Clippings

Mostly from the NYR. Carried with me for 25 years. Now I can toss them. 

Reflections on Casanova and Dada.

Julian Barnes on Browns bio of Flaubert 

Flaubert loved fairs and sideshows and theatrical dazzle; he was later to write a féerie—a theatrical extravaganza dependent on special effects—in which (and this must have been one of the unlikeliest stage directions to come from the pen of a great novelist) a vast winged stockpot would rise into the air, hover over a town, and upend itself to disgorge carrots, leeks, and_ turnips, which would remain suspended in the air and turn into luminous constellations. Flaubert also loved freaks and sports of nature, both animal and human. “I attract mad people and animals,” he wrote. 

Bouvard et Pécuchet, by contrast, a work of the highest artistic purpose, is an encyclopedia of human endeavor with a directly opposite take—“the Baedeker of futility,” as Cyril Connolly called it. The novel is an exasperated assertion that human resourcefulness is usually directed at foolish projects, and human ingenuity an excuse for gross self-satisfaction. And imagine what it would have been like reading the Copie, which would have doubled the length of the novel we have at the moment? (We can certainly “read” the Copie today, since various versions of it have been published: but it is impossible to read it in the way Flaubert intended, as the lifeleavings of two dogged and defeated clerks. Instead, we read it as something assembled, or not quite assembled, by Flaubert.) The novel’s resistance to easy reading must have been as much part of its appeal to modernism as its curious flatness of tone and its radical innovation of form. At last—the novel was allowed to be difficult, allowed actively to deter certain readers, and to tack a vast appendage of data and pseudodata on the end of something that was half hyperrealism, half tract. Thus Pound thought Bouvard et Pécuchet inaugurated “a new form which had no precedents”; while, according to Cyril Connolly, it was Joyce’s favorite novel.

One of Bouvard and Pécuchet’s many failed projects is biography. Pécuchet Suggests they write about the Duc d’Angouléme, the eldest son of Charles X, and the last-ever dauphin of France. “But he was an idiot!” Bouvard objects. To which Pécuchet has the correct biographer’s cliché waiting in reply: “Secondary figures sometimes have an enormous influence, and this one might turn out to have been a key player.” 

On the death of a PR man James Moran

 One of Mr. Moran's cleverest schemes went nowhere in its own time. An avid kite flyer he hit upon the notion of using kites to fly midgets over Central Park. The police refused to grant him a permit and nipped the scheme in the bud. Mr. Moran was outraged. "it's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" he declared.

 From NYT 1996 when the last imperial eunuch died.

For centuries, the most secretive and grotesque corner of China’s extensive imperial court belonged to the fraternity of special guardians: the eunuchs, whose high voices and soft demeanors often cloaked the viciousness of their back-alley politicking and custody of the Forbidden City’s magnificent exotica. 

When the last emperor’s last eunuch died this week, he closed the final page on a bizarre chapter of Chinese imperial history, even though the last dynasty and its ancient system of governing were overthrown in 1911. 

The eunuch, Sun Yaoting, was just days shy of 94 years old when he died at his home in a Beijing temple on Tuesday evening. 

Like the thousands who preceded him through Chinese history, Mr. Sun was emasculated as a young boy, in a crude and risky operation that was arranged by his family, who were looking for a way out of poverty and into the private domain of China’s highest rulers. 

Aside from the emperor, eunuchs were generally the only men trusted to enter the inner courtyards of the palace, where the women of the imperial family and harem lived. Other men, including officials, military guards and even the emperor’s male relatives, were often required to leave the palace grounds at night. 

Using only hot chili sauce as a local anesthetic, the people who performed this fateful operation typically did so in one swoop, using a small, curved knife. In exchange for a lifetime of humiliation marked by incontinence and sexual frustration, a few  were able to achieve tremendous influence and wealth.

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From 1997 on Schizophrenia 

Scientists have linked a genetic defect to a brain abnormality that might help explain a hallmark of schizophrenia: the inability to filter out irrelevant sounds and other distractions. That lack of filtering can result in a flood of heightened sensation that makes it nearly impossible to concentrate, and may be part of the reason schizophrenics hear voices and hallucinate. 

The defect by itself does not cause schizophrenia, the researchers said but it could be one of the risk factors that combine to bring on the devastating mental illness. And because their research involved a brain structure that responds to nicotine, they also proposed a most unusual , theory: that nicotine might provide fleeting relief for some of the distressing symptoms schizophrenics feel, which might in turn explain their well-documented tendency to smoke heavily. 

The new findings, reported today in The Proceedings of the National: Academy of Sciences, are the first to link a genetic defect to a specific: brain abnormality and a symptom of : mental illness. 

On the Magi from 1995

The Magi, the only word of Persian origin in the original Greek Bible — were evidently priests of Zoroastrianism, which was the official religion of Persia. It is not surprising that they would turn up at the birth of Christ. According to various sources, Magi tended to turn up at portentous events in the ancient world. Pliny records a crowd of them standing amid the smoke and ruins after the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus burned to the ground (circa 356 B.C.). These Magi announced that the great temple’s destruction augured the (virgin) birth of Alexander the Great, who of course would go on to conquer the known world, be declared a god and die at the age of 33. 

Processions of Magi also appear at celebrations hosted by dubious characters like Nero. It iS not always clear whether they come to bless or blame, condone or condemn, and frequently they leave without explaining the purpose of their visit, Just as the prophet Zoroaster Came to be viewed in the West as the supreme Magus, master of occult arts, so Magi were both feared and regnected — and sometimes despised for charging exorbitant fees for their arcane skills.

 Accounts dating to the 2nd and 3rd centuries some of them by saints give the number of kings present at the nativity as high as 14 and as low as 2 . Their names range...

Michiko K mentions Harold Bloom’s digression in his book Omens of Millenium on how Freud "saw everything in terms of the past".

New books on Jos. Smith by McMurtry

Joseph Smith possessed two seer stories or peep stones (crystals?), Urim and Thummin; these he placed in his hat, which sat on the table in front of him. Peering through these peep stones (and the hat) he poured out rapid dictation, welding most of the languages of the ancient world into a quasibiblical English. By this odd method the Book of Mormon got written—not the least of its problems is that the locution “And it came to pass,” with variants, is used more than a thousand times, giving the whole text a stuttery feel.

On O'Neill from Fintan OToole

Eugene O’Neill’s artistic career moves backward. The normal trajectory of a writer is from the particular * to the general, from family to society, from the autobiographical to the im" personal, from more or less unmediC ated realism to experiments in form. > O'Neill travels in the opposite direc, tion. He starts with the human condi- tion and ends with his own. He starts { with the social and ends up with the \ familial. When he finds his voice as playwright it is self-consciously theatrical, highly wrought, expressed through masks and formal contrivances. But when he thinks of the work that will appear in the unknown future, after his death, he moves into a plain, almost primitive naturalism. After Days Without End in 1933, he gave up the use of masks and turned thereafter to something like realism. The suicides and murders, the incestuous and illicit desires of the early plays give way to the minutiae of daily life. This shift away from overt theatricality was not just an exercise in form. As he burrowed beneath the high emotional pitch of his father’s melodrama, he was honing in on the hard reality of his father’s life. This reverse order of O’Neill’s career mirrors his journey toward the past. As Zander Brietzke has put it, “He adopted a traditional form in his final plays but the action became entirely retrospective and time, in a novel way, became the definitive and tragic subject at last.”’ Con Melody in A Touch of the Poet says of himself that he has “no future but the past”

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This apeman shambles around the verbal landscape of O’Neill’s plays before The Hairy Ape, almost always associated with Irish characters. The Englishman Cocky in The Moon of the Caribbees tells Paddy, an Irish fellow sailor, “A ’airy ape, I calls yer.” Paddy reappears in The Hairy Ape and tells Yank that respectable people see in their likes “a queerer kind of baboon than ever you’d find in darkest Africy.” Mat Burke in Anna Christie, another version of Driscoll, appears half-naked “in the full power of his heavy-muscled, immense strength” and announces to Anna, “’Tis a clumsy ape I am.” Later, O’Neill describes Mat’s “impotent animal rage, baffled by its own abject misery.” The slur is also thrown back—Burke calls Chris “ye old ape” and “ye old babboon” and Driscoll in The Long Voyage Home calls Ivan a “Rooshan baboon” and tells the Englishman Cocky to “Shut up, ye ape...” —but this is merely the defensive repetition of an insult that has been so often received. 

The image of the apeman is drawn from Darwinism and from anthropology (the stokers at the start of The Hairy Ape should, according to the stage directions, “resemble those pictures in which the appearance of Neanderthal Man is guessed at”) but it is also situated in Irish-American history. When Mildred utters her fateful cry of “Take me away! Oh, the filthy beast!” her horror 1s in response not simply to the sight of Yank but to a speech of his to which she has just “listened, paralyzed with horror...by the terrific impact of this unknown, abysmal brutality, naked and shameless.” The rant that so terrifies her is not just any sailor’s foul tirade. It is a specific emanation from the sectarian rage of old Ireland, a Catholic’s abuse of a Protestant: 

Come down outa dere, yuh yellow, brass-buttoned Belfast scut, yuh! Come down and Pll knock yer brains out! Yuh lousy, stinkin’ yellow mut of a Catholic-moiderin’ bastard! Come down and IH! motder yuh!... VM crash yer skull in! Ill drive yer teet’ down yer troat! I'll slam yer nose trou de back of yer head!” 

This speech evokes the violence of the Orange riots in New York in the 1870s, when Catholics and Protestants fought each other on the streets of the city and, in response, the image of the simian Irishman came to the surface of American culture. In magazines like Harper's Weekly, Puck, and Judge, Thomas Nast and the other leading ‘New York cartoonists of the 1870s and 1880s did not, as L. Perry Curtis noted, “refrain from simianizing Irish-American Paddics & ho epitomized the tens of thousands of working-class immigrants and their children caught up in urban poverty and slum conditions after their flight from rural poverty and famine in Ireland.”

When Nast drew an Irish-American man, Curtis notes, “he invariably produced a lusus naturae or cross between a professional boxer and an orangutan.” 

Yet though it was directed primarily at poor immigrants, the simian analogy took on such a powerful life that it could attach itself even to the most sophisticated, outwardly civilized Irishman. In 1882, when Oscar Wilde visited the US, he was greeted by a cartoon in The Washington Post. Beneath the heading “Mr Wild of Borneo,” it placed a drawing of an apeman holding a coconut beside one of Wilde, in the same pose, holding a flower, asking the question “How far is it from this to this?”'* Artistic fame and material wealth of the kind that the O’Neills themselves achieved could not entirely ward off the threat of being configured as an ape. 

That threat was all the more keenly felt because it is intimately linked in the warped logic of so-called scientific racism to the notion that the Irish were not white, but black, and therefore barely above the apes on the supposed evolutionary scale. For all his courage in putting black characters on stage, O’Neill himself was not immune to the racist impulse. Lem in The Emperor Jones is “a heavy-set, ape-faced old savage of the extreme African type” and the flight back into the jungle of the title character in that play is enacted, in part, aS a regression to the primitive conditions from which he is assumed to have come, What makes it more complex, however, is that Jones occupies the place in O’Neill’s work that is usually held by an Irish character that O’Neill is, in his own sly, strange way, embracing the racist connection between Irish and African. 

In William Macready’s’ midnineteenth-century comedy The Irishman in London, popular on the New York stage, the climax came, as Dale T. Knobel puts it, when “Murtoch Delaney fell hopelessly in love with his perfect match, the humanoid ‘grinning Cuba.’ The African and the Irishman were made for one another.” The Emperor Jones plays a similar kind of game by making Jones, in effect, an Irishman in blackface. In the stripping away of his outward trappings of civilization and in his reversion to the wild, Jones is linked to Yank, and more specifically to O’Neill’s cruellest version of his own father, Con Melody in A Touch of the Poet. 

On Lovecraft by Luc Sante

It is clear from all available evidence that sexuality, procreation, and the human body itself were among the things that scared him the most. 

He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York ary, fungus and molds, viscous sub-. stances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering — the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list. He evidently took pleasure in his fears, at least those on the creepy-crawly end of the spectrum, and although he really did suffer from his fear of cold, for example, this did not prevent him from exploiting that fear in a couple of stories, one of them (“At the Mountains of Madness”) his best. 

The things that did not scare him are generally absent from his work. Often his stories take place in a continuous landscape of fear, in which every detail contributes oppressively. In “The Lurking Fear,” for example, all of nature is malevolent: “I hated the mocking moon, the hypocritical plain, the festering mountain.... Everything seemed to me tainted with a loathsome contagion and inspired by a noxious alliance with distorted hidden poweis the hidden powers "

Lovecraft only barely managed to exist on the material plane himself, and it certainly was not his subject. His strengths, meanwhile, were unusual and idiosyncratic. ; He had a flair for names, for instance. The monikers he hangs on his other worldly manifestations—Nyarlathotep, ‘ Yog-Sothoth, Tsathoggua—are evocatively miscegenated constructions in which can be seen bits of ancient Egyptian, Arabic, Hebrew, Old Norse. . The terror of Cthulhu is most vivid on the purely linguistic level: “Ja! ShubNiggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!” The New England he fashions is so tangibly haunted in its nomenclature Arkham, the Miskatonic River, Devil’s Hop Yard, Nooseneck Hill—that he would have been wise to stop there and not attempt further description. He savors the dark texture of seventeenthcentury Puritan names: Obed, Peleg, Deliverance, Elkanah, Dutee. He frequently engaged his schoolboy correspondents to send him lists of regional names from their local phone books. Names, real and imagined, accomplish nearly everything his strangled fustian tries and fails to do: suggesting vast stretches of time, experience far outside the modern frame of reference, the subterranean course of genetic inheritance, the repression of dismal ancestral proclivities.