Connect the dots

It really is stunning, the sheer amount of information at our fingertips on the Web. Perhaps I should not mention that the following is how I spend my weekend, but ... alas.

Yesterday, I finished Ender's Game (who knew? I'm sort of loving science fiction!), and I picked an unread book off my shelf: Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Oxford English Dictionary, the story of OED editor James Murray and contributor WC Minor, who happened to live (for more than 30 years) in an asylum.

I'm almost finished, and my God, how the world has changed. It took decades, and tens (hundreds? Thousands?) of volunteers, reading books in English and cataloguing words, illustrated by historical usage, on slips of paper that they then passed along to Murray. I can't speak to the process that goes into the dictionary's revision today, but information is just so much faster: you don't even have to thumb through impossible, unwieldy tomes any more, you can simply log on to OED.com. I learned about the Web site's revamp (a list of changes can be found here) through a tweet by Felix Salmon; through February 5, 2011, you can log on for free and explore using the username "trynewoed" and the password "trynewoed." (Or, if you just want a glimpse of what one entry looks like, here is a sample, the definition of "digital.")

But, being curious like a cat, I was not (am not) content to simply explore the high-level subjects of the book. No, Winchester repeatedly mentions a publication from that era, The Athenaeum (a literary and scientific review printed in London from 1828 to 1923), and I wanted to know more. It was a long shot, but there was so little to lose that I decided to try anyway: I plugged the title into Google Books.

Lo and behold, a copy of an issue covering January to June, 1870, popped up; the full text was available. This issue came from the Harvard University library. It is formatted in three columns and the type is tiny; it would be difficult, if not impossible, to undertake any academic research based on this digital collection, but for a dilettante such as myself, it is a gold mine.

I've been skimming the work for quite some time now. My progress is hampered by my frequent tracking down of other interesting books mentioned, even in passing. For example, I fell into a rabbithole looking at Old Merry's Queer Discourses on Queer Proverbs, for which the etching of the cat and mice above served as a frontispiece.

Who or what was "Old Merry"? Well, for that, I have no answer; Google did not provide adequate information, only references to "old, merry England," and a link back to The Athenaeum. To the New York Public Library with ye!

Diorama-rama

Library, 2007, Lori Nix

Blown away by Lori Nix's dioramas (via Craft and a number of other sources). Her show at ClampArt Gallery lamentably closed on December 18, but if you're in Chicago, you can catch it at the Catherine Edelman Gallery (it runs through February 26). On "The City," her latest series (of which Library, above, is a part):

In my newest body of work ... I have imagined a city of our future, where something either natural, or as the result of mankind, has emptied the city of its human inhabitants. Art museums, Broadway theaters, laundromats and bars no longer function. The walls are deteriorating, the ceilings are falling in, the structures barely stand, yet Mother Nature is slowly taking them over. These spaces are filled with flora, fauna and insects, reclaiming what was theirs before man's encroachment. I am afraid of what the future holds if we do not change our ways regarding the climate, but at the same time I am fascinated by what a changing world can bring.

MASTER regurgitator

That's right, folks, Hadji Ali was more than just an amateur regurgitator: he was a consummate pro. The video above is from a 1927 Spanish-language Laurel and Hardy movie, Politiquerias; it highlights Ali's most famous vaudeville act, which was described in an ode to the dedication of vaudeville performers that was a part of Karen Abbott's Gypsy Rose Lee biography American Rose:

Consider how many times Chaz Chase, the ‘Eater of Strange Things,’ consumed lit matches in order to make the trick appear effortless, or the practice schedule of Hadji Ali, the master regurgitator, famous for swallowing a gallon of water followed by a pint of kerosene. After his assistant set up a small metal castle a few feet away, Hadji Ali spat kerosene in a six-foot stream and set the structure ablaze. He then opened his throat and, with the aim and velocity of a fire hose, purged the water and killed every flame.

I was seriously sad to come to the end of this book. If you like Gypsy, or even just strange people doing strange things, pick it up. Structural and stylistic deficiencies aside, it is fascinating, and there are plenty of little gems that will make your eyes bug out in disbelief. (Including an inference from Morton Minsky about Gypsy and her monkey Woolly Face that is, in the words of a friend, "seriously lurid.")

Jacket copy

Sincerely wish I had this pulp edition of The Outward Room. Instead, picked up an old copy at Argosy last week; it's the Simon and Schuster second printing from 1937.

Loving the cover text from the S&S edition -- the back features a snappy bio of Millen Brand, who at the time was more or less an unknown. Interesting facts! About Brand!:

He is now thirty years old. He plays chess occasionally, but is indifferent about most games. He is no automaton. ... he has, according to his wife (who is Pauline Leader, author of And No Birds Sing), an irritatingly even disposition.

Will probably scan/write more about this later when I collect my thoughts. New York Review Books reprinted it in 2010 -- if you're interested in a work that begins with a riveting escape from a mental hospital, this is for you!

Gypsy!

Guiltily loving every minute of Karen Abbott's American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare, the Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee, hearsay or not, disconcerting shifts in time and voice or not. An amazing anecdote from early in the book (guess grit runs in the family!):

[Gypsy's] great-great-grandmother emigrated from Norway and set out for the West Coast in a covered wagon. She made it as far as the Sierra Nevada mountains when her party was stranded by a blizzard. Most of the party died, frozen or starved or devoured by wolves. Rescue workers whisked Grandma to the nearest settlement and undressed her, discovering what appeared to be horsemeat strapped around her body, hidden from the other survivors. She alone appeared plump and healthy. On closer inspection, the rescue team discovered that it wasn't horsemeat after all but rather the flesh of her less fortunate companions.

Order to madness

Le Corbusier, an architect and painter, created The Modulor, an anthropometric scale of proportions in the vein of Vitruvius, da Vinci, and Alberti, in 1943. (My fascination with Le Corbusier stems from Sumeet's growing up in Chandigarh, India's first planned city, which the architect had a big hand in planning.)

Le Corbusier described the measure as a "range of harmonious measurements to suit the human scale, universally applicable to architecture and to mechanical things"; I picked up this copy of The Modulor (second edition, trans. Peter De Francia and Anna Bostock, Harvard University Press, 1966) from The Strand's $1 book cart. I admit that I understand the math behind it very little, but I love that he applies the system to city planning, building construction, painting and composition, and the movement of consumer goods. 

Lots of scans behind the cut, and in my Flickr set.

Click to read more ...

Goodbye 2010, hello 2011!

I'm having Martinelli's, but if you're inclined toward Champagne (or sparkling wine), cheers to you!

2010 in books: What I read

Definitely not going to finish The American Language (HL Mencken) or The Metropolis Case (Matthew Gallaway) before midnight, so here, with little comment, and in no particular order, are the books that fed my brain between January and December (favorites bolded):

1. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick Flynn
2. Sacred Games, Vikram Chanda
3. Freedom, Jonathan Franzen
4. Lush Life, Richard Price
5. Sunset Park, Paul Auster
6. The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman
7. Like Life, Lorrie Moore
8. Lit, Mary Karr
9. Birds of America, Lorrie Moore
10. Flaubert's Parrot, Julian Barnes
11. Anatomy of an Epidemic, Robert Whitaker
12. Rumpus Women, compilation
13. C, Tom McCarthy
14. The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz
15. My Dog Tulip, JR Ackerley
16. Make Believe, Joanna Scott
17. The Manikin, Joanna Scott
18. The Black Minutes, Martin Solares
19. Half Life, Shelley Jackson
20. The Places in Between, Rory Stewart
21. Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson
22. A Short History of Women, Kate Walbert
23. Lowboy, John Wray
24. You Are Here, Meenakshi Madhavan
25. The White Mary, Kira Salak
26. Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk
27. The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafron
28. Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson
29. Fugitives and Refugees, Chuck Palahniuk
30. The 42nd Parallel, John Dos Passos
31. The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon
32. The Help, Kathryn Stockett
33. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
34. The Girl Who Played With Fire, Stieg Larsson
35. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Stieg Larsson
36. Room, Emma Donoghue
37. The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, Thomas Mullen
38. Possible Side Effects, Augusten Burroughs
39. A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
40. Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane
41. Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann
42. The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
43. Bad Marie, Marcy Dermansky
44. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Aimee Bender
45. Bright-Sided, Barbara Ehrenreich
46. Ghosted, Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall
47. Kapitoil, Teddy Wayne
48. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
49. Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
50. Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins
51. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa
52. The Coast of Akron, Adrienne Miller
53. The Vagrants, Yiyun Li
54. Moth Smoke, Mohsin Hamid
55. The Territory of Men, Joelle Fraser
56. Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault
57. The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova
58. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Geoff Dyer
59. The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
60. Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon
61. War, Sebastian Junger
62. A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore
63. The Ask, Sam Lipsyte
64. Little Bee, Chris Cleave

Hey, cool -- that's more than a book a week! Maybe next year, I'll make it an even 100. Not sure what to take away from this; apparently, I like women writers, I like fiction more than nonfiction, and I skew toward white American writers?

Anyone want to borrow a book? Lemme know. The lending library is open in Astoria. Also, my beloved book club has more or less disbanded. New year, new group?

Stocking the bookshelf for 2011

New additions (from Powell's Books in Portland and Argosy Books on 59th between Park and Lex):

1. Nina Berberova, The Book of Happiness
2. Millen Brand, The Outward Room
3. Richard Cobb, Paris and Elsewhere
4. Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and Into the Trees
5. Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question
6. Ed. Erin McKean, Verbatim
7. Susan Minot, Lust & Other Stories
8. Susan Minot, Monkeys
9. Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris
10. Joanna Scott, Tourmaline
11. Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

I just finished Sacred Games (Vikram Chanda) and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Nick Flynn). Sacred Games was just what I needed for vacation: sprawling but fast paced, absorbing, full of Hindi expletives (bhenchod!). Haven't read many memoirs lately, and Suck City was a pretty good one; it focuses on Flynn's relationship, or lack thereof, with his father, a writer/bank robber/homeless man in Boston who begins sleeping at the shelter Flynn is employed by. At heart, it's just a fascinating story. And it's true: "There are many ways to drown, only the most obvious wave their arms as they're going under." 

Sumeet and I are keeping it low-key for the night: trying out Tiffin New York, finding something good on Netflix, listening to our cat mewl, and breaking out the Martinelli's at midnight. Here's to 2011! We (plus my parents) salute you from our great backyard in Milwaukie!

Merry merry happy

Happy holidays from mine to yours; this is the Christmas Eve scene. Half the fam was here last night, and half will be here today! Christmas cheer for weeks!

I received a Kindle, about which I am delighted. My first download was from Project Gutenberg: the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, by Francis Grose. A term I would like to revive: "Admiral of the narrow seas," which is defined as "one who from drunkenness vomits into the lap of the person sitting opposite to him." Ho ho ho!