Month: July 2004

This will risk being a little pretentious, and will be exceedingly nerdy, but here goes. When I read, I have a habit of writing down any words I have to look up, usually on an old postcard I’ve repurposed as a bookmark. The postcard-bookmark then gets recycled and years later, I find it stashed in some other book altogether and find myself wondering what book the words came from.

For example, some time after I acquired a postcard dated 22 September 1999, I did not know the definitions of the following: morion, galliot, cope, pentimento, cassowary, tontine, and houding. Hope I haven’t just typed the launch code to anything. And, um, I still don’t know what more than a few of those mean. My self-improvement scheme doesn’t include writing out the definitions. I have a guess about what book this list is from, but I’m not sure.

Here’s another: taw, oast, drugget, bullace, sprigged, medlar, sago, and topee. I checked my guess about which book this is from, and my guess is wrong.

Okay, and going back to ancient history—the years immediately following college—I used to keep the same lists in a journal. In this virtuous era, I wrote out definitions. Very early on, I also recorded what books the lists were from. So I can say that spiles, telemark, troll, christy, and khud are from a collection of Hemingway stories. Or maybe the khud is from somewhere else. There are no guarantees as to the single-volume integrity of these lists.

I didn’t keep to the discipline of writing down the book titles for long. Nonetheless, I’m pretty sure that the very short list esurient, intercrural comes from Richard Ellman’s biography of James Joyce, because I still vividly recall the moment of looking up intercrural, for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who remembers the word “in context,” as the vocabulary drillmasters advise.

But I have no idea where this list came from: divot, clepsydra, lentisk, mastic, lictor, and terebinth. A lot of gummy trees, evidently.

Or this one: rennet, mortise, imbrication, lanai, cantilever, cataplexy, quaquaversal, etui, and fescue. For years I hoped to be able to use imbrication in print somewhere, but the postcolonials got to it first and ruined it.

If any of these look familiar, feel free to hazard an identification.

To add to the list of odd items found in books, as chronicled so far by Alex Ross and Our Girl in Chicago, my best find was at the 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library. In the pages of a 19th-century belletrist, I found a bookmark dating from World War II with detailed instructions on how to save lard. Once you had a nice potfull, you were supposed to turn it in at a local collection center. (Obedient dupe of the system that I am, I returned it with the book to the shelves, an act of improvident good-citizenship I regretted almost immediately. I’ve requested the title again several times since, but the library has so many copies that they’ve never sent back the same one.)

My next best find was at an estate sale held in a Catholic church in Philadelphia in the mid-1990s. Somewhat incongruously, the deceased had been a collector of early 20th-century books on sexuality. I skipped the ones in German, which was most of them, but I snatched up the 1922 edition of Huysmans’s Against the Grain. On the inside front cover, the owner had written, very neatly, “First edition in English. Translation completed.” He had pasted in his own translations, typed onto onionskin paper, of passages that the American publisher had found too naughty to include.

I used to think I had figured out the dog brain: Dogs have an associative memory but not a historical one. For example, if dogs hear the jingle of the leash, they know to expect a walk. They recognize people after years of absence, because they are reminded at once of the fondness (or anxiety) they once felt with them. But although they’re very good at these associations and remember them a long time, they can’t put them in any chronological order. Few dogs like to be on a leash, but if you praise a dog lavishly every time you put the leash on, they submit happily, because no matter how many times it happens, they never really figure out that the state “being on a leash” always follows the event “putting on a leash.”

My killer example for this was my dog’s response one day to a neighbor she loved more than anyone else in the world (and who is still, I suspect, my dog’s favorite person, even though the neighbor has lived on the other coast for the last few years). Returning from a walk, my dog and I saw the neighbor leaving our building. My dog greeted her with enthusiasm and then looked longingly at her over her shoulder as she walked away. Moments later, inside the building, we passed my neighbor’s apartment on the second floor, and my dog hurled herself against the door, hoping to find her friend inside. She had recognized my neighbor; she had just said good-bye to her with impressive wistfulness; and she expected her to be waiting inside the apartment we had just seen her leave.

Excellent associative memory, no historical memory. But there’s a problem with my model. Whenever we take a trip, the infallible sign by which my dog recognizes that a car is in her future is my red dop kit. Its unzipping sends her into frantic and somewhat maddening barks of joy. If my theory were correct, the unzipping of this dop kit would arouse her when I unpack after a trip just as much as it does when I pack before one. But it doesn’t. After a trip, she listens equably, as if she remembers quite clearly that we’ve just come home. Even if half an hour has elapsed between our return home and the unzipping, she isn’t fazed. Is this evidence of a historical memory? Has she remembered a sequence? Or is my original theory correct, and she’s picking up a signal, ineffable to me but obvious to her, that overrides the signal of the unzipped dop kit? Such a signal would indicate “This is the unpacking pattern; no rides in the car are associated with it.” I haven’t been able to isolate the signal, however, and I have a strong incentive to; packing would be quieter if I knew how to trigger it.

The illustration above is from yet another advertisement for a Newfoundland in 19th-century newspaper, the Tribune of 31 January 1849. It’s not meant to look like a Newfoundland; it’s just the standard icon for dogs in classified ads. The ad reads “CALIFORNIA.—A large Newfoundland DOG for sale cheap. Inquire at the Bird store, 5 John-st.” In other words, someone was off to prospect for gold and had decided not to bring his dog.

I feel tempted to say something rude, or gauche, or at any rate frowned upon in sophisticated media circles. On the heels of having, through inattentive planning, dined at an Applebee’s, I feel like howling in despair over American culture. I know it’s green of me to be shocked by an Applebee’s, but I’d never eaten in one before, and I wasn’t prepared for an environment so thoroughly corrupt. There; I’ve begun to sound the wrong note, to write in the disallowed tone.

Maybe I had been put off my feed by reading in the morning paper that six months after the discovery of an American mad cow, the government had only just got around to requesting that cow brains and cow spinal matter be left out of lip gloss and moisturizers. Or maybe it was the unfortunate coincidence last week of the National Archives and Records Administration’s vow to preserve all U.S. military service records in perpetuity and the Pentagon’s admission that the microfilm of Bush’s National Guard paystubs had been destroyed (the paper originals, which would not have been so fragile, were no doubt trashed decades ago). Or maybe it was the report from the National Endowment for the Arts on Thursday, according to which the decline in literary reading by Americans has accelerated so precipitously that in the year ending in 2002, roughly the same percentage of American adults attempted to read a novel, short story, poem, or play as were incapable, because of illiteracy, of doing so even if they had wanted to. About 45%. (Note that if 45% tried and 45% couldn’t have tried, then there’s not a lot of statistical room for change of this trend through mere will power. Campaigns of exhortation won’t do much. The culture has shifted, and reading for pleasure is now a minority taste, which will continue to retreat.)

So Applebee’s. Blaring televisions were broadcasting the World Series of Poker, sponsored in part by Levitra. That is, an erectile dysfunction drug, which recent history suggests will be used for the most part recreationally, was paying for the glamorization of gambling, an addictive behavior which functions in our country, thanks to the pusillanimity and venality of thousands of state-level politicians, as a regressive tax, and these messages, accompanied by Top 40 radio, were rendering intimate conversation all but impossible. If you weren’t on speaking terms with your family, this was a wonderful place to eat. Our table display included an ad for bottled water, for sale at $1.49, in which was mounted a sample bottle, in case anyone was having trouble with the concept. Good luck to the vegetarian—or to anyone who doesn’t like to eat animals pumped full of antibiotics, snipped of their beaks, and raised in boxes—in search of a salad without slices of fried chicken in it.

It was a wretched environment, and I felt sour. And I felt sour about feeling sour. I needn’t have eaten there, of course, in the larger scheme of things. (In a small town, however, there aren’t many alternatives to these big-box restaurants these days.) It’s nonetheless dismaying to experience an environment engineered down to the last detail to take advantage of weakness—of the human wish to take a pill rather than change a life, whether the pill be for what the eighteenth century called a cockstand or for diseases like diabetes and high cholesterol that have proliferated because of overweight, which is worsened by consuming the food and drink served in such places. Some have warned that because of obesity the young today may be the first generation in American history to die off before their parents. And now the NEA report suggests that they will read fewer books than their parents in each of the years they do manage to complete.

I expect there will be a lot of worldly acceptance in the next few weeks of the new statistics about literacy, if much attention is paid to them at all, and rants like this one are not very worldly. I know that the link between visual-media supremacy and the structure of restaurants like Applebee’s is tenuous, but there is a link: distraction displaces attention. I don’t mean to sound like a supercilious shit: I know that not everyone eating in Applebee’s is as sloppy as the designers of it hope. But individual will power and self-discipline only go so far; no one really wants to be left outside of group life. In such an environment, eventually you’ll forget that it’s hazardous to the common weal for people to think they can opt out of worrying about the quality of the water. Eventually you’ll drink the high-fructose corn syrup, and the “metabolic shunting” of your insulin system will not be the only shunting you will suffer.