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Reading seeks to propagate itself in me by reading

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Elias Canetti’s The Agony of Flies, a collection of insights, imaginings, and observations compiled from his shorter works by the author himself. I struggle with a fitting description since the form is aphoristic but I think Canetti would run from the claim to broad accuracy and applicability that aphorism typically implies.

Reading seeks to propagate itself in me by reading; I never follow any outside recommendations, or if I do, then only after a very long time. I want to discover what I read. Whoever suggests a book to me knocks it out of my hands; whoever praises it spoils it for me for years. I only trust the minds I truly revere. They can recommend anything to me, and to awaken my curiosity all they have to do is to mention something in a given book. But whatever others recommend with their facile tongues is as if truly cursed. Thus it was hard for me to get to know the great books, for the greatest works long ago have entered the idolatry of the commonplace. People have the names of those books – as well as their heroes – on the tips of their tongues, and since they are so intent on stuffing themselves, they pronounce these names with their mouths full, thereby spoiling my own appetite for what would be so important for me to know. 

Not worth the poorest thought

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Ralph Waldo Emerson’s speech The American Scholar:

The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetich of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom.

One Democritus cannot suffice

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From Erasmus’ Praise of Folly (27):

For, as they point out. what is more foolish than for a candidate seeking office to flatter the people, to buy their favor with doles, to court the applause of so many fools, to be pleased by their shouts, to be carried about in parades as if he were a spectacle for the populace, to have his statue in the marketplace? To all these add the adoption of new names, and nicknames; then add those divine honors paid to very sorry fellows, and the deification, at great public ceremonies, of criminal tyrants. This sort of thing is most arrant folly. One Democritus cannot suffice for laughing at it. Who denies this?

Quid enim stultius, inquiunt, quam supplicem candidatum blandiri populo, congiariis favorem emere, venari tot stultorum applausus, acclamationibus sibi placere, in triumpho veluti signum aliquod populo spectandum circumferri, aeneum in foro stare? Adde his nominum et cognominum adoptiones. Adde divinos honores, homuncioni exhibitos, adde publicis cerimoniis in Deos relatos etiam sceleratissimos tyrannos. Stultissima sunt haec, et ad quae ridenda non unus sufficiat Democritus. Quis negat?

The pleasantest dotage that ever I read

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Andre du Laurens‘ 1594 treatise Discours de la conservation de la veuë: des maladies melancoliques: des catarrhes, & de la vieillesse, englished in 1599 by Richard Surphlet as A discourse of the preservation of the sight of melancholike diseases of rheumes and of old age:

The pleasantest dotage that euer I read, was of one Sienois a Gentleman, who had resolued with himselfe not to pisse, but to dye rather, and that because he imagined, that when he first pissed, all his towne would be drowned. The Phisitions shewing him, that all his bodie, and ten thousand moe such as his, were not able to containe so much as might drowne the least house in the towne, could not change his minde from this foolish imaginati∣on. In the end they seeing his obstinacie, and in what danger he put his life, found out a pleasant inuention. They caused the next house to be set on fire, & all the bells in the town to ring, they per∣swaded diuerse seruants to crie, to the fire, to the sire, & therewith∣all send of those of the best account in the town, to craue helpe, and shew the Gentleman that there is but one way to saue the towne, and that it was, that he should pisse quickelie and quench the sire. Then this sillie melancholike man which abstained from pissing for feare of loosing his towne, taking it for graunted, that it was now in great hazard, pissed and emptied his bladder of all that was in it, and was himselfe by that meanes preserued.

This was cited in Mary Ann Lund’s A User’s Guide to Melancholy, a book which is (to me) wrongly taken as an introduction to Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. It feels more an onramp, a brief overview of the renaissance conception of melancholy and the medical theories behind that conception. I think the same is achieved just as effectively by several other books that also provide broader overviews – Matthew Bell’s Melancholia: The Western Malady and Stanley Jackson’s Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times – but this one does have the benefit of sustained connection to the text and its author if you’re looking for the confidence to pick up Burton. There’s a Guardian review here and a far better (but paywalled) TLS here.

Thunder looses beds of eels

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From Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre (4.2, the firmly Shakespearean portion of the play beginning at act 3):

I warrant you, mistress, thunder
shall not so awake the beds of eels as my giving
out her beauty stir up the lewdly-inclined.

The clear phallic play aside, the Arden note adds:

If not a proverb – Dent questions (?T276) ‘Thunder looses beds of eels’ – this was certainly a common zoological belief, appearing in Marston’s Scourge of Villainy (1598) and George Wither’s Abuses Stripped and Whipped (1613).

Dent in both Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language and the more catchingly titled Proverbial Language in English Drama Exclusive of Shakespeare, 1495–1616 is cagey about asserting the proverb despite compiling four other instances of the belief. In the former he cites:

1598 Marston Satire 7.78 – They are naught but Eeles, that never will appeare, / Till that tempestuous winds or thunder teare / Their slimie beds.

1613 G. Wither Abuses ed. 1863 168: Let loose, like beds of eels by thunder.

cl620 (1647) Fletcher & Massinger, False One 4.2.200f.: I’ll break like thunder / Amongst these beds of slimy Eeeles.

And in the latter adds:

1615 S.S. Honest Lawyer II C3v: Shall we cling, like a couple of Eeles, not to bee dissolv’d but by Thunder?

None of this addresses the question of the origin of the idea of eels fearing/stirred up by thunder, which is what I mainly cared about. I don’t have a definite answer, but I do have a logical chain. We begin with Pliny, as anyone seeking answers on odd beliefs about animals should do (Natural History 9.38):

Eels live eight years. They can even last five or six days at a time out of water if a north wind is blowing, but not so long with a south wind. But the same fish cannot endure winter in shallow nor in rough water; consequently they are chiefly caught at the Pleiads, as the rivers are then specially rough. They feed at night. They are the only fish that do not float on the surface when dead. There is a lake called Garda in the territory of Verona through which flows the river Mincio, at the outflow of which on a yearly occasion, about the month of October, when the lake is made rough evidently by the autumn star, they are massed together by the waves and rolled in such a marvellous shoal that masses of fish, a thousand in each, are found in the receptacles constructed in the river for the purpose.

I’ve edited the above to translate circa verginias as ‘at the Pleaids’ rather than ‘at the rising of the Pleaids’ since I think this confuses the issue.

The Pleiades were associated in the ancient world with storms at both their rise in Spring (April-ish) and especially their setting in Fall (Oct-Nov). So Hesiod in Works and Days (615-622):

 When the Pleiades and Hyades and the strength of Orion set [in October], that is the time to be mindful of plowing in good season. May the whole year be well-fitting in the earth. But if desire for storm-tossed seafaring seize you: when the Pleiades, fleeing Orion’s mighty strength, fall into the murky sea, at that time [in November] blasts of all sorts of winds rage; do not keep your boat any longer in the wine-dark sea at that time

Later Ovid in Heroides (18.187):

What when the seas have been assailed by the Pleiad, and the guardian of the Bear, and the Goat of Olenos? Either I know not how rash I am, or even then a love not cautious will send me forth on the deep

And a last instance in Statius’ Silvae (3.2.71):

Hence raging winds and indignant tempests and a roaring sky and more lightning for the Thunderer. Before ships were, the sea lay plunged in torpid slumber, Thetis did not joy to foam nor billows to splash the clouds. Waves swelled at sight of ships and tempest rose against man. ’Twas then that Pleiad and Olenian Goat were clouded and Orion worse than his wont.

It doesn’t seem a far leap to take that Pliny’s reported pattern of eel behavior and eel hunting season, whether scientifically accurate or not, was understood as connected to the rising or setting of the Pleiades and so to the stormy season. Hence by shorthand approximation to thunder generally. And so eels, unable to deal with storms or the rough water that follow, were viewable as loosed from bed by thunder.

To all this my vanity adds a much later reference in the opening of Robert Browning’s Old Pictures in Florence. I was proud of this as altogether my own but in due diligence checking the most recent edition of John Marston’s poetry (The Poems of John Marston ed. Arnold Davenport) I found a previous editor of the same (Bullen) had also pointed out the quote, taking it as Browning reporting a piece of ‘Italian folk-lore’:

The morn when first it thunders in March,
The eel in the pond gives a leap

I sometimes feel bad about doing these things on work time but I work for a university so it should all wash out as research.

Some cats by Saito Kiyoshi

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There are very few English resources on Saito. The fullest is a recent exhibition book (Saito Kiyoshi: Graphic Awakening) that follows overviews on his life and technique with brief sections on the genres he worked in. It’s hardly comprehensive as it claims but it gives more structure and examples than the other treatments I’ve found. Online there are brief (and mostly overlapping) biographies at two of the better dealer sites (Ronin Gallery and Moonlit Sea, with bibliography on the latter). These also feature works for sale while Ukiyo-e hosts a larger selection aggregated from a number of collections. Past that, Google is your friend since the best compilations are all in hard to find (and expensive when found) Japanese volumes.

But here are some of his cats. There’s a clear progression from the less stylized earlier row (1940s-50s) to the hyper-elongated (sometimes owl-ish) geometrics of the second row (1950s-70s) and later back to something of a blend in the third row (1980s, though the right-hand piece is, as best I can tell, a late revision of an earlier one from the 1960s).

The bellows blows up sin

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Shakespeare’s (and George Wilkins‘) Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1.2.276):

For flattery is the bellows blows up sin;
The thing the which is flatter’d, but a spark,
To which that wind gives heat and stronger glowing;

The italicized ‘wind’ is the subject of a number of editorial conjectures. The original (often corrupt) quarto text has ‘sparke‘ which cannot be right (spark then being object in the first instance and separate agent in the second). Other readings beside the one adopted here are ‘breath’, ‘blast’, and ‘spur.’ I rather like ‘blast’ for picking back up the ‘bellows blows’ bl repetition but I stick with the Arden.

Anyway, I liked the image and it struck me that it that I couldn’t think of another such use. That felt surprising since the metaphor feels an obvious one. It turns out there’s only one other use in Shakespeare, at the beginning of Antony and Cleopatra (1.1.9)

Nay, but this dotage of our general’s
O’erflows the measure: those his goodly eyes,
That o’er the files and musters of the war
Have glow’d like plated Mars, now bend, now turn,
The office and devotion of their view
Upon a tawny front: his captain’s heart,
Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper,
And is become the bellows and the fan
To cool a gipsy’s lust.

I think I’ve always unreflectively misread this line by taking ‘bellows’ and ‘fan’ as synonyms both governing ‘cool’. But, following the OED’s figurative use definition – ‘applied to that which blows up or fans the fire of passion, discord, etc’ – there must be a contrast between the two and an implied verb for ‘bellows’ like ‘the bellows [to arouse] and the fan to cool.

Speaking of the OED, their entry provides Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale a few centuries earlier as the first figurative use:

Now shal ye understonde in what manere that sinne waxeth and encresseth in man. The firste thing is thilke norisshing of sinne of which I spak biforn, thilke flesshly concupiscence. And after that comth the subjeccioun of the devel – this is to ayn, the develes bely, with which he blowth in man the fir of flesshly concupiscence.

Now shall you understand in what manner that sin waxes or increases in man. The first thing is this nourishing of sin of which I spoke before, this fleshly concupiscence. And after that comes the subjection of the devil — this is to say, the devils bellows, with which he blows in man the fire of fleshly concupiscence.

To which I’d add, more by way of associative thinking than argument for connection, one of the Old English Exeter Book riddles (37, translation source here):

I saw these things—their belly was behind them,
swollen-up splendor. Its servant followed,
a powerfully eager man, and a great deal
had it endured what it experienced—
flying through its eye.

One doesn’t always die, when one must give up
what’s inside to another, but it comes soon,
a benefit to his bosom, its fruiting fulfilled—
he engenders his son, but is his own father as well.

Bellows is the generally proposed solution.

On Tarot as Bookmarks

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

Apologies, this will be a self-indulgent ramble.

We had some people over for dinner last night and someone browsing my books commented on my habit of using the major arcana of the Tarot as bookmarks. I’ve done this since undergrad and take it now as an unspoken eccentricity, but it originates in my earlier use of scrap ticket stubs for marks. I never knew how many of these I’d need so I just hoarded them in a bedside table until a girlfriend one day asked why my drawer was full of trash paper. Now I was conscious and so cowardly (pensando, consumai la ‘mpresa, to add some respectability). A few weeks later at a bookshop’s outdoor bargain shelves I found a copy of Oswald Wirth’s La Tarot: Des Imagiers Du Moyen Age (is this a translation?, I still don’t know). I opened it in passing curiosity and found at the rear a set of Wirth’s edition of the 22 major arcana. These I at once recognized as ideal bookmarks and have used as such ever since. I’ve now read a few books on the Tarot – Wirth’s, Jodorowsky’s, and the anonymous Meditations on the Tarot – and have a sense of what each arcana ‘should’ mean but I generally apply my own notion of associations for what card to use where. This is the fun of the system. Apart from a few ‘assigned’ cards with dedicated uses (listed below) the rest are pulled as fancy strikes and often switched halfway through volumes. A student once told me this revolving meditation on each arcana is a respectful and orthodox way to deploy the Tarot, but I mainly take it as a means of tracking how my feelings flex on the value of texts I’m reading.

These are the cards serving as set pieces always in use:

Sterne or Ovid – I – le Bateleur
Buddhism generally – VII – le Chariot (from Sanskrit Mahayana as ‘great vehicle’)
Proust – VIIII – L’Hermite
Dante – XVI – la Maison Dieu (originally XX – le Jugement but it seemed too pat)
Gita/Upanishads – XVII – les Etoiles
Shakespeare – XXI – le Monde

Wrangling in the Muses’ birdcage

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

A pretty and still relevant phrasing by Timon of Phlius speaking of the scholars and librarians of Alexandria:

In Egypt of the many tribes, many bookish scribblers are being fed, endlessly wrangling in the Muses’ birdcage.

Πολλοὶ μὲν βόσχονται ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ βιβλιαχοὶ χαραχῖται ἀπείριτα δηριόωντες Μουσέων ἐν ταλάρῳ

This quote even gets its on entry in LSJ as a unique metaphorical use of τάλαρος

After a while, write again.

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A few months back a relative left me most of her personal library. Our interests were more adjacent that overlapping but she trusted I’d take care of what I wanted and spread the rest out to appreciative parties. One of the happier surprises among what I’ve kept is the six volume Enciclopedia Virgiliana, a project inspired by the success of the earlier Enciclopedia Dantesca (explained in brief here – though this legacy also brought me the lovely 1996 edizione di lusso). I’d used the work a couple of times – mainly for Virgil’s relationship to his Greek predecessors – but knew it less in its own right than as a recurring citation in the commentaries on Aeneid 2, 3, 6, 7, and 11 the scholar Nicholas Horsfall had done through from ~2000-2015. This morning I checked some entry, started flipping about, and discovered Horsfall himself had authored several articles. Curious if he’d written anything on the origins or progression of the project, I did a bit of searching and found an informal review in v.33 (1987) of Vergilius. The general thrust is flattering with a few expected scholar’s snipes at some of the entries and editorial choices but it ends with a set of ordering instructions that could only have been written by someone with enough time in Italy to be at peace with – but still baffled by – how the nation operates:

It should however be by now clear that we have here a massive new tool in Virgilian studies, that the specialist should not be without. The next step is to write to the Ufficio Abbonamenti, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 00186 Roma, Pza. Paganica 4, Casella Postale 717, in Italian (of course), asking for details of a subscription to the five volumes of the EV. Do not send US stamps. After a while, write again. If you are finally sent details and decide to subscribe, you will need to acquire a banker’s order for an exact sum in lire (non-contributors may need to find as much as 750 dollars at current rates). A different office will then need to realize that you should be sent a copy. Further reminders may well be necessary at this stage (tel. Rome 650881). And a wait while the beautifully packed volumes arrive by sea mail. This account will seem depressing; distinguished Italian scholars find it no easier to acquire series from Pza. Paganica. But let us be quite clear: the delays in acquisition and the irritations in use are definitely worth it in the end. Francesco della Corte deserves our warm gratitude.