et cetera

Dictionary quotation of the day comes from the Oxford English Dictionary entry for doppelgänger—

It may well be that you will observe my little doppelgänger poltergeist soul hoisting a drink in a bar in them parts.

(From Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry (Eds), Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1965).

Currently on the London Review of Books homepage—

In the next issue, which will be dated 28 January, Perry Anderson: Ways of Looking at China; David Trotter on phone booths; James Lever on Philip Roth. We’ve given up hope of James Wood on Lermontov.

Imagine writing a poem by assigning to every letter of the alphabet some other letter, so that they are mutually assigned—so, for example, if I were to assign E to A, I’d have to assign A to E; if I were to assign D to T, I’d have to assign T to D, and so on. Imagine enciphering the alphabet according to such a rule. There are about 8 trillion different ways of enciphering the alphabet so that the letters are mutually encoded. Pick one of those 8 trillion ciphers. Now write a poem that is beautiful, that makes sense, in such a way that if you were to swap out every single letter of that poem and replace it with its counterpart from the mutual cipher, you’d produce a new poem that still remains just as beautiful and that still makes sense.

Christian Bök interviewed by Jonathan Ball, in The Believer, Vol. 7, No. 5, June 2009. (via Harper’s).

How conscious is this echo?

What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

(Ecclesiastes 1:3–4)

How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods.

(Darwin, Origin, p. 84).

In the latest issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion there is an article by Amy DeRogatis with the title “ “Born Again Is a Sexual Term”: Demons, STDs, and God’s Healing Sperm”, about “the intersection between sexuality and spiritfilled bodies in American Evangelicalism”. The article is oriented around a book with the title Holy Sex: God’s Purpose and Plan for Our Sexuality, which argues “that sexually transmitted diseases are, in fact, demons lodged in genetic material that can be transferred through body fluids and bloodlines”. Casting around for more information, I found the Google Books page—where it is categorised under Fiction / Erotica. Exactly.

Further searching reveals that one of the authors of the book, Terry Wier, is scientifically literate not only in molecular biology, but also in the neurobiology and cognitive science of human sexuality. Here is his technique for turning a homosexual into a heterosexual¹—

I dedicate to Wier this passage from Schiller²—

1. From Wayne R. Besen, Anything but Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth, Routledge, London, 2003, pp. 139–140 [↩]
2. From Anna Swanwick (Trans), The Maid of Orleans, in The Works of Frederick Schiller, Bell and Daldy, London, 1872, Volume 3, Historical Dramas, p. 396. [↩]

Flipping through the excellent By its Cover¹ I noticed a familar cover design, credited to Alvin Lustig for the New Directions edition of Kafka’s Amerika. However I had never seen this book—instead, I own the Picador paperback of the Bret Easton Ellis collection The Informers (I would swap). A nice design quotation, probably lost on everyone besides book design aficionados and those—like me—who happen to stumble upon it².

There’s a very nice website on Lustig, which at one time was selling prints of this cover, along with some of his other New Directions designs. Unfortunately, they are all sold out…

1. Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger, By its Cover, Princeton Architectural Press, Princeton, 2005. [↩]
2. I am not the first to notice. See http://www.totalcardboard.com/book_cover_gallery.htm. [↩]

Eve Arnold, Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses, 1955.
From a letter dated 20 July 1993 from Eve Arnold to Richard Brown, quoted in Richard Brown, “Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses: Goddess or Postcultural Cyborg?”, in R. B. Kershner (Ed), Joyce and Popular Culture, University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 1996, p. 174.

Monroe is reading the 1934 Random House edition, with the dust jacket removed. This is the edition that was famously set from a pirate version containing numerous errors. This defect notwithstanding, the dust-jacket artwork and typographic design by Ernst Reichl constitute one of the great works in the history of book design.

Unfortunately, Random House seems to be oblivious to this fact—in their 2002 hardcover reprint, they reproduced the artwork and design without crediting Reichl¹.

1. Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger, By its Cover, Princeton Architectural Press, Princeton, 2005, p. 16 [↩]

From Richard Higgins, Foew and Ombwhnw: A Grammar of the Mind and a Phenomenology of Love and a Science of the Arts As Seen by a Stalker of the Wild Mushroom, Something Else Press, New York, 1969, pp. 134–135.

Christian Bök, “The Great Order of the Universe”, in Poetry, Vol. 194, No. 4, July and August 2009, p. 334. (via)

Do you want to know how to tell when you have gotten old? It’s when a cyclical theory of history starts to strike you as plausible. It begins to seem that the same stuff keeps coming around again, just like Hegel said. Except that it’s not ‘transcended and preserved’; it’s just back.

Fodor, Jerry. 2001. “Doing Without What’s Within: Fiona Cowie’s Critique of Nativism”, in Mind, Vol. 110, No. 437, January 2001, pp. 99–148.