Saturday Links
John Steinbeck’s stuff, a history of the pocket calculator, the early novels of Thomas Love Peacock, at home with Rachmaninoff, and more.
Good morning! If you are so inclined—and have a couple of thousand sitting around—you can buy a fragment of John Steinbeck’s original draft of Of Mice and Men that was torn apart by his dog. You can also buy a first edition of Tortilla Flat inscribed to his sister, among many other items, all of which go on sale October 25th.
The slide rule “dominated the world of pocket calculation for centuries,” James Vincent writes in his review of Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator—until the pocket calculator, that is: “The simplicity and cheapness of the slide rule ensured its domination of the world of pocket calculation for centuries. Designers experimented with circular and cylindrical versions that were even more compact and accurate; additional scales were added to facilitate further types of calculation. Although it was invented in the 17th century, the slide rule peaked in popularity in the 20th, with variants catering to different professions. There were slide rules for photographers calculating light levels; slide rules for engineers to gauge the flow of liquids and gases; and slide rules for pilots to estimate ground speed and calculate fuel consumption. Slide rules not only went into space but were onboard the Enola Gay when the US used atomic weapons for the first time (specialised versions were made to calculate radiation exposure). By the mid-1960s, more than a million slide rules were sold in the US each year. The device became for the mathematically minded what the stethoscope was for the physician: a badge of professionalism as well as a practical tool . . . The slide rule’s replacement – the calculator proper – took time to develop.”
The best-selling artist last year in the UK was not Damien Hirst. It was Abdoulaye Diarrassouba: “Aboudia, aka Abdoulaye Diarrassouba, 40, whose art is inspired by street culture in his home town of Abidjan in Ivory Coast, heads the Hiscox Artist Top 100, a new survey analysing key trends in contemporary art that will be published on Monday. Aboudia’s work is influenced by the graffiti of Abidjan and the traditional wood carvings of West Africa, and has been compared to the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who made his name with graffiti-like images.”
Without these two men, half of Shakespeare’s work would have been unknown to us: “In his will, Shakespeare left twenty-six shillings and eight pence each to three of his friends and fellow actors: Burbage, Heminges and Condell, to buy mourning rings. Recent speculation has suggested that this was rather a request to memorialise their friendship and the body of work they accomplished together. And perhaps this was the trigger for Heminges and Condell (Burbage died in 1619) to gather all Shakespeare’s plays and publish them in a folio edition.”
In praise of the early novels of Thomas Love Peacock: “Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats: the giants of English Romantic verse still loom large in our literary landscape, despite the twenty-first century’s attempts to decolonize the canon. Turn to prose and we think of Hazlitt, De Quincey, (Mary) Shelley, perhaps Lamb, and, arguably, the Brontës. But when the net is cast out, who gathers in Thomas Love Peacock—poet, novelist, and satirist? Peacock (1785–1866) was the most urbane and erudite of them all: a formidable mind and a shrewd, amused observer of literary and intellectual society who gently lampooned what he saw in a handful of crisp, brilliant novels.”
Poem: Jason Guriel, “The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles”
John Wilson wrote about the pleasures of re-reading in this newsletter a couple of months ago. Joseph Epstein takes up the topic in the latest issue of The Lamp: “Re-readability is not only a useful criterion for a novel’s worth, but such is the complexity of serious novels that the same novel often reads differently at different ages while other novels cannot be read beyond a certain age and still others ought not to be read until one has attained to a later age. In this connection the Italian novelist Italo Calvino has described a classic as ‘a book that never finishes saying what it has to say.’”
This week I published a round-up of the latest reviews of Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad and covered the latest attempt of the ALA and PEN America to convince us that there’s a book-banning crisis in America. (There’s not.) If you aren’t a paid subscriber, consider supporting the reporting, commentary, and aggregation of this humble, grassroots publication.
At home with Rachmaninoff: “The train from Zurich to Lucerne tips you out right by the lakeside, practically on the steamboat piers. A white paddle-steamer takes you out of the city, past leafy slopes and expensive-looking mansions. Tribschen, where Wagner wrote the ‘Siegfried Idyll,’ slides away to the right as you head out across the main arm of the lake. At the foot of Mount Rigi, shortly before the steamer makes its whistle-stop at the lakeside village of Hertenstein, is a promontory where — if the sun is coming from the west — a yellow-colored cube shines among the trees. This is the house that Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff built between 1931 and 1934: Villa Senar, his last attempt to make a home outside Russia in Europe. It isn’t what you expect; at least, not if your idea of Rachmaninoff is shaped by the lushness of his music.”
The Paris Review excerpts Richard Deming’s This Exquisite Loneliness, which is featured in the “Forthcoming” section below:
I got sober in Rochester, New York, in the early nineties, staying in the suburb where my parents had moved after I graduated from high school, a town a few miles from where Hoffman had grown up. That part of the country is brutal in its winters—tearing cold and endless snow and darkness that for months never abates. Or maybe that’s simply how it felt. Having not grown up there, I knew almost no one when I retreated to the area after my arrest, and the consequent loss of my job, my savings, and my license. Living at my parents’ house, I was taking classes part-time at the city’s famous music conservatory before I eventually entered rehab at the very hospital where Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, a hero of mine since childhood, had died in the seventies.
Rochester may have been where I dried out, but it was not cure for my loneliness. I was left on my own to practice drums and piano for hours every day, make my way into the school to take my classes, and then drift back to my parents’ house, where I stayed up for hours, hiding bottles of wine though I was supposed to be getting off the sauce. Every week, after my lessons, I went to the art-house cinema and saw whatever was playing. Sitting alone in the dark, whole worlds flashing across the screen, I fell into other people’s lives, other people’s stories. Since in being lonely we feel only the throes of emotional distance, it is through art, books, music, movies, that we can collect our glimpses of others’ lives, that we can collect those fellow travelers.
Charles Fain Lehman takes stock of the work of Robert Caro: “Where did our ability to build go? We used to build skyscrapers in months; now it takes decades. Where did this sclerosis come from? Yes, it is a product of regulation, of “vetocracy” and bureaucracy taking its pounds and pounds of flesh. But how did we end up here? And how, if at all, can we go back? These are the questions I thought about, more than anything else, reading the works of Robert Caro.”
Forthcoming: Richard Deming, This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity (Viking, October 3): “At an unprecedented rate, loneliness is moving around the globe—from self-isolating technology and political division to community decay and social fragmentation—and yet it is not a feeling to which we readily admit. It is stigmatized, freighted with shame and fear, and easy to dismiss as mere emotional neediness. But what if instead of shying away from loneliness, we embraced it as something we can learn from and as something that will draw us closer to one another? In This Exquisite Loneliness, Richard Deming turns an eye toward that unwelcome feeling, both in his own experiences and the lives of six groundbreaking figures, to find the context of loneliness and to see what some people have done to navigate this profound sense of discomfort.”
Epstein’s rereading comments here are great. I can’t imagine not rereading and even look forward to it. The anticipation of rereading certain books provides a joy all its own. And there are times I postpone a reread to (a) prolong that joy and (b) ensure the time is right for the rereading. The funny thing, of course, is that if you talk to someone who’s not much of a book person about this they can’t understand a word of it.
A good word for Peacock is always welcome. I love the Romantics but Peacock surpasses them in sense and humor and maturity. It was Gore Vidal's fine essay on Peacock that alerted me to his presence in the literary landscape.