Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

The End-of-the-Book Reading List

Not really, of course. I believe paper-based books, also known as codices, are here to stay, even if the advent of foldability does threaten to render electronic reading devices somewhat cuter than heretofore.

Nonetheless, over the last few months, in intermittent fits of sentimentality, I have accumulated a wee library of printed materials that seem to be mementoes or comments on the decline of certain aspects of book culture.

1. To celebrate all things analog, from transistor radios to lighthouses, Simon Roche of the Irish-Danish design firm Field has produced a magazine titled The Radio Post, which I learned about from my boyfriend, Peter Terzian, who wrote about it for Print magazine recently. The Radio Post is an extraordinarily beautiful thing, because it’s in form a folded broadsheet, printed in silver ink on black paper. Fedrigoni’s Savile Row Tweed Paper, to be exact. On one side, poster-size, is a photograph of Simon’s father at the horse races, years ago. On the other are small articles and images, including photos of a low-tech recording studio used by the White Stripes and an extract from Seamus Heaney’s Nobel acceptance speech. The best thing is, it’s free to the first thousand comers, provided you send a non-electronic letter or postcard asking for it. Write to The Radio Post, Republikken Building, Vesterbrogade 24b -2.Sal, 1620 Copenhagen V, Denmark. It arrives in a stamped and numbered envelope.

2. But maybe nostalgia is not your thing. Maybe, in the defense of book culture, you prefer . . . gunshots and car chases? In that case, order Jason Shiga’s Bookhunter from Sparkplug Comics for $15. You can also read it online, but that would sort of defeat the point of defending book culture, wouldn’t it. The premise is that it’s 1973, and an 1838 Bible at the Oakland Public Library has been swapped with a high-quality simulacrum. A crack team of special agents from the Federal Library Police are called in to investigate. In the name of library science, the agents are of course licensed to kill. My favorite moment comes during a chase scene, when an agent crawls out of the cab of a bookmobile while it’s in motion, à la Keanu Reeves in Speed or Buster Keaton in The General, in order to reach a reverse telephone directory in the library part of the vehicle. Hands-down shoe-in for the most creative use of a card catalog in motion pictures.

3. If you don’t like your books about books to be sullied by actual words, there’s Zero Mostel reads a book, a photo pamphlet by Robert Frank, originally issued by the New York Times as a giveaway in 1963 and now reissued by Steidl for $27.50. Mostel seems to be performing Harold Bloom avant la lettre, or a more theatrical version of Bloom, if that’s possible—threatening to punch one volume, savoring another with a magnifying glass and a cigarette, and goggling at what must be a true-crime tale with bug-eyed glee.

4. On the studious end of the spectrum, meanwhile, Anthony Grafton has expanded his November 2007 New Yorker article on the future of reading into a small book, Codex in Crisis ($30). It is published, rather lavishly, by the Crumpled Press, in a limited edition of 250, with an engraved cover and a fold-out color reproduction of Felice Giani’s The Burning of the Library at Alexandria. The opulence risks making the book itself sound precious, but it isn’t. Given free rein, Grafton is able to go into more detail about such matters as his first-hand experience of the financial constraints of running a scholarly journal in the internet age; the frequency with which Google Books’ character-recognition software renders the Latin word “qualitas” as “qnalitas”; and the ineffable something that is added to scholarship when a researcher shares a physical workspace with sleepy vicars who visit the Bodleian in their bedroom slippers.

5. I’ve recommended the photographer Moyra Davey’s books of images and essays about books before, and Long Life Cool White ($24.95) and The Problem of Reading ($12) are still highly recommended. (By the way, Davey’s piece Bloom is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until 18 October 2008 in the exhibit “Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium since 1960.”)

6. Finally, and just as aesthetically, the Spartanburg Art Museum of Spartanburg, South Carolina, is selling the catalog to its exhibit People Reading, depictions of readers in paint and ink collected by Donald and Patricia Oresman. The Oresmans, a Manhattan couple with a 1,250-square-foot private library with 23-foot ceilings, own more than two thousand such images, which have been featured in The Paris Review and The New Yorker. They have loaned sixty to the Spartanburg Art Museum, and while they’re all visible online, the pictures are bigger and better in print, and the catalog only costs $5 (plus $5 shipping).

And then it became the consensus

Last year, the consensus among mainstream journalists seemed against the idea of peak oil—that is, against the idea that the world has a finite supply of oil, that a graph of its production is likely to follow a bell curve, and that we may be within a decade of the peak of that curve. For example, in a 7 March 2007 article, “Oil Innovations Pump New Life into Old Wells,” New York Times reporter Jad Mouawad wrote that “There is still a minority view, held largely by a small band of retired petroleum geologists and some members of Congress, that oil production has peaked, but the theory has been fading.” To maintain his dismissal of peak oil, Mouawad had to walk a fine tightrope. The gist of his article, after all, was that as oil prices rise, it begins to make fiscal sense to use more expensive technologies to extract oil from the earth. In fact this is something that most people concerned about peak oil expect to happen as oil becomes scarcer. True, rising oil prices have reopened wells that were once closed as unprofitable, and they have brought dirty and unwieldy petroleum sources such as tar sands into development, but none of these phenomena suggest that oil is still as abundant as ever. To the contrary.

But it was not until recently that I began to notice mainstream journalists accepting that oil production may be peaking. In a more recent Times article, “Why Is Oil So High? Pick a View,” dated 21 June 2008, Mouawad and fellow reporter Diana B. Henriques don’t actually embrace the idea of peak oil, but they sidle up awfully close to it. They note with puzzlement, for example, that lately “the future price is higher than the spot price” of oil—reversing the offer of Popeye’s friend Wimpy, who will gladly pay you Tuesday for a cheeseburger today. “That development usually signals concerns over future supplies,” Mouawad and Henriques note, “encouraging refiners to stockpile oil, which has not happened yet.” They don’t speculate as to why not. They continue:

Many economists see a straightforward explanation for rising prices: Global oil supplies remain tight and there is a deep-seated fear that demand will outpace new production growth for years to come. In that climate, they say, the price will rise until it reduces global demand. But demand is still rising, even with oil at $134.62 a barrel.

The high price “doesn’t mean we have a shortage today, but it means there is a serious worry about a shortage three to five years from now,” said Adam E. Sieminski, the chief energy economist at Deutsche Bank.

That view — that market fundamentals are responsible for the price rally — is widely held among energy analysts.

In other words, prices may be rising because demand is exceeding supply, and because everyone in the market expects demand to continue to exceed supply, they expect they’ll have to pay more for the Tuesday cheeseburger.

The journalistic consensus may be shifting because a scientific one is coalescing. In “Final Warning,” New Scientist, 28 June 2008, Ian Sample writes, “Most geologists now accept we have reached, or will imminently reach, peak oil,” and backs up his assertion by citing Gideon Samid, head of the Innovation Appraisal Group at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Writes Sample:

Most industry experts, including geoscientists and economists, who were polled by Samid in 2007 said that peak production will occur by 2010. This contrasted with a similar survey conducted two years earlier, in which respondents were split, with many of the economists opting for a later date. “Now, a real consensus is emerging,” says Samid.

And in a drive-by Nixon-goes-to-China sort of way, this week The Economist jumped on the bandwagon. In “The Power and the Glory,” dated 21 June 2008, part of a special report on the future of energy, Geoffrey Carr wrote that “Oil is no longer cheap; indeed, it has never been more expensive. Moreover, there is growing concern that the supply of oil may soon peak as consumption continues to grow, known supplies run out and new reserves become harder to find.” Carr continues by unraveling the apparent contradiction that was flummoxing the Times last spring:

“Peak oil,” if oil means the traditional sort that comes cheaply out of holes in the ground, probably will arrive soon. There is oil aplenty of other sorts (tar sands, liquefied coal and so on), so the stuff is unlikely to run out for a long time yet. But it will get more expensive to produce, putting a floor on the price that is way above today’s.

Jellyfish

In case you were wondering, if you cut and paste the entire text of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick into the new online widget Wordle, you can get a picture like the one above, featuring the seventy-five words that appear most frequently in the novel. I stipulated for all words to appear in lower-case, so that “whale” and “Whale” would be counted together. If you ask for the top three hundred sixty-five words, you can get a picture like this:

Note that the name “Ishmael” appears in neither. It didn’t show up when I asked for the five hundred most popular words in the novel, either. (Here’s a link to the PDF, in case anyone wants to print it out.)

UPDATE, 30 June 2008: Since Michael asked, you can now buy T-shirts. I made one version with just the Moby-Dick word cloud, and another that has that on the front and Billy Budd on the back.

Vagaries of translations past

In The Year of Reading Proust (1999), Phyllis Rose related an anecdote that stuck in my head for a long time, because of its symmetry. It concerned the Englishing of the title of Proust’s multi-volume novel À la recherche du temps perdu.

Proust’s first English translator, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, famously rendered the title as “Remembrance of Things Past,” drawing on a line from Shakespeare sonnet number 30, which begins:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,
I summon up remembrance of things past
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste . . .

Recent translators, however, have preferred to be more literal and less allusive, and Proust’s title is today more often given as In Search of Lost Time. When, in Rose’s memoir, she mentions this change to a friend, he regrets it. It’s less sonorous, the friend complains, and furthermore, Scott-Moncrieff was not taking the liberty he seemed to be taking. As everyone knows, the phrase comes from a Shakespeare sonnet. But, continues the friend,

“. . . do you know that when Voltaire translated Shakespeare’s sonnets, he translated that phrase into French as ‘à la recherche du temps perdu’? That’s where Proust got it. So when Moncrieff wanted to translate Proust’s title, he went back to the Shakespeare sonnet Voltaire had been translating.”

It’s a perfectly formed anecdote. The pieces of the puzzle fit together exactly; the boldness of the first translator is justified by a knowledge of French literature that later translators lack. When I read Rose’s book, I went looking in Columbia’s library for Voltaire’s translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets, because the story made me want to see them with my own eyes. I couldn’t find them, but I figured I would run across them later, so I made a point of remembering to look for them again when I had a chance.

So I looked for them this afternoon, when I was in the New York Public Library. No luck. My guess is, Voltaire never translated Shakespeare’s sonnets. In the age of Google, if you spend an hour or two looking in scholarly databases for a piece of information about people of the stature of Voltaire and Shakespeare, and you can’t find it, it is not likely that it exists. There is no mention of such a translation among the volumes of the Oxford edition of the Complete Works of Voltaire. There’s also the circumstance that Voltaire was at times rather cranky on the subject of Shakespeare. He translated Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy in his Lettres philosophiques of 1726, and he called Shakespeare “a genius” and “sublime” in 1770, but by 1776 he was calling him a “huckster” and discounting his earlier praise of Shakespeare as an attempt “to point out to Frenchmen the few pearls which were to be found in this enormous dunghill.”

In a 1963 issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, a scholar named Ralph Aiken suggested that the phrase “remembrance of things past” may itself have come from French. Aiken noticed that the phrase appears in a 1579 English translation by Thomas North of an introduction that Jacques Amyot wrote to his 1559 French translation of Plutarch’s Lives. Amyot was praising written history as an improvement over and fitting heir to the singing of memory that happens in oral cultures:

Now therefore I will overpasse the excellencie and worthines of the thing it selfe, forasmuch as it is not onely of more antiquitie then any other kind of writing that ever was in the worlde, but also was used among men, before there was any use of letters at all: bicause that men in those dayes delivered in their lifetimes the remembrance of things past to their successors, in songes, which they cause their children to learne by hart, from hand to hand, as is to be seene yet in our dayes, by thexample of the barbarous people that inhabite the new found landes in the West, who without any records of writings, have had the knowledge of thinges past, welneare eyght hundred yeares afore. [Aiken’s italics]

Aiken notes that “North has followed the French with his usual fidelity; Amyot’s phrase is ‘la memoire des choses passees [sic],’ and not, unfortunately, ‘la recherche du temps perdu.'” So Aiken, a formidably well-read Shakespeare scholar, was on the lookout for an instance of someone translating Proust’s title the way Scott-Moncrieff did, before Scott-Moncrieff did, and didn’t seem to know of one.

Maybe Rose’s friend misremembered the name of the translator? A number of French translations of Shakespeare were available to Proust and Scott-Moncrieff, and perhaps the anecdote will turn out to be true with someone else’s name in Voltaire’s place. I looked up Victor Hugo’s prose translation of the sonnets, just in case. I was for a while baffled by Hugo’s decision to give to sonnet 30 the number XLIV, but eventually I found the one I was looking for:

Quand aux assises de ma pensée doucement recueillie j’assigne le souvenir des choses passées, je soupire au défaut de plus d’un être aimé, et je pleure de nouveau, avec mes vieilles douleurs, ces doux moments disparus . . .

Hélas, no luck there, either. For now, this anecdote, like the one of quayside New Yorkers clamoring to hear the fate of Little Nell, should probably be athetized. I’ll leave you with Hugo’s rendering of the sonnet’s closing couplet, because it’s pretty and ends up almost rhyming:

Mais si pendant ce temps je pense à toi, cher ami,
toutes mes pertes sont réparées et tous mes chagrins finis.

Unrequited love and zucchini curry soup

[Today’s post is a departure from this blog’s usual preoccupations and usual author: Peter Terzian interviews singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright.]

Martha Wainwright made her recording debut in 1998 on The McGarrigle Hour, a collaborative family album featuring her brother, Rufus; her father, Loudon Wainwright III; and her mother and aunt, the Canadian folk duo Kate and Anna McGarrigle. Set among straight-arrow American standards—“Gentle Annie,” “Johnny’s Gone to Hilo,” and such—Martha’s “Year of the Dragon” was sexy and shape-shifting. A full-length debut, however, was years in the making; Martha Wainwright didn’t appear until 2005. Wainwright’s songs traffic in big, messy emotions. Her now-famous “Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole” is addressed to her dad; “When the Day is Short” is a dreamy paean to one-night stands.

“My heart was made for bleeding all over you,” she sings on her new album, I Know You’re Married But I Have Feelings Too. Wainwright’s voice is breathtakingly elastic—sometimes soaring and theatrical; other times kittenish; occasionally goofy.

I interviewed her a few weeks ago, on a sweltering Tuesday at Monkeyboy Studios, the Williamsburg recording studio of her husband, producer Brad Albetta.

PETER TERZIAN: How long have you lived in Brooklyn?

MARTHA WAINWRIGHT: Almost ten years, I think. I lived in Williamsburg early on. I lived in the East Village for a while and then moved back to Williamsburg.

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