"(the pain, or the piano-tuning)"

At the NYRB blog, Christopher Benfey on pain and parenthesis.

Closing tabs (strangulation edition)

I have always had a preference for writing in coffee-shops as opposed to libraries; I like the buzz of background noise, I find it soothing and mildly stimulating and it makes it much easier for me to concentrate than when I'm in an environment that's totally silent. The same thing goes for city living: New York makes me feel comfortable and able to concentrate because there's this constant mid-level surrounding buzz, whereas Cayman presents difficulties for me due to smotherationally high levels of quiet.

Alas, I have spent the whole week on the verge of total meltdown, or really at times in actual meltdown mode (thus relative broadcast silence, as I prefer not to blog when I am mildly hysterical!), but will take advantage of a moment of relative inner calm to close a few tabs and report on some minor light reading.

(Ottawa worries continue to be overwhelming, and I regretfully observe that really I think I will need to go back there again in August to help with various bits and pieces of next-stage planning: I had hoped to have a spell of weeks in one place with no travel, but on the other hand the "no-travel" preference is at odds with the "urban environment" one, so perhaps there is a silver lining....)

(Note to future self: don't sublet New York apartment in future for more than a month, unless absolutely locked in on irresistible year-long out-of-town sabbatical opportunity i.e. residential fellowship! Over the summer, and especially when I'm going to be away quite a bit anyway, the dollars are the great temptation; it is my best way of getting my finances annually back into whack, as my NYC rent is a bit more than half my monthly take-home salary and I can't really afford it. However, two months is clearly too long to be without access to city life!)

Fascinating piece about an exhibit on Wittgenstein and photography that explores the relationship between photographic composites and the philosopher's idea of a 'family resemblance'. (Via Marjorie Perloff.)

Evan Goldstein profiles Wayne Koestenbaum for the Chronicle of Higher Education on the occasion of the publication of Wayne's new book Humiliation (hmmm, very copious and weird collection of Amazon reviews for a book that has not yet been published!). I am much looking forward to this book, I am a huge fan of Wayne's (really he is one of my couple most important literary and intellectual role models!). (Link courtesy of the excellent Dave Lull.)

(Side note: I had dinner earlier this spring, after Stefan Collini's talk at the humanities center, with sociologist Harriet Zuckerman, whose late husband Robert K. Merton was the person who actually coined the term role model!)

At the NYRB, David Bromwich on Obama's distaste for politics. (DB is of course another one of my role models, in this case perhaps a more impossibly aspirational one!)

Sophia Hollander profiles academic and bestselling novelist Mary Bly for the Wall Street Journal. (Via Bookforum.)

Two good links via Marginal Revolution this morning: How much would it cost to attend Hogwarts?; parrots have individual 'names' in the wild.

Sasscer Hill's Full Mortality does indeed call to mind Dick Francis in its rich and full bringing-to-life of appealing racing settings, but the voice isn't as compelling to me, and it is no discredit to Hill's writing abilities (it speaks more to my own state of mind, and to recent excesses in the way of light reading!) that this was the book, last weekend, that induced a fit of absolute self-disgust at the lack of any nutritional value in much recent literary fare, and a resolve to seek more things out to read that do not simply bathe my brain in cheap serotonin.

That did not stop me from then reading one of the worst novels I've read in a long time (a bargain purchase at Chapters in Ottawa). Then I was truly self-disgusted!

I have read two other books (both nonfiction) that deserve posts of their own, about which more anon. But the hours loom long, and light reading remains necessary; I thoroughly enjoyed Karen Marie Moning's Darkfever, which has some of the appurtenances of trashiness and is not perhaps up to the standard of Seanan McGuire's Toby Daye books but is really very good with regard to any reasonable set of expectations (I have downloaded the next one, and I would evaluate the series as being enjoyable and smart on a level with Charlaine Harris's books, which I also like quite a bit).

Somehow I had never read Connie Willis's Lincoln's Dreams, though I think I've read almost all of her other novels, so that was an excellent way of whiling away an hour or two, and we are also watching an episode or two most nights of the extremely appealing Fringe, often with a chaser of Black Books.

BOMH proceeds in fits and starts; I had a very good work day on Wednesday, yesterday not so much, but this morning I got a decent hour and a half in early and will hope to have another session on it this afternoon.

Finally, I am completely mesmerized by Gillian Welch's latest album The Harrow and the Harvest. There are two songs on it that I like as much (by which I mean to say am absolutely fixated on and can't stop listening to) as any songs I have ever heard in my entire life: "The Way That It Goes" and "Tennessee". Buy the album!

Impasto

William Boyd on the Leopold Museum and the paintings of Egon Schiele. On Schiele's “Self-portrait with Head Inclined” (1912):

Most unusually, Schiele has a moustache in this portrait—the only image of him moustachioed that I can recall. Luckily for posterity, Schiele was fond of being photographed and in all the many photographs we have of him he appears clean-shaven. I don’t mean to be facetious, but Austro-Hungarian Vienna was, among everything else, the city of facial hair. Was it a mark of rebellion not to grow a beard or a moustache in those days and thus distinguish yourself from the hirsute complacent burghers and whiskered bemedalled soldiers? I think of another of Schiele’s Vienna contemporaries, another harbinger of the modern 20th century and a ground-breaker in his field, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein—lean, ascetic and permanently clean-shaven, like Schiele. Does the demonic stare in this portrait, the added black stripe of the moustache, gesture towards the schizophrenic nature of Viennese society in those days before the Great War? This may be the wisdom of hindsight but another contemporary of Schiele (and of Wittgenstein and Freud) in pre-war Vienna was Adolf Hitler, then an embittered and near-destitute down-and-out, roaming the streets, living in squalid hostels, nurturing his paranoid fantasies. Twenty years later he would be chancellor of Germany.

(I am thinking I must have seen the Schiele exhibition at the Royal Academy in December 1990 - it certainly made an impression on me...)

The pure ice

Possibly autistic Wittgenstein son's first word was "Oedipus."

Lotteries of life

At the Telegraph, Noel Malcolm gives a favorable review to Alexander Waugh's book about the Wittgensteins:

Paul, the closest sibling in age to Ludwig, had some of his younger brother's qualities: asceticism, an iron will, an inability to dissemble, and a sometimes comical unawareness of how the world worked.

(Once, in New York, he complained to a friend that his shoes were hurting, and that the replacement pair he had asked the Wittgenstein staff in Vienna to send him had not arrived. 'Why don't you buy a pair here?' asked the friend. He looked at her in astonishment: 'What a wonderful idea. I never thought of that.')

He gave his debut concert in Vienna in December 1913. Eight months later, during his first week on the Eastern Front, he was hit in the right elbow by a Russian bullet; surgeons at a field hospital amputated most of his right arm, and he was taken off to Siberia as a prisoner of war, eventually returning to Vienna after more than a year of atrocious ill-treatment.

But during that year he had made up his mind to continue his career as a pianist; and that is what, with his Wittgensteinian iron will, he proceeded to do.

The Wittgensteinian money also helped. Realising that the repertoire for the left hand was extremely limited, he commissioned concertos and other pieces from a number of leading composers, including Strauss, Hindemith, Prokofiev, Ravel and, later, Benjamin Britten.

The fees he offered were huge, but the composers soon discovered that he believed himself to have thereby bought their music in a truly comprehensive way: he wanted not only exclusive performance rights, but also the right to engage in large-scale tinkering with the score.

Also of interest: Maya Jaggi interviews Tom Stoppard at the Guardian.

Adventures in research

Four years ago I went to Copenhagen to do a couple days' worth of research for the sequel to The Explosionist--the novel I'm only just now writing this summer, due to the intervention of life and other obligations...

My main purpose was to visit Niels Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics, where the very wonderful archivist took me around the place and told me a number of stories that lodged securely in my imagination. Many of the opening scenes of The Snow Queen (the sequel's title) are set in my alternate universe's version of the Institute, and there are all sorts of things it is difficult to glean from books...

(Me: "Would the scientists have eaten lunch in, say, a cafeteria?" Wonderful Archivist [humorously shocked]: "Oh, no! Denmark is a nation of box lunches!")

The story she told me that utterly captivated me, though, involved the escape of a number of cats from the basement. They were the subjects in an experiment concerning radio-isotopes, and the Institute backs onto a rather lovely park: the afternoon was spent frantically rushing around with a Geiger counter to try and distinguish the cats in the experiment from the ordinary feral cats that lived in the park and retrieve them so that all was not lost!

The alchemy of fiction: I wanted the story of the cats, but I did not want them to come to the sorry end that one knows, really, cats setting off Geiger counters undoubtedly must have come to...

I did not at the time register the names of the particular scientists involved, but after doing a bit of reading this summer it became clear that the main instigator would have been the intriguing Hevesy. I was very pleased to find a firsthand account of the incident of the cat (singular), in his assistant and collaborator Hilde Levi's very interesting biography of Hevesy:

I recall our excitement when the P-32 injected cat suddenly escaped; she jumped out through the window and disappeared into the nearby park. Everybody rushed out to retrieve the precious animal. Several wild beasts were caught and wipe tests of their saliva were placed under a Geiger counter - alas in vain! After hours of chasing, the right cat was found and the experiment could proceed in an orderly manner.

Hevesy published a collection of his major scientific papers in two volumes, under the title Adventures in Radioisotope Research: these are the volumes whose arrival at the library I was eagerly awaiting earlier this month...

The papers proved - what? Dry and mesmerizing at the same time, and of course very grim in terms of the hard facts they presented about the animals involved in all of these very important and valuable physiological experiments! I strongly believe in the value and legitimacy of animal experimentation, but I also (weak-mindedly) am very glad that I am not involved in it myself, because I am fond of animals and I think it would prove painful to me.

In a strange way, Hevesy's personality comes through very strongly in these papers, despite the fact that much of the writing is quite impersonal:

UREY'S discovery of heavy water was bound to impress the tracer-minded scientists, although their number was very restricted in those days. The present writer at once approached Professor UREY who most generously mailed a few litres of water containing 0.5 mol. per cent heavy water. In view of the great sensitivity with which the density of water can be determined, this strongly diluted heavy water sufficed to study the interchange between the water molecules of the goldfish and the surrounding water, and also to carry out studies described in paper 48, and presented in more detail by HEVESY and HOFER (1934). . . .

In paper 48 it is stated that the goldfish behaves in the same way in the heavy water employed in the experiments described as in tap water, though it may behave differently in more concentrated heavy water. In experiments with HAGGKVIST carried out in recent years (1958), we found that the life-span of the fish investigated was reduced from years to 10 days when kept in 40 per cent heavy water. When the fish were placed in 50 per cent heavy water, they tried to escape by jumping out from the vessel in which they were kept.

But the most painful page for me to read was this one! (The first sentence of the footnote induced in me a sort of horrified laughter...)



When I was really dug in writing The Explosionist, I had a strong image of myself hacking through something like a field of cane with a blunt machete: it was hard work, but it was straightforward, I was clearing the way. And even before I started writing it, I had a strange illusion that if I concentrated really hard, I could actually visualize - not the incidents of the story, as though they were a film, but the printed pages of the published novel, in chapters and laid out on the page in a particular format and font that I could still describe to you!

This one, on the other hand, is giving me a feeling of needing to nerve myself up to put aside the research (I cling to research, I love facts!) and start making things up. The sensory image in this case is not of fieldwork (the machete image was so vivid to me that I could feel the effects of the work in my triceps!) but of being a blindfolded person in utter darkness. I am still with my hands pressed right up against the wall, because it feels like the safest place, but I have to take the plunge and start feeling my way, blind, around the room and getting a sense of the space by bumping into things...

Postscript: Wittgenstein had a more obviously appealing orientation towards animals. Here is another funny bit of his friend Maurice Drury's reminiscences:

He told me that he had got to know some wonderful characters in Norway. A woman who had said to him how fond she was of rats! "they had such wonderful eyes." This same woman once sat up every night for a month waiting for a sow to farrow, so as to be on hand to help if necessary. This attention to animals seemed to have pleased Wittgenstein especially.

On his journey back from Norway, the boat bringing him down the fiord stopped at a jetty. There was a woman standing on the jetty dressed in a trouser suit.

WITTGENSTEIN: "Usually I dislike seeing women wearing trousers, but this woman looked magnificent."