Epic histories remix

I had a very good concentrated spell of work this morning, the task being to revise the syllabus for my Epic Histories class and get the new information out to students. (I've promised them a digital "packet" as well - a single PDF with all the pages for option 1 - on the grounds that sometimes when things are overwhelming it's easier to just read one thing that you could even open on your phone as opposed to wrangling different books and digital files. Planning to use CamScanner - upgraded today to Pro and am hoping that I will be able combine individual page images into a single file within the app.)

Here's the new version of the rest of the semester. I've cut a few things altogether (Nadar's memoir! Benjamin on photography!) and given a bare-minimum option for those whose concentration is failing them. In going through my old class notes and the pages of the Arcades Project, I kind of fell in love with it all over again....

p.s. I think I got the idea of three different levels from the way you show poses as a progression in a yoga class!

Revised syllabus (spring 2020)

3/30 Option 1:

Decline and Fall 1:446, 1:471-74, 1:518-21, 1:524, 1:576-81
Pocock, “Gibbon and the primitive church,” 50-53, 66-68
Pocock, “Putney, Oxford and the question of English Enlightenment,” 44-46

Option 2:

Option 1 + all of chapter XVI

Option 3: original reading

Decline and Fall chapters XIV-XVI (vol. 1)

*J.G.A. Pocock, “Gibbon and the primitive church,” in History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750-1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 48-68
*Pocock, “Putney, Oxford and the question of English Enlightenment,” in Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737-1764 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 13-49
*David Womersley, “Gibbon and the ‘Watchmen of the Holy City’: Revision and Religion in the Decline and Fall,” from Edward Gibbon and Empire, ed. Rosamond McKitterick and Roland Quinault (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997),190-216
*B. W. Young, “Gibbon, Newman, and the Religious Accuracy of the Historian,” from The Victorian Eighteenth Century: An Intellectual History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 70-102

4/6 Arcades: an introduction

Option 1:

Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 13
Convolute C: epigraph through C6 (82-83), C4 (90-91), C6a,2 + C7,1 (95), 9a,2 (100)
Sieburth, “Benjamin the Scrivener,” 7-11
Johnson, “Passage Work,” 82-84

Option 2:

Option 1 + all of “Paris, the Capital…” and Sieburth

Option 3: original reading

Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1935) (AP 2-13)
Convolutes A, C and P: “Arcades, Magasins de Nouveautés, Sales Clerks” (AP 31-61), “Ancient Paris, Catacombs, Demolitions, Decline of Paris” (AP 82-100), “The Streets of Paris” (AP 516-526)

*Richard Sieburth, “Benjamin the Scrivener,” Assemblage 6 (1988): 6-23
*Barbara Johnson, “Passage Work,” in Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project, ed. Beatrice Hanssen (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), 66-86
*“Encounters,” from Peter Buse, Ken Hirschkop, Scott McCracken and Bertrand Taithe, Benjamin’s Arcades: An unGuided tour (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), 1-12

4/13 Baudelaire I

Option 1:

Convolute J: J1,5 (230), J3,2 (233), J3a,1 (234), J41,3 (302), J44,3 (308), J51a,5 (321), J55a,5 (329), facing pages 332-33
Baudelaire, “The Sun”/Le Soleil,” “The Swan”/“Le Cygne”

Option 2:

Option 1 + further reading in Convolute J

Option 3: original reading

Convolute J: “Baudelaire” (228-386)
Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life”

*T. J. Clark, “Should Benjamin Have Read Marx?,” boundary 2 30:1 (2003): 31-49
*Max Pensky, “Tactics of Remembrance: Proust, Surrealism, and the Origin of the Passagenwerk,” in Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, 164-189

4/20 Baudelaire II

Option 1:

The four spleen poems
Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 182-85
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd”

Option 2:

Option 1 + Haroutunian 62-67 (not on original syllabus)

Option 3: original reading

*Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” from Illuminations (155-200)
Selections from The Flowers of Evil: “To the Reader”/“Au lecteur,” “Correspondences”/“Correspondances,” “A Former Life”/“La vie antérieure,” “The Ideal”/“L’Idéal,” “‘I love you as I love . . .’”/ “‘Je t’adore à l’égal,” “Spleen” 1-IV, “The Taste for Nothingness”/“Le Goût du néant,” “The Sun”/“Le Soleil,” “The Swan”/“Le Cygne,” “To a Woman Passing By”/“A une passante,” “Gaming”/“Le Jeu,” “Meditation”/“Recueillement”

4/27 Baudelaire III

Option 1:

Convolute M: M3a,4 (423), M5,6 (427), M13a,2 (442), M16,3 (446), facing pages 447-48
Convolute m: m2,1 (801-2)
Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur,” 33-43

Option 2:

Add full Buck-Morss

Option 3: original reading

Convolutes M, m: “The Flâneur” (AP 416-455), “Idleness” (AP 800-806)

*Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,” in Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project, 33-65
*Françoise Meltzer, “Money (La chambre double)” (selections), from Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 138-180

5/4 Knowledge, Progress, History

Option 1:

“Theses on the Philosophy of History”: IX (257), XIV (261), XVII (263)
Convolute N: N1,3 (456), N1,10 (458), N1a,8 + N2,1 (460), N3,4 (463), N4,2 + 4,3 (464), N7a,7 (470), N9,6 + N9,8 (473), N9a,6 (474), N10,3 (476), N15,2 (481), N19,2 (487)
Rolleston, “The Politics of Quotation,” 13-17
Arnaldo Momigliano, “Historicism Revisited,” in Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 365-73

Option 2:

Option 1 + all of Convolute N and the “Theses”

Option 3: original reading

Convolute N: “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress” (AP 456-488)

*Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations (253-64)
*Letter from W. Benjamin to G. Adorno
*James L. Rolleston, “The Politics of Quotation: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project,” PMLA 104:1 (Jan. 1989): 13-27
*Stathis Gourgouris, “The Dream-Reality of the Ruin,” in Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project, 201-24
*“The Angel of History,” from Benjamin’s Arcades: An unGuided tour, 95-104

*Arnaldo Momigliano, “Historicism Revisited,” in Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 365-73

"The glacier is experienced as a silence"

At the TLS, Robert Macfarlane on the memory of ice:

Ice is a recording medium and a storage medium. It collects and keeps data for millennia. Unlike our hard disks and terrabyte blocks, which are quickly updated or become outdated, ice has been consistent in its technology over millions of years. Once you know how to read its archive, it is legible almost as far back – as far down – as the ice goes.

"Kept from myself"

Walter Benjamin to Gretel Adorno, April/May 1940, on the text that would later be published as "Theses on the Philosophy of History": "As for your question about my notes, which were probably made following the conversation under the horse-chestnut trees, I wrote these at a time when such things occupied me. The war and the constellation that brought it about led me to take down a few thoughts which I can say that I have kept with me, indeed kept from myself, for nigh on twenty years. This is also why I have barely afforded even you more than fleeting glances at them. The conversation under the horse-chestnut trees was a breach in those twenty years. Even today, I am handing them to you more as a bouquet of whispering grasses, gathered on reflective walks, than a collection of theses. The text you are to receive is, in more ways than one, a reduction."

The artist moved to despair

Fuseli, "The artist moved to despair before the grandeur of ancient ruins" (1778-79) (via)

From Catherine Edwards, Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City: “The nature of the artist’s despair remains open. Is it provoked by the impossibility of emulating the greatness of the past, still overwhelming even in ruins? By the knowledge that even the greatest works of art will decay? Or is it rather caused by the unassuageable longing for a closer contact with the long vanished dead? These ruins, though of vast stature, are yet human in form; the artist stretches out his hand to touch flesh that turns out to be cold, unresponsive stone” (15).

"The night is for the dead"

Hilary Mantel on why she became a historical novelist (this is A Place of Greater Safety, her novel of Robespierre, which I remember reading at the recommendation of my brilliant teacher Simon Schama circa 1993):

I wasn’t after quick results. I was prepared to look at all the material I could find, even though I knew it would take years, but what I wasn’t prepared for were the gaps, the erasures, the silences where there should have been evidence.

These erasures and silences made me into a novelist, but at first I found them simply disconcerting. I didn’t like making things up, which put me at a disadvantage. In the end I scrambled through to an interim position that satisfied me. I would make up a man’s inner torments, but not, for instance, the colour of his drawing room wallpaper.

Because his thoughts can only be conjectured. Even if he was a diarist or a confessional writer, he might be self-censoring. But the wallpaper – someone, somewhere, might know the pattern and colour, and if I kept on pursuing it I might find out. Then – when my character comes home weary from a 24-hour debate in the National Convention and hurls his dispatch case into a corner, I would be able to look around at the room, through his eyes. When my book eventually came out, after many years, one snide critic – who was putting me in my place, as a woman writing about men doing serious politics – complained there was a lot in it about wallpaper. Believe me, I thought, hand on heart, that there was not nearly enough.

Conjectural histories

I have completely succumbed, by the way, to the allure of Gibbon.  Excited about working on this project!  Here are two small bits that may convey some of the quality I find so irresistible in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

On Gordianus, father and son:

When he reluctantly accepted the purple, he was above fourscore years old; a last and valuable remains of the happy age of the Antonines, whose virtues he revived in his own conduct, and celebrated in an elegant poem of thirty books.  With the venerable proconsul, his son, who had accompanied him into Africa as his lieutenant, was likewise declared emperor.  His manners were less pure, but his character was equally amiable with that of his father.  Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than for ostentation.  

(The note to that last sentence reads: "By each of his concubines, the younger Gordian left three or four children.  His literary productions, though less numerous, were by no means contemptible.")

Or again, in a more contemplative vein (on the difficulty of writing about the empire c. 248-268 CE):

The confusion of the times, and the scarcity of authentic memorials, oppose equal difficulties to the historian, who attempts to preserve a clear and unbroken thread of narration.  Surrounded with imperfect fragments, always concise, often obscure, and sometimes contradictory, he is reduced to collect, to compare, and to conjecture: and though he ought never to place his conjectures in the rank of facts, yet the knowledge of human nature, and of the sure operation of its fierce and unrestrained passions, might, on some occasions, supply the want of historical materials.

The transition to summer

Always awkward and more protracted than I would like! But this is the beginning of a full year of sabbatical - I won't be teaching again till September 2017 - and once I get into a groove, it should be pretty idyllic. I'll be based mostly in NYC with frequent trips to Cayman, but I have two really exciting additional places to be.

(And most immediately, I'll be embarking on the "Reading Austen" book and working on a few smaller non-academic bits, including a piece about Jenny Diski. Clarissa project has not been forgotten but is temporarily on the back burner....)

I'll spend the Michaelmas term (early October through early December) as an Oliver Smithies visiting lecturer at Balliol College, Oxford (I'll be working on the literary history of the footnote with special emphasis on Gibbon and history-writing).

And I'll spend six weeks in February and March as Sovern/Columbia Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Here is the project I'll be working on (I'm really excited about this!):

“Gibbon’s Rome”

“It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October 1764,” wrote Edward Gibbon in a draft of his memoirs, “as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind.” Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire would expand to treat the long history of the empire as it migrated east, not just the history of the city in which the empire had its origin, and his research took place in libraries, cabinets of medals and so forth in London, Paris, Lausanne and Geneva as well as in the streets of Rome. But the physical landscape of Rome as Gibbon first encountered it in the 1760s provided much of the emotional impetus for the project, and the city figures in the history in a number of different ways.

In “Gibbon’s Rome,” I am proposing a long essay or a short book (probably in the region of 40,000 words) that tells the story of what Gibbon saw in Rome and what it meant to him. I am envisioning a narrative not oriented exclusively towards scholarly readers but written more in the style of something like Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome; another model, in a rather different vein, is Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence. The narrative will weave together a number of different strands with the goal of producing a lively narrative history with a literary-critical bent: recounting the series of choices and accidents that led Gibbon to Rome as a place and a topic; reading important passages from some of the works of history that were formative for Gibbon (this is a book about Gibbon’s reading as well as about Gibbon as tourist!) in earlier years and that contributed to the research techniques and evidentiary protocols that underpin Decline and Fall; considering the rise of the Grand Tour as a mode of self-cultivation and development for wealthy young British men over the first half of the eighteenth century; vividly describing the streets and buildings Gibbon walked through, the state they were in during this period and the kinds of collections of artifacts he was able to visit and examine; and of course analyzing and celebrating the language of Decline and Fall. I will draw on visual and journalistic records made by other visitors during the same period in order to bring the setting most powerfully to life.

My goal in this project is not just to recount the history of one historian’s relationship with one city, though that will occupy a good deal of my attention, but also to use the story of Gibbon’s encounter with Rome as a case study that gives us more general insight into how eighteenth-century writers came to understand the relationship between past and present and the tools for narrating and comprehending historical change. The context in which I developed this project involves a longstanding interest in the battle of ancients and moderns as it was worked out in Britain by combative writers like the textual editor Richard Bentley, Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, and my large-scale research project for the next few years will be to do the groundwork for an ambitious literary history of the footnote in the long eighteenth century. My interest in the footnote really derives from the fact that, as the scholar Evelyn Tribble has observed in an essay on the history of the transition from marginal annotation to footnotes, the shape of the page often becomes “more than usually visible” at periods when “paradigms for receiving the past are under stress”: “In the early modern period, as models of annotation move from marginal glosses to footnotes, the note becomes the battlefield upon which competing notions of the relationship of authority and tradition, past and present, are fought” (“‘Like a Looking-Glas in the Frame’: From the Marginal Note to the Footnote,” in The Margins of the Text, ed. D. C. Greetham [Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997], 229-244). Gibbon will feature in a chapter of that projected monograph, with the tension between the evidentiary impulse of the notes to the Decline and Fall and their fundamentally skeptical or ironic orientation towards the main narrative providing a starting point for a closer investigation of the footnote in British and French history-writing during this period. But I feel that there’s enough material, in the question of what Gibbon’s monumental history tells us about his own and his contemporaries’ understanding of the relationship between past and present as we comprehend it by way not just of books but by movement through ruins and landscapes and by interaction with historical artifacts, that I’ve made a commitment to pursue this smaller-scale project as a complement to the bigger one.

Six weeks at the American Academy in Rome would provide the ideal setting for some physical exploration of sites and museums alongside time in the library reading some of the narrative histories from which Gibbon took his inspiration as well as modern scholarship on the history of archeology and antiquities in Italy, museums and other viewing sites, other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British visitors’ accounts of their relationship to the city, practices of historical restoration or reconstruction and so forth. An initial list of authors and books of particular interest to me would include Cicero, Livy’s histories, Erasmus’s Ciceronianus and the associated debate on Latin style, Bayle, Voltaire, Bossuet, le Sueur, de la Bléterie’s Life of Julian and Guischardt’s Mémoires critiques et historiques sur plusieurs points d'antiquités militaires. I would especially love to look closely through the collection of historical maps in the Rare Book Room; serendipity has a large role to play in this sort of project, and there will be no substitute for being physically on-site as I embark upon this research.

"Documents, ink, methods of drying"

I loved this Paris Review interview with Hilary Mantel. I have been reading her for a long time, ever since my college professor and literary inspiration Simon Schama recommended A Place of Greater Safety to me c. 1993 (and then I read all the backlist):

When I began work on the French Revolution, it seemed to me the most interesting thing that had ever happened in the history of the world, and it still does in many ways. I had no idea how little the British public knew or cared or wished to know about the French Revolution. And that’s still the case. They want to know about Henry VIII.

The Zone

An excerpt from Voices from Chernobyl at n+1.

Lost sound

At the LRB, a great piece by Colm Tóibín on two new books about the eighteenth-century castrati:

The French soprano Emma Calvé wrote in her autobiography about hearing the castrato Domenico Mustafà in 1891: ‘He had an exquisite high tenor voice, truly angelic, neither masculine nor yet feminine in type – deep, subtle, poignant in its vibrant intensity … He had certain curious notes which he called his fourth voice – strange, sexless tones, superhuman, uncanny!’ Another writer wrote of a castrato voice that it was ‘so soft, and ravishingly mellow, that nothing can better represent it than the Flute-stops of some Organs’, which themselves were ‘not unlike the gentle Fallings of Water’.

Nonetheless, as Feldman writes, ‘we still lack access to the sound of the castrato’s voice, save some early recordings of the last castrato.’ It is as though we had the letters of Wordsworth and Coleridge and some reviews of their work, or some wonderful descriptions of Impressionist painting, but not the things themselves – the poems or the paintings.

Plague, pestilence

What was the plague that hit Athens in the summer of 430 BCE?

The sorrows of gin

My former student Siobhan Phillips on women and the gin market.

The originals

Richard Price's history of the NYC Housing Authority:

In most housing projects these days, a hard-times hidden economy thrives, what Mark Jacobson and others call the gray market, consisting of improvised and in some cases ingenious ways of making ends meet—apartments doubling as daycare centers, some licensed, some not; takeaway lunches sold out the door or lowered from the window; a legion of bootleg car mechanics whose garage is the street; come-to-your-house handymen, plumbers, carpenters, computer programmers, and repairmen; just-text-me drivers for hire; CD and DVD duplicators leaving for the commercial strips of Fordham Road, Harlem, and elsewhere; wholesale candy hustlers, kids mostly, heading out to Grand Central Station, Penn Station, and tourist-centric Times Square, introducing themselves as grassroots fundraisers in order to sell ten-cent chocolate bars for two dollars a pop, a 2,000 percent markup.

Sedimentalism

At the LRB, Ferdinand Mount on David Bromwich's Edmund Burke (subscription only):

If politics is a science, then it is a kind of geology. As J.W. Burrow puts it, ‘the common law is not a creation of heroic judges but the slow, anonymous sedimentation of immemorial custom; the constitution is no gift but the continuous self-defining public activity of the nation.’ Burke is a sedimentalist, just as he is, in a non-pejorative sense, a sentimentalist. The sentiments of the people, himself included, are political facts accreted over time, which cannot be ignored or easily overridden in the interests of abstract principles, however desirable. The thought experiment so beloved of philosophers from Hobbes and Locke to John Rawls, of men in the state of nature coming together to conclude a social contract, would have seemed to Burke a sophistical fantasy. Burke foreshadows the 19th century in seeing everything – law, morality, solidarity – as historically evolved, the outcome of experience rather than design.

Things I saw and ate and thought about this week

On Tuesday: looking down at the Baha'i Temple from the panorama in Haifa; a walk around Nazareth, followed by lunch at Al-Reda (the best grilled vegetables I have ever eaten, and an angelically good salad with oranges, pistachios, bean sprouts and baby greens) and then a dessert from a bake shop, evocative to and devoured by the Israeli friends I was with but slightly overwhelming to me (I was still just wiped out from travel, and feeling a bit queasy!), an incredibly rich flat square of pastry with a layer of cheese topped by a layer of shredded phyllo dough all drenched in syrup and warm out of the oven (we waited for a new batch, it came out in a huge tray); then to Tiberias/Capernaum in the Lower Galilee for a walk through the church and monastery grounds at (I think) Tabgha.

We had two more sites on the day's projected itinerary, but it was nearly five o'clock, we'd left from the hotel at 9:30 and I was absolutely dropping - I had to plead fatigue and beg for us to return to Tel Aviv!

On Wednesday, I was working frenetically to sort out the second of my two talks and put together appropriate handouts for both - normally this is what I would have done before I left (I especially prefer to travel with all the copies of handouts already made, and hard copies of speaking notes in case of some computer-related calamity), but B.'s father's death and the unexpected trip to Ottawa knocked out the two days I'd set aside for that last week (right up until I left town, I was reading huge stacks of other work stuff - on Wednesday last week, for instance, I had a meeting to decide on Whiting fellowships for which I needed to read sixty applications, and then on Thursday the last thing I did before leaving for the airport was a meeting to pick the award-winning departmental MA essays, which also involved hundreds of pages of reading).

I should have done the prep Monday, which was my quiet day at the hotel, but I was too tired. Bad moment Wednesday late morning when the computer suddenly restarted itself (I suppose it was 11 or 12 Tel Aviv time, i.e. 3am or 4am EST) - Word has this wretched habit of not preserving the autosaved document unless the program has shut down irregularly, i.e. not when the computer shuts everything down for updates, and I wasted a good half an hour trying to retrieve five minutes of work that fatigue made me feel I could hardly bear to recover from brain as opposed to hard drive, though really it would have been easier and less stressful just to write it again!

Both talks went very well, I think, and I had dinner afterwards near the university with my friend and host. It is slightly comical the extent to which I am most myself - happy, focused, energetic - when I am in a classroom.

On Wednesday night I slept well, and I woke up Thursday feeling much better. We went to Jerusalem, which was as extraordinary as one might imagine (the only other place I have been in my life that is so shockingly visually iconic was Red Square, Moscow). An amazing thing: you can pay a modest fee and walk the ramparts of the Old City (here's more information - they were built by Suleiman in the sixteenth century, and it gives you an intense albeit historically fuzzy feeling of the crusades etc.!). What you can see, what you can imagine - really quite extraordinary.

The stairs are very deep, but modern railings make it quite safe; there was only a precipitous metal spiral staircase or two to give me a bad moment. We walked quickly round many of the main sites (Golgotha, the Western Wall) and ate amazing hummus and falafel at Abu Shukri. Pleasant delayed-onset muscle soreness in following days from genuinely strenuous walking.

Quiet days on my own in Tel Aviv Friday and Saturday, doing a lot of walking along the promenade (to Jaffa, where I saw the so-called Andromeda rocks, and also north to the old port). It is a gorgeous city, incredibly easy and enjoyable to visit (more so I think than any other place I have ever traveled to.

Alas, I was coming down with a respiratory infection, so I neither ran along the promenade nor had another swim in the amazing 50m Gordon Pool - but walking is good regardless....

I especially liked the hotel I was being put up in by the university, the Melody Hotel. It was one of these small boutique hotels that is somehow perfectly comfortable - not lavish exactly, but really amazing breakfast (also daily happy hour with wine and delicious snacks) and free wifi and a roof deck the like of which one can hardly imagine. Little fridge in the room, and super-convenient markets and ATM and so forth nearby, also a ton of restaurants (I had a particularly good meal on my own at one deli-type one, one of these meat and cheese platters that turns out to be just sublimely delicious, but I think I have misplaced the card and cannot reconstruct the exact name).

And a final very nice dinner with my friend at Rustico (pasta puttanesca), followed by toffee ice cream from Iceberg.

Minor reading on related topics (I am a person who mostly prefers to avoid thinking about politics, but really one cannot do so all the time, and the most disconcerting and, really, dismaying moment I had on the whole trip involved an enjoyable conversation with two extremely nice young journalists from London, visiting on a promotional trip funded by the Israeli tourist board - we were all watching the sunset from the hotel roof - during which it rapidly emerged that they knew nothing, I mean absolutely nothing, about Israel's twentieth-century history: nothing about the expulsion of the Palestinians, nothing about the history of hostilities with Egypt and Lebanon and Syria, nothing whatsoever about the Occupied Territories; I am a professor to the core, I could not help but give a short impromptu lecture, though it is really not one of my preferred topics! Their eyes were like saucers!): two books, each of which is about 60% great and 40% less so, the first because of a sort of columnist's liking for airy and/or emotional generalizations and the second because by necessity it includes so much not-very-interesting detail about a young visitor's coming-of-age post-college - though of course that is precisely the detail required to make the other content so shocking.

Ari Shavit's My Promised Land is extremely absorbing, especially in its account of the country's early years. I was fascinated by the story of how the "Masada ethos" came into being - I had been wondering why my host didn't mention Masada at all, as it looms relatively large in my imagination of Israel due to the TV series, which I did not see but which was very much talked about by my classmates - I suppose the year it came out I was in fifth grade or so? Shavit's book makes it much clearer to me than it had been before why a present-day Israeli leftist might not automatically single out that particular site for visiting! The description of the Israeli nuclear program is also fascinating. Here is a thoughtful review of Shavit's book; my criticisms would be more literary (why, oh why do these reporters have to narrate things in the present tense, and attribute to real historical individuals impossibly specific sequences of thoughts at specific times and places sixty or seventy years in the past? plus aforementioned columnist-style verbiage).

Pamela Olson's Fast Times in Palestine: A Love Affair with a Homeless Homeland is also highly worthwhile. It claims the authority not of deep knowledge and longtime expertise but rather of witnessing. I've seen quite a bit along these lines before, obviously, but this gives a much more detailed account of the ordinary lives of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories over the last ten years or so.

I'm taking suggestions for other reading. I can't read really dense policy stuff, the narrative history mode is more of a default for me, but please recommend in the comments or by email anything you think I would find particularly worthwhile. I think I'm going to go and get some of the academic history from the library - I have been meaning to read this one for instance for quite a long time, now I really will get it and crack it open....

After this, then, the irony (the shame?) of posting this record of what the texture of my week was like!

Midweek brain fog

I feel that I am operating at only about 60% functionality due to fatigue - it is not good! My Friday meeting this week is canceled, which gives me a bit of a breather (usually I have a Wednesday morning deadline for initial round of reading and reports), but on the other hand I have to write up some thoughts for my other committee by late morning today, if I can pull myself together sufficiently. Hoping to fit in a run at some point, but it has been a disastrous winter for exercise, and it's not quite as warm today as I had hoped....

No Exit at the Pearl was thoroughly enjoyable (tasty dinner afterwards at Ktchn - it is bizarre that there should be a restaurant of that ilk on that block, times have changed!).

Two funny things later today: first of all, at three some people are coming to my apartment to film interview footage for Aaron Brookner's documentary about his uncle Howard Brookner, a documentary filmmaker and admirer of William Burroughs; Brookner did not live in my actual apartment while he was at Columbia in the 70s, but it was one with similar layout in the same building, and the notion is that it can be used to capture the flavor of life here at that time.

Then at 6:15 it's the Rape of the Lock reading! Hmmm, must not forget to prepare a few introductory remarks - I am speaking briefly beforehand then reading the opening stretch of lines.

Viz.

Lauren Klein's slideshow on the long arc of visual display. (And an associated course syllabus here.)

The blue meth

Dwight Garner on criticism:

By the time I was in high school my English teachers had turned me on to Pauline Kael and Greil Marcus. I loved James Wolcott’s stuff, too. [. . . .] I remember going through the microfilm and microfiche machines, getting a sore neck, just to find Wolcott’s old stuff in the Village Voice and Harper’s. I still have those Wolcott printouts. They’re on those warped old pieces of prehistoric photo-print paper. I’m still a fan.

His stuff just popped off the page. It was the most vivid critical writing I’d ever read. His stuff shouted, the way good art does, “I’m alive.” I felt the same way about Kael and Marcus, among others. These people had things appearing in magazines like Rolling Stone, and in newspapers, and it felt like, to my blinkered perspective at any rate, a golden age.

I reread the work of my favourite critics—Orwell, Agee, Updike, Tynan, Sheed, Macdonald, Kazin and so on—all the time. Just to breathe that air. But there’s nothing like reading a critic in real time. That’s the blue meth. There’s nothing like going to see a film and coming back and inhaling the words of a critic like AO Scott or Stephanie Zacharek, now at the Village Voice. There’s nothing like getting that buzz in your head.

It is a terrible confession, but I just don't feel that buzz - it's partly why I don't like Twitter, I don't want to be peppered with news about things happening right now - I love instead that feeling of immersion in a deep elsewhere, preferably far in the past....

"Blobbed by hand"

Roald Dahl on the golden age of British chocolate. (Via.)

Footer and white mice

At the TLS, Paul Addison on Lucy Lethbridge's Servants:

Looking into the origins of Universal Aunts, an employment agency founded in 1921 to supply child minders and home helps of many kinds, she has discovered the card index in which its founder, Gertie Mclean, recorded the salient characteristics of applicants. Miss Charlotte Hedgecombe was “hefty, stern, stood for no nonsense, a stickler for etiquette and deportment. On borstal board of governors, Zoological Society’s certificate. Cope older boys, any number”. Miss Phyllis Beckett, on the other hand, “knows all about footer and white mice. Guaranteed not to nag. Can slide down banisters at a push”. Miss Pansy Trubshaw, she noted, understood cricket and foreign stamps, “but not much else”.