The Case of the Inventive Conscience
Sherlock Holmes had been bending for a long time over a low-power microscope. Now he straightened himself up and looked round at me in triumph.
“It is ash, Jones,” said he. “Unquestionably it is ash. Have a look at these scattered objects in the field!”
I stooped to the eyepiece and focussed for my vision.
“Those hairs are threads from a tweed coat. The irregular gray masses are dust. There are epithelial scales on the left. Those black smears in the centre are undoubtedly ash.”
“Well,” I said, laughing, “I am prepared to take your word for it. Does anything depend upon it?”
“It is a very fine demonstration,” he answered. “In the St. Pancras case you may remember that a cap was found beside the dead policeman. The accused man denies that it is his. But he is a poet of dubious cleanliness who habitually handles cigarettes.”
“Is it one of your cases?”
“No; my friend, Merivale, of the Yard, asked me to look into it. It is called: “The Case of the Inventive Conscience.”
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Holmes aside—though what a graaaand gentleman he was to tolerate a humble blogger in his private laboratory—I thought you’d want to know about this event:
The Committee on Social Thought
announces a public lecture in its John U. Nef Lecture Seriesby
Edward Mendelson
Columbia Universityon
“W.H. Auden and the Case of the Inventive Conscience”
Thursday, May 3, 2007 4:30 PM
Stuart Hall 101
5835 S. Greenwood
Chicago, Illinois
April 30th, 2007 17:26
This I can go to but you missed the Role of Story in the Creative Arts Symposium conducted by Mark Slouka who runs the Creative Writing Department at the University of Chicago. He is a conflicted public speaker but had some cogent thoughts on the role of narrative continuing in the literary arts at least in this humble observers opinion. The story that is to say the role of story was indeed as he promised it would be amply examined by the film feature Nine Lives, by Rodrigo Garcia, which, inasmuch as it is a flick, really did communicate a complicated feeling through the interconnected stories of nine separate women. The point here is though the movies are so bad, I mean inefficient, implausible, and dialoguely dumb, that you really don’t take anything from the admittedly sophisticated narrative devices but a misunderstanding of the entire production because you yourself have worked so hard to ignore cinematic fallacies that, in the end or before the end because I actually left before it ended, the intellection of film seems implausible to you. That said, it wasn’t bad for what it was. Boy there were some scenes though where you just cringed for all involved. Cringed!
The Hood Company
April 30th, 2007 17:34
Interesting – that event definitely caught my eye. So Slouka was good, huh? I was sorry to see the Mendelson scheduled cross-Slouka next week.
Did you see Eva Hoffman’s review of Slouka’s book in the NYT yesterday:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/books/review/Hoffman3.t.html
Not without reservations, but the kind of review that made me want to read the book …
May 3rd, 2007 10:28
Lydia Davis actually excited me. The trouble there becomes place: which is to say, being outof.
The Hood Company