March Midness

OED in the LRB

 

James Murray in the Scriptorium at Banbury Road, 1880s.

Lexicographical letters:*

Lost Words

Henry Hitchings mentions that whole entries were mislaid in the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary during James Murray’s time as editor (LRB, 7 March). On one occasion it was the result of deliberate sabotage. As a child, Cyril Joad, the future BBC radio celebrity and popular philosopher, was a frequent guest at the Murrays’ house in the Banbury Road. One Sunday in summer 1899 the nine-year-old Cyril came across Murray’s Scriptorum, a large shed-like structure in the garden. Having forced his way in through a window he emptied the ink bottles and paste over the notebooks, pulled down the bookcases, and scattered the slips on which the words and their meanings were written and gummed others together. A whole pile of notes to be entered on the slips by the assistant editors was reduced to an unuseable pulp. Many words were probably lost and there was a delay of months in the publication of the next volume. Murray amazingly forgave the boy, and continued with his promise to his parents to keep an eye on him.

Tony Judge
Twickenham

Who He Was

It wasn’t only Pepys, Joe Melia and W.H. Auden who read as they walked (Letters, 21 February). According to K.M.E. Murray in Caught in the Web of Words, James Murray, editor of the OED, while still a schoolteacher in Hawick, ‘claimed that he learned at least two languages’ during his five-minute walk to school every day. ‘He was described by his former pupils hurrying up the street … bearded chin in the air and the cape of his Highland cloak … flapping behind him, open book in hand which he glanced at from time to time as he memorised the contents.’

Michael Robertson
Augsburg, Germany

*In Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (1977), Murray's eldest granddaughter and biographer Katherine Maud Elisabeth Murray (1909-1998), casts some skepticism upon Joad's account of his youthful essay in vandalism:

The family remembered the fat, spoiled, small boy, but not this episode. It was probably what Joad would like to have done, moved by the resentment which he says he felt against the 'decorous regularity' of the Murray household. It would have been unthinkable for any of the Murrays to have dreamed of doing any damage to the contents of the Scriptorium, nor would they have forgiven anyone who committed such an outrage on the centre of their world.

See also "Give the Word", a review of Murray's book in The New Yorker for November 21, 1977 by George Steiner (reprinted in George Steiner at The New Yorker), who said of the OED: 

Dip into it anywhere and life itself crowds at you.

For a profile of The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, the remarkable American work that preceded (and partly informed) the OED, and its no-less remarkable editor, William Dwight Whitney, see my post "The Lex Luther" from April 2012. 

Huxley, Buckley and Nock

From "Aldous Huxley's Theory of Democracy" by James Kierstead in The Utopian:

... Huxley’s early novels – like those of P.G. Wodehouse – have bite precisely because the world they portray is so culpably carefree. If his characters’ failures are inconsequential, so – Huxley suggests – are much of their lives. The early novels are composed of equal parts dialogue and anecdote, and neither ever issues in more than a witticism or a punch line. At the same time, the accumulation of these conversations and stories leaves the reader with a strong impression of the pretentiousness – not to say hypocrisy – of the chattering classes. In Crome Yellow, a guest at the mansion makes the acquaintance of three sisters who are so refined as to immediately declare their distaste for the “coarse” activity of eating.  Soon afterwards, he catches them stuffing their faces in a secret room.

  

Cf. WFB on AJN, 1999:

I remember hearing that Mr. Nock had made some point of informing my father that he never read any newspapers, judging them to be useless and, really, infra dignitatem.

Newspaper-reading is a pure habit; it argues nothing for the extension of either our interest or our sympathies. My belief is, too, that it is as bad and debilitating a habit as one can form. Either one is or is not taken in by what one reads. In the first case, one is debauched; in the second, one is outraged. - A Journal of these Days (1934)

But one day my father stopped by at the little inn Mr. Nock inhabited in nearby Lakeville, Connecticut, to escort Mr. Nock to lunch, as arranged. Inadvertently my father arrived a half hour earlier than their planned meeting time. He opened the door to Mr. Nock’s quarters and came upon him on hands and knees, surrounded by the massive Sunday editions of the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times. My father controlled his amusement on the spot, but not later, when he chatted delightedly with his children about the eccentricities of this august figure, this great stylist—my father preferred good prose to any other pleasure on earth, if that can be said credibly of someone who sired ten children.

Barbara Stanwyck as Lily Powers and Theresa Harris as Chico in Alfred E. Green’s Baby Face, 1933

Hollywood’s ‘Naughtiest, Bawdiest Year’

Geoffrey O’Brien

1933 

a series of sixty-six films released in 1933, at Film Forum, New York City, February 8–March 7, 2013 

... Yet though signposts of unease—a sense of slippery collapse and the apprehension of worse to come—are all over the place in these movies, what emerges more forcefully is a raucous counterforce of defiant assertion, if only of the right to have fun and make a little noise. Often the life on screen seems like a hyper-energetic paradise of flagrancy. Whatever else American films of that moment may have been, they were overt, keyed-up, ready to start on a dime when the stage manager barked: “All right, girls, snap into it.”

There was a discernible kick just in letting the eye run down the titles on the program—Broadway Thru a Keyhole, Footlight Parade, Roman Scandals, Wild Boys of the Road, Island of Lost Souls, Mystery of the Wax Museum, The Sin of Nora Moran, Laughter in Hell—especially after coming to appreciate how hard they work to fulfill their sensational promises. Whether the promise is to realize the ultimate fantasy of a chorus line of desirable chorus girls shuffling off to Buffalo in 42nd Street or to wallow in the seductive temptations and exotic cruelties of a thoroughly imaginary Orient in The Bitter Tea of General Yen or to plot a harsh vicarious journey into the heart of the economic crisis itself in Heroes for Sale, it is done with no holding back ...

Wind your great-grandfather clock back a decade further still, get out your mah-jongg tiles and your Ouija board, and keep in mind both your Caligarian cabinet/cabaret cousins in Weimar Germany and the historic earthquake of that recent war of the world with them and without which the marsh in chronicle below of the decade to come would have been a mere bathtub without the poison gin: 

Wild Nights in the Neon Jungle

by James Wolcott

   FEBRUARY 22, 2013

A heap of thanks with chocolate sprinkles on top to the benificent Siren for directing me to Raymond de Felitta's Movies 'til Dawn blog, which is devoted, and I mean devoted, to roaring 20's Broadway, early talkies, classic Hollywood, now-forgotten stars of stage and screen, the sadopathia of Jerry Lewis--in short, so many of the things that I, as a New Yorker, hold dear. His tribute to Helen Morgan--"the first torch singer--before Piaf, before Judy Garland--who managed to infuse her dark and tormented songs with her own personal traumas"--is as much a meditation on the 1920s, a decade of dark id and raw abandon that ended with the stock market crash of '29 coming down like a coffin lid.

The critic and historian, Martin Gottfried, in his excellent biography of the demonic Broadway producer Jed Harris, notes that the 1920's were "times of floridity, of vamps with panthers on leashes, of Rudolph Valentino and Bela Lugosi...in the 1920's it was not so odd to view and even live life in purple."

This is one of the finest--and spookiest--evocations of any era that I know of, in large part because it looks beyond the usual "gin some and sin some" party-time, Wall Street-booming, Charleston-dancing image that we generally assign to the period--the "Ain't We Got Fun" racoon coats at the Harvard/Yale game bit. Indeed there was much about the 1920's, as reflected in its popular culture, that was exceedingly dark, strangely perverse, masochistic and sadistic to a degree that it may be hard for us to understand today. For in the twenties, the lines between sex and death, booze-fueled fun and booze-fueled collapse, living life on the razors edge and being willing to cross the line into the abyss, were strangely fused and often non-existent. Deaths from bad liquor, from gangsterism, from passion gone awry, were the accepted norm of the period--the lingua franca, if you will, of the normal, urban inhabitant of the decade.

 

[snip]

 

That word eerie sums up what most intrigues me about the twenties; I get the sense that it was a period in which humanity lived in the moment in a way we humans simply aren't built to endure; that there was an urgency to feel, to experience, to push beyond the normal perception of lived life, that led to a jangly, up and down and extremely kinky sense of reality. If you've ever drank way too much gin, smoked a bunch of unfiltered cigarettes, stayed up all night and then added black coffee to the equation (forgetting to eat of course) you get a sense of how urban people of the 20's felt...upon awakening. The rest--the violence, the emotional plumbing of the depths, the guns and lovers--came after dark, when Times Square and its denizens awoke and--seeking to live life to the fullest--prepared for another dance with death.

 

No such neon voodoo haunts Times Square today, its cynical heart replaced by a jolly tourist piazza infested by fake Elmos and Disney cartoon characters. Consider how squeaky-clean and earnestly questing NBC's Broadway musical soap Smash is compared to the Broadway of 1929, an early talkie relic that makes the Great White Way look like one big speakeasy. Speaking of Smash, be sure not to miss Rachel Sukhert's hilarious, hobbit-baiting recap of the "Dramaturg" episode, which has an almost terrifyingly baroque frame of reference for a series this vanilla milk-shakey.

Illustration by Joel Holland

How Sweet It Is

'Salt Sugar Fat,' by Michael Moss

... The “Fat” section of “Salt Sugar Fat” is the most disquieting, for, as Moss learns from Adam Drewnowski, an epidemiologist who runs the Center for Obesity Research at the University of Washington, [unlike with levels of added sugar, which for optimum pleasure require pinpoint calibration] there is no known bliss point for fat — his test subjects, plied with a drinkable concoction of milk, cream and sugar, kept on chugging ever fattier samples without crying uncle. This realization has had huge implications in the food industry. For example, Moss reports, the big companies have come to understand that “cheese could be added to other food products without any worries that people would walk away.”

And just why is America in the process of getting cheese-bombed, in ways both orgiastic (witness the proliferation of “four cheese” and “cheesy crust” pizzas) and subtle (via Kraft’s marketing push to get home cooks to use Philadelphia cream cheese in everyday recipes)? Because, while whole milk has gotten a bum rap as a source of saturated (read: bad) fats, resulting in a precipitous plunge in milk-drinking, cheese, though no less fatty, is still perceived as wholesome and dietarily innocuous. More to the point, we have a federal mandate to eat lots of cheese! So efficient have our subsidized Big Ag dairy farmers become that we are running a milk and milk fat surplus. Thus, the U.S.D.A. spends millions a year marketing American cheese to the public — and a more meager sum, Moss dryly notes, on its nutrition department’s reports urging folks to cut back on fatty foods. (Of all the alarms that “Salt Sugar Fat” sounds, perhaps the gravest is that executives within the private sector have done more soul-searching about addressing the obesity epidemic than their cowed counterparts in government agencies.)

... Moss is on his surest footing when he tethers his narrative to some convenience-food innovator like Al Clausi, the chemist-visionary behind Tang, Alpha-Bits and Jell-O instant pudding; or Howard Moskowitz, a consultant who helped reboot Dr Pepper in a time of brand struggle; or Bob Drane, the Oscar Mayer executive whose team invented Lunchables, those prepackaged grab-’n’-go plastic trays that, in their original form, came embedded with a puck of bologna, some sliced cheese product and a stack of butter crackers.

Moss doesn’t villainize these men, portraying them as relatively benign figures who simply heeded the call of the times and delivered what their bosses wanted. But when he gets into their personal relationships with their own creations, the results are more indicting than any authorly polemic would ever be. Over lunch with Moss, Moskowitz avers, “I’m not a soda drinker,” and when pressed to take a sip of Dr Pepper he pronounces the taste “just awful.” Drane has an adult daughter named Monica who admires her father, she says, for developing a product “for people who didn’t have the resources that I have,” but draws the line at letting her own three kids eat Lunchables. “They know they exist and that Grandpa Bob invented them. But we eat very healthily,” she insists.

Max Ernst: Les hivernants de la Grande Jatte (The Winterers of La Grande Jatte), 3 1/4 x 5 1/8 inches, 1929

Surrealism Made Fresh

Sanford Schwartz

Drawing Surrealism

an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, October 21, 2012–January 6, 2013; and the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, January 25–April 21, 2013 

Catalog of the exhibition by Leslie Jones, with contributions by Isabelle Dervaux and Susan Laxton

Los Angeles County Museum of Art/DelMonico/Prestel, 239 pp., $60.00        

... It was the Cologne-based [artist Max] Ernst—who sent Breton, in 1921, before Surrealism actually existed as a movement, some of the collages and drawings he had been making—who gave Surrealism some of the key elements of its identity.

Using photos from newspapers and engravings from catalogs and manuals and turning them, via seamless cutting and pasting (and sometimes coloring), into mesmerizing and rather confounding little stories of a kind, Ernst excited the Parisians because, reassembling materials he had found, he wasn’t, in the fullest sense, inventing his artwork himself. More than that, he was the first artist, I think, to connect the insouciant aspect of Surrealism (and of Dada) to a distinct body of images—and images that in an elusive yet persistent manner are about sexuality and can be nightmarish.

Speaking of elusive images of sexuality, in the form of the latest evidence of just how arcane in its specialties scholarship can be, in the case of the reviewer for the TLS for March 8, 2013, of Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World:

Malu Halasa is the co-author of The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie: Intimacy and design, 2008 ...

Andrianampoinimerina
King of Imerina
Idealized portrait painted around 1905 by Ramanankirahina

And you thought Kamehameha was a mouthful of polysyllabic pineapple juice:

Chiefs and indians

PETER TURCHIN

Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus 

THE CREATION OF INEQUALITY How our prehistorical ancestors set the stage for monarchy, slavery, and empire 

... Addressing the transitions to state-level societies, the authors review the rise of early states in recent societies: the unifications of Hawai'i by Kamehameha, of the Zulu by Shaka, of the Hunza (northern Pakistan) by Mir Silim Khan, and of Madagascar by Andrianampoinimerina. 

Ludwig van Beethoven; drawing by David Levine

Beethoven and the Quality of Courage

Daniel Barenboim

... Beethoven’s music tends to move from chaos to order (as with the introduction to the Fourth Symphony) as if order were an imperative of human existence. For him, order does not result from forgetting or ignoring the disorders that plague our existence; order is a necessary development, an improvement that may lead to the Greek ideal of catharsis. It is not by chance that the Funeral March is not the last movement of the Eroica Symphony, but the second, so that suffering does not have the last word. One could paraphrase much of the work of Beethoven by saying that suffering is inevitable, but the courage to fight it renders life worth living.

Cf. the close of Beethoven: His Spiritual Development by J.W.N. Sullivan (1927):

If they stood alone, these superhuman utterances [the final quartets] might seem to us those of an oracle who was hardly a man. But we know, from the rest of his music, that Beethoven was a man who experienced all that we can experience, who suffered all that we can suffer. If, in the end, he seems to reach a state 'above the battle' we also know that no man ever knew more bitterly what the battle is.

The editors of MANAS, "Artistic Greatness", in their issue for June 27, 1956:

Sullivan saw in Beethoven not only a man head and shoulders above his fellows in sensitivity and ability, but—and this, we are affirming, is far more important—a 

man who became, in his own way, what every other may become. He writes that "Beethoven's imagination and emotional nature, although so intense, is, on the whole, of a normal kind. Most of the very great artists may be regarded as huge extensions of the normal man, which is the chief reason why they are so valuable. Beethoven, in his last years, was speaking of experiences which are not normal, but which are nevertheless in the line of human development. But this strange slow movement, as more than one writer has remarked, makes on us the impression of something strictly abnormal. It is as if some racial memory had stirred in him, referring to some forgotten and alien despair. There is here a remote and frozen anguish, wailing over some implacable destiny. This is hardly human suffering; it is more like a memory from some ancient and starless night of the soul."

Beethoven first saw his talent as a means to personal power and fame. He worshipped strength because he was strong; he wished to reach a pinnacle of recognition 

and adulation. But his morality of power, as Sullivan terms it, was simply one stage, an immature stage of development. Later he came to know as much about submission as he did dominance, yet carried the strong will of the domineering man into his acceptance of serious physical disabilities. As Sullivan describes it, Beethoven was finally convinced that his afflictions were in some mysterious way necessary, as a means of providing the resistance out of which great visions spring.

In his last chapter, Sullivan describes the "final stage" of Beethoven's life, finding essential truth in the Tolstoyan claim that art must have moral beauty. In great art, 

Sullivan says, "we make contact for a moment with the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come."

He continues:

There seems to be no reason to doubt that the great bulk of Beethoven's work is of permanent value. The greatest function of a work of art is to present us with a higher organization of 

experience. It is on this that its claim to "greatness" depends. It does not seem that the "greatness" and the "beauty" of a work of art are identical. What constitutes the beauty of a work of art is a hitherto unresolved problem with which, in this book, we are not concerned. That Beethoven's music is more beautiful than any other music we are not inclined to assert; that it is greater than any other music has been, on the whole, the general opinion ever since it appeared. Its greatness depends on what we have called its spiritual content, and this is something that the listener perceives directly, although he may be entirely unable to formulate it. Beethoven's work will live because of the permanent value, to the human race, of the experiences it communicates.

These experiences are valuable because they are in the line of human development; they are experiences to which the race, in its evolutionary march, aspires. At a given 

period certain experiences may be current, and may be given popular artistic expression, which are not valuable. In our own day, for example, a certain nervous excitability and spiritual weariness, due to specific and essentially temporary causes has informed a good deal of contemporary art. Small artists can flourish in an age which is not fit for heroes to live in. But such manifestations are of quite local importance. The great artist achieves a relative immortality because the experiences he deals with are as fundamental for humanity as are hunger, sex, and the succession of day and night. It does not follow that the experiences he communicates are elementary. They may belong to an order of consciousness that very few men have attained, but, in that case, they must be in the line of human development; we must feel them as prophetic. Beethoven's later music communicates experiences that very few people can normally possess. But we value these experiences because we feel they are not freakish. They correspond to a spiritual synthesis which the race has not achieved but which, we may suppose, it is on the way to achieving. It is only the very greatest kind of artist who presents us with experiences that we recognize both as fundamental and as in advance of anything we have hitherto known. With such art we make contact, for a moment, with

The prophetic soul of the wide world

Dreaming on things to come.

It is to this kind of art that Beethoven's greatest music belongs and it is, perhaps, the greatest in that kind.