Due to my work and teaching commitments this summer, newsletters might arrive a bit thinner and possibly less often than usual for a while. If you’ve come across anything interesting in your own reading or browsing, I welcome suggestions to share!
WORK
“Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and with legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous (a chemical term meaning without water), consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, which, as you know from Brillat-Savarin, is a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink-for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.”
—Honoré de Balzac (translated by Robert Onopa)
—from “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee”
—found in Traité des excitants modernes
WORD(S)
Capgras /KAP-GRAW/ Syndrome. noun. A delusion in which one believes that friends or family have been replaced by impostors or doubles.
“Many of the stories made her thankful that Mark had avoided all the fates worse than Capgras. But even when Dr. Weber wrote about people stripped of words, stuck in time, or frozen in pre-mammalian states, he seemed to treat them all like his nearest kin.” (Richard Powers)
“But still, I carry that scar within my head. There are phantom visions for me, the way other people have to live with phantom limbs, and I stand, divided in the wake of a Capgras delusion in which another me had replaced myself without due warning.” (Vicki Weiqi Yang)
“I’m the only person now who’s 100 percent certain that Frederik’s not the man I married. A few times he’s said—in jest, I suppose—that I act as if I have Capgras syndrome…” (Christian Jungersen)
“…misjudging your spouse’s fitness to continue in the role as your life companion does not hold a candle to the belief, known as the Capgras delusion, that your spouse (or other family member) has been replaced by an alien, robot or clone.” (Cordelia Fine)
WEB
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Is this the real face of Shakespeare? Have a couple of researchers proved, through computer textual analysis, that a mysterious play was penned by Shakespeare?
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The Last Day of Her Life…a sad and powerful story.
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Today in 1799, novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac is born. His life’s work was an interlinked series of 91 novels and stories collectively called La La Comédie humaine or The Human Comedy. Balzac is considered the father of “realism” and approached that task seriously, as he thought a scientist would, writing in his introduction to the Human Comedy that he sought to document reality and, in the process, would “only be the secretary.” I haven’t read a lot of Balzac’s work (which is almost all available online), but I did enjoy Father Goriot, which adopts and adapts themes and characters from King Lear.
REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES
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Multiple members of the Clamor corrected me on the date of the Bath School bombing. It was 1927, not 1827. But Reader J. added an interesting question: “It’s 1927, of course (but why ‘of course’? Why so much easier to believe of the 20th than the 19th century?)”
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Reader N. extends the conversation about vowels and constrained writing: “You wrote about including vowels; there’s also some literature that omits certain ones. ¶ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void ¶ Do you know much about OuLiPo? It can be amusing, but I prefer substance over Jedi mind tricks in writing.”
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