Overheard of the Day

On the train into the big, bad city. A woman into her cell phone.

“I even posted a selfie, which I *never* do. I even had my hair down. But Jennifer wouldn’t let me do kiss lips. ‘That’s just for kids' she said.” 

This Week's Non-Related Reading: Elise Gravel's The Worm

Worms don’t have eyes, the eyed worm in Elise Gravel’s The Worm tells us.  Worms also don’t wear berets, drive garbage trucks, or are so gosh darned cute, but that is besides the point… This is a fabulous book that strikes a nice balance between entertainment and education—always good in a book for this age group.  Our narrator the worm wears everything from a beret to a pair of spectacles, and seen in all sorts of decidedly un-worm-like conditions (when was the last time you saw a worm driving a garbage truck?).  And the illustrations and lettering are absolutely gorgeous.  At the same time, it gives kids the chance to learn some new words like ‘invertebrate,’ or ‘hermaphrodite’**—all helpfully drawn in larger, bold, and otherwise eye-catching letters.  

It’s part of a larger series called Disgusting Creatures, though the narrator does try to tell the reader that worms are not disgusting!  Unless you plan on eating them, in which case, yes, they are disgusting and please do not eat me.  

‘Disgusting creatures’ are a good choice for edutainment—what child hasn’t let out a long, drawn out ewwwwwwwwwww when presented with something creepy, crawly, slimy, or sticky, only to be drawn in closer for a good poke?  This is the textual equivalent of a good poke, and just as satisfying. Also, I can imagine some kid, armed with both a love of grossing people out and a charming puerility digging out a worm and presenting it on some unwilling lap, armed with the knowledge that not only are worms slimy, but that some can be up to 115 feet long.  And isn’t that disgusting?  

Best out of context line: What? Delicious? No, no, no! I'm disgusting! I'm disgusting! 


Also, though I'm not exactly the target audience for the book, I'm glad I received it, because it led me to other work by the author/illustrator, Elise Gravel. And it's awesome!  Her blog is here.

I received this book as of LibraryThing's Early Reviewer Program. 

**Also, props to her for saying that some worms have both male and female reproductive organs. Not something sillily euphemistic, like they have both girl and boy parts.

The Fortnightly Review

The fortnightly review: 

• Cold acquired, cold not yet divested.  
• PowerPoint presentation created.  
• 30 pin to VGA connector acquired, after Apple Store mishap. 
• Conference paper presented.  
• Conference PowerPoint created (taking too much time) and presented on iPad with no problems. (taking up 1:15 more than it should have).
• Reenrollment application completed.  Fingers crossed.  
• Blue Bottle Coffee drunk.
• Books acquired and read: 
• Strangers on a Train: terrifying and engrossing, made me miss my tube stop. Twice. Gave me indigestion.
• Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore: lovely. Reminded me not a little bit of Microserfs, another favorite. 
• The Empress of the World: good book for teens, less good for adults. A solid 'meh.'
• Books acquired and not read: 
• An Instance of the Fingerpost
• The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths
• Put out more Flags
• Books from conference book displays salivated over / put into my “I should have read this yesterday list:
•  far too many
• Dissertation research read: 
• pamphlets upon pamphlets, crappily written letters upon crappily written letters, articles upon articles.  
•  Dissertation chapter: 
• 14,000+ words. Still not done. My footnote word count make it a suitable length for a conference paper.  It might be good performance art: Stand in a hotel lobby in an ill fitting suit, reading in a monotone “ibid., p. 34.  Ibid., p. 347…, the work on this subject is voluminous, but for some examples, see…” 

This Week's non-related reading: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Clay Jannon is at a bit of a loss. His last job, web deign at NewBagel went the way of the cronut during the recession, leaving Clay with no job, an art-school thesis on Swiss typography, and an old company-issued MacBook. So when he walks by a help wanted sign and the shadowy proprietor of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore asks him what he is seeking in his shelves, he can only answer with the truth: a job. And as a clerk there, his life just gets stranger and stranger. First, he works the graveyard shift in a bookstore, but it gets weirder than that. He learns that while there are customers who will wander in with the hopes of buying a book—but there are no teenage wizards, vampire police, or biographies of Albert Einstein here—there is also a strange group of men and women who come in to borrow one of the books in the back—books written in some sort of esoteric code. And Clay must keep a meticulous of what they borrow—not just titles, but appearance, state of mind, and what the buttons on their clothes are made of. 

Things really take a turn for the weird, though, when a hyper targeted Google Ad search (“likes books, night owl, carries cash, not allergic to dust, enjoys Wes Anderson movies, recent GPS ping within 5 blocks”) brings in Kat Potente, a lover of codes with the power to harness Google’s tech to figure out just what on earth is going on in the back stacks of Mr. Penumbra’s bookstore. Unraveling that brings in a odd cast of characters participating in a modern day quest, with modern day heroes and villains (the Big Bad Wolf of the story, for example, collects the IP addresses of people who download pirated books and turns them over to be sued, and charges exorbitant licensing fees). Our narrator and his friends want to use the powers of the new to unlock the secrets of the old, and pit the mass resources of Google to solve the problem that black robed scholars have been trying to figure out with pencil and paper for 500 years. And the result is… not what anyone expected. 

There has been a lot of ink (virtual and otherwise) spilled over the fate of the book in our technological world, and I think one of the things I appreciated most about this book is the approach this book takes about the relation between books and technology. The love and admiration for both is palpable. The members of the Unbroken Spine, after all, revere and spend their lives trying to decode the Codex vitae of Aldus Manutius. If anyone wanted to make a then current technology obsolete, it was this dude. He dusted off countless manuscripts of the likes of Aristotle and Pliny, set the type, and churned out an mind-blowingly large number of copies (for the time). Who needs manuscripts? Buy my books! And even though knowledge was no longer carefully maintained in the minds of those scribes who meticulously copied it, it did not mean the end of the written word, just the beginning of the printed word. And now we have the digital word, coexisting more or less peacefully (depending on the latest polemic) with the printed one, just like shelves in Manutius’ day were stuffed with both printed texts and manuscripts. And even the ancient Mr. Penumbra has a Kindle. And a Nook. And a Kobo. And he managed to get his hands on a cool Google prototype e-reader. 

The epilogue was a bit of a letdown though, and it is an encapsulation of the one great problem I had with the novel. Everything works out, and it works out too easily. Need to make an exact facsimile of an old ledger? Well it is a good thing you happen to have a friend who can do that for you.  Scan and OCR that (hand-written) sucker?  Google an a couple of nameless and faceless people (mostly Estonians) to the rescue.  Need to clandestinely scan an old book in a library? A portable scanner will appear to you in a pizza box in DUMBO. And so on. But, that really does not detract (for me, at least) from the charm of the story, and if it can be at times hokey, well, sometimes it is nice to imagine a world where everything works out. And if the big conclusion that the main characters come to is a mushy mess that gives you the feel-good-fuzzies… well, who doesn’t like feel-good-fuzzies from time to time? 

But, it’s great. It has everything a book could need, and them some: shadowy 24 hour bookstores next to seedy 24 hour strip clubs. Lunches at Google HQ, and a midnight quest into the dragon’s lair. Museums of knitting that accept yarn donations in lieu of admissions fees, and a company that made millions by rendering breasts for computer games. Dodgy internet message boards, and dodgier libraries with books chained to the tables. So go, read it. But read it now. I can only imagine that a few years down the road, we’ll look back at how obsolete the technology described is. Oh, back in 2012, you had to carry a laptop across the room if you wanted to video chat into a party? How quaint. 

--

Best line out of context line(s): 

“I did not know people your age still read books,” Penumbra says. He raises an eyebrow. “I was under the impression that they read everything on their mobile phones.”

“Not everyone. There are plenty of people who, you know—people who still like the smell of books.”

“The smell!” Penumbra repeats. “You know you are finished when people start talking about the smell.”

“Anyway, he swiped some silver forks and spoons … and the Gerritzoon punches, Some say it was revenge, but I think it was desperation. Latin fluency doesn’t get you very far in New York City.” 

You know, I’m really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.

--

This has been, so far, my favorite book of 2014. 

Totemism - Claude Levi Strauss

How I amuse myself while reading:  adding my own commentaries to tables and charts.

Overheard of the day

“I’ve done well in my career,” says the dude trying to pick up a chick in our hostel.  

Dude, you’re staying in a hostel.  You’re not fooling anyone with your tales of great wealth, amassed because you “work harder than anyone [you] know” and never take vacations.  It is 11pm on a Thursday.  You’re hanging out in the common room of a dubiously clean one star budget accommodation. Clearly, you’re taking a vacation. Unless you’re a professional chatter-up of chicks.  In which case, in my (granted, not very experienced) opinion, you’re fantastically bad at it.   

Hello from London!

     
     I remember a cold day in June in Chicago. It's memorable enough that it was cold in June in Chicago, but also because it was, all in all, a lovely month.  I was on a cushy fellowship, living in a fantastic city, learning incredible things, looking at incredible pictures, and reading incredible books.  On that particular cold Sunday, I was sitting in a Caribou Coffee, reading a book I had picked up in one of the many used bookstores that I haunted in that city, happy to be living-- for once-- in a place where there is the choice of not one, not two, but frankly uncountable bookstores to visit, all within reasonable walking distance.**  While I know that I should not take advice from plastic cups that hold sparkling green tea lemonade, the message printed on it has (for good or for ill) stuck with me. 

Life is waking up an hour earlier 

to live an hour more. 

     While I know that by now, my sleep debt could probably be better measured in months rather than days, or even weeks,  there is something lovely about being out and about before the daily grind begins.  No matter how tired I am, or how little I've slept, I know that if I roll from bed straight to work I will feel terrible-- like life is nothing more than workworkworksleepworkwork. This goes double now. I've been in London for the week (happy Spring Break to me!), trying vainly to finish my first chapter, something I told myself I would finish back in January. But then the doldrums set in. Then the writers block set in. Then a conference paper set in.  Then the post-conference paper writing anxiety set in. And now the 'how is it that I've been seriously working this for more than three months and I'm not done' anxiety set in, along with the looming reenrollment deadline anxiety.  So I've been at the British Library from opening time to closing time-- 10 and a half hours-- trying to read the letters I want to read, and write write write.  I have just shy of 10,000 words, but it is simultaneously too long and too short, and my argument is not so good.... and I tend to get carried away with all this worry.   
     So, it is all the more important for me to wake up an hour early and take the tube to a neighborhood I've not yet been to, and take the time to see the city before it fully wakes up. The subway is still blessedly empty, and I emerge to quiet streets, perhaps with a dog walker or two, depending on the neighborhood.  Then, sleepy employees begin to trickle in to cafes and coffee shops. Slowly, doors open, and the dog walkers give way to young mums and dads taking their kids to school, only to be replaced with brisk-walking black-suited businessmen and women, and other harried workers.  Eyes are on smartphones or the metro newspapers.  Hoards pour into the tube stops in neat, ordered lines.  The air is full of quietly stamping feet and the beeps from validated Oyster cards.  Stand on the right. Hustle on the left. Wait for descending passengers to leave the train. Mind the gap.  My mind turns once again to the things I must read, the chapter I must right.  But that hour has made a world of difference. And of course, there is coffee along the way.  

** I have been told that I tend to walk unreasonably much.  I don't think this is true; in fact, I don't always meet my fitbit step goal of 11,000 steps

It has been almost two years

And it's amazing to see just how little has changed in my life.  There is still coffee though. There is always coffee.

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.