed a fork.

I chuckled at that; I've always prided on being pretty good with chopsticks for a small-town white boy, but I'm sure it must have looked like clumsiness.

vashti's guess-the-music post (one of the songs is off "Appetite for Destruction," a very fine album but not one which I really ever feel like going out of my way to listen to) reminds me of a high school moment.

In the spring of 1988, my high school held its last (very) "wet" grad party before they switched over to "dry grads." These grad parties were legendary, comprised of 700 absolutely hammered teens in a farmer's field -- pretty impressive when you consider that our entire high school had 350 students over five grades -- drinking until dawn. Dancing like a fool, I fell backward off a hay wagon ("fell off the wagon," haha!) that year and was lucky not to have broken my neck. Other debauchery too awful to tell here, too, of course, culminating in a ride back to town lying in the bed of a pickup truck, staring at the morning sky and smelling the bonfire smoke in my shirt.

Anyway, my friends, being far too cool and far too stoned to request songs from the d.j., asked me to go up to him and get him to "Play us some Guns & Roses, man." I'm, like, "who the fuck are they? but sure," and I go gamely up to the d.j. and say "Play us some Guns & Roses, man" and he's, like, "who the fuck are they?"

So, yeah, my friends were a bit ahead of the curve. As you can imagine, over the next few years you heard almost nothing else at gravel pit parties across rural BC...

One thing struck me this time. I'm used to people confusing me for a grad student, and never take offense; it's like being carded at the liquor store, and anyway I too am still trying to find the most inoffensive way of asking that (my current strategy is "What level are you working at?" and perhaps "where are you at in the System?" might be good, as well, as long as it's said with a sort of wry grin).

But it was rather disconcerting to be talking to the chair of a panel I had attended and had asked a question at and to have him say, "Oh, I thought you were a very precocious undergraduate." Being youthful is all very well, but, I mean, I'm 36, man. Do I have to start wearing a suit? Maybe I need another haircut. Or am I asking puerile questions?

My own panel was the very last one of the conference, late Friday afternoon, and what with that and with concurrent panels and with there being only two papers (one of the presenters dropped out mysteriously), the panel was pretty mellow. It was a respectable crowd of twenty or so, but mostly just all my friends who were in attendance. That's good, because this particular paper (the "Forgotten Fantasy" one) was fun to present, full of pulp magazine covers and references to moustaches and psychedelia, and was very well received in the room, but it was kind of short on innovation. The sporting paper earlier this summer was probably the best thing I've done lately, and probably has more legs.

Seven weeks into reading A Tale of Two Cities in weekly 150th-anniversary installments, I've been keeping the schedule religiously, and enjoying it a lot. I get up on Thursday morning, print off the six pages of the weekly number, and read it over coffee. Reading takes about fifteen minutes, after which I staple the pages of the installment together and put them in a folder with the previous numbers. I tend to forget about the story over the intervening week, but occasionally on Wednesday I think, "Aha! Dickens tomorrow."

Some patterns are emerging. First, there is a real moment of readjustment with the first page; after all, it's been a week since I read the last one, with lots of printed and digital reading in between. This time, for instance, I had a hard time remembering what happened at the trial last week. But Dickens is very adroit at recalling your attention to names and events in sufficiently varied ways without giving an entire synopsis. Someone with more knowledge of rhetoric should do a study of this, because I'm coming to the conclusion that it's an essential part of his contemporary appeal. In line with my own interests in reading communities, all this makes me wonder if perhaps we now admire Dickens for different reasons than the Victorians did. The imprimatur that the Leavises eventually marked him with really marked a shift in the quality, though perhaps not the extent, of Dickens's reputation.

I also find myself reading the page with more care than I usually do. Partly, of course, I'm watching for patterns of narrative recall like the ones above, and reflecting on my own reading experience like a good scholar, but this desire not to miss any words also stems from the fact that the type is very close set. If you miss a couple of inches of type in an Oxford World's Classics paperback, you're not missing much; but if you miss a couple of inches in this one you're skipping over an entire paragraph or more. Is there a possibility that close type like this actually focuses the reader?

Finally, I get the feeling that we're missing out on a lot by not getting the rest of the magazine. I find myself scanning the final page after the end of the installment, reading about parliament, or turnips, or whatever, and thinking that I ought to go to the library and take a look at the other articles. I haven't done that yet, though.

I am gratified to find that the adjective "Scheherezadean" passes MS Word's spellcheck function. Maybe there's hope for civilization after all!

Just as, in reading O'Brian, I find all sorts of natural everyday expressions stemming from nautical terms ("at loggerheads," &c.), I am finding a few such expressions in the culture of the hunt: to "draw a blank," for instance ("drawing" being the action of sniffing out a bushy area or "cover" trying to flush out a fox, and "blank" being, obviously, a failure to find).

Also "painting the town red," which refers pretty literally to the exploits of the Marquis of Waterford and his friends in Melton Mowbray one drunken night in 1837.

Been reading up on the ancient English institution of fox-hunting for my upcoming conference paper, and poring over issues of The Sporting Magazine and The New Sporting Magazine from the early 1800s. It's been fun. What marvellous pseudonyms those old sporting writers adopted: Charles Apperley's immortal "Nimrod" of course, but also "The Druid," and "Sylvanus Swanquill." All redolent of antiquarian taste and bucolic Latinity.

So the other day I was looking through the microforms of, first Bell's Life in London and Sporting News, poring over the entire year of 1833 looking for reviews of William Hamilton Maxwell's anonymously-published Field Book. Bell's Life is particularly charming, all close-set pages, the right margins packed with dodgy advertisements for dog biscuits, guns, smutty books like "The Life and Amours of the celebrated Earl of Rochester, including his Amatory Poems, &c." or "The New Frisky Songster, a prime lot of love songs, for Gentlemen only," -- followed by various venereal ointments.

Anyway, I had one of those moments of archival joy when, my eyes aching (goddamn microforms), I found precisely the review I was looking for, in the May issue of the New Sporting Magazine. Not only that, it confirmed my reading of the book almost precisely.

Of course, I've since discovered the magazine on Google Books, where I could've just used control-f. But still, it was a very rewarding experience.