Lance Mannion

Writers aren't people exactly...

Sunday night, April 18, 2021.

A writer trying hard to be one person. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, detail from a caricature by Barry Blitt, in the New Yorker. November 2009.

It was my first inkling Wylie was a writer. And while I like writers---because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer---still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren't people exactly, or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors, who lean backward trying---only to see their faces in reflecting chandeliers.

--- from “The Last Tycoon” by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

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Lots more to read: "Slow Fade: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood" by Arthur Krystal in the New Yorker, November 16, 2009.

From the Illinois prairie to Washington, D.C. by way of outer space

Posted Wednesday night, April 14, 2021.

Color photograph of Saturn taken from the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA and the European Space Agency, via the Hubble Newsletter.

This is how Carl Niebur, a program scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., began his career as a space traveler:

Niebur knew long journeys, having taken one of his own to the nation’s capital from Breese, Illinois (Pop. 3,000), all cow pastures and corn fields. It was as idyllic a place as you might find on the Earth planet, and Breese was the big town in his part of the windy prairie state. On birthday as a boy, he received a little three-inch refracting telescope. To the extent that it had a brand, it was “the white one,” and that very first night, he hauled it to the backyard and aimed it expectantly at a pristine pitch of rural American sky. Curt got his celestial bearings, pressed expectant eye to eyepiece, and suddenly those points of distant light inflated into worlds as real as Breese. And each was so different! Mars, the color of rust and capped with white. Jupiter and its watchful red eye and tan and brown bands of clouds---and moons! It had moons! Four of them! AND YOU COULD SEE THEM! There was Saturn, rings and all, just as the textbooks promised! You’re in sixth grade learning about all this stuff and it’s just a few photos in science class…, but then you strap on that telescope for the first time and all at once you’re not dealing in the theoretical. You’re a space traveler. Science suddenly isn’t a class you take in school, something that begins and ends with fill-in-the-blanks and multiple-choice questions---it is a thing that is absolutely, metaphysically happening and I have seen it and there’s no going back from that.

---from “The Mission: A True Story” by David W. Brown.

Oh, the places you'll go without seeing any evidence of cancellation

Posted Thursday, March 11, 2021.

Look at all that cancellation! Children’s section of the Barnes & Noble in Newburgh, New York, around three this afternoon.

I was kind of disappointed to see they didn’t put a little mask on the Cat and the Hat---or is that Little Cat A, or Little Cat B, or C, or D, or E, F, G...?

Oh, the places you'll go without seeing evidence of cancellation

Posted Thursday night, March 11, 2021.

Look at all that cancellation! Children’s section of the Barnes & Noble in Newburgh, New York, around three this afternoon.

I was kind of disappointed to see they didn’t put a little mask on the Cat and the Hat---or is that Little Cat A, or Little Cat B, or C, D, E, F, G...?

That Carl Sagan

Posted Thursday evening, March 4, 2021.

First Mr Spock, then Professor Sagan. Following up on the previous post, Bob Pappalardo’s education as a planetary scientist continued:

...During high school, Bob worked at Vanderbilt Planetarium in Centerport, Long Island, not far from his house. A few years later at Cornell University in Ithaca, he found the field of planetary science the way everyone else in the wider discipline did: through a Carl Sagan Moment. Upon enrolling, Bob had intended to take up the ancient art of astronomy, but problem the first: there was no astronomy major proper at Cornell; the field was taught under physics. Problem the second: physics. Bob therefore switched studies, his base camp now the university’s new geology building. Myriad mineralogy labs lined the hallways, and to study the stuff of the Earth was to spend long days and late nights in them, over big, binocular-type microscopes adorning tall black lab tables. Pappalardo was seated in one such lab on one such night behind one such microscope when another student, first name John, last name Berner, and so of course they called him Bunsen, walked in.

Hey, Bob, asked Bunsen, you know about this course Sagan is offering? This course on icy moons?

Bob did not know about this course Carl Sagan was offering, this course on icy moons, but he went home that night, pulled out the course catalog, and looked it up. ICES AND OCEANS IN THE OUTER SOLAR SYSTEM. Instructor: SAGAN, CARL.

That Carl Sagan, yes. He of Cornell, yes, of course. The prominent professor was for Bob part of the university’s initial allure. But Sagan didn’t always teach, had a lot going on. Carl Sagan, recently of Cosmos (book and television series) and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (television series). Carl Sagan, of the NASA spacecraft Voyager 1 and 2, the robotic explorers that in 1979 transformed the four telescopic dots of Jupiter’s moons into jaw-dropping globes of fire and ice,and later, around Saturn, revealed worlds diverse, living, geologically active, almost fully-fledged and practically planets (further study needed). Carl Sagan of the spacecraft Viking 1 and 2, which in 1976 revealed the Martian surface to be barren, though certainly in possession of everything necessary for life to exist (further study needed). Carl Sagan, a superstar in a profession bereft even of minor celebrities, who brought astrophysics into blue-collar living rooms, who in turtlenecks and with windswept hair spoke like a philosopher, practically in verse and presented the the pursuit of knowledge as something intrinsic and vital to the soul of every human being, who used his platform and lilting baritone to advance social causes, who planned protests against nuclear weapons test sites, arms linked with fellow activists, who crossed police lines and was placed gladly under arrest---Armageddon’s Thoreau---in order to advance his cause. Page one the next day: a rebel astronomer in handcuffs! Carl Sagan with a Ph.D. behind his name and a childlike imagination in his head, who had, for example, lobbied for light to be added to the Viking lander so that at night martian animals might be attracted to it and scurry up to investigate. Well, why not? Nobody knew what waited on the surface of the Red Planet.

That Carl Sagan.

---from “The Mission: A True Story” by David W. Brown.

The Empirical Misha

Posted Wednesday night, February 10, 2021.

Detail from “In a lesson of credence with the sexton” by Ivan Vladimirov. 1913. Via Wikiart.

Today would have been the 121st birthday of Boris Pasternak, the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature winning Russian poet and author of the novel “Doctor Zhivago”. Yura is the boy who will grow up to be the title hero of the book.

Yura realized how much he owed to his uncle for the general qualities of his character.

Nikolai Nikolaevih was living in Lausanne. In the books he published there in Russian and in translation, he developed his long-standing notion of history as a second universe, erected by mankind in response to the phenomenon of death with the aid of the phenomena of time and memory. The soul of these books was a new understanding of Christianity, their direct consequence a new understanding of art.

Even more than on Yura, the circle of these notions had an effect on his friend. Under their influence, Misha Gordon chose philosophy as his specialty. In his department, he attended lectures on theology and he even had thoughts of transferring later to the theological academy.

The uncle’s influence furthered Yura and liberated him, but it fettered Misha. Yura understood what role in Misha’s extreme enthusiasms was played by his origins. From cautious tactfulness, he did not try to talk Misha out of his strange projects. But he often wished to see an empirical Misha, much closer to life.

---from “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak.

On using your own words when writing online instead of being used by the words you read online

Monday night, February 8, 2021.

"A gorgeous metaphor for a communal life online": A school of surgeonfish in reef waters off the Maldives. Detail from a photo by Uxbona, via Wikipedia.

Variations of the phrase “no one is talking about this”, which, with conventional capitalization, is the title of a new novel about lives lived out online by Patricia Lockwood, appear all the time in my Twitter feed, as one Twitterer after another vents their anger, frustration, horror, or anguish that an issue they believe is of vital importance and needs immediate attention from the media so that politicians will notice and set to work right away solving the problem. Thing is, it’s usually the case that the reason no one is talking about it is that they’ve already talked about it, as a quick Google will show. The top ten items that the algorithm turns up will be links to articles and stories in which people have talked about this at length. The angry, frustrated, horrified, anguished Twitterers have made the mistake of thinking that what’s happening in their Twitter feeds is representative of more than what’s happening in their Twitter feeds and of thinking the world as it appears to them online is the world as it is.

One of my objects since I started writing for an online readership, sixteen and a years and four portals ago, has been to drive my readers offline and out of the virtual world back into the analog one. Read this book, watch this movie, was my constant theme, take a walk in the woods or at least a hike around the block; look at that bird, watch out for bears; grab your tool kit; enjoy the weather or, at any rate, get out into it long enough to know what you’re complaining about when you sit back down at your keyboard or take out your phone to complain about it: better yet, take out your phone and call a friend to complain about it. Study a real school of fish, instead of being a member of the school of fish you swim with online. And then use your own words when you blog, Facebook, tweet, instagram, TikTok, or substack about it.

Another object has been to use my own words myself and come up with my own jokes. I’m old enough to remember when that was a point of pride, and I’m proud to say I’ve succeeded in that. (Narrator: Not always.) So you can see why I’m looking forward to reading “No One Is Talking About This” and why I’ll be talking about it as soon as I do. What’s coming up aren’t more of my words. They’re the words of Claire Wills talking about “No One Is Talking About This” in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books.

“Stream-of-consciousness!” yells the protagonist of Patricia Lockwood’s first novel, No One Is Talking About This. She is, like Lockwood herself, a writer in her thirties with a huge Internet following. She has, like Lockwood herself, a husband, parents, brothers and sisters, friends—all of whom appear in the novel—but she is just as tightly bound to the commune of “people who lived in the portal.” She is onstage in Jamaica, talking about the world online, about life as it is lived through the window of the phone you hold in your hand, and on which you may be reading this review....

“But what about the stream-of-a-consciousness that is not entirely your own? One that you participate in, but that also acts upon you?” One audience member yawned, then another. Long before the current vectors came into being, they had been a contagious species.

Lockwood expects her reader to work hard. The novel is all about the importance of being in the know, and it won’t work unless we are prepared to join in, parsing the anecdotes. There is something very winning about Lockwood’s abundant faith not only that we can but that we will follow her. She jollies us along, leading us through the language and styles of ever more evolved platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), without explicitly naming any of them. She trusts us to keep up to speed, to catch meaning off the current vectors and to keep it circulating.

That passage is one of several in which Lockwood tries out labels (with exclamation marks!) for the kind of book she is writing: “The plot! That was a laugh.” What hope for storyline, when the novel simply follows the Lockwood character, an Internet obsessive, obsessing about the Internet? She scrolls, she showers, and she scrolls some more. She spends her time in bed engaged in “spellbound reading” of her phone—exactly the same reading that everybody else is doing. She posts, she messages, and she texts; her phone buzzes repeatedly in her pocket when she starts trending; she climbs onto stages in Australia and Japan and all over Europe and talks about the portal:

All around the world, she was invited to speak from what felt like a cloud-bank, about the new communication, the new slipstream of information. She sat onstage next to men who were better known by their usernames and women who drew their eyebrows on so hard that they looked insane, and tried to explain why it was objectively funnier to spell it sneazing. This did not feel like real life, exactly, but nowadays what did?

She laughs, “Ahahaha!,” “the new and funnier way” to laugh. She knows to say “it me,” or “unbelievably me,” rather than “that’s just how I feel!” in response to a post about a warty frog, unutterably alone. She is absolutely in command of the language of the portal, and she writes about this command in discontinuous sections of prose that appear like lengthy tweets, separated by asterisks and gaps. Naturally she wonders about this style:

Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote…

“Someone could write it. But it would have to be like Jane Austen—what someone said at breakfast over cold mutton, a fatal quadrille error, the rising of fine hackles in the drawing room.” Pale violent shadings of tone, a hair being split down to the DNA. A social novel.
…

It’s an odd ambition, when you think about it—to write a novel about the Internet. However much you jazz up the form you are folding new modes of communication back into old ones, and by mentioning Austen Lockwood wants us to notice this. The novel she has written is a hybrid beast: it is an arch descendant of Austen’s socio-literary style—a novel of observation, crossed with a memoir of a family crisis, and written as a prose poem, steeped in metaphor.

No One Is Talking About This does feature a plot, if not exactly a “plot!,” and the plot even belongs to a genre—the disenchanted bildungsroman. As Lockwood moves deeper inside the portal she becomes increasingly alienated from “real life,” increasingly “locked in” to the collective consciousness. Lab rats in a cage get a pellet of food when they hit a button, but all you get for living in the portal and playing the game is to be more of a rat. She looks back wistfully to a time when the portal appeared to serve people rather than the other way around. The idea of spending time in a chat room seems positively Edenic compared to the new world in which “every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate.”

A school of fish, seen from above—it’s a gorgeous metaphor for communal life online, and it points to a contradiction in this novel, in which Lockwood repeatedly discovers new ways of saying that we have lost new ways of saying things: “What began as the most elastic and snappable verbal play soon emerged in jargon, and then in doctrine, and then in dogma.” You start by pinging an elastic band at the back of the class, and before you know it you are part of a gang, talking only to the people who talk exactly as you do, listening only to your own echo:

It was a place where she knew what was going to happen, it was a place where she would always choose the right side, where the failure was in history and not herself, where she did not read the wrong writers, was not seized with surges of enthusiasm for the wrong leaders, did not eat the wrong animals…

The alternative to spouting the shared doctrine of your online community is to try to keep ahead of the portal itself. But it is such hard work, not just being an ordinary fish, but being the first fish to catch the light in a dart of new direction: “It was so tiring to have to catch each new virus, produce the perfect sneaze of it, and then mutate it into something new.” You can’t afford time off. She tries locking her phone in a safe, but that isn’t exactly self-control, and she very quickly folds. Eventually her husband diagnoses a “dead look” behind her eyes, just when she claims she is feeling most alive…

---from “Bildungsonline” by Clair Wills, from her review of “No One Is Talking About This” in the February 25, 2021 issue of the New York Review of books.

Tinker Tailor Telephone Tea Cosy Grumpy Spy

Posted Thursday night, February 4, 2021.

Gary Oldman as George Smiley at work in the 2011 film adaptation of John le Carre’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”. Focus films

Le Carre could be funny: mordant, witty, sardonic, satirical, even parodistical, all in his own manner and voice. He had influences, naturally, some you’d expect, like Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, and Evelyn Waugh. But in certain sentences and phrases and Smiley’s relationship with telephones I hear whispers of P.G. Wodehouse, particularly in Smiley’s tea cosy and those nearly anthropomorphized “anonymous” grey boxes humming “without warning”:

Smiley had always loathed the telephone, and he would take no calls whatever, unless in Guillam’s view they concerned matters of great urgency, and none did. The only instrument Smiley could not switch off controlled the direct line from Guillam’s desk, but when he was in one of his moods he went so far as to put a tea-cosy over it in an effort to quell the ring…

...It was during this...period that a new and wonderful gadget appeared on the fifth floor. It was brought in suitcases by two crew-cut technicians and installed over three days: a green telephone, destined, despite his prejudices, for Smiley’s desk and connecting him directly with the Annexe. It was routed by way of Guillam’s room, and linked to all manner of anonymous grey boxes, which hummed without warning….

---from “The Honorable Schoolboy” by John le Carre.

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Declassified related post: "John le Carre, Comic novelist?"

There was a time when work had complete hold over life

Posted Monday night, January 12, 2021.

There was a time, not long ago, in fact, when work had complete hold over life, when I was my work, when I took so much pleasure in it that work was the recuperation for work itself. But that is gone now. Everything has changed.

---from “In the Light of What We Know” by Zia Haider Rahman.

What else do journalists have to do?

Posted Saturday night, January 9, 2021.

Dutch journalist Robert Dulmers kneeling by the grave of Bosnian Deputy Prime Minister Hakija Turajlić, who was murdered by Serbian gunmen, January 8, 1993. Photo by Christian Marechal, taken in the winter of 1993 at the Ali Pasha mosque, in Sarajevo. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In the waning days of the Cold War, temporarily retired part-time British spy Jerry Westerby, the honorable schoolboy of John le Carré’s novel “The Honorable Schoolboy”, affectionately nicknamed because of his boyish good looks and good nature, whose cover had been as a journalist, has made a private retreat to a village in Tuscany, where he’s “working” on a book, much to the consternation of a prying neighbor, the village postmistress. Another neighbor, Signora Sanders, who may have been Westerby’s father’s mistress, tries to satisfy the postmistress’ curiosity. It’s not clear she knows the schoolboy had been a spy, only that he worked for newspapers:

But what was he? What had he done with his youth? A journalist, said the Sanders, and gave what she knew of the family background. The father, a flamboyant figure, fair-haired like the son, she had met him again not long before his death...Like the son, he was never at peace: women and houses, changing them all the time; always roaring at someone, if not at his son then at someone across the street. The postmistress pressed harder. But in his own right---was the schoolboy distinguished in his own right? Well, he had certainly worked for some distinguished newspapers, put it that way, said the Sanders, her smile mysteriously broadening.

“It is not the English habit to accord distinction to journalists,” she explained…

But the postmistress needed more, far more. His writing, his book, what was that all about? So long! So much thrown away! Basketsful, the rubbish carter had told her...

Beth Sanders understood the intensity of isolated people, and knew that in barren places their intelligence must fix on tiny matters...Well, he certainly had travelled incessantly, she said…Today all journalists were travellers of course---breakfast in London, lunch in Rome, dinner in Delhi---but Signor Westerby had been exceptional even by that standard. So perhaps it was a travel book, she ventured.

But why had he traveled, the postmistress insisted, for whom no journey was without a goal; why?

For the wars, the Sanders replied patiently; for wars, pestilence, and famine. “What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life’s miseries?”

---from “The Honorable Schoolboy” by John le Carré.

Compromises with logic

Posted Thursday night, January 7, 2021.

Detail from the lithograph “Hand With Sphere (Hand With Reflecting Sphere)", a self-portrait by M.C. Escher. 1935. Courtesy M.C. Escher.Com, via Wikipedia.

"Really, you are not playing fair, Timofey. You know perfectly well you agree with Lore that the world of the mind is based on a compromise with logic."

---from "Pnin" by Vladimir Nabokov.

What stories memories tell

Posted Thursday night, January 7, 2021.

Detail from “A Reverie” by Frank Dicksee. 1895. Courtesy of Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, via ArtUK.

When I listen to my memories now, I believe that all they tell me are stories about themselves…

---from “In the Light of What We Know” by Zia Haider Rahman.

It is very hard to know what is human nature

Posted Thursday night, January 7, 2021.

'It couldn't be that such a man as that should become a thief all at once. It's not human nature, sir; is it?'

'It is very hard to know what is human nature,' said the squire.

---from "The Last Chronicle of Barset" by Anthony Trollope.

The greatest trial of Amy March's young life

Mined from the notebooks, Christmas day, Friday, December 25, 2020. Posted Monday night, December 29.

Kirstin Dunst as Amy March in the 1994 film adaptation of “Little Women”.

All the March sisters in "Little Women" come in for some ribbing from their author. Each sister makes herself a tad ridiculous with their vanities and minor character flaws and faults: Meg is vain about her looks and takes advantage of her place as the eldest to order her sisters about; Jo is vain about her free-spiritedness and too quick to lose her temper; and even the good-natured, self-effacing, eager to please Beth, is vain about her musical talent and her shyness sometimes seems more like cowardice and sometimes like the wrong sort of pride. But Amy, the youngest, is the special target of Alcott’s satire. Naturally, as the youngest, she sees herself as being in competition with her big sisters for their mother’s approval, but she is too given to praising herself and always ready to one-up the others. She wants to be seen as being as virtuous and self-sacrificing as the household saint Beth, as artistically talented as the budding playwright and novelist Jo, as lady-like, grown-up, and pretty as Meg, the family beauty, and smarter and wiser in the ways of the world than all three. “Poor Petrea” is a comic character in “The Home”, a novel Alcott had read and taken to heart when she was around Amy’s age at this point in the book:

If anyone had asked Amy what the greatest trial of her life was, she would have answered at once, “My nose.” When she was a baby, Jo had accidentally dropped her into the coal hod, and Amy insisted that the fall had ruined her nose forever. It was not big nor red like poor “Petrea’s”, it was only rather flat, and all the pinching in the world could not give it an aristocratic point. No one minded it but herself, and it was doing its best to grow, but Amy felt deeply the want of a Grecian nose, and drew whole sheets of handsome ones to console herself.

And a few pages later...

"I think being disgraced in school is a great deal tryinger than anything bad boys can do," said Amy, shaking her head, as if her experience of life had been a deep one. "Susie Perkins came to school today with a lovely red carnelian ring. I wanted it dreadfully, and wished I was her with all my might. Well, she drew a picture of Mr. Davis, with a monstrous nose and a hump, and the words, 'Young ladies, my eye is upon you!' coming out of his mouth in a balloon thing. We were laughing over it when all of a sudden his eye was on us, and he ordered Susie to bring up her slate. She was parrylized with fright, but she went, and oh, what do you think he did? He took her by the ear—the ear! Just fancy how horrid!—and led her to the recitation platform, and made her stand there half an hour, holding the slate so everyone could see."

"Didn't the girls laugh at the picture?" asked Jo, who relished the scrape.

"Laugh? Not one! They sat still as mice, and Susie cried quarts, I know she did. I didn't envy her then, for I felt that millions of carnelian rings wouldn't have made me happy after that. I never, never should have got over such a agonizing mortification." And Amy went on with her work, in the proud consciousness of virtue and the successful utterance of two long words in a breath.

---from “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott.

 

Lily Dale resolves to keep her resolve

Posted Monday morning, December 28, 2020.

Detail from “Five O'Clock Tea”, by Julius LeBlanc Stewart, 1884. Private Collection, via Victorian Society in America-Eloise Hunter Chapter.

Even strong-willed romantic heroines like Lily Dale have the same problem we all have, knowing our own minds and keeping our opinions separate from the general opinions of the world around us...

I must not, if I can help it, let the reader suppose that she was softening her heart to John Eames because John Eames was spoken well of in the world. But with all of us, in the opinion which we form of those around us, we take unconsciously the opinion of others. A woman is handsome because the world says so. Music is charming to us because it charms others. We drink our wines with other men's palates, and look at our pictures with other men's eyes. When Lily heard John Eames praised by all around her, it could not be but that she should praise him too,—not out loud, as others did, but in the silence of her heart.

---from “The Last Chronicle of Barset” by Anthony Trollope.

Lily Dale unsettled in London

Posted Monday morning, December 28, 2020.

Detail from “La Première Sortie (At The Theatre)” by Pierre-August Renoir, 1876, 1877. National Gallery, London. Via Wikipedia.

Lily Dale, the romantic heroine of Anthony Trollope's novel "The Last Chronicle of Barset" is torn between two suitors neither of which she dares marry: a bad man, Adolphus Crosbie, whom she loves despite herself, and a good man, Johnny Eames, whom she doesn't love---can't love because of her feelings for Crosbie. She's settled the matter with herself by resolving not to marry either, or, anyone. But on a trip up to London, she finds that her feelings aren't the same in the city as they are in the country...

This coming up to London, and riding in the Park, and going to the theatres, seemed to unsettle her. At home she had schooled herself down into quiescence, and made herself think that she believed that she was satisfied with the prospects of her life. But now she was all astray again, doubting about herself, hankering after something over and beyond that which seemed to be allotted to her,—but, nevertheless, assuring herself that she never would accept of anything else.

Mercenary motives of Biblical heroines and the models who pose as them in paintings by impecunious artists

Posted Tuesday night, December 15, 2020.

Detail from “Jael and Sisera” by Artemisia Gentileschi, circa 1620. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, via Wikipedia.

Picked up Anthony Trollope’s “The Last Chronicle of Barset” again the other night. Trollope has replaced Dickens as my Christmas season reading mainly because I have Dickens’ novels memorized by now and I can’t read more than a paragraph of any one of them before the whole book pops into my head. There’s way too much Trollope to memorize. I’d started “The Last Chronicle of Barset” last December but stopped, not because I lost interest, but because life here at the ranch got a little too interesting. (Mrs M’s condition suddenly, surprisingly worsened.) By the time things calmed down, it was past time for reading by the lights of the tree while listening to Christmas music. But a whole year has rolled around, the tree’s up and lit, and the music’s on. I had to read my way back into it, skimming here and there, working my way toward the bookmark I’d left at the beginning of Chapter XXXVIII (page 382, Oxford World’s Classics edition, 1988), reminding myself of the story---stories---and reintroducing myself to the Trollopian crowd of characters, until I reached the bookmark, and practically the first new scene I read was the one below. Clara Van Siever is preparing to pose for the painter Conway Dalrymple as the Biblical heroine Jael, under the supervision of her married friend Maria Broughton at Maria’s house. It’s a funny, situation comedic scene, but it becomes fraught when you know Maria’s indifferent and neglectful husband isn’t home, that Clara is scheming to marry Dalrymple, Dalrymplye and Maria are having an affair, that the reason the sitting is taking place at Maria’s and not at Dalrymple’s studio or Clara’s home is to keep it secret from Clara’s grasping, avaricious, and controlling and bullying mother who would be furious to learn that her daughter wanted to marry a poor artist and had set out to do it without her permission. To top it off, although in the Book of Judges, Jael is honored for percussively assassinating Sisla, the general of the Canaanite army threatening Israel, there’s a folk tradition that has Jael a seductress, adulteress, and betrayer, a later version of Delilah. Note as well, how both Clara and Maria casually attribute mercenary motives to Moses!

Very little drawing or painting was done on that day. In the first place it was necessary that the question of costume should be settled, and both Mrs. Broughton and the artist had much to say on the subject. It was considered proper that Jael should be dressed as a Jewess, and there came to be much question how Jewesses dressed themselves in those very early days. Mrs. Broughton had prepared her jewels and raiment of many colours, but the painter declared that the wife of Heber the Kenite would have no jewels. But when Mrs. Broughton discovered from her Bible that Heber had been connected by family ties with Moses, she was more than ever sure that Heber's wife would have in her tent much of the spoilings of the Egyptians. And when Clara Van Siever suggested that at any rate she would not have worn them in a time of confusion when soldiers were loose, flying about the country, Mrs. Broughton was quite confident that she would have put them on before she invited the captain of the enemy's host into her tent. The artist at last took the matter into his own hand by declaring that Miss Van Siever would sit the subject much better without jewels, and therefore all Mrs. Broughton's gewgaws were put back into their boxes. And then on four different times the two ladies had to retire into Mrs. Broughton's room in order that Jael might be arrayed in various costumes,—and in each costume she had to kneel down, taking the hammer in her hand, and holding the pointed stick which had been prepared to do duty as the nail, upon the forehead of a dummy Sisera. At last it was decided that her raiment should be altogether white, and that she should wear, twisted round her head and falling over her shoulder, a Roman silk scarf of various colours. "Where Jael could have gotten it I don't know," said Clara. "You may be sure that there were lots of such things among the Egyptians," said Mrs. Broughton, "and that Moses brought away all the best for his own family."

---from "The Last Chronicle of Barset" by Anthony Trollope. Chapter XXXVIII.

Nabokov on the laboratory of Gogol's peculiar genius

Posted Sunday night, December 6, 2020.

“The banquet degenerates into a brawl”: Detail from an illustration by Marc Chagall for Nikolai Gogol’s “Dead Souls”, via WikiArt.

"Poshlust"?

Socially minded Russian critics saw in Dead Souls...a condemnation of the social poshlust emanating from serf-owning bureaucratic provincial Russia and thus missed the true point. Gogol’s heroes merely happen to be Russian squires and officials; their imagined surrounding and social conditions are perfectly unimportant factors…Moreover, their surroundings and conditions, whatever they may have been in “real life,’ underwent such a thorough permutation and reconstruction in the laboratory of Gogol’s peculiar genius that...it is as useless to look in Dead Souls for an authentic Russian background as it would be to try to form a conception of Denmark on the basis of that little affair in cloudy Elsinore.

---from “Nikolai Gogol” by Vladimir Nabokov, in “Lectures on Russian Literature”.

Joseph Conrad, ironist, at work: A benevolent man

Posted Wednesday night, December 3, 2020.

Detail from “Landschap Bij Maneschijn In De Omestreken Sumadang” by J.C. Greive”, the cover illustration for the Oxford World’s Classics 1992 edition of “An Outcast of the Islands”, Joseph Conrad’s second novel, published in 1896.

A benevolent man contemplates his munificence while rationalizing the course of corruption that will lead to his undoing. From “An Outcast of the Islands” (1896) by Joseph Conrad, born 153 years ago today, December 3, 1857:

When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to fall back again into the monotonous but safe stride of virtue as soon as his little excursion into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired effect. It was going to be a short episode—a sentence in brackets, so to speak—in the flowing tale of his life: a thing of no moment, to be done unwillingly, yet neatly, and to be quickly forgotten. He imagined that he could go on afterwards looking at the sunshine, enjoying the shade, breathing in the perfume of flowers in the small garden before his house. He fancied that nothing would be changed, that he would be able as heretofore to tyrannize good-humouredly over his half-caste wife, to notice with tender contempt his pale yellow child, to patronize loftily his dark-skinned brother-in-law, who loved pink neckties and wore patent-leather boots on his little feet, and was so humble before the white husband of the lucky sister. Those were the delights of his life, and he was unable to conceive that the moral significance of any act of his could interfere with the very nature of things, could dim the light of the sun, could destroy the perfume of the flowers, the submission of his wife, the smile of his child, the awe-struck respect of Leonard da Souza and of all the Da Souza family. That family’s admiration was the great luxury of his life. It rounded and completed his existence in a perpetual assurance of unquestionable superiority. He loved to breathe the coarse incense they offered before the shrine of the successful white man; the man that had done them the honour to marry their daughter, sister, cousin; the rising man sure to climb very high; the confidential clerk of Hudig & Co. They were a numerous and an unclean crowd, living in ruined bamboo houses, surrounded by neglected compounds, on the outskirts of Macassar. He kept them at arm’s length and even further off, perhaps, having no illusions as to their worth. They were a half-caste, lazy lot, and he saw them as they were—ragged, lean, unwashed, undersized men of various ages, shuffling about aimlessly in slippers; motionless old women who looked like monstrous bags of pink calico stuffed with shapeless lumps of fat, and deposited askew upon decaying rattan chairs in shady corners of dusty verandahs; young women, slim and yellow, big-eyed, long-haired, moving languidly amongst the dirt and rubbish of their dwellings as if every step they took was going to be their very last. He heard their shrill quarrellings, the squalling of their children, the grunting of their pigs; he smelt the odours of the heaps of garbage in their courtyards: and he was greatly disgusted. But he fed and clothed that shabby multitude; those degenerate descendants of Portuguese conquerors; he was their providence; he kept them singing his praises in the midst of their laziness, of their dirt, of their immense and hopeless squalor: and he was greatly delighted. They wanted much, but he could give them all they wanted without ruining himself. In exchange he had their silent fear, their loquacious love, their noisy veneration. It is a fine thing to be a providence, and to be told so on every day of one’s life. It gives one a feeling of enormously remote superiority, and Willems revelled in it. He did not analyze the state of his mind, but probably his greatest delight lay in the unexpressed but intimate conviction that, should he close his hand, all those admiring human beings would starve. His munificence had demoralized them. An easy task. Since he descended amongst them and married Joanna they had lost the little aptitude and strength for work they might have had to put forth under the stress of extreme necessity. They lived now by the grace of his will. This was power. Willems loved it...

Reckoning the cost of friendship

Posted Sunday night, November 29, 2020.

Illustration by Clifford Harper (agraphia.co.uk) for a review of Zia Haider Rahman’s novel “In the Light of What We Know” in the Guardian.

The narrator of Zia Haider Rahman's novel "In the Light of What We Know", having failed as a friend, reckons with the burden of guilt he counts as the cost of friendship...

My lasting regret is that I made my excuses and did not go with [Zafar and his parents] to Headington for breakfast. At the time, and immediately afterward, I told myself that I had sensed in his heart my friend did not want me to. But the truth is that I myself, to my own shame, felt embarrassed for my friend. Sharper still was the disconcerting feeling I had in those few minutes that a distance had opened up between him and me for reasons I did not grasp in the full subtleties. After that day, Zafar did not mention his parents again. If friendship has a cost, then perhaps it is that at its heart there is always a burden of guilt. I don’t deny that I’ve failed to do certain things, failed, for instance, to provide support in the hour of need, or skype in when that’s what a friend should o, failed as a friend…