Holy fucking shit (?)

They discovered a first folio of Shakespeare in a library in France.

Denis Charlet/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Is this like a big deal?

“This is huge,” said Eric Rasmussen, an American Shakespeare expert who traveled to France over the weekend to authenticate the volume.

Wow.  How huge?

Mr. Rasmussen pointed out the name “Neville,” inscribed on the folio’s first surviving page — a possible indication, he said, that the book was brought to St.-Omer in the 1650s by Edward Scarisbrick, a member of a prominent English Catholic family who went by that alias and attended the Jesuit college, founded when Catholics were banned from England’s universities.

OK…

The St.-Omer folio, Mr. Rasmussen said, also contains handwritten notes that may illuminate how the plays were performed in Shakespeare’s time.

Like… Hamlet has a happy ending now?

In one scene in “Henry IV,” the word “hostess” is changed to “host” and “wench” to “fellow” — possibly reflecting an early performance where a female character was turned into a male. “I’ve never seen this kind of gender switch in a Shakespeare folio,” Mr. Rasmussen said.

I’m very happy for Mr. Rasmussen, and wish him happy hunting. But if you ask me, the better story is of the hunt for the things, not the things:

Today, first folios are tracked like rare black rhinoceroses, right down to their disappearances. One is known to have burned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871; another went down with the S.S. Arctic off Newfoundland in 1854.

New ones come to light every decade or so, Mr. Rasmussen said, most recently in the library of a London woman who died without a will. “It was a mess, with a bunch of second-folio bits mixed in,” Mr. Rasmussen said.

The disgust in his voice.

When it comes to the pinch

Was thinking about this Orwell quote:

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.

did my Google legwork, and found it came from an essay about the postcard artist Donald McGill.  Here’s more:

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.  It has to demand faultless discipline and self-sacrifice, it must expect its subjects to work hard, pay their taxes, and be faithful to their wives, it must assume that men think it glorious to die on the battlefield and women want to wear themselves out with child-bearing.  The whole of what one may call official literature is founded on such assumptions.  I never read the proclamations of generals before battle, the speeches of fuhrers and prime ministers, the solidarity songs of public schools and Left Wing political parties, national anthems, Temperance tracts, papal encyclicals and sermons against gambling and contraception, without seeming to hear in the background a chorus of raspberries from all the millions of common men to whom these high sentiments make no appeal.  Nevertheless the high sentiments always win in the end, leaders who offer blood, toil, tears, and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time.  When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.  Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash.  It is only that the other element in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside all of us, can never be suppressed altogether and needs a hearing occasionally.

The comic post cards are one expression of his point of view…

The whole essay is a terrific thing to read about life and comedy, we trust most HelyTimes readers will savor that over the weekend.  For Friday, let’s enjoy this McGill postcard, which was apparently listed in the 1973 Guinness book as the most sold postcard ever:

McGill was born in London in 1875. He lost a foot in a school rugby accident…

Approaching 80, McGill fell foul of several local censorship committees which culminated in a major trial inLincoln on 15 July 1954 for breaking the Obscene Publications Act 1857. He was found guilty and fined £50 with £25 costs. The wider result was a devastating blow to the saucy postcard industry.

(found those here thanks to a tumblr search)

I should’ve known

I’d find something poignant when I bought a used copy of Charlotte’s Web.

How about Wilbur’s plan for his day?

His plans for the day went something like this:

Breakfast at six-thirty.  Skim milk, crusts, middlings, bits of doughnuts, wheat cakes with drops of maple syrup sticking to them, potato skins, leftover custard pudding with raisins, and bits of Shredded Wheat.

Breakfast would be finished at seven.

From seven to eight, Wilbur planned to have a talk with Templeton, the rat that lived under his trough.  Talking with Templeton was not the most interesting occupation in the world but it was better than nothing.

From eight to nine, Wilbur planned to take a nap outdoors in the sun.

From nine to eleven he planned to dig a hole, or trench, and possibly find something good to eat buried in the dirt.

From eleven to twelve he planned to stand still and watch flies on the boards, watch bees in the clover, and watch swallows in the air.

Twelve o’clock – lunchtime.  Middlings, warm water, apple parings, meat gravy, carrot scrapings, meat scraps, stale hominy, and the wrapper off a package of cheese.  Lunch would be over at one.

From one to two, WIlbur planned to sleep.

From two to three, he planned to scratch itchy places by rubbing against the fence.

From three to four, he planned to stand perfectly still and think of what it was like to be alive, and to wait for Fern.

At four would come supper.  Skim milk, provender, leftover sandwich from Lurvy’s lunchbox, prune skins, a morsel fo this, a bit of that, fried potatoes, marmalade drippings, a little more of this, a little more of that, a piece of baked apple, a scrap of upsidedown cake.

Wilbur had gone to sleep thinking about these plans.  He awoke at six and saw the rain, and it seemed as though he couldn’t bear it.

Three messages from writers I admire

1) George Saunders, from a Chipotle bag.

2) Rev. F. Washington Jarvis, speaking at the International Boys’ School Conference in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand in 2009:

3) Cormac McCarthy, in The New York Times magazine, April 19, 1992.

“There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy says philosophically. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”

Happy belated Bloomsday, ya’ll

A puzzle I turn over in my head sometimes is whether it’s worth someone’s time to read Ulysses.  Depends how much time you have, I guess.

I remember reading once that you can’t really begin to approach this book unless you can speak English, Old English, Irish, Greek, and Latin, and you’d probably best know Hebrew too.

My favorite part, from Episode 8, Lestrygonians.  Bloom sees a walking advertisement for his former employer:

A procession of whitesmocked men marched slowly towards him along the gutter, scarlet sashes across their boards. Bargains. Like that priest they are this morning: we have sinned: we have suffered. He read the scarlet letters on their five tall white hats: H. E. L. Y. S. Wisdom Hely’s. Y lagging behind drew a chunk of bread from under his foreboard, crammed it into his mouth and munched as he walked. Our staple food. Three bob a day, walking along the gutters, street after street. Just keep skin and bone together, bread and skilly. They are not Boyl: no: M’Glade’s men. Doesn’t bring in any business either. I suggested to him about a transparent show cart with two smart girls sitting inside writing letters, copybooks, envelopes, blotting paper. I bet that would have caught on. Smart girls writing something catch the eye at once. Everyone dying to know what she’s writing.

Fight scene on last night’s Game Of Thrones*

Still at best a distant number two in “upsetting fight scenes on HBO serials,” falling well behind to Deadwood, season 3 episode 5.

HelyTimes will always be in the tank for Milch.  Milch on (parentheticals) in scripts:

Taking it as always to it’s conclusion…

One more bonus Milch:

* what a bunch of wimps we are about “spoilers.”  All-time favorite Mindy Kaling rant is about how whining about spoilers is disgusting and unmanly.  Take your spoilers with courage and dignity.

Words

This New Yorker blog review of Patricia Lockwood‘s book reads like delightful nonsense to me.  It reminds me of writing bullshit papers for English classes.

Take this sentence

Lockwood is famous—more than thirty thousand people follow her on Twitter—but the source of her fame is almost entirely owing to her tweets and not to her poetry.

1) Does that count as “famous”?  I have no idea what famous is anymore.  My cousin Mike has fifty-seven thousand followers, is he famous?  Coffee Dad has 125,000 followers, is he famous?

2) “Lockwood is famous – look at how many Twitter followers she has – but the source of those Twitter followers is almost entirely owing to her tweets and not to a thing that is not her tweets.”

3) isn’t her whole point, the whole reason to write an article about her, that the separation between her tweets and her poetry is kinda porous?

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Came to my attention that some HelyTimes readers are not following the book world’s frenzy over Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle.

Some facts:

* Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard has been publishing a six volume book that recounts the minute details of his life, or at least the life of a man named Karl Ove Knausgaard the details of which match the actual details of the author’s life to an almost* exact degree.

* We’re only up to Volume 2 in English.  Here is my copy pictured next to a coffee mug for scale:

* One out of every ten Norwegians has bought at least one of the volumes.

The level of obsession around this literaryGesamtkunstwerk has been so intense that some Norwegian workplaces have reportedly instituted “Knausgaard-free days”, when staff are forbidden to talk about the books.

* Reviews have been rapturous.  Tyler Cowen:

I would put this among the greatest Continental novels of the last fifty years and not at the bottom of that tier.  It is not often that one discovers such books.

*

His wife had agreed to be included, telling him only: “Don’t make me boring,” and he gave her the manuscript to read on a long train journey. Having finished it, she called him three times. The first time she said she thought it was OK, but that she didn’t like it. The second time, she told him that their life could never be romantic again. Finally, she called him and wept.

“I was so frustrated that I didn’t foresee the consequences,” Knausgaard has said. “I thought, if the consequences are that she’s leaving me, then OK, she can go. That was how it was. There was a certain desperation that made it possible. I couldn’t do it now.”

Nonetheless, their marriage survived. Last year, Knausgaard admitted that he felt guilt, “for almost everything around this book. I was kind of autistic […] I was saying, ‘My book is more important than your life.'”

(Linda with cat, from here, a site of artists and cats)

* The kind of stuff that’s in the book:

A teenage mission to procure beer for a New Year’s Eve party, for example, occupies about 70 pages in book one.

* I’ve only read about 20 pages, at random, which were about Karl going to gymnastics with his kid and being frustrated that the attractive young teacher can only see him as an emasculated dad.

* I flipped to another section, which was musing about “what would it have been like to live in a world where everything was made from the power of your hands, the wind, or water?”  It was pretty engaging.

* The title’s provocative, obviously.  KOK says:

For two years, I worked as a kind of adviser on a team that translated the Bible to Norwegian. It was there I learned to read. The gap between the two languages was a shock, and made it possible to experience, not only to recognize, the gap between language and the world, the arbitrariness everybody talked about in the eighties was all of a sudden visible for me.

Another lesson was that in the Old Testament, everything is concrete, nothing is abstract. God is concrete, the angels are concrete, and everything else has to do with bodies in motion, what they say, what they do, but never what they think. No speculations, no reflections. Even the metaphors are connected to bodies. I became especially interested in the story of Cain and Abel, when Cain’s countenance falls and God says, “Why is your countenance fallen? Lift up!” Cain doesn’t look anyone in the eyes, and no one looks in his. This is to hide from the world and from the other. And that is dangerous.

In the sixth book of Min Kamp, I wrote four hundred pages on Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Hitler was a man who lived a year without seeing anyone, just sitting in his room reading, and when he left that room, never let anyone close, and stayed that way, intransigent, through the rest of his life, and one characteristic thing with his book, is that there is an “I,” and a “we,” but no “you.” And while I was writing about Hitler, a young Norwegian who had stayed some two years all by himself, and written a manifesto with a strong “I” and a “we,” also without a “you,” massacred sixty-nine youths on an island. In other words, his countenance fell.

* I’m told by a Scandinavian friend that the last volume was so long it couldn’t be bound into a book, so Karl took it home and cut it down until it was the EXACT length that could fit into a binding.

* I’d highly recommend reading this short take on it by Sophia Pinkham at n+1, which points out that what might strike an American writer is “how come this guy isn’t worried about money?”

* Karl himself:

“The critical reading of the texts always resulted in parts being deleted. So that was what I did. My writing became more and more minimalist. In the end, I couldn’t write at all. For seven or eight years, I hardly wrote. But then I had a revelation. What if I did the opposite? What if, when a sentence or a scene was bad, I expanded it, and poured in more and more? After I started to do that, I became free in my writing. Fuck quality, fuck perfection, fuck minimalism. My world isn’t minimalist; my world isn’t perfect, so why on earth should my writing be?”

Or this, from The Guardian:

“Concealing what is shameful to you,” he’s said, “will never lead to anything of value.” And the most indelible moments tend to involve his own humiliation. In book two, A Man in Love, for example, he describes getting drunk, breaking a glass and slicing up his own face, when the woman he loves rejects him. Even more abject and embarrassing are book three’s boyhood recollections, including an unhappy appraisal of his own penis, “like a little cork. Or a kind of spring, because it quivered when you flicked it lightly.”

Well, I’m glad it exists I guess.

Is art just the turning of yourself into “art” until you, yourself, are indistinguishable?

Is the cost always that your wife will be crying?

Is it “worth” it?

Should we honor a person like this or figure out what meds he needs?

Is this the logical end of writing?

Is it criminal to do this to your children/relatives?  Or worth it for the art?

How good does the art have to be to justify the cost?

Would we feel differently if Karl Ove did this and almost NO Norwegians bought it?

Do we have to respect his balls at least?

Is his desire for us to respect his balls part of this project?

If part of his motive is our respect, does that change it?

Do I actually have to read this or is it enough that it exists?

Is this admirable, like a kid doing an awesome trick on a playground, or just kind of horrifying or troubled, like a kid taking out his little cork on the playground?

What about this, the very first exchange in KOK’s Paris Review interview?:

Did you keep diaries when you were young?

Yes, I did, but I burned them when I was twenty-five or twenty-six.

Why?

I was so embarrassed, I couldn’t stand it. It’s the same with Min Kamp, I can’t stand it. If I could I would burn that, too, but there are too many prints, so it’s impossible.

Life develops, changes, is in motion. The forms of literature are not. So if you want the writing to be as close to life as possible—I do not mean this in any way as an apology for realism—but if you want to write close to life, you have to break the forms you’ve used, which means that you constantly have the feeling of writing the first novel, for the first time, which means that you do not know how to write. All good writers have that in common, they do not know how to write.

Anyway, here’s another picture from the Cultural Cat website:

* behind a paywall, but in her review Sheila Heti finds herself disappointed at a detail Karl admitted to her he made up or at least may not have remembered exactly.  

Inside Hollywood

From this profile of Beau Willimon and the writing staff of “House Of Cards”:

Meanwhile, Willimon stood in front of a table full of writers and spoke, while the writers, many of them playwrights whose work he admired, sat and listened and occasionally chimed in. One writer, whose back was toward me, idly surfed the Internet: He researched a plane ticket, then checked out an Airbnb listing for a tropical getaway for $99 a night, then bought some camping gear, then browsed an article with the headline “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.”

(An excellent detail although why did reporter Adam Sternbergh include it I wonder?  Photo by Ruddy Roye.) 

The human desire to give a shit is not defeatable.

from Craig Mazin and John August’s podcast (Mike is guest Mike Birbiglia):

Craig: You’ve lost your defenses and you’re expecting to laugh again. So, nobody sees it coming, you know? I remember talking to David Zucker and Jerry Zucker about the first time they screened the movie Airplane! for a test audience. And in their minds everything was jokes. They were just obsessed with how the jokes would play. And they were just thrown on their heels when at the end of the movie the plan finally lands and the audience bursts into applause.

Mike: Oh, that’s amazing.

Craig: Because they cared that the plane would land. You know? And they just thought, “It doesn’t matter. We’ve told them in every possible way this is not a real plane.” It is to them. It matters. And so the human desire to give a shit is not defeatable.

We Spent It All On Kites

Ann Summa for The New York Times

Haven’t read The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner yet despite strong recs from Pittsburgh office and elsewhere.

How about this, from this NY Mag profile?

In Eugene, Oregon, where the Kushners lived in a painted school bus like Ken Kesey’s, Rachel walked to her “totally hippie preschool” unaccompanied. Hard at work on their Ph.D.’s, the Kushners often left her and her brother at home alone, once for days with no sitter. “They left money in a jar,” Kushner says. “We spent it all on kites, and then we didn’t have any money to buy food.”

And:

Eugene “was a sweet little town,” Kushner says now, “but it was the seventies. I feel like there was a certain kind of evil lurking around the edges.” She and Smith are raising their own 6-year-old son very differently. “We actually take him to school and make his lunch. We dress him in clothes.”

Vollman vs. Munro!

vs.

Robert L. Caserio, a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University who has studied Vollmann extensively, thinks Vollmann deserves a far greater audience: “When I consider Vollmann’s gigantic energy and global reach, and consider that feeble, ill-writing Alice Munro has won a Nobel Prize, I am staggered by how pathetically shrunken our standards of magnitude have become.”

from this Newsweek article about William Vollman.

A personal counterpoint to that:

• I tried to read  Vollman, many times, because he seems brave and his projects are fascinating. (Going out of my way to be nice here even though Vollman has said he does not read the internet)
• The Ice Shirt is interesting and ambitious (Jean and Hubbs got it for me for my birthday!) but I found that it was so wrapped up in elaborate Norse dream visions and stuff as to be unreadable (and I’m pretty into pre-Columbian North America)
• Ditto Imperial.
• Riding Towards Everywhere – a book about hobos, mind you – I failed to finish.

From the other corner:

• I once read an Alice Munro story, selected truly at random from the probably full yard of Alice Munro books on the shelf at a public library in Victoria, British Columbia.  When I was done I had to wipe tears off my face with a coarse Tim Horton’s napkin.  I put the book back and was like shit that was just one I picked at random, maybe not even a good one of these, of which there are – 200?

Anyway, no accounting for taste, huge respect to Vollman, whose latest thing was dressing up like an old woman named Dolores I just think Prof. Caserio came off sounding a bit catty.

(Vollman from Wiki, Alice Munro photo from here)

(readers should know I have a possible positivity bias towards Alice M. because I won £200 betting on her, through a London intermediary, to win the Nobel Prize)

Trivia

Jane Austen died a virgin.

(so says John Sutherland in The Lives Of The Novelists.  Portrait of Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra).

Wiki:

In December 1802, Austen received her only known proposal of marriage. She and her sister visited Alethea and Catherine Bigg, old friends who lived near Basingstoke. Their younger brother, Harris Bigg-Wither, had recently finished his education at Oxford and was also at home. Bigg-Wither proposed and Austen accepted. As described by Caroline Austen, Jane’s niece, and Reginald Bigg-Wither, a descendant, Harris was not attractive — he was a large, plain-looking man who spoke little, stuttered when he did speak, was aggressive in conversation, and almost completely tactless. However, Austen had known him since both were young and the marriage offered many practical advantages to Austen and her family. He was the heir to extensive family estates located in the area where the sisters had grown up. With these resources, Austen could provide her parents a comfortable old age, give Cassandra a permanent home and, perhaps, assist her brothers in their careers. By the next morning, Austen realised she had made a mistake and withdrew her acceptance. No contemporary letters or diaries describe how Austen felt about this proposal.

Tough review

Joseph C. Hart wrote a bestselling book of the 19th century, Miriam Coffin or The Whale-Fisherman (1835).  It was based, apparently, on real life Nantucket smuggler, war profiteer, and sharp-eyed businesswoman Kezia Coffin (ht Nathaniel Philbrick’s Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island And Its People, 1602-1890).

At the end of the novel, Miriam is instructed by her husband to literally go back to the kitchen where she belongs.

Hart also wrote a book called The Romance of Yachting, which Wikipedia describes “as a narrative of his travels to places that give him occasion for musings on a variety of topics.”

Herman Melville, who was apparently influenced by Miriam Coffin, did not care for this one.  Says Wiki:

Herman Melville scathingly described Hart’s book in his review as “an abortion” which “deserves to be burnt in a fire of asafetida, & by the hand that wrote it.”

Asafoetida is an interesting plant.  Wiki tells us it’s used as an antiflatulent in the Jammu region of India.

Jammu.

I’m guessing it also burns pretty hot?  There’s also this mysterious claim on the asafoetida wiki page:

Penrod, an 11-year-old boy in a 1929 Booth Tarkington story set in the midwestern United States, suffers intensely for being forced to wear a bag of asafoetida on his neck and encounters a girl in the same condition.

You remember Penrod of course: