I confess that I did not fully appreciate — until Mrs. Jones began reading passages aloud to me — how hilarious Moby-Dick could be:

They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease in manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, though: Ledyard, the great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch one; of all men, they possessed the least assurance in the parlor. But perhaps the mere crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did, or the taking a long solitary walk on an empty stomach, in the negro heart of Africa, which was the sum of poor Mungo’s performances — this kind of travel, I say, may not be the very best mode of attaining a high social polish.

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Great article in the TLS by the poet David Wheatley marking the centenary of the birth of Flann O’Brien. I hadn’t heard of “Speak English Week” or “Myles Away from Dublin,” so always something to be learned about The Master.

O’Brien has long been seen as part of a literary trinity whose two other members are Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh, but in the final contribution to “Is It About a Bicycle?”, Frank McNally reminds us that he more naturally belongs in the company of Joyce and Beckett. O’Brien had a difficult relationship with Joyce, coming to resent the older writer’s assumed influence on his work, while on his only meeting with Beckett he disparaged Joyce as a “refurbisher of skivvies’ stories”. Lines of succession are rarely simple and, as critics have noted, O’Brien’s work relegates parents almost entirely in favour of uncles and brothers, while its principal model of parent–child relations is that of a character intent on destroying his author. Yet for all his resistance to appointed lines of succession, his canonical status is beyond dispute: the carnivalesque exuberance of At Swim-Two-Birds, the disturbing vision of The Third Policeman and the comic riches of “Cruiskeen Lawn” are the work of an undeniably major talent. If Joyce and Beckett are father and son, as McNally insists, O’Brien is the holy ghost of Irish modernist writing.

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Cool event in Chicago on Wednesday of this week …

Assouline@Assouline
Meet “en personne” the celebrated French author (In French and in English)
Thursday, May 05, 2011
6:30 p.m.
54 W. Chicago Ave. entrance
Members and students with ID $5, non-members $10

Pierre Assouline, the celebrated French author, has published 6 novels and 10 biographies (Simenon, Hergé, Gallimard, Cartier-Bresson…) but he is even better known for his blog, La République des Livres, in the newspaper Le Monde. Come and listen to Assouline speak about the state of contemporary French literature as well as his own achievement as an author and a bloggeur.

Pierre Assouline’s latest novel Vies de Job, was published chez Gallimard in the spring 2011.

Listen to the interview (in French): click here.

Read a critic from his book (in English): click here.

Pierre Assouline will be in conversation with author Aleksandar Hemon. A native of Sarajevo and a resident of Chicago since 1992, Aleksandar Hemon has written several works of fiction, including The Lazarus Project, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. Hemon, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, also served as the editor for Best European Fiction, a new annual publication of stories from across Europe.

For more information about Aleksandar: click here.

This program is possible thanks to the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the Jean Bodfish Brown Fund.

Register for this event!

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I’ve always enjoyed literary criticism which applies specialized knowledge in a scientific or technical domain to further elucidate a literary work. My favorite in this vein is Herbert F. Smith’s 1965 classic, “Melville’s Master in Chancery and His Recalcitrant Clerk.”

I recently found a new one: “Don Quixote’s Countenance Before and After Losing His Teeth,” from the February 2009 issue of the Journal of Dental Research.

Here’s the argument in a nutshell:

We must ask ourselves why Don Quixote had a permanently sad expression on his face. Was it hunger, a constant companion of the gentleman throughout his adventures? Was it pain?

As we will attempt to show, it was the lack of molars and incisors.

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From Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty, by Phoebe Hoban, p. 19:

Even then, she had her own aristocratic way of doing things. When an old-fashioned art teacher criticized her naturalistic method of painting hair, suggesting she simply color it in, she told him, “Well, that isn’t the way the hair goes. I don’t want to put in a tone.” When he told her, “Before you conquer art, you’ll have to conquer yourself,” Alice retorted, “That’s not for you to say because you are only my beginning teacher.”

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From poems by Gottfried Benn, translated by Michael Hofmann, in the March 2011 issue of Poetry.

People Met

I have met people who,
asked after their names,
shyly—as if they had no title
to an appellation all to themselves—
replied “Fräulein Christian” and added:
“like the first name,” they wanted to make it easy for the other,
not a difficult name like “Popiol” or “Babendererde”—
“like the first name”—please, don’t burden your memory overmuch!

I have met people who
grew up in a single room with their parents
and four brothers and sisters, and studied at night
with their fingers in their ears at the kitchen table,
and grew up to be beautiful and self-possessed as duchesses—
and innerly gentle and hard-working as Nausicaa,
clear-browed as angels.

I have often asked myself and never found an answer
whence kindness and gentleness come,
I don’t know it to this day, and now must go myself.

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From The World of Nabokov’s Stories (1999), by Maxim D. Shrayer:

In an 1971 interview with Stephen Jan Parker, Nabokov said: “In relation to the typical novel the short story represents a small Alpine, or Polar, form. It looks different, but is conspecific with the novel and is linked to it by intermediate clines.” Critics have inquired into the meaning of Nabokov’s statement and the light it sheds upon the study of his short stories. By “conspecificity,” I believe, Nabokov meant most of all that his “short stories are produced in exactly the same way as [his] novels and informed by their [a]uthor and his subtexts [italics added].” Nabokov’s working and somewhat tentative definition, based primarily on the criterion of textual length, lacks a second criterion related to the structure of composition. When working on his “small Alpine forms,” I experienced a need to draw a line between the short stories and the transitional or hybrid forms. The latter include two short novels, Sogliadatai (The Eye, 1930) and Volshebnik (The Enchanter, 1939, published 1986) and two chapters of an abandoned novel (”Solus Rex,” 1940, and “Ultima Thule,” 1942) which appeared in periodicals and collections in the guise of separate short fictions. I have decided to exclude them from my analysis. At the same time, I could not leave several of the early plotless fictions out of my study. Virtually eventless, “Groza” (The Thunderstorm, 1924) satisfies the criterion of length, but not of structure, as I have conceived of it in this study. A few, like the very early “Nezhit”‘ (The Woodsprite, 1921) or “Slovo” (The Word, 1923), correspond to the genre of creative nonfiction. Finally, there is also the exhilarating case of “A Guide to Berlin,” which is not a short story but a sequence of five vignettes of the type that Ernest Hemingway inserted between his short stories in the collection In Our Time (1925).

(Hat tip to Chris Power’s “A brief survey of the short story part 28: Vladimir Nabokov.”)

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William Clark’s spelling is one of the delights of reading any account of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. An Indian tribe, for example, is described by Clark as “Durtey, Kind, pore, and extravigent pursessing national pride. Not beggarly.”

An extravigent number of mosquito bites on this summer evening brought to mind Clark’s famous “19 variations on the spelling of mosquito.” Seeking a list of all 19, I looked in vain in Stephan Ambrose’s excellent Undaunted Courage. Thankfully, a quick Google search turned up a partial list on a blog entry written by Frances Hunter. Hunter’s account made me laugh:

Clark in particular raised spelling to the level of performance art, and never was he more creative than when writing of one of the Expedition’s greatest pests, known to us as the “mosquito.” Clark came up with no fewer than 19 variations, including mesquestors, misquestors, misquitor, misquitoes, misquitors, misqutors, misqutr, missquetors, mosquiters, mosquitors, mosquitos, muskeetor, musqueters, musquetors, musquiters, musquitoes, musquitors, musqueters, and musqutors.

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From “Conclusio ad Diversos,” the final chapter of Notes on a Cellar-Book, George Saintsbury (1920):

As one looks back over such a life there are many things that one regards with thankfulness. It is good to have walked by oneself five hundred miles in twenty days and one pair of boots (never needing the cobbler till the very last day) without any training and with a fairly heavy knapsack. It is good to have seen something on this and many other occasions, sometimes alone, sometimes in company, of the secret of the sea and the lessons of the land from Scilly to Skye; from the Land’s End to Dover; from the Nore to the Moray Firth; from Dartmoor to Lochaber; and from the Weald of Sussex to those Northumbrian lakes that lie, lonely and rather uncanny, under the Roman Wall. It is good to have attended evening chapel at Oxford, then gone up to town and danced all night (the maximum of dances with the minimum of partners), returning next morning and attending chapel again. It is good to have prevented an editor, some time before Pigott caught the Times, from engaging in negotiations with that ingenious person as he had intended to do; and to have actually silenced a Radical canvasser. It it good to have been always like-minded with the old and not the  modern law of England, to the effect that ‘collective bargaining’ can never be anything but collective bullying. It is good to have read Walz’s Rhetores Graeci, and the Grand Cyrus, and nearly all the English poets that anybody ever heard of; also to find The Earthly Paradise, at a twentieth reading in 1920, as delightful as it was at a first in 1868. It is good to have heard Sims Reeves flood St. James Hall with ‘Adelaida’ til you felt as if you were being drowned, not in a bath but in an ocean of malmsey; and to have descanted on the beauties of your first Burne-Jones, without knowing that a half-puzzled, half-amused don stood behind you. Many other things past, and some present, have been and are—for anything, once more, that has been is—good.

But I do not feel the slightest shame in ranking as good likewise and very good, those voyages to the Oracle of the Bottle and those obediences to its utterance, taken literally as well as allegorically, which are partially chronicled here.

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