SCALES #36: "Pip among Pleiads"
Hello!
I think last time around I didn’t quite capture the feeling I wanted to convey from my mini immersion into Somerville/Medford history with Electric Avenue as the kind of arbitrary entry point.
It has felt like having secret code to be able to walk around and think, “Oh, the city stables used to be over where the public works building is now, near the park that once was the city farm” or to know the street I take into lab every day was one of the first streets of Somerville, marking the division between the strips of farmland. To realize one of the houses I’ve passed nearly every day is the Stearnes House, a former farmhouse built around 1800. To think the anonymous concrete bridge I take over the commuter rail tracks was in 1890 a “substantial iron [structure] of modern design, … in excellent condition.” To know construction in the 1890s was done using “Salem hard stone”, “Waltham hard stone”, “Somerville blue-stone”. To know Magoun Square took off as the terminus of an electric trolley line down Medford Street, a street perhaps first built because Broadway’s route up Winter Hill was too steep and icy for teams of horses in the winter. To be reminded the alewives fished from the eponymous brook were not just sold as bait to Boston fishermen, but also “salted and shipped to the West Indies as food for plantation workers [ed: ahem] in return for molasses brought to the Medford rum distilleries”.
(Indebted, again, to the digitized Somerville annual reports and Beyond the Neck.)
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A recommendation by John S. Hayes, Somerville’s librarian in 1894: “Several libraries in this country, and some abroad, allow two books to be taken on one card. Wherever tried it has been found to be a great convenience, and has given general satisfaction to the public. The card now in use in the Brookline Public library … is divided in the middle; the left side has “Fiction” at the top, the right side “Other works.” This arrangement permits a dessert with the meats, and gives a person opportunity of tasting the notable literature of the day without giving up the delightful novel.”
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Finally got my public library card (with unlimited book privileges!) and indulged in my beloved pasttime of trawling new books shelves, at the treasure that is the Cambridge Public Library. Haul included the 33⅓ on Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde (the reading of which resulted in “Quinton’s on His Way” running through my head on repeat), Teju Cole’s Blind Spot, an edited anthology of Thoreau’s Animals from his journals. (February 24, 1857: "It seems to be one of those early springs of which we have heard, but have never experienced. Perhaps they are fabulous.")
And, finally, Susan Howe’s latest book of poetry, Debths (I guess I’ll throw in a [sic]). The prose foreword alone is worth the price of admission. (An excerpt.) The following four sections then alternate between sections of free verse and what I gather from the back cover are “her newest collage poems”: “Tom Tit Tot” and “Debths”.
I loved struggling with figuring out how to read these: fragments and strips of printed text, arranged on the page. There are a lot more layers here than simpler cutup or blackout techniques. Knotty, not cute. Assemblages of raw materials of language, with different layers coming in and out of focus: shapes of character fragments, individual diacritics, words, phrases, gestures toward narrative and pastoral imagery. An almost overwhelming variety of scales on display. It’s not entirely opaque, though. You realize different source materials run episodically through the pages, and the foreword serves as a key: the New England tall tale of Peter Rugg, a Rumpelstiltskin-like fairy tale, Spinoza, textual transcriptions of edited manuscripts, a commonplace book, a dictionary of a lost language, legal theory.
And then, after focusing on the collage poems for a while, it’s breathtaking how direct straight lines of poetry read. Howe’s “Periscope” launches out weightlessly after "Tom Tit Tot": “These tallied scraps float / like glass skiffs quietly for / love or pity and all that // What an idea in such a time / as ours Pip among Pleiads”. I’ve experienced how listening to harsh noise can feel like scrubbing out your ears, but I had never felt the same thing with reading.
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Reading list
Knausgaard’s literary Russia travelogue starts with a head-fake that’s almost too good: you think the piece is going to be far more pedestrian and reductive than it ends up being. Has the welcome side effect of making me want to return to Turgenev!
Matthew Guerrieri carefully picking apart the difference between Western concert music that leads to an empathic response, and that which facilitates indulging in our own emotions. Interesting thoughts about romanticism, Webern-style modernism, recorded music. (Pretty sure the Musical Preference Factor Scale he treats with skepticism is worse than useless, though.)
"We don’t want to face how much knowledge that colleague has in their head that’s just going to be lost to those who remain, and even worse, we don’t want to face how much knowledge that colleague has in their head that’s going to be utterly useless in the rest of their lives.” Figuring out what I think about this.
Do you know what’s a lot better than linking to a (paywalled) scientific paper about sampling bias in climate–conflict research? Linking to Rob Meyer’s piece on the paper, with plentiful quotes from both sides of the debate. (Another recent piece by Erica Klarreich, on the disputed prevalence of power laws in real networks, also seems to boil down to both sides interpreting a new paper as confirming what they believe.) Also check out his piece on a recent household VOC emissions paper: exciting to see not my research, but research within striking distance, communicated in an accessible, accurate way! (Also a total sucker for the "ack of all trades” line.)
DNA of old Polynesian sweet potato specimens as possible evidence for pre-Columbus, pre-Viking New World contact!
Anne Helen Petersen’s profile of a self-described “low-rez” Native American MFA program (and accompanying commentary in her email newsletter) is excellent.
"Ulysses reimagined as a police operation” is classic BLDGBLOG-style Geoff Manaugh.
“The joy and intimacy of the personal writing outlet.” (h/t chomp chomp, interviewed therein)
And one podcast episode: In Our Time on Rosalind Franklin, going beyond the well-trodden DNA story.
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Location: "Jacobsburg State Park"
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—Adam