|k| clippings: 2015-08-07 — tentacular reading

WORK

During the next thirty years I came to realize that just as there is more than one way to love a person, so is there more than one way to love a book. The chambermaid believed in courtly love. A book’s physical self was sacrosanct to her, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller. The Fadiman family believed in carnal love. To us, a book’s words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.

Hilaire Belloc, a courtly lover, once wrote:

Child! do not throw this book about;
Refrain from the unholy pleasure
Of cutting all the pictures out!
Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.

What would Belloc have thought of my father, who, in order to reduce the weight of the paperbacks he read on airplanes, tore off the chapters he had completed and threw them in the trash? What would he have thought of my husband, who reads in the sauna, where heat-fissioned pages drop like petals in a storm? What would he have thought (here I am making a brazen attempt to upgrade my family by association) of Thomas Jefferson, who chopped up a priceless 1572 first edition of Plutarch’s works in Greek in order to interleave its pages with an English translation? Or of my old editor Byron Dobell, who, when he was researching an article on the Grand Tour, once stayed up all night reading six volumes of Boswell’s journals and, as he puts it, “sucked them like a giant mongoose”? Byron told me, “I didn’t give a damn about the condition of those volumes. In order to get where I had to go, I underlined them, wrote in them, shredded them, dropped them, tore them to pieces, and did things to them that we can’t discuss in public.”

WORD(S)

anthemion /an-THEE-me-ən/. noun. A flat floral motif in the shape of a honeysuckle or similar radiating cluster. Often found in ancient architecture and as a printer’s ornament. From Greek literal, diminutive of anthos (flower). See a nice example on the face of the Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral and more information than you’re ever likely to need on this palmette.

“It was a four-story establishment with a vermiculated facade, the oval windows surrounded by onyxlike anthemion friezes.” (Peter F. Hamilton)

“In the Foreword to the 1966 version of Speak, Memory, Nabokov says that in looking for a title for the first edition, he ‘toyed with The Anthemion which is the name of a honeysuckle ornament, consisting of elaborate interlacements and expanding clusters, but nobody liked it’; it would be a fitting, if precious, subtitle for Lolita (as well as for several other Nabokov works). A grand anthemion entwines H.H.’s narrative, like some vast authorial watermark, and its outlines are traced by the elegantly ordered networks of alliteration, ‘coincidences,’ narrative ‘inconsistencies,’ lepidopterological references, ‘cryptocolors,’ and shadows and glimpses of Quilty.” (Alfred Appel, Jr.)

“Greek artists were transported to Rome and placed in charge of the most important public works. Roman art is, consequently, but a development or adaptation of the Greek. It is noticeable, however, that it almost completely ignored the most characteristic and popular of the Greek forms—for example, the anthemion—and adapted those, such as the acanthus and the scroll, which had been considered of minor importance among the Greeks.” (Marie R. Garesche)

WEB

1. This link is everywhere now (the hazards of not publishing daily), but it’s too awesome to not share → Cornell University—World’s largest natural sound archive now fully online

2. Of course not on par with Ambrose Pierce’s classic, but still amusing → The New Devil’s Dictionary

3. Charming Bookstores in Unexpected Places → What are some of your favorites?

4. The One Grand pop-up bookstore “Favorite Books" series continues → first Tilda Swinton, then Carrie Brownstein and now: Ta-Nehisi Coates.

5. Today in 1869, explorer (and astronomer) George Davidson deeply impresses hostile Chilkat Indians in Alaska with his prediction of an eclipse, ensuring the safety of his team which he feared would be attacked soon. A bit of the Englishman in the Tlingit Chief’s court.

WATCH/WITNESS

Isobel Varley, who is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the “the world’s most tattooed senior woman.” This photo is one in a series of photos of aging rebels by Muir Vidler.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader S. was the first to spot my error: “Time warp or did the last email take over a day to get to me?” — No, I sent the last issue out with the wrong date. It hurts me worse than it hurts you, believe me…

• From Reader H. on the excerpt from Barthelme: “Barthelme’s 60 Stories (and his 40 Stories as well) are full of wonders.”

• From Reader B. on the same: “That’s astonishing Barthelme. ¶ And you did a fine followup with the booze word.”

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