We return once again to the tumultuous events of the Second World War, but this week our quest for answers to questions nobody asked heads for Europe. Ready?
Copenhagen, April 1940. Germany invades Denmark. The chemist George de Hevesy had some time prior been given two articles for safekeeping by his German friends Max von Laue and James Franck. Hevesy knew there would be serious consequences if they eventually fell into Nazi hands. As the German forces marched in the city, de Hevesy dissolved each in a powerful solution of aqua regia. When the Germans searched his lab, they saw nothing noteworthy in the containers of the acrid solution, which remained undisturbed through the war. After the war was over, Hevesy extracted the dissolved material from the solutions.
What were the dangerous possessions with which Hevesy was concerned?
First correct answer posted to comments wins a tattered copy of the sole issue of the 1943 comic THE MALINGERER (in which PFC Gordon Crimp, aka THE MALINGERER, simulates a case of food poisoning in order to smoke out an Axis plant in the chow line at Allied Command). No Googling or instant-messaging Tom Brokaw. One guess per comment, please, but you may comment as often as you like.
In this space, at irregular intervals, the Wombat File staff report on (relatively) new and forthcoming books which offer evidence that reading pleasure, despite its reported decline in cultural prominence, can still occasionally be spotted, stalked, dispatched, stuffed, and mounted. No attempt shall be made to analyze those volumes which disappoint, nor to catalogue those which meet dismally low expectations. Don't get us wrong: this isn't the Believer. But our reserves of bile, spleen, venom, and acid wit are just barely big enough to handle the demands government and television place on them. Therefore, the Hi-Kwlaity Literature Report will stick to recommendations; as for the torching of the chaff -- last time I checked Michiko was still on the job.
So, to start, one that's out now, and one coming soon.
*Colm Tóibín, The Master
It's probably a little redundant to give Colm Tóibín a glowing review, since The Master looks to be picking up praise everywhere, and anyway I'm more or less abashed that I never even thought about reading Blackwater Lightship. But I'll go ahead: this is a damned fine and satisfying read, the more so for offering up a completely convincing Henry James as the closely observed main character -- without ever diving into a pastiche of any of the well-know variations on James's famously refined prose style. The Master, which loosely follows the events of the author's middle years, is essentially a character study, an attempt to inhabit and illuminate a consciousness that has remained aloof from his devoted readers. Partially concerned with the question of James's tightly controlled passions (there is a great set piece in bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes) and partially with the intricate structure of the fragile relationships James constructed with family and friends, there is no plot save the imagined movement of waves of memory self-knowledge through James's mind, as life takes him from partial engagement with the world to protective (and creative) seclusion, and then back.
But there is no lack of suspense and drama, as the emotional veiling and unveiling Henry performs generates both tension and fascination. Daniel Mendelsohn's essay in the NYT Sunday Book Review criticized Tóibín for being unable to solve the problem of understanding a man who might have been happy valuing art over more ephemeral relationships. In the end he wonders if the Toibin could truly have sympathy for such a hero of disengagement. The Master didn't read to me that way: the haunting, haunted, deeply likable Henry he creates is no cold fish. And there is something about Tóibín's prose style -- spare, precise, both direct and reticent, perfectly modulated -- that makes simply reading along such a pleasure that affection for this version of Henry James comes naturally. He's a pleasure to spend time with, and that is perhaps this book's greatest acheivement.
*Susannah Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
You heard it here first. There's going to be a significant amount of press generated with the September release of this fantasy novel, and with good reason. Clarke's 800-page whimsy is set in Regency England (for those of you who don't read much 19th century lit or, alternatively, paperback romance novels, the Regency is the era of Jane Austen, Waterloo, and represents the last hurrah for men who wore wigs), and it concerns the rediscovery or resurgence of magic in England, after its retreat into theoretical academic study for several hundred years.
I won't bother trying to summarize the plot, which is complex and appropriately wandering, but advanced at every turn with a light step and a sense of brio, so that the story seems much shorter than it is. The real feat Clarke pulls off is the absolutely convincing re-imagining of an English history in which fairy tales -- the slightly sinister, fascinating kind, like the kind that Yeats draws upon, in which a hidden world of powerful, often malevolent, sometimes helpful beings intersects with our own -- have the same weight as the Battle of Agincourt or the signing of the Magna Carta. Much revolves around the person of the Raven King, an early-medieval ruler of the northern half of England, whose reign of four hundred years is both a mythic golden age and also a modern Empire's irrational, repressed self, that must inevitably and violently return.
Clarke's drive toward the epic and tragic (which she shares with many fantasists, including Pullman) is perfectly checked by her choice of setting (the spirit of the Regency, which privileged careful social control and rationality, as well as verbal wit, kept the Gothic as its well-regulated nightmare), her natural humor (only the foolish in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell take themselves very seriously), and her love of the footnote. It's the latter that makes the novel particularly zesty -- in the footnotes Clarke can append every conversation about magical history with an engrossing tale of how a Golden Age magician found himself on a fairy road, and what happened. Multiple possible endings to these mini-stories (they are presented as a scholar's research into uncertainly recorded history) complicate one's reading of the main story. Clarke understands that the most important special effects a magician can employ are those which don't so much dazzle as hypnotize. By the time one realizes how cleverly this labyrinthine, many-faceted book is constructed, one is effectively caught, like Merlin in the cave. In this case, though, it's because one never wants to leave.
Next time: Arthur Phillips's The Egyptologist
No time for anything but the question today -- the alien squids are closing in. To battle, comrades --
In the early 1940s an internationally known American movie star worked with equipment designed by the award-winning theatrical sound designer Harold Burris-Meyer (who had been one of the team that put together the first sterephonic movie soundtrack and playback system), in an elaborate project off of Sandy Hook, New Jersey.
Who was the movie star? For extra credit, what was the purpose of the project? For extra, extra credit, for what film did Burris-Meyer do groundbreaking sound work?
First correct answer posted to comments wins a signed picture of an Alf other than the one with with Scott is obsessed. Googling for the answer makes baby Jebus cry. One guess per comment, but comment as often as you like.
Also on beyond Bloomsday -- over at Slate J. Eugenides and Jim Lewis "debate" in a familiar fashion the question of Joyce's relevance and that of literary Modernism in general. Of course, it's a mock fight, but there are some interesting thoughts tossed off amid the nonserious attempts to pigeonhole a beautiful monster like Ulysses in a couple of hundred words.
To Eugenides's credit, he doesn't go there with anything other than a wink, and while he goes to more lengths than he needs to establishing his own stately, plump credentials as a Joyce-lover, I appreciate his cool eye toward the current trend of p-shawing a century's worth of fictional tinkering. Let's hope the "I Always Really Hated [insert challenging work here]" meme dies the death it was meant to, and that right soon.
Note on preview: I am in no way implying any plumpness on the part of Jeffrey Eugenides. I just had to work a well-known quotation from the book in somewhere. It's one of the goddamn rules.
Reviews in the trade magazine Publishers Weekly are always funny things -- a cross between a prediction of the book's commercial performance and a more "objective" estimation of the book's real quality (for reasons which should be obvious, pans of major releases are rare, but they do occur).
This review of conservative writer Stephen F. Hayes's book The Connection is one of the strangest I've yet seen. After outlining what it describes as a pretty weak attempt to bolster the fraying party line on the question of Iraq as a player in the World Trade Center attacks, it goes on to conclude that "most readers" will decide that the connection "still has play."
I can't decide what's stranger -- the choice of the reviewer to throw in his lot with the neocons in this venue, or the logic by which the conclusion is reached.
It's interesting how I've been consistently able to use the immediacy of Web-publishing to chronicle my thoughts on subjects well after they've been beaten to death by the dead-horse factory of the print and television media.
Luckily for you, all I'm really doing here is providing a conduit to a couple of tangents to last week's funeral orgy. The first is Tom Carson's summation in the Village Voice, which makes the profound and correct point that "Nixon is comprehensible; Reagan is not" -- a point of view which goes a long way to explaining the mind-choking fog of mystique that blanketed the country (or at least the part of it that talks on TV) for the past week or so. (The fact that the vapors are still pretty heady in some places can be readily observed in the reader mail.)
The second is one of the scariest, saddest shapes that loomed out of the fogbank: the on-beyond-eulogy most recently penned by Peggy Noonan. Her distracted, repetitious, inadverdently moving "Highlights of a State Funeral" is a startling example how cultish the cult of personality can get...
Oh, and yes, today was the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday. If you never learned what all the fuss was about, here's the ultimate abridgement.
The northern exurb of KC, MO, looks a lot like the suburb-exurb of Washington, D.C. in Virginia, except that here and there the highway embankments along the parade of exit ramps sprout long-stemmed grasses that go all brushy and dusty-rose colored at the ends, with pale blue and yellow wildflowers intermingled. A redwinged blackbird stoops in the late-summer light (no, really, I was watching from the window of a Toyota speeding Wal-Mat-ward) over some goner of a bug; somewhere over yonder, past the sluggardly Missouri river and the compact skyline of downtown Kansas City, somewhere over there is what is still in places that prairie thing that I remember from fourteen or so of Willa Cather's novels.
It is also a place where you can get Crab Rangoon, a "Chinese" appetizer which I can now confirm my wife did not invent in a dream, as I had previously believed. Because the inhabitants of western Missouri are a noble and gracious people, with many fine culinary traditions including the expert barbecuing of the brisket of beef, I will say no more about Crab Rangoon, except only to reiterate in a tone that should convey my lingering disbelief in the face of all sensory evidence to the contrary, that it involves a great deal of cream cheese, a wonton, and is actually something that you may have delivered along with your otherwise completely recognizable Kung Pao chicken.
Oh, and by the way, hotels which install extremely short swimming pools, in the hopes of enticing additional custom with minimal outlay of aquarecreational expense, are just begging to have nearsighted guests run smack into the far end of the pool while attempting to do a lap underwater, and to sacrifice a significant quantity of towels on the outpouring of blood resulting thereof. I'm just saying -- it looked to me like there was enough room to extend that puppy for another two meters, easily. Would have saved us ALL a lot of time. But my thanks to the volunteer EMT who happened to be hanging out, and to the nurses' aide who was working the front desk and brought me an ice pack.
In my haste to wrap up matters in time to catch an early flight to the Show Me State, and having completely failed to find time to arrange a Guest Quiz for Friday, I blush to inform you that this Friday will be Quizless. I'll be out of reach of all things Internet, family-reunionizing my head off.
IF, however, the mysterious and nearly omniscient Gavin Edwards, who sometimes swoops this way on his mental flights hither and yon, can clear a few minutes of his schedule to march in and save the trivial day, a quiz might yet appear. I suggest you all applaud and stomp and yell "GA-VIN GA-VIN GA-VIN" in the comments, until the sheer force of public need brings the man himself to your beck and call.
Fresh things a-comin’ in this space. Bold new directions. The striking out into new territories. The forging in the smithies of various souls the uncreated conscience of something or other.
Yes, the sinus pressure on my frontal lobe and the prematurely ripe summer heat have, perhaps, combined to derange my otherwise thoroughly ranged brainpan, but nevertheless I insist there will be change, modification, protean waves of alterity, magnificent and unpredictable REVOLUTION in this heretofore snoozy corner of Blogdonia.
By which I mean: I’m going to be posting more often, and I’m thinking of a redesign.
In the meantime, here’s a bunch of great stuff that’s elsewhere.*
Greatest U.S. President revealed as awful young poet (via a bunch of places)
Great concept, awful choices: Great “Song Parts” (via MeFi)
Great idea with interesting consequences
Great deal of comeuppance delivered which raises question of why we find the awful interesting (via KF)
Just plain great travel writing over at Rory’s place
*That’s a pretty lame excuse for a bold new direction, I know. But since I haven’t even been bothering to do THAT for you of late, surely you can appreciate even this miniscule effort to make your visit worth it.
Note: Before the month is out, we pledge to revert to a more-than-just-the-quiz updating schedule. We might even chnge the picture on the right. In the meantime, here's today's meatball:
Born in seventeeth-century Southampton, this famous man was reputedly so ugly that when he proposed to marriage to one female admirer of his work she refused him saying ", I only wish I could admire the casket (jewelry box) as much as I admire the jewel.
Raised in a devout family, he wrote this at the age of seven --
I am a vile polluted lump of earth
So I've continued ever since my birth;
Although Jehovah grace does give me,
As sure this monster Satan will deceive me.
Come therefore, Lord, from Satan's claws relieve me.
He became one of the most popular writers of his time, and his work is still in wide circulation. His work was first published in America by Benjamin Franklin.
Who was this famed versifier?
First correct answer posted to comments wins a scratchy but playable copy of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's ill-starred 1972 a-cappella rendition of Emerson, Lake and Palmer's Tarkus. No Googling or any such quizly goldbricking. Guess only once per comment, please, but comment as often as you like.