books other people have recommended

in an effort to make myself seem smarter, i thought i’d recommend a few books that i haven’t read yet. all of them are either stacked on my coffee table or permalinked on my amazon wishlist and i do plan to read them in the near future. therefore, i thought i’d give you a heads-up in case we ever bumped into each other at the turkish bathhouse and we needed a quick topic to gab about (besides the sorry state of my pectorals).

non-fiction

• swearing ・ you know you’re in for a treat when the highbrow crashes into the low. in this academic work, geoffrey hughes (a linguistics professor) recounts the history of various dirty words. here are a few of them: shit, motherfucker, and gadzooks.  
• names on the land: a historical account of place-naming in the united states ・ if you like names and you like maps then this classic survey by george r. stewart on the legacy of place names in america will definitely get you hot and bothered. 
• on the origin of stories: evolution, cognition, and fiction ・ where do stories come from? brian boyd (nabokov’s hype-man) labors to answer this question in this sprawling, multi-disciplinary work.
• handbook to life in prehistoric europe ・ if you’re like me and have a repeated fantasy that you’re magically transported back to prehistoric europe and must fend for yourself while throngs of primeval babes (in squirrel bikinis) vie for your affections—then this manual (edited by jane mcintosh) is for you too.

not non-fiction

• lynd ward: six novels in woodcuts ・ one of my secret vices is reading comic books in my neighbour’s jacuzzi when he’s away on business trips. up next is this handsome collection by lynd ward, father of the modern graphic novel. each of these stories is told through expressionist woodcuts without using any words. this is what the industry calls a “silent comic” but that label makes no sense since all books are inherently silent. 
• the sugar frosted nutsack ・ i’ve been a mark leyner junkie since one night in undergrad when me and this ugly ukranian kid stayed up all night reading aloud outlandish excerpts from my cousin, my gastroenteroligist and then feeding each other powdered donut holes (don’t ask). leyner seemed like one of those supernova geniuses who was bound to burn out after a book or two. but he has since resurfaced and now i can’t wait to buy this and load up a skype chat with ivor. 
• the diary of a nobody ・ all you need to know about this spoof diary (by brothers george and weedon grossmith) is that evelyn waugh called it the “funniest book in the world.”
• house of holes ・ true story: i caught a reference librarian at widener library reading this depraved and obsessive work by nicholson baker and now it’s going to be the june 2012 selection for my book club—and the librarian has agreed to come by and talk about it! #superboner  

know your fools

one of the 14 reasons i was so heavily into the king’s speech last year was that it reintroduced modern audiences to the fool trope of mediæval literature. only after the monarch (george vi) listens to the seemingly non-sensical advice of his social inferior and then participates in his foolish exercises, is he able to become a tru-sovereign™.

i maintain that fools are all around us. but what’s the difference between the fool and the jester? is a buffoon or natural still a fool? it turns out that the taxonomy of fools is as complex as the taxonomy of lizards. here is francis douce’s early nineteenth century attempt to classify all the types of fools in just the works of shakespeare alone:

I. The general domestic fool, often, but as it should seem improperly, termed a clown. He was 1. A mere natural, or idiot; 2. Silly by nature, yet cunning and sarcastical; 3. Artificial. All these officiated occasionally as menial servants.

II. The clown, who was 1. A mere country booby; 2. A witty rustic; 3. Any servant of a shrewd and witty disposition, and who, like a similar character in our modern plays, was made to treat his master with great familiarity in order to produce stage effect.

III. The female fool, who was generally an idiot.

IV. The city or corporation fool, whose office was to assist at public entertainments and in pageants. To this class belong perhaps the Lord Mayor’s state fool, and those employed by the companies of trades, &c.

V. Tavern fools. These seem to have been retained to amuse the customers…They were sometimes qualified to sing after the Italian manners. Fools were also employed in the common brothels.

VI. The fool of the ancient theatrical mysteries and moralities. He was, more properly speaking, the Vice…Being generally dressed in a fool’s habit, he appears to have been gradually and undistinguishably blended with the domestic fool; yet he was certainly a buffoon of a different sort. He was always a bitter enemy to the Devil, and a part of his employment consisted in teazing and tormenting the poor fiend on every occasion. He ceased to be in fashion at the end of the sixteenth century.

VII. The fool in the old dumb shows exhibited at fairs and perhaps at inns, in which he was generally engaged in a struggle with Death…It is possible that some casual vestiges’ of this species of entertainment might have suggested the modern English pantomimes.

VIII. The fool in the Whitsun ales and Morris dance.

IX. The mountebank’s fool, or merry Andrew. 

were you to take the cosmo “what fool are you quiz” where would you land? as for me, i could see myself pretty easily as a class ii, subtype 1 fool. 

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source: “a dissertation on the clowns and fools of shakespeare,” in illustrations of shakespeare, and of ancient manners, by francis douce (1807).

facebook for the characters of 19th century fiction

there are few occasions when the computer science wing of a university gets together with the english department. don’t get me wrong, the english department is an insecure scrounger all too eager to take over bits and pieces from every other discipline. marxism? sure! gender studies? why not? semiotics? gimme gimme! but one thing that english has yet to grab up is compsci.

and yet this paper manages to unify both fields in one amazing topic: using computers to extract social networks from 19th century literary fiction. from the abstract:

We present a method for extracting social networks from literature, namely, nineteenth-century British novels and serials. We derive the networks from dialogue interactions, and thus our method depends on the ability to determine when two characters are in conversation. Our approach involves character name chunking, quoted speech attribution and conversation detection given the set of quotes. 

using the data presented in this paper, i mapped out the conversation network of the principal characters of jane austen’s mansfield park. the size of the oval is proportional to how often a character is mentioned (ie. their tumblarity) and the connection line weight is proportional to the conversation length. among other items, we can clearly see that edmund, despite fewer mentions, is clearly the central character of the book.

as i always feared, it was only a matter of time before our humanities professors were squeezed out of a job by a bad boy gang of robot scholars. 

the continuing adventures of gabriel garcía márquez

one novel that’s not a künstlerroman is garcía márquez’s living to tell the tale because it’s not a novel—it’s a memoir. but who cares? what we really want to know is how did garcía márquez become garcía márquez? here’s the definitive answer:

Those who knew me when I was four say that I was pale and introverted, and spoke only to recount absurdities, but for the most part my stories were simple episodes from daily life that I made more attractive with fantastic details so that the adults would notice me. My best sources of inspiration were the conversations older people had in my presence because they thought I did not understand them, or the ones in intentional code in order to prevent my understanding them. Just the opposite was true: I soaked them up like a sponge, pulled them apart, rearranged them to make their origins disappear, and when I told them to the same people who had told the stories earlier, they were bewildered by the coincidence between what I said and what they were thinking.

At times I did not know what to do with my thoughts and I tried to hide them with rapid blinking. This happened so often that some rationalist in the family decided I should be seen by an eye doctor, who attributed my blinking to a problem with my tonsils and prescribed a syrup of iodized radish that worked very well to assuage the adults.

and this, i think, is the solution to how to become the next garcía márquez: iodized radish syrup.

evelyn waugh was [spoiler alert] kind of a dick

if evelyn waugh reigns as one of the divine beings of your literary pantheon, you might not want to read this anecdote about his relative dickness.

maybe we need to have heroes. maybe we need to have villains. or maybe we need to see that those we exalt or those we condemn can act just like us, that our villains can be heroic and our heroes…well, our heroes can do something unthinkable with a banana right in front of our anguished eyes.

the following reflection is from evelyn’s son’s 1991 memoir. 

On one occasion, just after the war, the first consignment of bananas reached Britain. Neither I, my sister Teresa nor my sister Margaret had ever eaten a banana throughout the war, when they were unprocurable, but we had heard all about them as the most delicious taste in the world.

When this first consignment arrived, the socialist government decided that every child in the country should be allowed one banana. An army of civil servants issued a library of special banana coupons, and the great day arrived when my mother came home with three bananas. All three were put on my father’s plate, and before the anguished eyes of his children, he poured on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and ate all three.

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source: will this do?, by auberon waugh (1991).

languages are you

just as the family in the swiss family robinson was not named robinson in the book, the 7 dwarfs from snow white and the 7 dwarfs also had no names until disney got involved. these now iconic dwarf aptronyms have since been translated into every language in which disney has found a market and i have made it my morning’s duty to translate them back.

i was reading an old book once that had the very curious phrase “translated out of german” on its title page. i assumed “out of” was just a colloquialism for the much more standard “from” but it wasn’t until i was discussing it with a friend that i learned what it actually meant. apparently the original text was written in latin, then translated into german, and the book i was reading was a translation out of it [into english]. it was the whisper-down-the-lane method of literature!

this dwarf chart is thus a translation out of various languages back to english.

ie. dopey (english) > cucciolo (italian) > puppy (english)

i used google translate for all the terms and was pleased at the proficiency of its engine. when i entered the list of 7 names, it would immediately recognise them as disney’s dwarfs and give me a perfect translation. entering each name separately, without context was the only way to get google to stumble.

you wonder how the utopian present leads to the dystopian future? i’m not totally certain, however it probably has something to do with google robots trying to foil my understanding of forest dwarfs and their associated personalities.

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i used this list and other online discussions to determine the dwarf names in other languages. obviously, the lists and my chosen translation service are not without error.

bookups

people is always accosting me at the mall (usually when i’m getting my hollister on) and axing me how i got my abz to be so 3d. “anyone can get length-width definition,” they intimate, but what exercise was i rockin’ to pop each sixth pack in the field of depth?

in situations like these, i usually pretend to receive an urgent phone call from the acting town fire chief (a passing acquaintance) and slip into a changing room to try on some pastel pocket t’s while my interrupters find someone else’s muscles to admire (as if).

but now, because i am so sick of people rubbing my abs unsolicitously like i’m some teenager who is pregnant with twin babies, i will reveal one of my trade secrets—bookups.

you start by crunching your shorty books (think: the old man and the sea and heart of darkness). you then work your way up to the lesser dickens and d.h. lawrence. most people tap out when they get to pynchon level or anything michener, but raynor ganan is not most people. i am proud to admit that i have been camera-phoned crunching the ten volume kathasaritsagara, an 11th century indian fairy tale that contains 20,000+ sanskrit verses.

so now you know my trade secret but there is one final thing that…hold on, i’m getting an urgent call from the acting town fire chief who is a personal friend. i need to take this…