I could quote endlessly from J. M. Ledgard’s novel Submergence. I could gush over it like a professional blurbist. But I’ll limit myself to saying: read this book. If you don’t trust me, Google it for yourself.

WORK

"They arrived at a place no satellite image can do justice to. There was a plain of volcanic clinker, like on the slopes of the terrorist’s island, then the lorry drove down below sea level onto a Greenlandic whiteness. Even close up it had the look of pack ice, with those same veins of green. All the shades of white were visible and there were roseate floes far out to sea. It crunched under their feet when they jumped down onto it. But it was illusory. It was not the life-giving ice of the north that melts and freezes, under which the beluga whale swims. It was a salt flat. The mists were chlorine vapors. There were no birds in the sky. It was littered with the bones of animals that had strayed there and died and been covered in salt. He picked up what he took to be the skull of a gazelle. It looked frozen, the sockets hoary, but the salt broke apart at the slightest touch, leaving only the bone.

Saif ordered the group to smash up slabs of salt and load them onto the lorry that they might trade later in their journey for charcoal and whey. He helped wrap them in sisal. He brushed salt from his hair and face. It formed on all of them. They began to look frosted to each other: it was impossible to live under the rim of the world."

—J. M. Ledgard
—from Submergence

WORD(S)

palimpsest /PAL-imp-sest/. noun or adjective. A manuscript or artwork which has been erased, scraped or washed off and overwritten, leaving traces of the original. More generally, something that has been reused or altered but bears evidence of the original. Owing to its durability (and expense), most existing written palimpsests are found on parchment or vellum manuscripts. Many texts only survive in this form. Use of the word has expanded into astronomy, medicine, archaeology and even augmented reality.

“Holmes and I sat […], he engaged with a powerful lens deciphering the remains of the original inscription upon a palimpsest.” (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

“All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary.” (George Orwell)

“They [television reruns] are another manifestation of today’s palimpsest pop culture, in which everything is ripe for sampling and nothing stays dead.” (Time magazine)

cf. The Archimedes Palimpsest

WEB

1. A poster diagramming 25 famous opening lines from revered works of fiction from Cervantes to Faulkner to Pynchon. I’d put it up.

2. Cormac McCarthy on how James Joyce influenced his use of punctuation (video; on Oprah no less).

3. “But it still feels, having consumed two novels, that I am reading a facsimile of the true book.” — Reading on a Kindle for the First Time

4. Arthur Tress’s photography. Wow. The “Classic Images” portfolio is particularly haunting.

5. Today in 1924, Don Knotts was born. See Knotts “filling in” for Frank Sinatra on the Dean Martin Show or a classic bit: Barney Fife and the Constitution.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader K comments, re: esprit de l’escalier, “A perfect word/phrase.” To which I would add “affliction.” I’ll probably think of something wittier right after I press send.

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