This week's non-related reading: One of Our Thursdays is Missing

It's been too long since I read a books didn't have footnotes in it.  Ever since the semester ended, I've been trying something new-- instead of working on school-related stuff until I pretty much pass out from lack of sleep, this week, I've been spending my late evenings with Jasper Fforde's One of Our Thursdays is Missing. 


It's a book that probably will not be terribly enjoyable for people who haven't read the other works in the series (which I urge everyone to do.  Go on, I'll wait. *surfs the Internet.  Makes a cake. Writes the next great American novel.  Does dishes.* OK, all done?  Good).  It's also a bit slower than the other books in the series, and the jokes seem a bit more forced this time around, but Fforde is a wonderful author, so even on a less-than-stellar book, the result is chuckle-worthy, even if it's not the same ohmygodicannotgotosleepuntilifinishthisbook that The Eyre Affair was.


The premise is, not terribly surprising, that Thursday Next, or, rather, a Thursday Next has gone missing, and another Thursday has to go and both find her, and find out why she's missing (though not in that order).  In the mean time, written Thursday meets up with a clockwork butler, an elephant with a long memory, a Designated Love Interest, and Unrequited Love Interest, and others.  Hijinks (formulaically) ensue.  Lessons are told, consequences are suffered, and everyone who was meant to lives happily ever after.


Not the best book in the world, and I doubt that I would have finished it if I hadn't had the great love of Fforde that I do.  But it did provide a nice counterbalance to reading about sodomy in early modern Italy, which was today's related reading.  I think I giggled more at the latter, but that's just because I am immature.

I just made a strange realization-- I date my childhood by Harry Potter books. I was just trying to remember the summer I spent at a creative writing program in some far-off fancy university.  I was in high school, but when?  All I could remember was that it was the summer that The Order of the Phoenix came out.  Dang, that was a long time ago.

when the doctor

gives you a prescription, tells you to get plenty of rest, and drink fluids that are not coffee, and you do only one of the three for a few days, the result is not a great one.

So. very. sick.

The best part about Easter?

Easter candy is 50% off pretty much everywhere.

The bad part about Easter?  Easter candy is 50% off pretty much everywhere.

Cadbury eggs - real food + coffee + all day sitting in a chair reading + stress = upset stomach + diabetes

Freaky Fauna Friday: Succarath

This little beast comes from Francisco Núñez de Cepeda's Idea de el buen pastor copiada por los SS. Doctores representada en empresas sacras: con avisos espirituales, morales, politicos y economicos para el govierno de un principe ecclesiastico, though it takes as the source for the animal information the Spanish Jesuit Juan Eusebio Nieremberg's Historia naturae, maxime peregrinae, 1635.  

I believe that Nieremberg's work also has an image of this little beastie, but since the work doesn't seem to have ever been scanned, I can't be sure.  

At any rate, this fearsome beast, (with a rather fetching plumed tail) was called a succarath, and Núñez de Cepeda writes that it lived in the southernmost reaches of America, and its skin is used by the natives as a covering.  Núñez de Cepeda goes on to call attention to the way in which this fearsome beast cares for its young, for even while chased by hunters, it still takes its young upon its back to try and carry them to safety.  

"Mira con tan singular afecto la propagacion de su descendencia, que perseguida de los caçadores, toma sobre su espalda los hijos, y por asegurarlos la vida, aventura la propia: Tanto es el amor con que atiende à su posteridad aun la fiereça de los brutos mas indomitos!"

Núñez de Cepeda's work gives a snippet of the original information from Nieremberg's book, where he calls the animal a ferocious and wild beast ("Succarath apud Patagonas bellua rapax, & torva est.")  And it does seem fierce indeed-- it looks a bit like an overgrown dog, but it's bearded (seen more clearly in other images), though most of its hair outside of the beard and the tail isn't terribly long.  Nieremberg also mentions its love for its young, and in that, his description seems almost Aesopian.  

Nieremberg's Historia naturae, maxime peregrinae was one of the two works on natural philosophy/history that he published (the other being the 1649 Curiosa y oculta filosofía), and it was a curious book chock full of really, really strange arcana (to our modern eyes, at least), interspersed with descriptions of natural history, much of it from the new world. Our imaginative Jesuit, it should be noted, never left Spain.  He was simply a compiler of information, and his sources for the new world were works by new world historians like Francisco Hernández, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, José de Acosta, Cieza de León, Fernández de Oviedo, and others.*  This highly detailed drawing of a creature that neither Núñez de Cepeda, Nieremberg, nor the illustrators of their books had ever seen is to me, what's so cool about these illustrations and their descriptions.  How do you describe an animal you don't know?  

* Juan Pimentel, “Baroque Natures: Juan Nieremberg, American Wonders, and Preterimperial Natural History,” in Bleichmar, Daniela and Paula de Vos, eds. Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2009. 

More fun romps through a catalog

Another day, another romp through a catalog.  I just found a work, Remaines concerning Britaine (1637), by a William Camden, a work classed under the subject of 'generalities.'  If there was ever a catch-all category, that would certainly be it!

Quotation of the day

Or, in which I discover the visually pleasing qualities of a human navel... 


"History, that is, a rehearsal of the events of human tragedy. [...] Words cannot do sufficient justice to the importance of this. [...] For the study of human history makes men gentle, humble, and careful, so the ignorance of it keeps him crude toward himself and others, proud, and hasty towards his own and the state's undoing."

From Johann Valentin Andreae's Chrisianopolis (1616)

catalog reading

I came across an entry in a catalog for a book with, as early modern books are wont to have, a really long title.  The title in the Worldcat citation is Iobi Ludolfi aliàs Leut=holf dicti Historia Aethiopica: sive brevis & succincta descriptio regni Habessinorum, quod vulgò malè Presbyteri Iohannis vocatur : in qua libris quatuor agitur ... : cum tabulâ capitum, & indicibus necessariis, which is more than a mouthful.  Who was it that said that his mouth felt as if a mouse had pissed in it, then died?  At any rate, no doubt that's how I'd feel if I tried to declaim that title.

What really drew me to the book, however, was the description for the illustrations noted in the catalog I was consulting. To wit:

Map - Ethiopia. Banana. Sheep. Elephants. Monkeys. Hippopotamus. Execution - Beheading of missionaries.

Where else can you get a banana, elephant, and a beheading, all in one, convenient seventeenth century package?  

Review: Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution

Moran, Bruce T. Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

The work is, by its nature, an introductory work, aimed more for students or general readers wishing to get a crash course in European alchemy during the Scientific Revolution, but also interestingly, Moran’s chronology reaches into the in the Middle Ages, because of course, alchemy did not spring, fully formed and articulated, in the early modern period.  Despite its brevity, it must be noted that it fulfills its aims quite well.  It is a short, compact, but adept little book that discusses the conceptual framework and development of alchemy in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.  While its format is that of the standard textbook in history of science, its argument takes into account several interesting features that have been coming out of the scholarship in the Scientific Revolution over the past decade or so.  Eschewing the grand narrative of the Scientific Revolution (in which alchemy is vilified as the exemplar of the irrationality of premodern knowledge), and even a more nuanced argument that alchemy is important because certain alchemical principles would become important for later chemists, he instead argues for the centrality of alchemical practice in a new sort of Scientific Revolution, one that was not a revolution of ideas, but a revolution in the way artisanal practices were viewed.  In this, Moran’s work is very similar to a recent work by Pamela Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, which also argues that if we begin to look at physical processes, practical experiences, and the physical process of doing, then we see the story of the Scientific Revolution in a new light. 

The book begins with a description of the many things that doing alchemy *meant* in the early modern period, and the second chapter stresses the links that alchemical practices had to the various artisanal practices of the day.  The third chapter treats Paracelsus, the iconoclast physician without whom no treatment of alchemy is complete.  The fourth chapter looks at the places where alchemical and chemical learning was done.  The Paracelsians had long laid claim to the courts of German princes, and Philip II had also created an alchemical laboratory in his own court, and was a great patron of Paracelsian doctors and apothecaries. Attempts were also made, Moran writes, to secure a place for chemical knowledge within academic walls, and the tradition of teaching it at the university began in early seventeenth century Paris, and spread to other sites of early modern knowledge-making like the Jardin des Plantes.  Chapter 5 brings us into the world of apparatuses and experiences beyond the ken of those who worked only in the environments that nature provided.  Hooke and Boyle’s air pump, for example, gave new sites of knowledge-making, including alchemical knowledge.  The chapter also goes on to talk about Boyle’s major work, the Scepitcal Chemist, and the views on alchemy and chemistry it contained.  His main aim in the book, Moran writes, was to attack the claims of those who, without experimental justification assumed the presence of principles and elements to use in their chemical philosophies, taking direct aim, or course, at Aristotle’s four elements, and Paracelsus’ three principles of mercury, salt, and sulfur.  What Boyle replaced these elements and principles with was buts of matter in motion, obeying the laws of god and nature.  Boyle, like Bacon and Starkey, displayed a skeptical empiricism, and a desire to make knowledge through experiment, a newly forming category of the time.  The discussion of alchemy as a discipline that crossed traditional boundaries is the subject of the final chapter. Alchemy, he argues, crossed national borders, and was at home in the courts as well as in the academies.  Alchemists worked to support the mechanical view of life, while other alchemists balanced these discussions with arguments for the presence of vitalistic principles. He uses that to stress his view of the Scientific Revolution not as a story of opposites, with one aspect of a pair triumphing over another, but to look at the congruences between them, be they between mechanism and vitalism, or alchemy and mechanics. In this way, he argues, we can see how the process of making things can share a role in the process of creating scientific knowledge. To this end, he discuses the contribution of chemistry and mechanics to medicine, and (following in the footsteps of Betty Jo Dobbs’ The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy) Newton’s alchemical practices, which Newton took very seriously.

Moran concludes with the usual story of reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution:  alchemy and chemistry. were important, even before they were quantitative; modern categories of ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ have little bearing in the early modern world, and there was more of a continuity than a displacement in the move from alchemy to chemistry during the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  His overall point, reiterated in the conclusion, is that hands-on practices themselves were forms of making knowledge, and that these activities should be afforded a place, alongside discoveries and theories, in the now-traditional narrative of the so-called Scientific Revolution.  

things I don't like

Snow.  Snow is something I really don't care for.  And the cold.  Is it summer yet?

quotation of the day: on paradigms

"... only with great difficulty could [Kuhn] have left the concept of 'paradigm' more open to misinterpretation than he did.  One sympathetic critic has shown that Kuhn uses the tem in no fewer than 21 different ways." - Cedarbaum, "Paradigms"


Every time I hear the word 'paradigm,' I remember my old PI, incensed that the lab's work wasn't getting into the best journals, when everyone should be able to see that it was paradigm shifting, or that it would start a new paradigm, paradigm, paradigm.  I suspected paradigm was his favorite word. 

quotations from Trevor-Roper

In the section refuting the notion that Calvinism was responsible for the Enlightenment, we get a lot of choice tidbits about Calvinists from a man who certainly knew how to wield a pen. On the Calvinist torch-bearers of the 17th c:

Their masters may have been grim, but there is a certain heroic quality about their grimness, a literary power about their writing, an intellectual force in their minds. The successors are also grim, but they are grim and mean. Perkins and ‘‘Smectymnuus’’ in England, Rivetus and Voëtius in Holland, Baillie and Rutherford in Scotland, Desmarets and Jurieu in France, Francis Turrettini in Switzerland, Cotton Mather in America—what a gallery of intolerant bigots, narrow-minded martinets, timid conservative defenders of repellent dogmas, instant assailants of every new or liberal idea, inquisitors and witch-burners!

On Calvinism in France:

But after 1629, when the pride and autonomy of the Huguenots were broken, the independent laymen gradually disappear from among them, and French Protestantism, like Scottish Protestantism, is dominated by a clergy which becomes, with time, increasingly narrow and rigid: crabbed prudes and Puritans, haters of literature and the arts, stuck in postures of defence. 

On radicalism (or not):

In general we are too prone to suppose that the Independency of the Puritan Republic was intellectually a radical movement. Once again this results from a confusion of political with intellectual terms. Because the Independents, the Cromwellians, were prepared to cut off the king’s head, while the Presbyterians, the followers of Denzil Holles, wished to keep it on, it is easy to suppose that the former were more ‘‘radical’’ than the latter.

Word of the Day: lampadophory

Camaraderie is a wonderful thing, I suppose.  I was reading Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (which is available for free from the wonderful folks at the Online Library of Liberty), and I came across an unfamiliar word: lampadophory.  I used the not-so-trusty-but-incredibly-handy Oxford New American dictionary on my computer.  Not terribly surprisingly, it was not there.  So, I googled it, but while I was waiting for the page to load, I realized my folly-- why bother to google it, I *know* that I'm going to look it up in the OED, no matter what I find on the internet.  But, in a strange coincidence, the first hit for the word was this blog post that was about the process of reading Trevor-Roper in the library, and wondering what this strange word meant.  Well, I now know that I am not the only one who stumbled on this particular word!

Oh, and for all the people who might stumble on this page while looking up 'lampadophory' while they too are reading Trevor-Roper, the word comes from the Greek lampadedromy:

A torch-race; a race (on foot or horseback) in which a lighted torch was passed from hand to hand.

There, saved you a trip.

quotation of the day

“I also met at Gorice a Count Cotonimi, who was known in learned circles as the author of some Latin treatises on diplomacy.  Nobody read his books, but everyone agreed that he was a very learned man.” - Casanova, Memoirs, VI

Reading Latour "Matters of Fact, Matters of Concern"

And the best quotation of the night is the following:

‎The problem with philosophers is that because their jobs are so hard they drink a lot of coffee and thus use in their arguments an inordinate quantity of pots, mugs, and jugs-- to which, sometimes, they might add the occasional rock.

I'm no philosopher, but I do appreciate a profession that requires drinking a lot of coffee (or throwing rocks at relativists, also a good use for a rock).


Another notable tidbit:

Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind? ...You are always right! ... Isn't this fabulous!  Isn't it really worth going to graduate school to study critique!  'Enter here, poor folks.  After arduous years of reading turgid prose, you will always be right, you will never be taken in any more; no one, no matter how powerful, will be able to accuse you of naïveté, that supreme sin, any longer.

I do like the sound of always being right.  I don't like the reading turgid prose part though.... Can't I always be right, and leave the purple prose to the professionals?

Cardano's Cosmos Review

Grafton, Anthony. Cardano’s Cosmos: the Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

The world will end in 2012.  So it is foretold in the stars— on 21 December of 2012, the December sun will line up with the plane of the Milky Way on the winter solstice with disastrous consequences for life on earth.  Or, at least, that’s what some believe.  Claims like these, and the astronomical data that buttress them, are mostly met with scorn or amusement today, but they were no laughing matter in the sixteenth century.  Anthony Grafton’s marvelous work on the life and works of Girolamo Cardano—a true Johannes-of-all-trades—explores the study of sixteenth century astrology with great sensitivity to the notion that this was very serious stuff indeed for Cardano and his contemporaries.  Despite the central importance that the stars had in the lives of sixteenth century men and women, there have been (or at least in 1999, there had been) precious few studies that took astrology as their contemporaries did, as a serious, empirical science.  Cardano, Grafton tells us, is an excellent choice to bridge the gap between two different historical interpretations of astrology: the first treats the subject on a social and cultural level, the second dwelled in the more internal, nitty-gritty world of endless calculations. The former usually could not find its way around a deferent, much less the complicated computations that went into a geniture, but the latter often could not dwell in the complicated social reality that made these astrological predictions so crucial in the first place.  Never before had the twain met, but these two roads of inquiry converge at Cardano; at a place where his writings and commentaries upon them abound. 

In Cardano’s Cosmos, Grafton recreates the world and the works of a typical sixteenth century astrologer—and we have no reason to doubt that Cardano was anything but typical (even if his store of writings and personal introspection was certainly unusual).   The book also goes into great detail about Cardano’s biography, and traces his published works from his first treatise on astrology, the 1534 Prognostico, the 1538 Libelli duo, and in the last chapter, Cardano’s own autobiography.  In chasing down Cardano’s life and astrological practices, Grafton shows how the man’s astrological prognostications were the end result of a system of knowledge that was both highly empirical and critical, and was indispensable for a Renaissance man or woman’s understanding of their world and themselves.

The work also touches upon several aspects of importance to early modern history.  It adds an interesting addendum to the already voluminous chapter of the rise of print culture, since Cardano exploited the new media to disseminate his ideas, and he in effect made his career by bringing into print a realm of materials that had only been in the manuscript tradition before.  However, Grafton is quick to point out that this is not a story of the triumph of print over manuscript, but that even in the post-Gutenberg west, the manuscript tradition was alive and well, and in fact, the first few printed horoscope collections were of far inferior quality and low technical level.  While print quickly became the preferred media for things like almanacs and astronomical tables, the media for horoscopes, which were so personal, and so dependent upon interpersonal connections, remained the manuscript and the conversation, but they were but one example out of many of texts whose manuscript forms remained standard until well after the advent of print.  The work also maps the place of the astrologer in late Renaissance society, and the perils and pitfalls that concerned anyone offering advice in a world of politics, fickle patrons, and great rivalry between practitioners. 

Astrology, Grafton writes, was an art that had persisted over centuries, but the application of tools of the trade “depended on the changing needs and situations of their users and their clients and readers” (198).  Astrology, then, as now, has always had its critics.  In the sixteenth century, the specter of Pico della Mirandola’s debunking of the origin myths of astrology hung over the whole enterprise, yet it lived on; Cardano is a testament to that.  But, he also participated in the humanistic endeavor to reform astrology, but his reformation took on the two-pronged approach typical of medical humanists of the day.  He sought to re-examining the ancient sources, and attempting to recreate the Imperial astrology which Ptolemy based his Tetrabiblos on, but he also collected new genitures and subjected them to minute scrutiny in hopes of reforming the practice through his own observations.  Grafton stresses that, when looked at in its social, political, and intellectual context, astrology was not simply superstitious hokum, but a system of knowledge of the most empirical sort. Cardano’s Cosmos brings to light this interesting chapter in the history of early modern science, and steers the reader on an intriguing journey in the life and times of a supremely fascinating man. 

Department of Spell Check

Another very surprising omission from the MS Word spell-check dictionary: scry. I thought at first I had  misspelled the word, so I typed it out again.  Still misspelled.  I typed it out again. Still misspelled.  Then I had a moment of paralyzing doubt:  maybe this word doesn't exist.  I think it does.  But maybe since it's late, my mind is playing tricks on me.   I had to cut-and-past from my document into the dictionary to ascertain that I was not, in fact, losing my marbles.  Besides, I've been scrying in my crystal ball.  I won't loose my marbles for at least another three months.

a meditation on bread

I love the smell of baker's yeast.  There is something so comforting, so welcoming about it; not to mention the fact that it's a harbinger of good eats to come soon.  When I used to have a bit more time on my hands, my Sunday morning ritual was to bake a challah, and while the dough was rising, I would leisurely do various chores about the house, basking in the delicious scent that comes with that type of bread.  Times change, of course, and though I know in my heart that I can squeeze the time in to bake a loaf or two every once in a while, I haven't for such a long time.  I'm too busy, to tired, to stressed, it's too late.... The excuses come so easily, and my willpower slips away even easier.  Now, my chores are done at a breakneck pace, twenty minutes every day, with more substantial time spent on saturday mornings, in between putting laundry into the machine and rushing off to do my weekly grocery trip as soon as the Trader Joe's opens, in order to beat the weekend crowds.  Sure, I get more done when I'm not kneading dough, or endlessly peeking at my work in progress, wondering if it's time to punch it down, if it's time to put it in the oven, if it's going to burn on top, and perhaps should I put some foil on it....  I tell myself that if I wanted a loaf of bread, I am lucky to have quite a good bakery in town, where the loafs--made fresh every morning by an elderly Frenchman-- are much better than my own.  No matter how good the bread is, however, it doesn't give my apartment that wonderful smell that can only come with lots of yeast, doing what it does best.

Tonight, I came home from a long day at the library, shaking my head at the fact that I am really quite lucky in having the opportunity to do what I do, and yet wondering if I was wasting my life by spending my Friday nights alone with my books.  And I was exhausted; both physically and mentally drained.  From what?  I sat at a desk, putting together a reading list for one of my generals fields.  I agonized over it: over what books to include, and what books to leave off.  I agonized at the thought of having to meet with a professor later that day, wondering how I could presume to do this field, when I knew next to nothing about it.  I met with the professor, and agonized at my attempts to make semi-intelligent conversation about this field, agonized over the obvious books I didn't know to include, and agonized at the thought of all the work that needed to be done before the semester ended.  Then I went back to the library, and tracked down all of the books I needed for the field.  A few trips down into the bowels of the building, weaving in and out of the stacks, and trotting up and down the stairs with my load of books.  And then I read.  And I read. And I read.  And by the time night had properly fallen and I decided to call it a night, I was bone tired. Tired, when the most strenuous thing I did today was agonize. It's like my life is a Woody Allen movie, but it's not any of the good ones.

When I got home, all I wanted to do was loose myself in the comfort of the kneading, kneading, kneading that comes with making bread, but alas, it was too late to start on a loaf.  And tomorrow-- well, there is laundry to be done, and the oil to be changed in the car, and taxes to be figured out, and groceries to be bought, and books to read, and papers to be written, and languages to be learned.

But I did start a loaf of no-knead bread. It's not nearly the same as a proper challah, but a pale echo of the real thing is better than nothing.  And there will be bread tomorrow.

Department of Spell-Check

Another day, another set of reading notes, and another word not found in the MS Word dictionary: plagiarization.  As in, a good number of pamphlets on everything from astrological prognostication to the best way to grow cabbages were simply plagiarizations** and cut-and-pastings of other, earlier works.  The OED has quotations for this noun form starting only in the rather late nineteenth century, with the latest quotation taken from the Economic Times from 2003, to wit: "Plagiarisation has become a habit with today's music directors and it probably existed before I was born. There's nothing wrong in it." Well, it certainly has existed for quite a while, in all aspects of creative life, but as to the fact that there is nothing wrong with it, well....

Plagiarism has indeed had a long and venerable history blah blah blah Adrian Johns' Piracy*** blah blah blah.  Now back to my regularly scheduled readings.


** Though, to be fair, I just google-booked the word inside of the book I just read, and the word doesn't appear there either.  But, the OED says it's a word, so I'm running with it.  I like it better than plagiarism in the context in which I have written it.

*** Really good book, and my 'blah's really don't do it justice.

quotation of the day

One sticks one’s finger into the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is: I stick my finger in existence — it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint?
Søren Kierkegaard

I am still reading Cyrano's Voyage to the Moon.  "What is this thing called the world?"  It's a sentiment that would undoubtedly crossed the mind of our fair narrator, and it's certainly one that crosses my mind at least half a dozen times a day.  I told myself that until my generals exams are over, I'm not allowed to read any theater of the absurd-- it's just to demoralizing.  I suppose that goes double for thinking about Kierkegaard.

Cyrano de Bergerac

I am in the process of reading Cyrano de Bergerac's The Comical History of the States and Empires of the World of the Moon in an 1899 Doubleday reprint (on Google Books, thanks Google Books!) of the 1687 translation by A. Lowell (or, as the work says, "Englished" by Lovell).  A few choice quotations from the section about the author:

• “The fortune of his early education made him fall into the hands of a country curate, who was an insufferable pedant (the species seems to have been common at that time), and who had no real scholarship (the two things are by no means contradictory).  Cyrano dubbed his master an “Aristotelic Ass,” and wrote to his father that he preferred Paris.”

• “He lived the Paris student’s life, burning honest tradesmen’s signs and ‘doing other crazy things.’” I feel like such a lame student in comparison.  Why, I haven't burned a single tradesman's sign over in Grad School City.  I haven't even thrown a stone at the townies (though sometimes I am sorely tempted).  Perhaps I should remedy this situation, and take up the life of a 17th century Parisian student.      

• On Cyrano's famed nose: “not ridiculous, but monumental! … It is said that this nose brought death upon more than ten persons…”  Even Cyrano himself had hilarious things to say about his nose though—“This veridic nose arrives everywhere a quarter of an hour before its master.  Ten shoemakers, good round fat ones too, go and sit down to work under it out of the rain."

The section was written by a Curtis Hidden Page, a professor of English literature at the turn of the century (no, not this past one).  His is a name straight out of a Jasper Fforde novel!

Try some salt next time!

After a day of reading, it's Top Chef time!  I'm watching it now, and for the quickfire challenge, the contestants were suposed to peruse Modernist Cuisine (a book I already salivated over when it first came out), in order to create a modernist dish for Nathan Myhrvold, one of the authors. During the commercial*, I went back to Amazon to salivate over the set again, knowing full well that I would never spend $500 on a set of books, no matter how much I wanted to read them,** and went to read some of the reviews that have been posted since I last checked the book out.  For any item, I always read the negative reviews first, since I find criticisms more illuminating than platitudes, but mostly because for most items, there are at least a few negative reviews that are so bad, they are unintentionally hilarious, and make you wonder if the person who wrote them can manage, in real life, to walk and chew gum at the same time.  Except perhaps the person who complained that the measurements were all in grams, and the alarmist who equated the book with a nuclear disaster (to wit: "I love to keep my cooking simple, done by instinct with empirically felt impressions, not in the consultation of an operations manual for a nuclear power plant!"), there was nothing all that illuminating about the book in the comments section.   There was, however, a reviewer who noted that the book was terrible because it tasted awful :)  That was clearly a joke.  I can only hope that one of the comments ("You're not supposed to eat it") was also a joke!

Oh, how I want this set to miraculously be offered used on Amazon for a song!




* I'm not in my lonely, TV-less apartment, and I forget that you can zap past all the commercials when something is Tivo'ed.  This newfangled technology is a far cry from how I usually watch TV, which is all for the best, seeing as how Top Chef isn't (legally) posted online.


** I wonder if I can get the library to get it via ILL.  While I probably could, I feel like I shouldn't, thought that wouldn't be the largest set of books I have ever ordered via ILL.....  I wonder if our public library has an ILL system that has access to this book?