Something sort of interesting I came across recently in the course of some of my Walsering, though it isn’t primarily about Walser:

In his recent review of Walser’s The Assistant in the Village Voice, Giles Harvey begins:

In a famous short story, Borges has one of his characters, an obscure author, remark: “I do not belong to art, but merely to the history of art.”

He concludes the review with the line:

If it isn’t already clear, Walser belongs not just to the history of literature, but to literature itself.

Good enough. But then, reading Eliot Weinberger’s essay on Susan Sontag in the August 16, 2007, issue of the New York Review of Books, I see this concluding paragraph:

Arguably the most important American literary figure or force of the last forty years, she may ultimately belong more to literary history than to literature.

Probably just a coincidence, but here’s a few other odd connections or disconnections: the Sontag article doesn’t mention Walser. However, Sontag was one of Walser’s strongest advocates, and Weinberger himself recently shared a glowing opinion of Walser on the NBCC’s blog, Critical Mass. Further, Harvey attributes the quote to Borges, but Weinberger, who never mentions Borges, is the translator of Borges’s Selected Non-Fictions.

And there’s something a bit odd about the quote itself. Did it originate with Borges? The Borges story in question is “An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain.” It appears in a Borges collection called Ficciones. The relevant passage occurs in the story’s second paragraph, provided below in its entirely:

“I am like Cowley’s Odes,” he wrote to me from Longford on March 6, 1939. “I do not belong to art, but to the history of art.” In his mind, there was no discipline inferior to history.

In the previous paragraph, Borges makes a passing reference to Samuel Johnson, which reminded me that a) Johnson wrote about Cowley, in Lives of the Poets, and b) the quote actually has some of the architectural qualities of Johnson’s own writing.

Alas, I reread Johnson’s essay on Cowley but couldn’t find a quote like this. I did find similar sentiments, such as this expression of Johnson’s opinion of Cowley’s “Pindaric” odes:

It is hard to conceive that a man of the first rank in learning and wit, when he was dealing out such minute morality in such feeble diction, could imagine, either waking or dreaming, that he imitated Pindar.

I also enjoyed, in Johnson’s Cowley essay, seeing the Great Cham start a sentence with the very modern and colloquial-sounding, “The thing is, ….”
Anyhow, this little thread ultimately goes nowhere. I don’t know why I told you this story, except to wonder again aloud how these two writers with their odd and not entirely obvious affinities happened to hit upon this quote at the same time.

As promised, from “Haunted Technology,” a review by Phil Baker of The Iron Whim: A fragmented history of typewriting, in the June 1, 2007 issue of the Times Literary Supplement (not online):

Sooner or later, Wershler-Henry observes, “anyone writing about typewriting has to deal with the monkeys”: the monkeys, that is, who will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. They appear to derive from a 1909 book on probability by the French mathematician Emile Borel, who invented the image of the “datylographic monkey” to illustrate a mathematical proposition named Kolmogorov’s Zero-One Law. According to the zero-one law, Borel explained, a typewriting monkey would eventually reproduce every single book in the Bibliotheque nationale. Typing monkeys have had their niche in the mathematical imagination ever since. Sometimes they reproduce the Library of Congress, and in a 1940 short story by Russell Maloney, “Inflexible Logic,” the British Library. Overhearing a man explain that six chimpanzees would eventually write all the works in the British Museum, a Mr. Bainbridge sets out to experiment. The experiment works almost too well, with the monkeys producing John Donne’s prose, the memoirs of Queen Marie of Romania, and a monograph on marsh grasses. It remains for his sobering mathematical friend, Mallard, to bring him back to earth: “These chimpanzees will begin to compose gibberish quite soon,” he predicts. “It is bound to happen. Science tells us so.”

More soberingly still, a physics professor at Yale, William R. Bennett, has calculated that if a trillion monkeys typed ten random characters a second, it would still take a trillion times longer than the universe has been in existence just to produce the sentence, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Moving from calculation to experiment, The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, in existence since 2003 with a hundred monkeys typing at a vastly accelerated speed, has produced just nineteen letters from The Two Gentlemen of Verona after 42,162,500,000 billion monkey years: “Valentine. Cease to 1dor:eFLPoFRjWK78aXz …”

An enterprising experiment that involved real monkeys produced even more confounding results, not least because “they get bored and they shit on the keyboard rather than type …”

I guess only Imani and I have noticed the redesigned Times Literary Supplement, which debuted on June 15. Even Stothard hasn’t noticed, and he’s the editor. I’ll skip the elements Imani addressed and simply point out the other goods and the bads from my point of view.

First, the goods:

A masthead. We now have a list of TLS editors by topic. This is great. At a minimum, when I see the acknowledgements to Alan Jenkins and Adrian Tahourdin in John Taylor’s magnificent Paths to Contemporary French Literature, I can say: fortunately, still on the job!

Sorry, that’s all the “goods.” Here’s the not-so-much:

“This Week.” Kinda like the “Up Front” section in the New York Times Book Review, this new feature appears under the masthead on page 2 and provides an overview of the contents of this issue. Not really necessary. I find myself skipping this.

“Letters.” Five columns now instead of four. The four-column was a little more readable. But this might just be an “everyone hates change” kind of thing.

Finally, two of my favorite elements are now missing:

“Author, Author.” This was a little quiz featuring three, often obscure, quotations from literary works. You had to guess the author and the work. It ran for 1,351 issues (that is, almost 26 years). I got it right twice in 26 years. Still, I miss the darn thing. Trading quotations is just so essential to literary culture, a little way in which literary works survive the years and decades, “a way of happening,” as Auden says, “a mouth.”

The Back Page: Now “NB” (one of my favorite features) occupies the back page, we’ve lost one of my favorites things about the TLS: the back-page review. Although one of the more prominent pages of any publication, the back page of the TLS was never used to highlight the most popular books or the most important books. Rather, the selections for the back page followed some formula I could never really deduce. The significance of the insignificant: that was one theme. Another was the insignificance of the significant. Life in all its glory and futility: that was another. How ephemeral our current occupations and diversions: yet another. Here’s a list of the last 30 or so titles covered on the back page. Maybe you can detect an all-encompassing theme I’ve missed:

The Iron Whim: A fragmented history of typewriting (June 1)
Second Lives (May 18)
The Sun King’s Garden: Louis XIV, Andre Le Notre, and the creation of the gardens of Versailles (May 11)
Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette wore to the Revolution (Apr 27)
The Hottentot Venus: the life and death of Saartjie Baartman born 1798-buried 2002 (Apr 20)
Clever Girl: A sentimental education (Apr 13)
The Cat Orchestra and the Elephant Butler: The strange history of amazing animals (Apr 6)
Sovereign Ladies: The six reigning Queens of England (Mar 23)
The Ulster Anthology (Mar 19)
Agent Zigzag: The true wartime story of Eddie Chapman: lover, betrayer, hero, spy / Zigzag: The incredible war-time exploits of double agent Eddie Chapman (Mar 9)
Spike and Co: Inside the house of fun with Milligan, Sykes, Galton, and Simpson / The Unpublished Spike Milligan Box 18 (Feb 23)
Household Gods: The British and their possessions (Feb 9)
The Seven Hills of Rome: A geological tour of the Eternal City (Jan 26)
The Ball Is Round: A global history of football (Jan 19)
Growing Out of Trouble: A real-life story of redemption and recovery (Jan 12)
The Medical Detective: John Snow and the mystery of cholera (Jan 5)
London: City of disappearances (Dec 22 & 29)
Hollow Earth: The long and curious history of imagining strange lands, fantastical creatures, and marvelous machines below the Earth’s surface (Dec 15)
Love and Louis XIV: the women in the life of the Sun King (Dec 8)
Casanova’s Women (Dec 1)
The North Face of Soho: Unreliable Memoirs, Volume Four (Nov 17)
The Big Oyster: New York in the world: A molluscular history (Nov 10)
Time at War (Oct 20)
Bringing the House Down: A family memoir (Oct 13)
Nature’s Engraver: A life of Thomas Bewick (Oct 6)
I Was Vermeer: The legend of the forger who swindled the Nazis (Sep 1)
Alistair Cooke’s American Journey (Aug 11)
The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (Aug 4)

Looking at this again, perhaps the only thing that really binds all these books together is a wry smile, or a knowing look. It was a little silent dialogue with the editor. Or was it just my imagination?

This is the most sensible thing I’ve read in the whole blogs-versus-newspapers debate, from Terry Teachout in the Saturday Wall Street Journal (subs only):

One of the most important civic duties that a newspaper performs is to cover the activities of local arts groups — but it can’t do that effectively without also employing knowledgeable critics who are competent to evaluate the work of those groups. Mere reportage, while essential, is only the first step. It’s not enough to announce that the Hooterville Art Museum finally bought itself a Picasso. You also need a staffer who can tell you whether it’s worth hanging, just as you need someone who knows whether the Hooterville Repertory Company’s production of “Private Lives” was funny for the right reasons.

Can bloggers do that? Of course — and some of them do it better than their print-media counterparts. You won’t find a more thoughtful literary critic than Houston’s Patrick Kurp, a more imaginative commentator on music than San Francisco’s Heather Heise, or a better-informed art writer than Tyler Green of Washington, D.C. But blogging, valuable though it can be, is no substitute for the day-to-day attention of a newspaper whose editors seek out experts, hire them on a full-time basis, and give them enough space to cover their beats adequately. The problem is that fewer and fewer newspapers seem willing to do that in any consistent way. I don’t care for the word “provincial,” but I can’t think of a more accurate way to describe a city whose local paper is unwilling to make that kind of commitment to the fine arts.

I’ve had art on the brain lately. Twelve-hour work days seem to do this to me; in my rare hours of leisure I tend towards anything antiutilitarian. Usually it’s poetry, but art works too. There’s a double meaning in that.

When I was at the Art Institute to see the great Mel Bochner exhibition (mentioned earlier here), they were also running “Baldessari Sings Sol LeWitt” in the video gallery. I had never seen it, and I thought it was pretty funny. I’ll never again forget that “ideas are different than concepts.” Doo-dah.

Anyhow, now I see a lovely piece in the big, fat Summer issue of Art Forum in which Bochner remembers LeWitt (not online). A little taste:

Sol was a true intellectual. We immediately discovered we had similar tastes in authors — Samuel Beckett is an obvious one, but also more offbeat and marginal figures like Michael Butor and Celine. There was almost no writer you could name who Sol hadn’t read; no artist, past or present, who he didn’t know. There was also no piece of music, from medieval chansons to the most contemporary atonalist, that he didn’t have in his vast collection of records and tapes. In fact, the composer Morton Feldman periodically called Sol to borrow some obscure recording of his own music that even Feldman himself didn’t have. Sol had the whole of culture at his fingertips.

if you don’t know LeWitt, who died April 8, MCA in Chicago has a memorial exhibition running until August 8.

Remember this? That piece is normally at MOMA in New York, but I’d guess it’s part of the Jeff Wall exhibition that recently opened at the Art Institute. The following isn’t on AIC’s website yet, but I spotted it in the July/August issue of the member magazine:

The Leadership Advisory Committee, in collaboration with the Department of Museum Education and Congo Square Theater, presents “Whose Invisible Man” on September 7 at 6:00 p.m. Following a dramatic interpretation of the Prologue to Ralph Ellison’s seminal 1947 novel Invisible Man, the Art Institute will host a critical discussion of the work as it relates to Jeff Wall’s After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue, 1999-2000.

Finally, two favorites from some museum-going I managed to squeeze in over the last few months:

First, Mónica Bengoa’s tribute to George Perec (and others) in the exhibition called Poetics of the Handmade at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. (Not online, so you have to go and see it before it closes on August 8.)

Second, the exhibition Chinglish, at the Hong Kong Art Museum, in which seven artists explored Hong Kong’s local language, which blends English with various Chinese dialects, and which is thought be threatened by the increasing influence of mainland China and recent development like the (supposed?) elimination of traditional Chinese characters in official UN communications starting in 2008. (Hong Kong and Taiwan still use traditional Chinese; mainland uses simplified Chinese.)