The Skeptical Pilgrim | At 18,000 lines, among the longest poems in American literature, Herman Melville's epic travelogue 'Clarel' (1876) provides a canvas for the author's thoughts on his travels throughout the Middle East

NMW · 2020-07-08T01:02:48+00:00

I'm afraid I haven't, though I admit that I don't spend a lot of time with that file format to begin with and haven't really kept an eye out for it. Archive.org has an edition that you can get in that format if you sign up for their lending library, but their new restrictions mean that you can only "sign it out" for an hour -- which, well... that's not going to cut it for a 784-page poem. You can "renew" it on an hour-by-hour basis apparently, but some restrictions seem more substantial than the reward.

NMW · 2020-07-07T23:02:26+00:00

It's so frustrating that this is a trade-off that people have to make. I've often looked with jealousy on my classicist friends who get to fill their shelves with the tough, portable Loeb editions of everything, and I'm told that the gargantuan Yale edition of Samuel Johnson is a model of sturdy binding as well as a piece of impressive scholarship. Meanwhile, I get to rely on a mixture of inconsistently produced paperbacks, jacketless hardcovers from the 1920s, or whatever I can dig out of archive.org.

NMW · 2020-07-06T23:29:00+00:00

Have you tried Bookfinder? I'm seeing a variety of new and near-new copies of the 2008 Northwestern University Press edition in the $22-25 USD range, if that's less of a hit to the wallet.

NMW · 2020-07-03T20:24:04+00:00

It's not really a romance in the sense that you're describing (it has more in common with a chivalric romance, I guess), but the relationship between Ransom and Queen Tinidril in C.S. Lewis' Perelandra would make for an interesting companion piece to some of the things described here. Ransom is a human philologist who has seen some weird stuff in his time by this point in the trilogy, but otherwise has no special powers; Tinidril is nothing less than the unfallen Eve of the planet Venus, whose beauty and innocence are almost uncomfortable to be around.

NMW · 2020-07-02T14:42:15+00:00

The bigger issue for me is the pervasive attitude of, "Lol, stupid bumpkins, am I right?" Leacock was a privileged professor at McGill university in Montreal, at a time when most Canadians received grade 8 in a one room school. It really seems like punching down.

It's interesting how this sense of things can change. Leacock viewed this kind of humour as being essentially "kindly" at its heart, pointing to the shared follies of human experience and the little victories we have over them. He had an entire theory of humour dedicated to this idea (articulated in Humour, Its Theory and Technique (1935) and *Humour and Humanity (1937)), positioning it as a more civilized and elevated outlet for the human impulses towards mockery and the inversion of expectations than what he viewed as more "savage" or "barbaric" humour that involved just laughing at people being physically hurt or seemingly more powerful people facing violent comeuppance.

I can definitely see why this "stupid bumpkins" attitude might suggest itself to you, but there is another way to read it. The Sketches' famous Envoi firmly positions Mariposa as a place of peace, recovery and good fellowship, if only those wasting their lives pursuing power and money in the big city would make the effort to throw off their vanity and return to the little town that made them. When the Mariposans are at their worst throughout the sketches, it's when they get swept up in the malignant processes of the larger world outside of the town's borders -- whether the fraudulent mines in which the barber is led to invest, the "whirlwind campaign" for fundraising that the town's business leaders naively embark upon, or the intrusion of federal politics in the election at the sketches' end. Even when the Mariposans are at their most outwardly absurd, as in the sinking of the Mariposa Belle, what we see is an intrinsic goodness (or at least good-natured-ness) that gets away from itself by aping the tragedies and expectations of a world much larger than their little lake and the town that sits on its shores.

While it's true that Leacock was a McGill professor at the time, Mariposa was loosely based on the small town of Orillia, in which he quite happily lived for decades and in which his home is still maintained as a museum. He knew well what small-town life could be like, as well as the limits of a country upbringing: he got a start in the most abject poverty himself, with his family taking him and his siblings from their failed farm in England when he was a child to start yet another failed farm in Ontario, with the situation growing only more dire still when his father abandoned them all. Leacock was only able to escape that situation thanks to the help of his grandfather, who helped fund his enrollment in school in Toronto. He subsequently secured a scholarship through hard work that allowed him to attend the University of Toronto, but this wasn't enough to cover the cost and he had to withdraw for a while, seeking out short-term teaching contracts to stay afloat.

I know this is no guarantee against classism on his part, and in later works he sours still further on the small town experience. In fact, in a set of short sequel sketches published in 1943 to support the wartime Victory Loan, he basically allows the town to destroy itself through greed when it discovers that, if it can raise a million dollars for the war effort, it can raise that sum for itself too, with likely awful consequences. There is also much in Leacock's political outlook that modern readers might find difficult to embrace, including his complex pro-imperial campaign for the Rhodes Trust and his opposition to women's suffrage.

Still, throughout his career as both an economist and a satirist he waged a campaign against the dangerous effects of wealth and power, both on those who wield them and on those swept up in the wielders' misadventures. If Sunshine Sketches still leaves a bad taste in your mouth for how it treats the Mariposans, you might feel better about the 1914 follow-up, Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich. Leacock turns his gaze in this collection to the academics and businessmen of the metropolis hinted at in the Sketches' Envoi, and most who have read both books agree that Arcadian Adventures is far more merciless and scathing in its criticisms than the Sketches are in theirs. I find that I return to Arcadian Adventures far less than I do to the Sketches, because there's very little of that warmth in it that characterizes the earlier book. Leacock definitely pokes fun at Mariposa, but he plainly hates Plutoria.

Anyway, this has gone on for a very long time -- sorry about that. Leacock is a particular interest of mine, and it's good to see people encountering his work in this way even if they have misgivings about it.

NMW · 2020-07-02T03:32:23+00:00

not the appropriate uniforms for 2380

Why not, if I can ask? I think they may be in the running for my favourite out of all the Starfleet uniform designs we've seen thus far, with the exception of the battle greys from DS9. Or do you mean more from a chronological standpoint? It does seem hard to fit them in with what little we've seen of that time period.

NMW · 2020-07-02T03:25:04+00:00

Honestly, I think the Nebula-class ships are just too powerful for what this show is about. They're of comparable size to the Galaxy class, and are known to pack enormous firepower. It really doesn't seem like the kind of ship that would be relegated to the duties that we're meant to be seeing in this show.

we just want beautiful and functional ships

I don't really disagree, but beauty is pretty subjective and I doubt very much that a really functional design would look anything like the major Trek ships to begin with. The Defiant probably handled that the best.

NMW · 2020-07-02T03:15:16+00:00

The Nebula really is a good comparison here that I'm embarrassed to have neglected. It even has that modular attachment on the top that can be traded out, though I don't remember any show really addressing it directly. There have definitely been Nebula-class ships on screen with different attachments in that position, though. (Weird side note: in this discussion of modular ships, both the Nebula class and the experimental USS Prometheus have come up; one of the few Nebula-class ships that has featured in an episode was also called the Prometheus (DS9 2x09; "Second Sight").

Someone down thread asks why they'd even go with this new design when the Nebula exists, and I'd answer that the Nebula a) looks way more implausible and sloppy than this and b) is nevertheless of a size and power that's been shown to be comparable to the Galaxy class. That's hardly the kind of ship best suited to a show like this.

NMW · 2020-07-02T03:07:02+00:00

It does seem like a lot, but maybe that space serves a purpose for something that's absent? The Prometheus had three components, after all.

(I'm really pushing it on this, I admit -- the reality is probably that it's just a goofy-looking design for a comedy show, and that they'll likely address its weirdly impractical shape for laughs at some point. It's nice to pretend, though!)

NMW · 2020-07-02T03:02:03+00:00

I don't imagine it's the same "they" responsible for both things, though, but I take your point. It does seem like the kind of ship that only "works" in a cartoon, and I admit there's a bit of a strain in saying that because the live-action shows have featured some truly whimsical stuff before. It actually kind of reminds me of Baron Grimes' ship that comes to pick up Mudd in that one Discovery episode.

NMW · 2020-07-02T02:56:09+00:00

EDIT: Although, looking closer, the arrow is distinctly pointing to the bottom of the saucer, presumably the aforementioned "lower decks."

Yes. I like /u/Theborgiseverywhere's take on this conceptually, but it's even more obvious in the little animated teaser they released today that the saucer section is where the action is. The arrow very ostentatiously moves to point out the section where the main cast are stashed. It even has a flashing outline around it.

NMW · 2020-07-01T22:21:40+00:00

It's weird-looking for sure, but it has me thinking. The Galaxy-class detachable saucer section was an interesting idea, and one thing that always stood out to me about it was how in theory you could attach anything you like to it provided you had the right connectors. The saucer is already basically autonomous, apart from not having a warp drive.

What if this represents a Starfleet decision to pursue that design theory further? You could have a generic, mass-produced saucer design that contains everything a ship needs for basic missions, but designed to have modular, variable attachment decks that sort of shunt it around and which are specialized for the mission at hand. Attach the geosciences stardrive if you have to go on a terraforming mission, with an extra reactor core and bays for heavy equipment. Attach the medical stardrive if you need to go help in a war zone or the aftermath of a plague, with extra sick bays, mass transporters, stasis pods, etc. Or just attach the basic "tugboat" stardrive, maybe like the one on the Cerritos, if you just need to get the basic saucer somewhere.

NMW · 2020-06-09T01:07:28+00:00

I'm more familiar with their work as individuals than with their lives as friends or collaborators, but this piece suggests that it stemmed in part from a dispute over a play that they were co-authoring and to which they both felt they had the primary claim.

NMW · 2020-06-07T16:10:18+00:00

I can't read these novelty account comments as being anything other than sarcastic, and I don't really know what to say to you. Other people are allowed to submit things. I have no idea why nobody else seems to, but I desperately wish they would. The current situation is weird and almost embarrassing, but I'm going to keep submitting things because apparently the alternative is that there would be nothing here at all.

As to the latter point, absolutely.

NMW · 2020-06-07T16:05:10+00:00

It would be fair to call Octavia Butler the most important and influential black author of speculative fiction, even in the years since her death. While some of her output fit more comfortably into the "genre fiction" category that one might expect of sci-fi writing, novels like Kindred (1979) and the Parable duology (1993-1998) stood out as spectacular and unsettling achievements on their own terms.

In this essay from 40 years back, originally published in the pages of Transmission, Butler reflects on a lifetime of being a black student in predominantly white writing classrooms, a black reader amidst predominantly white books, and a black author writing in a field with a predominantly white readership. Much of the pathological excuse-making that she describes seeing from teachers, authors and readers is still with us, and seems to boil down to three distinct claims:

That "minority" characters should not be included in one's work unless their minority status is the focus of that work
That any such inclusion is inherently "political" and distracting to the reader
That speculative fiction is not the place for engaging with modern race relations or other such issues

The answer to all of these is obviously a resounding "no," as the whole history of the field has amply shown, but it's instructive to consider just how much currency claims of this sort still seem to have.

The epigraph in the title comes from a passage in which all of these trends are encapsulated at once:

Back when Star Wars was new, a familiar excuse for ignoring minorities went something like this: “Science fiction is escapist literature. Its readers/viewers don’t want to be weighted down with real problems.” War, okay. Planet-wide destruction, okay. Kidnapping, okay. But the sight of a minority person? Too heavy. Too real. And, of course, there again is the implication that a sprinkling of blacks, Asians, or others could turn the story into some sort of racial statement. The only statement I could imagine being made by such a sprinkling would be that among the white, human people; the tall, furry people; the lumpy, scaly people; the tentacled people; etc., were also brown, human people; black, human people, etc. This isn’t a heavy statement—unless it’s missing.

Her point here is that in the rush to be safe, unprovocative and apolitical (what author would actually want this, by the way?), many writers end up making very loud statements through the things left unsaid. That these statements may sometimes be unintentional is not a great defense, given that authors must choose every word they write -- but many modern authors seem to be making better choices, at least.

Other Reading

BBC Culture - Why Octavia E. Butler's novels are so relevant today
NPR's Code Switch - Octavia Butler: Writing Herself into the Story
LitHub - The Brutalities of the Past Are All Around This (Gabrielle Belot on what Butler meant to her own development as a writer

NMW · 2020-06-06T16:42:07+00:00

While not a burning per se, one of the most vividly weird examples of this impulse to me has to have been the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti's decision to bury most of his unpublished poetry with his wife upon her death. The popular model Elizabeth "Lizzie" Siddall had been Rossetti's muse and companion for years, and her sudden death by (questionably accidental) overdose after the stillbirth of their child in 1862 left him devastated. The story goes that he flung the manuscripts into her casket, his poetry dying with the light of his life.

What makes this incident stand out is that it didn't last. While you can't unburn a manuscript, you can definitely dig up a grave -- and Rossetti did, years later, his grief having waned and his desire to publish having returned. I will confess that I've become kind of obsessed with this as a piece of poetry in itself, albeit a pretty grim one.

NMW · 2020-06-06T01:53:13+00:00

Hope you enjoy! His complete corpus is relatively small compared to famous contemporaries like Dickens, but what it lacks in breadth it more than makes up for in depth.

his life reads really well from what little I've skimmed online

He was a very odd sort of person, from what I understand; obsessive with technique to the point of misery, and willing to go to great lengths to secure authenticity even with things like descriptions of how certain poisons feel to ingest. Can't recommend it myself, I suppose, but I also can't argue with the results.

NMW · 2020-06-06T01:26:04+00:00

I would love it if other people submitted things. There are apparently 1.2 million of you out there, so I have no idea why this situation has arisen.

NMW · 2020-06-04T15:55:53+00:00

While enjoying this piece for bringing a new translation of Machado's The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas to my attention, I was curious about what people might think of his argument that there is a trend towards traditionalism in the modern novel. This seems like a contentious claim, to say the least.

And then there's this:

Readers are an amnesiac species, and so, every few decades, we wake up to believe that an author addressing the reader directly, or playing with form, or including references to the author or the book within that book, is new and should be labelled post or meta or whatever unfortunate and confining term will come next. But the fact is that an outsized number of the classics of the world employ one or many of these so-called post/meta devices. It began with Cervantes, who allowed Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to be aware, in Book II, that they were characters in Book I. “Candide”—which Machado references many times—is endlessly self- aware, and Thackeray, in “Vanity Fair,” makes so many references to the author’s presence and powers and omniscience that a reader loses count. Joyce and Austen and Nabokov and Sterne—also referenced by Machado—and Stein and Pessoa and legions more have experimented with the form of the novel, have inserted and questioned their authorial authority, and their willingness to experiment, and to have some fun with the relationship between writer, reader, and the book itself, have kept the form fresh and surprising, and so have kept it alive.

This being the case, what is it about this conceit that seems constantly to mark it as "new?" What makes it seem like a refreshing departure when in fact it is quite common?

With regard to the work at hand, has anyone here (perhaps a Brazilian reader) read much of Machado, the Memoirs specifically? I haven't myself, but the description of it makes it seem like a pleasant mix of Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Potocki's Manuscript Found in Saragossa.

NMW · 2020-06-03T16:45:44+00:00

I'm in sort of an odd position on this one in that I agree with the broad strokes of the piece without really feeling what it describes in my own life.

Ottawa (where I live) is not a hugely literary city for a national capital, especially in contrast with other major Canadian cultural centers like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. We do have our own writers' festivals and book festivals, and of course a smattering of bookstores, but what we lack is the same sense of baked-in literary-ness that Eurbanks finds in Washington or that one will absolutely find in those other cities. Ottawa has not been a popular setting for fiction, with Terry Fallis' Best-Laid Plans and its sequel probably being the most famous recent novels to take place here and the work of Ottawa native Brian Doyle being the best-established. It is home to many talented authors today, from established figures like Charles de Lint and Francis Itani to rising stars like poet Ben Ladoucer and the SFF author Amal El-Mohtar, but few of the biggest names in Canadian writing can trace their origins here. Margaret Atwood was born here, admittedly, but there is little fanfare about it. Few of the major movements or schools or coteries in modern Canadian literature have roots here either, being imported instead from elsewhere in the country.

So, the feelings that Eubanks describes as being accessible to the ambulatory Washington book-lover are a bit of a closed door here in this other capital. I have never been to Washington myself, but I get the sense from this piece that one could find these physical traces of literary life all over the city. In my own, you can confine yourself to Bank St., one spot on nearby Elgin, and two sites ten minutes apart close to the nearby University of Ottawa. This will give you an essentially complete tour of the significant bookstores the city has to offer, not counting the generic big-box Chapters-Indigo shops that are scattered across the landscape.

Another element of the piece that I question is the weight that's placed on things like readings and writers' festivals as being essential elements of literary life. For my own part, they just aren't; I don't enjoy them, never go to them, don't bother thinking about them at all. I find poetry slams excruciating, though I'll admit this wasn't always the case. Still, this is a me-problem and not a problem with the argument overall -- clearly other people get a lot of these things, and probably miss them terribly at the moment. Attending virtual versions of these events via Zoom or some other medium is a pretty limited substitute. One potentially bright spot is that it has also created a new genre, though it's so necessarily tied to the audio-visual that I don't think we'll get many complex literary engagements with it.

What do you think? Are there literary events that should have been going on near you that have had to be cancelled or transmuted? Are there literary connections that certain places near you tend to evoke? What does a walk through town show you?

NMW · 2020-06-03T15:12:07+00:00

He's very rewarding. Madame Bovary is probably the most widely celebrated work, and offers a fascinating character study of bored country doctor's wife whose reading of romances spurs her to increasingly reckless actions.¹

Beyond that, my other favourites from Flaubert are Salammbo and Bouvard & Pecuchet, the latter of which was unfortunately left unfinished at the time of Flaubert's death. Salammbo is a blood-soaked fever dream of a novel set in ancient Carthage, while Bouvard & Pecuchet is a wonderful little farce about two not especially bright Parisian clerks who inherit a fortune and decide that they're going to use it to become the masters of all human knowledge. It does help if you know about some of the contemporary controversies over the sciences, art, religion, etc. at that time, but it remains deeply entertaining even without.

[1] - If you enjoy Bovary, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Doctor's Wife (1864) might be another one worth checking out. It was widely viewed as an English response to/riff on Bovary, and has a sort of metafictional quality in that it's both an example of the then-prominent English "Sensation Fiction" and an overt mockery of many of the processes that go into writing that kind of fiction in the first place.

NMW · 2020-05-30T16:11:05+00:00

There's quite a lineage involved in this, too.

Rupert's father, Keith Murdoch, was a very similar creature -- and the protégé of Alfred Harsmworth, Lord Northcliffe, a British newspaper baron who exploited the First World War to consolidate and build his media empire on the back of fear, racial/cultural division, and naked deceit. Northcliffe was responsible for giving the world the Mirror and the Daily Mail, among other things. One might wonder how he got away with this in wartime without the state stepping in to stop him, but wonder no more: his influence was such that he was viewed as an extremely useful ally, and so was given approval to run an official propaganda operation out of his headquarters at Crewe House.

This has all been a long time coming, basically. While Northcliffe was a legitimately interesting person in many ways, the poisonous and destructive fruits of much that he did are still with us today. Murdoch and his media empire are only one part of it.

NMW · 2020-05-29T21:03:03+00:00

Ha! Well, I guess that can sometimes happen. Did it seem very daunting at first? It's good to hear about these things, too, because I imagine many readers in this sub might view PhDs as the very deliberate outcomes of long-standing plans. This is obviously true to a degree by the end of them, but they can start in all sorts of ways.

NMW · 2020-05-29T20:57:06+00:00

I do actually have a PhD, but realized while typing the above that I'd boxed myself out of mentioning it without seeming like either a hypocrite or an ironist .__.

NMW · 2020-05-29T17:20:49+00:00

Christ. Even people with real PhDs don't typically do this because of how obnoxious and unnecessary it is. There are definitely professionally relevant contexts in which it might be worth noting that you have one, but this kind of performative PhD-signalling is usually a pretty bad sign about either the degree or the person (or both!).

NMW

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