On... ahem... trousers

As early as 1793, however, Gibbon in a letter to a gentleman of title referred to his "inexpressibles." In all instances contemporary with its popular usage the term expressed the exaggerated sensitivity of the time in referring to men's outer nether garments—breeches or trousers. Curious it is that this could acceptably be done only by a humorous euphemism. Writing in 1880, one Helen Bedingfeld in Jerningham Letters spoke of, "A pair of old inexpressibles . . . containing seven thousand Guineas ! . . . deposited in so vulgar a garment." In 1809 an English magazine observed that "a fine lady can talk about her lover's inexpressibles, when she would faint to hear of his breeches."

Lord Lytton in Paul Clifford speaks of a gentleman in boots and spurs, with one hand in the pocket of his "inexpressibles." A conversation in a little-remembered book of the period has the line, " `Hush: you should say inexpressibles—that's the way genteel people talk!' " One of the Ingoldsby Legends alludes to "Bond Street inexpressibles." In Sketches by Boz appears, "He usually wore a brown coat without a wrinkle, light inexpressibles without a spot." In the story Shabby-Genteel People, "The knees of the unmentionables soon began to get alarmingly white." Pickwick Papers has "symmetrical inexpressibles, and scented pocket-handkerchiefs." And so on. Gentlemen's legs might be named without circumlocution, but not their habiliments. In 1875 a Melbourne newspaper stated that "the episcopal inexpressibles for obvious reasons will be unsuited to lay legs."

Sometimes, presumably in the eighties or nineties, however, the humor of the term became extended—among people more bold than genteel. This occurred, at least, in the United States. Thenceforth it was a very reliable witticism, which endured with undiminished vitality well into the present century, in intimate gatherings to refer orally to the mysterious underthings of femininity as unmentionables.

Unmentionable by their given names certainly they were.

The matter of the explosive events occasioned by the early presentations of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, first in Dublin in 1911 and, four years later, in various American cities, has been variously explained. In New York potatoes were thrown at the players. These famous incidents probably had their origin in the tender sensibilities of Irishmen who felt the dignity of their country, then seeking to become a State, affronted by so veracious a picture of an unflattering aspect of life in Ireland. At any rate, upon the introduction of the play in Dublin, Lady Gregory wired to Yeats, "Audience broke up in disorder at the word 'shift.' The riots would no doubt have broken out without the mention of a shift, but that word was a good blasphemy to begin with.

-excerpt fr. Robert Cartes Holliday's "Unmentionables"

Mostly from the New York Review

On...

Collected Stories and Other Writings
by Katherine Anne Porter, edited by Darlene Harbour Unrue
Library of America, 1,093 pp., $40.00

by Ch. Baxter in the NYRB June 11, 2009

Katherine Anne Porter is a case of a writer whose last fiction seemed oddly ill-matched with the work that preceded it. Readers of a certain age may remember the literary hoopla surrounding the publication of her only novel, Ship of Fools, in 1962. A work of twenty years’ labor, the book was reviewed everywhere, called “a great work of art” by Mark Schorer, went onto the best-seller list, and was sold to the movies for $400,000. The author’s shrewd, imperious visage appeared in the pages of the Saturday Review and other publications. But readers who actually bothered to start this 497-page novel did not often finish it. Finally a critic told the truth about the book: Theodore Solotaroff, in a long essay-review in Commentary, did an inventory of its faults that still seems, from a distance of over four decades, definitive and irrefutable.

But at the time of its publication, Ship of Fools appeared to have almost everything: a large cast of pan-European blowhards, a historical moment of considerable importance (1931), and great themes having to do with prejudice and international relations. Indeed, Ship of Fools had almost everything except the one element it needed, the breath of life. After a few years, the novel fell off the shelf into oblivion.

None of this would have mattered very much if Katherine Anne Porter’s short stories hadn’t been among the best ever written by an American. But they were so remarkably good, so touched with genius, that the spectacle that followed their publication is more than a bit disheartening. A writer whose work could justly be compared to Tolstoy’s spent over twenty years of her life working on a bloated and sententious novel. With the publication of the Library of America’s edition of the Collected Stories and Other Writings, some questions naturally arise, although most of them are unanswerable. Where did the stories come from? And then what happened?

Katherine Anne Porter made a habit of misrepresenting the year of her birth, 1890, claiming that she had been born in 1894 (two years after her mother died). She also maintained that she had grown up as a descendant of four generations of Southern aristocracy—though in fact she was born in a two-room log house in Indian Creek, Texas. Other misrepresentations followed. Like many other American writers of her generation, she regarded her autobiography as unnecessarily factual and in need of revision.

“I was fed from birth on myth and legend,” she noted, “and a conviction of natural superiority bestowed by birth and tradition.” For her, snobbery and fantasy tended to stimulate each other. But the conditions of her early life were so difficult that one is surprised that she survived it with her faculties intact. After her mother’s death, her father moved her and her siblings to Kyle, Texas, where she was educated by her grandmother until she was ten. Following the death of her grandmother, her father took the children to various relatives, or dropped them in one boarding school or another, and generally left them to fend for themselves. By the age of sixteen, her formal schooling having ended, she was married to her first husband, John Henry Koontz, who habitually beat her. She lived with his alcoholism and physical abuse for eight years. She survived a bout of influenza in 1918. The illness turned her hair permanently white.

There has been a tendency among quite a few of Porter’s critics to criticize her life instead of her work and to give it low marks. According to these commentators, she should have lived some other kind of life than the one she actually had. What kind is not specified—perhaps one with fewer deceptions would have been better. Joan Givner’s biography does not present a particularly attractive picture of Porter, who was much married and given to more than a few of the usual human vanities.¹ She seems to have engaged, rather frequently, in betrayal of people close to her. Still, compared to the alcoholic stupidities of other American writers of her time, her misdeeds seem rather amateurish.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jun/11/flowering-porter/

From the September 24, 2009
John Searle on a book by Paul Boghossian:

A problem faced by social constructivism concerns facts about the past. Are we now constructing facts about the past when we make claims about history? One extreme social constructivist cited by Boghossian, Bruno Latour, accepts this conclusion with somewhat comical results. Recent research shows that the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II probably died of tuberculosis. But according to Latour, this is impossible because the tuberculosis bacillus was only discovered by Robert Koch in 1882.¹ “Before Koch, the bacillus had no real existence.” To say that Ramses II died of tuberculosis is as absurd as saying that he died of machine-gun fire.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/sep/24/men-and-boys/
Interesting article of Greek homosexuality and pederasty. Learned all about intercrural ways.

On Byron via Edna O'Brien through Harold Bloom
In the two centuries since Byron died in Greece (April 19, 1824, aged thirty-six), leading a messy rebellion against the Turks, only Shakespeare has been translated and read more, first on the Continent and then worldwide. High Romantic in his life but not in his art, which carried on from Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Laurence Sterne, the endlessly digressive Byron incarnated countless contradictions of thought and feeling. He bewildered and fascinated his contemporaries with a vitality overtly erotic, compounded of narcissism, snobbery, sadomasochism, incest, heterosexual sodomy, homosexuality, what you will. Of the two authentic English vices, humbuggery and bumbuggery, Byron scourged the first and expanded the horizons of the second. The first matter to bear in mind concerning Byron is his royal lineage, descended on his mother’s side, the Gordons, from Annabella Stuart, daughter of James I of Britain (James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, Queen of Scots). His father was “Mad Jack” Byron, gambler and heroic womanizer, who had been guilty of incest with his sister Frances. The daughter of his first marriage to Lady Amelia D’Arcy, Lady Augusta Leigh, the poet’s half-sister, became his true beloved, thus repeating the pattern. Mad Jack died in France, poor and abandoned, when his poetical son was three. Born with a lame left foot, George Gordon, Lord Byron, became a superb swimmer and marksman, and at ten secured the family title.
The rest:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/sep/24/pilgrim-to-eros/

More Yellowing Articles

More things to burn:
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/21/science/how-the-brain-might-work-a-new-theory-of-consciousness.html?scp=1&sq=how%20the%20brain%20might%20work&st=cse
The sensations of one instant of a spring morning have thus become represented by millions of activated cells in many different regions of the cortex. That much is known. A still baffling question for scientists is, how does the brain bind these fragmented pieces of information into a single coherent image? The nature of the reassembly process, known as the binding problem, is intimately related to the age-old question of consciousness, since an answer to the binding problem would go far to defining the physical basis of the conscious mind.
The first step to understanding, brain scientists say, is to realize that there is no Cinemascope screen in the brain where all the pieces come together. But if there is no screen, on what physical principle is consciousness organized? A growing number of scientists say the answer must lie in some form of timing. An image may be reconstructed from all cells that are firing in a particular rhythm at a particular instant.



Purdy by Vidal:
I first heard of James Purdy a half-century or so ago on a bright spring day in London. Edith Sitwell had asked me to lunch. We drank martinis while she put the finishing touches on a letter to The Times of London; D. H. Lawrence's novel ''Lady Chatterley's Lover'' was under attack for obscenity. Although Edith disliked Lawrence for having, she thought, caricatured her brother Sir Osbert in the novel, as the gin took its effect on each of us, I boldly assured her that the offending book was not actually the work of Lawrence but of Truman Capote. The red-rimmed eyes atop the long Gothic face narrowed: ''Surely the dates are not right.''
''Capote,'' I said, ''will never see 90 again.''
She sighed contentedly. ''That would explain the dreadful style.''

On the genetic basis for homosexuality:
Natalie Angier:

As it happens, the evidence for a genetic basis for homosexuality remains slender and incomplete. What Mr. Hamer reported in 1993 was that in families having two gay brothers, 33 of the 40 pairs of brothers shared a piece of the X chromosome, significantly more than the 20 pairs of brothers who would have been expected to inherit the same chromosomal terrain by chance alone. Mr. Hamer also found that a gay man was much likelier to have gay male relatives on the maternal side of the family than on his father's side, further evidence of something of interest on the X chromosome, which in men is always passed along from the mother. The molecular and genealogical evidence together suggested that a gene or genes embedded in the wilderness of the X chromosome somehow contribute to male sexual orientation.
However, the specific "gay gene" -- as Mr. Hamer calls it in a reluctant bow to popularization -- has yet to be found. He has no idea how the gene could possibly work to influence a man's erotic nature. Nor does he know how many people out there may carry the trait; whether the trait invariably or only occasionally leads to homosexuality; whether it operates solo or in conjunction with many other genes, and so on. In short, the genetics of sexual orientation is in an utterly embryonic stage, as is our grasp of the biological underpinnings for any interesting human characteristic.


More on The Bell Curve:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CEEDC123DF935A25753C1A962958260&scp=1&sq=what%20is%20intelligence%20and%20who%20has%20it?%20bbrowne&st=cse

The Guermantes are delayed

The last page of "The Guermantes Way":

‘I should like to know, all the same,’ Mme de Guermantes asked him, ‘how, ten months before the time, you can tell that a thing will be impossible.’
‘My dear Duchess, I will tell you if you insist upon it, but, first of all, you can see that I am very ill.’
‘Yes, my little Charles, I don’t think you look at all well. I’m not pleased with your colour, but I’m not asking you to come with me next week, I ask you to come in ten months. In ten months one has time to get oneself cured, you know.’ At this point a footman came in to say that the carriage was at the door.
‘Come, Oriane, to horse,’ said the Duke, already pawing at the ground with impatience as though he were himself one of the horses that stood waiting outside.
‘Very well, give me in one word the reason why you can’t come to Italy,’ the Duchess put it to Swann as she rose to say good-bye to us.
‘But, my dear friend, it’s because I shall then have been dead for several months. According to the doctors I consulted last winter, the thing I’ve got – which may, for that matter, carry me off at any moment – won’t in any case leave me more than three or four months to live, and even that is a generous estimate,’ replied Swann with a smile, while the footman opened the glazed door of the hall to let the Duchess out.
‘What’s that you say?’ cried the Duchess, stopping for a moment on her way to the carriage, and raising her fine eyes, their melancholy blue clouded by uncertainty. Placed for the first time in her life between two duties as incompatible as getting into her carriage to go out to dinner and showing pity for a man who was about to die, she could find nothing in the code of conventions that indicated the right line to follow, and, not knowing which to choose, felt it better to make a show of not believing that the latter alternative need be seriously considered, so as to follow the first, which demanded of her at the moment less effort, and thought that the best way of settling the conflict would be to deny that any existed. ‘You’re joking,’ she said to Swann.
‘It would be a joke in charming taste,’ replied he ironically. ‘I don’t know why I am telling you this; I have never said a word to you before about my illness. But as you asked me, and as now I may die at any moment… But whatever I do I mustn’t make you late; you’re dining out, remember,’ he added, because he knew that for other people their own social obligations took preference of the death of a friend, and could put himself in her place by dint of his instinctive politeness. But that of the Duchess enabled her also to perceive in a vague way that the dinner to which she was going must count for less to Swann than his own death. And so, while continuing on her way towards the carriage, she let her shoulders droop, saying: ‘Don’t worry about our dinner. It’s not of any importance!’ But this put the Duke in a bad humour, who exclaimed: ‘Come, Oriane, don’t stop there chattering like that and exchanging your jeremiads with Swann; you know very well that Mme de Saint-Euverte insists on sitting down to table at eight o’clock sharp. We must know what you propose to do; the horses have been waiting for a good five minutes. I beg your pardon, Charles,’ he went on, turning to Swann, ‘but it’s ten minutes to eight already. Oriane is always late, and it will take us more than five minutes to get to old Saint-Euverte’s.’ Mme de Guermantes advanced resolutely towards the carriage and uttered a last farewell to Swann. ‘You know, we can talk about that another time; I don’t believe a word you’ve been saying, but we must discuss it quietly. I expect they gave you a dreadful fright, come to luncheon, whatever day you like,’ (with Mme de Guermantes things always resolved themselves into luncheons) ‘you will let me know your day and time,’ and lifting her red skirt, she set her foot on the step. She was just getting into the carriage when, seeing this foot exposed, the Duke cried in a terrifying voice: ‘Oriane, what have you been thinking of, you wretch? You’ve kept on your black shoes! With a red dress! Go upstairs quick and put on red shoes, or rather,’ he said to the footman, ‘tell the lady’s maid at once to bring down a pair of red shoes.’ ‘But, my dear,’ replied the Duchess gently, annoyed to see that Swann, who was leaving the house with me but had stood back to allow the carriage to pass out in front of us, could hear, ‘since we are late.’ ‘No, no, we have plenty of time. It is only ten to; it won’t take us ten minutes to get to the Parc Monceau. And, after all, what would it matter? If we turned up at half past eight they’d have to wait for us, but you can’t possibly go there in a red dress and black shoes.