" Sharp-minded and fabulously profane, Beatty's novel is a fearless, metaphorical multicultural pot almost too hot to touch."
I prefer my multi-cultural pots to be literal.
Seven women authors! Franzen didn't make it!
Has all the criticism finally gotten to them?
And my usage of hyphens to be deviant and purposeless.
I prefer my multi-cultural pots to be literal.
And to have a handle.
Deviant and Purposeless
Thanks, Bulgur! A new title for my autobiography!
"Alexander von Humboldt may have been the pre-eminent scientist of his era, second in fame only to Napoleon, but outside his native Germany his reputation has faded. "
As long as I am being cranky, I also think this is doubly not true. In what fantasy world was he ever "second in fame only to Napoleon"? And his reputation is very current among Latin-American intellectuals. They constantly write about him when talking about the European exploration and colonization of the continent. Fair play, I guess, that few contemporary people in the Anglophone world know about him, whereas a Romantic-era Anglophone dilettante probably would have.
Humboldt and Napoleon both have penguin species named after them.
7: But Napoleon doesn't have a strain of marijuana named after him.
It is true that Humbolt had the reputation as the premier "natural philosopher" (scientist) before Darwin. Sometimes you'll be reading a book about 19th-century intellectuals and they bond over their shared admiration for Humboldt.
they bond over their shared admiration for Humboldt
Stoners, the lot of them.
6
As long as I am being cranky, I also think this is doubly not true. In what fantasy world was he ever "second in fame only to Napoleon"?
I can believe that he was the second-most-famous scientist during his heyday, and/or the second-most-famous scientist of his era as viewed by history, but (a) that's a very narrow claim, and (b) I really, really wouldn't know if it's correct or not. That being said, the most objectionable thing to me about that paragraph seems to be referring to Napoleon as a scientist. While it may be technically correct in that he liked science, supported it, and has a theorem named after him, he's not famous for being a scientist nearly as much as for other stuff.
You mean the code of laws and the brandy?
8: I had been thinking about commenting, "But Humboldt doesn't have a dessert named after him." This is a closer contest than I realized.
Napoleon was more a military scientists than anything else. Lots of people have tried to take over Europe, but nobody else made two separate attempts in an effort to create some degrees of freedom.
Someone should breed a new custom strain of marijuana and call it "Napoleon Dynamite".
11, I thought that meant "second in fame" among all eminent humans in Europe.
I mean, if he was the pre-eminent scientist, that means he was not second in fame to any other scientists.
But that's still absurd. Except for the penguins and, I think, an ocean current, I don't know anything about Humboldt and I can name dozens of eminent human in Europe from that time.
But you aren't a European from that time.
The claim isn't that his diachronic fame is second to Napoleon's but that his synchronic fame was.
But given that Napoleon was fighting with and against a largish group of fairly prominent people, I still find it hard to be believe Humboldt was more known to people than Wellington or Ney or Alexander or what have you.
"But Humboldt doesn't have a dessert named after him."
"We must develop the Napoleon before he develops Beef Wellington!"
Beef Wellington is a lot of work. Pigs in a blanket gets like 80% of the enjoyment for maybe 5% of the work.
"Prussian botanist" was basically the same as "international rock star" back then.
I don't remember every single discussion on the blog over the last twelve years, but I'm positive this is the most boring one.
But you would likely have forgotten the best contenders for the more boring ones, so really, who can say?
Because they would have been so boring, you see.
"We must develop the Napoleon before he develops Beef Wellington!"
Wikipedia denies the connection between the dish and the general.
26: It depends. At least I can follow it. A lot of discussions seem like they're about something more interesting than the relative fame of Europeans roughly two centuries ago, but I get lost trying to figure out who's rebutting which definition of the dialectical paradigm.
22: Maybe the author of that NYT article was only considering a very narrow time period and region, which excludes the actual Napoleonic wars. "In the universe of people now thought of as scientists, Alexander von Humboldt was the second-best-known person in continental Western Europe between the years of 1795 and 1800, after Napoleon."
I don't think I'm convinced that Napoleon is in the universe of people who are now thought of as scientists.
The Times' blurb does not mean that Napolean was a scientist. Are people seriously reading it that way?
You mean people here or your average person from 1795 if they could read today's NYT?
In a little known bit of history, Napoleon had initial success as a chemist, but he changed careers after a failed experiment left all of his equipment blown-apart.
Arguably, 36 is also infinitely recursive.
Come on, world-destroying fireball, where ARE you?
One more round of Candy Crush and I'm there.
And scroll my Twitter.
Wikipedia denies the connection between the dish and the general.
Someone needs to start an edit war.
So who was more famous than Humboldt to Humboldt's contemporaries?
Oh, wrong question. Jesus, Julius Caesar, and I guess Buddha.
Can I just do that pause/play thing and say that the police broke up the Black Lives Matter protest encampment in Minneapolis last night in about the style you might expect - masked and armed, tearing up banners, grabbing people, trashing all the perfectly useful flats of donated bottled water and so on. The mayor gave this disgusting speech the other day and held an exceptionally awful stacked-deck hearing about it yesterday in order to clear the ground, and apparently we're still debating whether the chatroom racists who shot up the protests were actually racist or not.
It's really pretty depressing.
There's a protest at City Hall right now and I'm going to head down once I get off of work. Of course, at the City Hall protest the other day - organized by religious leaders, no less! - one of the police administration staff greeted one with the young women protesters with "Hi, bl*ckie" and that's apparently just the way of the world in the good old city administration, so god only knows what's next.
There's a lot of nonsense in the media about how the protest was run. I was over there for some extended periods and all this stuff about conflicts with cops and spraypainting things and so on seems to be total lies. Also, some people are tossing around this "someone was making Molotov cocktails" business, and what I'm hearing from people who were on site is that the cops found some Snapple bottles (which would make terrible Molotovs anyway) and made the whole story up to smear the protesters. Which would be entirely in keeping with how the city handled the 2008 RNC protests, too.
Anyway, it just sucks. It is the death of my little "Minnesota has more of an ignorance-and-structural-racism problem than an overt-commitment-to-racism problem" dream.
Okay, play again.
Surely just limiting it to Germans you'd have
Goethe
Schiller
Friedrich Wilhelm III
Emperor Francis
Blucher
Probably Beethoven
Blucher
all before Humboldt
Blucher: the Prussian field marshall so nice I named him twice
Oops, I meant to ask about more famous scientists only.
Oh, in that case, Faraday, Lavoisier, Volta... those guys.
Faraday, Lavoisier, Volta.
I think Humboldt would have been more famous among non-scientists, because educated people read his books as adventure/travel literature.
If Lavoisier had been so famous, why did he lose his head? Actually, I thought of Lavoisier and Priestley, but was surprised to find that though they overlapped with Humboldt, they were significantly older.
Humboldt managed to stay on the wall, unlike Agassiz.
55. Educated people queued round the block to hear Faraday lecture. He was the Neil DeGrasse Tyson of his age.
56. La République n'a pas besoin de savants ni de chimistes ; le cours de la justice ne peut être suspendu.
John Montagu was still alive when Humboldt was born, but wouldn't have heard of him.
Anyway, everybody ought to read A Personal Narrative... which is the best piece of travel writing I have ever encountered by some orders of magnitude: a genuine page turner, though a bit long.
I'm still working through Mort and maybe I'll try the Jeeves stuff again first.
Anyway, everybody ought to read A Personal Narrative...
Oh joy another memoir. Let me guess: Oberlin, Iowa, Brooklyn, complaining about gentrification?
It was a writers' workshop joke, Moby! You're ruining the delicate balance and deft allusiveness!
Bonus joke: God damn it I forgot to limn!
Don't be so parochial. There's lots of stuff in the state of Iowa besides a writers' workshop. There's corn, a casino, and the little bit you have to drive through to get the Omaha airport.
Also: cheese curds and increasingly annoying Hawkeyes fans.
My cousin had to tell her kids to stop with the gloating on Facebook.
I took it to be a Girls reference.
The Beastie Boys didn't have anything to do with Iowa or Oberlin as far as I ever knew.
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Reading Erich Auerbach and Mori Ogai
Anime report!
Had to do something this week I very rarely do, I marathoned a 2006 series Nana from the Ai Yazawa manga. Getting the technicals out of the way, this is Madhouse doing what it does best (adaptations) at its peak years with a good budget. It's fucking magnificent. I had been saving it.
Nana is about two 20 yr old women going to Tokyo to achieve their dreams, One is a tough punk rocker who wants to make her band into stars; the other is a softer dependent woman who wants a loving husband (kids, picket fence). They become roommates. Shit gets real.
What makes it brilliant, feminist and horrible is the way these two women's dreams intersect to simultaneously support and damage each other.
From an IMDB review that gets it:"Nope. I'm not that lucky. The world in Nana freaking sucks. People only grow apart. They don't learn their lessons, they don't overcome their difficulties, they don't have solid, healthy relationships. It is a downward spiral, so subtle that, by the time you realize the descent, you're 20+ episodes in."
*Spoilers*
By the end (although unfinished, long story, it's easy to see) Nana 1 has become a rich and successful solo star, lonely isolated controlled by management, the bandmates she loved left behind to become shmoes.
Nana 2 has a loveless marriage with a rich cold absent controlling husband, Harry's house/centerpiece.
This doesn't provide the catharsis of tragedy. It's just ordinary and depressing. The art of the series is to make you feel it as horror, because, besides blaming the Patriarchy, the Nanas to a large degree did it unintentionally to each other. And you can barely see alternatives, what they could have done different, it's all inevitable, inexorable.
And yeah, it's metaphor, allegory. Separatism forever.
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More Nana
I haven't even mentioned the more than dozen richly detailed other characters. Or the craft of structuring each episode with emotional beats that build tension and excitement until you are as exhausted as the leads.
But the argument about the Nanas destroying each other would get the most resistance, so here very quickly an argument:
Nana 2 admires and worships the glamour and excitement of Nana 1's rocking, but is not equipped to even visit that world. Nana 1 feels guilty about not protecting Nana 2, so in order to provide Nana 2 with vicarious and possible real independence, to be her hero, makes too early compromises with commercialism. Lives are set in seven months.
No blaming? But maybe responsibility.
I can't begin to explain how deep, realistic, intelligent, and attractive these characters are, or how invisibly the machinery of the story grinds.
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I understood Flip's joke but not what book chris is actually referring to.
75. von Humboldt, "A Personal narrative of a Journey to the equinoctial regions of the New continent, during the years 1799-1804" (original in French: "Relation historique du Voyage aux Régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent"). Get an abridgement; there are 7 volumes and I freely admit I haven't attempted the whole.
When I'm famous, some besotted admirer will buy me the 13 volume Moulton, hardbound. I'm not going to read it start to finish or anything, but it'll look great on a shelf.
Books do furnish a room. Is there a readable short Moulton?
What I've downloaded for Christmas reading is Wallace's "Malay Archipelago", of which I've heard great things.
Dennis Washburn, Translating Mount Fuju
In setting out his overview, [Martin]Jay describes what he calls Cartesian perspectivalism as the mode of surveillance, characterized by a monocular gaze occupying a privileged position (the eye atop a pyramid)*, while descriptive vision may be characterized as a mirror of nature, a fragmentary mode that draws attention to the articulated surface of the world in a way that prefigures the experience of vision created by photographic technology. He likens the third mode, the baroque, to the spectacle, in that it rejects the monocular, rational geometry of Cartesian perspectivalism, with its illusion of an objectified, three-dimensional space, in favor of a surplus of images that establish a disorienting and open visual field. ... His account is based not only on the critique that the idealized vision of Cartesian perspectivalism was disconnected from history and the world
*the 1st or 3rd person novel, interior monologue etc, the 19th century artform
"in favor of a surplus of images that establish a disorienting and open visual field." ...anime, the 21st century art media
Nana has enough "super distortion" of faces to get complaints about incongruity of tone in what is mostly a "realistic" presentation, but it also includes the usual repertoire of imaginative and dislocating cinematographic choices and edits that are less easily noticed: long shots, long takes, "pillow shots," symbolism, etc
The linear narrative of the Western novel
was recognized in the Meiji period as an innovation linked to modernity.
Followed of course by Imperialism and fascism. I'm serious.
Nana breaks linear narration constantly, with non-diagetic diachronic narration that frame every episode, usually in a mood contrary to the visuals; and multiple uses of flashbacks, and eventually flashforwards. Not to mention the background music.
Enough. I'll take my drooling ignorance and idiocy away.
Party scene. The conversation is in the bubbles, the simultaneous thoughts of multiple characters is the text outside the bubbles.
I'm trying to remember, Joyce didn't do it in Ulysses, Woolf tried it, O'Neill famously failed at depicting conversation and thoughts of multiple characters simultaneously.
The imaginary flowers floating over the woman's head are a nice touch.
Form matters. Form matters most.
That I called the flowers dancing over her head "imaginary," even though they aren't distinguished as different from most of the content, is interesting in itself.
I run across that kinda problem a lot in anime.
Overstimulated by great art.
