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?

I don't get out into literary territory much

and it shows.  I am currently reading Aït-Touati's Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century (which is already turning out to be wonderful), and the author informs the reader that she will be using, among other things narratology as a tool.  I was totally unaware of its existence as a conceptual tool.  In that, I can seek solace in the fact that MS Word's spell check tool also was unaware of the word, though that is of little comfort.

Although, now that I think back, I feel that perhaps Hayden White might have talked about it in Metahistory, a book which I was assigned to read, but never really did. But, there was stuff about literature in there. Hmmm... irony, metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche, or something like that?    And a chart.  And him writing in the ironic mode.  But not in Williamsburg, and possibly not with a mustache. Although there were a lot of words, or that I am quite certain.  That is all I remember from the hour or so I spent skimming the book.  So it is entirely possible that it discussed narratology, or even was about narratology, or even was about tail-chasing piglets on their way to the zoo. All I know is that I am ba bad student, and did not read it with the diligence it was most certainly due.  And yet, I am sill in my program.  Strange, how these things happen.

Review: Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud

In Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Laqueur argues that like sex (much like gender) has been invented and reinvented in response to an age’s particular social and cultural norms, and was not a result of scientific advances.  He argues that over the course of medical history, there had been a shift from the one-sex model, where there was just one sex, and that differences between males and females were differences in degree, and not of kind, to a two-sex model.  The one-sex model was, according to him, surprisingly long-lived because differences between men and women were externally accorded to different sexes, and not thought to be a function of a completely different body.  Also, he argues that sex was linked to power, and man, at that time, was in all aspects really the measure of all things, including bodies, female and otherwise.  The further argues that this was a point corroborated by the great sixteenth and seventeenth century anatomists—their representations of male and female genitalia as simply inverted versions of one another were correct in that they represented what these anatomists thought they saw, because representations are dependent on cultural ideas, and not necessarily on empirical evidence.

Around 1750, he goes on to say, sex was invented.  The one-sex model was transformed into the two-sex model that states that men and women have different bodies and different characteristics that are a direct result of these two fundamentally different types of bodies (though, the one sex model lived on in the cultural imagination up to the present day).  Again, he argues that this change was not due to advances in medical theory, but a result of a changing social, political, and cultural context.  The differentiation (or not) between two sexes was never due to biology or what the status of medicine was at any particular time, but to “the rhetorical exigencies of the moment.”  In the end, he argues, sex is an artifice, and always has been.

The problem, however, is that Lacquer grossly simplifies the matter.  His one-sex model, especially, picks and chooses ideas from various philosophers and medical figures, and in the end, the patchwork he creates samples many, but adequately explains nothing.  His book represents an elaborate attempt to demonstrate that attitudes about a person’s sex have changed over time, and that they have changed as the result of cultural and social factors, rather than strictly scientific ones.  In this, he follows the work of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, but on a more specific level, he argues that, in opposition to Foucault’s idea that one episteme overtook and completely supplanted another, ideas of the one-sex model lived on, even in a two-sex model world.  And it is at the level of this specific argument that the book ends up woefully unconvincing.  Lacquer seemed so intent on adducing evidence for his thesis that he artificially imposes an order on pre-eighteenth century medical thought (that, in itself is problematic—any argument that purports to explain a swath of time from Aristotle to the French Revolution automatically raises red flags) that simply was not there.   The book is provocative, to be sure.  But the argument, woefully, is simply inaccurate.

Andreas Vesalius

I am currently reading (and, for some parts of it, re-reading) O'Malley's biography of the sixteenth century anatomists, Andreas Vesalius (as well as drinking some coffee from the grad lounge coffee machine (it seems to have picked up an interesting.... terroir of grad lounge filthiness, but I have a raging cold, and can't taste anything anyway).  O'Malley really seems to have closed the book on Vesalian studies-- after Roth's earlier biography of the man, this seems to be the only good biography of the dude, and besides his inclusion in every general history of medicine that was ever written, there seems to be a paucity of books dedicated to Vesalius and his work (at least in comparison with, to chose some contemporaneous examples, Nicholas Copernicus or Girolamo Cardano**).  But, at any rate, O'Malley's book is filled with some marvelous details, and it's not like books about Renaissance medicine are in short supply...

Some great quotations/hilarious anecdotes from the book:

• "Some of the dissections were apparently carried out by Vesalius alone, or possibly with certain chosen students, in his own dwellings, upon cadavers from rifled tombs or from executions, and, as he wrote in the Letter on the china root, sometimes kept in his bedroom for several weeks. Unquestionably he was an enthusiast, and just as unquestionably it was best that he had no domestic responsibilities at that time."  I understand that as a new professor, he might have had small digs, and would have trouble finding a place to put extraneous things like cadavers, but I think that leaving them in his bedroom seems a bit… strange.  Enthusiast of what, I sometimes wonder…
• Is Vesalius coming to your town?  Lock up your graveyards and guard your cadavers—whenever he traveled to give lectures in other universities, there was a wave of body-snatching in his wake.  This practice became so widespread that in 1550, the Venetian senate publicly threatened to actually enforce the existing ban against grave robbing. 
• Vesalius, on the capriciousness of artists:  “[No longer] shall I have to put up with the bad temper of artists and sculptors who made me more miserable than did the bodies I was dissecting.” (Letter on the china root).  That is pretty miserable; those bodies must have stunk up to high heaven. 
• The printer of the Fabrica, Joannes Oporinus married poorly, because (according to O’Malley, at least) the lady was “an ill-tempered shrew.”  Editorializing much?  
• Worst name encountered so far: Polycarp.  Polycarp Cratander was the son of Andreas Cratander; the two were in a father-and-son printing getup in Basel. They had decided to give up the business, and they sold all their equipment to Thomas Platter, Balthasar Ruch, Robert Winter, and Oporinus (all of whom were partners in their publishing firm)
• “As the emperor’s [Charles V] far flung empire was the result of inheritance from many sources, so like his physical and mental inheritances were the result of many and various dynastic marriages, of which some might better have been left unconsummated. […] More somber was the emperor’s inheritance from his mother, Joanna of Spain, whose mind, delicately balanced if not always somewhat unbalanced, was finally toppled by the combination of her husband’s long absences and infidelities, and then his early death in 1506.  Presumably Joana was the unlucky heir of her grandmother, a Portuguese princess who died quite mad.”  Royal lineages, so much crazy stuff!
• Oh, Vesalius, you snarky, snarky man!  “I esteem [Jean] Guinter for many reasons, an in my books I call him a teacher of medicine, but I do not consider him an anatomist, and I should willingly suffer him to inflict as many cuts on me as I have seen him attempt on man or any other animal—except at the dinner table.” 

And that's one more book that has been read. It's time to celebrate-- break out the coffee!





** Interesting fact: all three of those men practiced as physicians, although Copernicus never finished his medical degree (he instead got a degree in canon law from Ferrara).

some google book hands

I love Google books. I love it a lot.  In fact, I don't know how anyone ever managed to do research without them.  I also love how mis-scanning there are, but I do sometimes like to see latex-covered finger here and there (so long as it's on the page I absolutely need and cannot find anywhere else).  It makes the whole process seem more human.  I suppose if I saw a robot arm, I would be less impressed, but as someone who has spent too much time scanning books at our library book-scanning station, I appreciate how tedious the work can be.

From Early Venetian Printing Illustrated:
The first is from a hand holding down the sheet with the errata on it, and the page was later scanned in its entirety















They also scanned the obverse of the errata sheet to show that there was nothing on it.  That was nice of them:

The book is free on Google Books, and quite interesting.  Books about books.  Good times.