SCALES #23: granite, hornblende-schist, and the rest
Hello!
I finished A.S. Byatt's Possession and found it a deeply pleasurable book to read—knowing satires of all these different literary scholar types; some glamorous academic sleuthing; and well-developed themes related to artistic creation, selfhood, the connections between past and present, storytelling, romance. Byatt's jumping between expository narrative, epistolary form, retold folktales, and Victorian poetry feels like the most joyful, liberated form of postmodernism. In a similar vein, one of the key struggles of the modern-day characters is to figure out how to live in a way that constructs new meaning, rather than just recapitulates the past—making a final moment involving a long-sealed letter, which I think also implicates you the reader as part of the "strange gathering of disparate seekers and hunters", pretty breathtaking. A blurb at the front of the paperback that I can't get out of my head is, "More heartfelt and more fun to read than The Name of the Rose", which, exactly. I only wish I hadn't been battered with the word "possession" itself so many times in the text, especially one howler near the end.
Some choice passages:
The geologic force of Ellen Ash emerges as a key part of the book. (Also, hi Lyell!)
Roland kind of fades away near the end, but he does get this corker.
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Ethan Iverson on Monk. "As thunderous piano-accompanied art songs were to the sad young men of Romantic Germany, so were status messages to us." (Also, the shameless kicker!) Visual story of the destruction of Seneca Village in the making of Central Park. Exhaustion of the frontier myth in the new Blade Runner (which I haven't seen). Some gorgeous pictures of historical mechanical and electronic oceanographic models (including one built by Kazuo Ishiguro's father).
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The tenth, and what was intended to be the final, episode of The Messenger has been released, but without any kind of closure, which seems sadly of a piece with Aziz's entire experience. He's still in detention on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. There's talk of the detention center closing this month, but no clear plan of what the Australian government would plan to do then.
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The Science section returns!: "The keratin of the skin outer layer is stiff and rough at a small scale. When encountering a smooth, stiff, and impermeable surface, such as polished metal or glass, the actual contact area is initially small as is the friction. Because the keratin softens when it is hydrated by the moisture secreted from the sweat pores, it requires many seconds for the contact area to increase to the value reached almost instantaneously with a soft material, such as a rubber."
—Adam