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Happy birthday, Jorge Luis Borges

V. S. Naipaul continues to provoke and offend. In a talk at the Royal Geographic Society he said:

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me….[A] woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too…My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. I don’t mean this in any unkind way.

Nothing needs to be said. The statement speaks for itself.

The Guardian did a follow-up, posting short passages from various writings. Now you can test your mettle against Mr. Naipaul. I scored 7 out of 10 correct. The Guardian‘s quiz informs me “Not bad, but you’re no Sir Vidia.” That’s probably a good thing.

Take the test.

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Image via The Telegraph

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The Naipaul Test

I have a month to polish up the book I’m currently working on, and I’m experimenting with a randomized editing process.

Most writers spend a lot of time on the beginnings of their books, and rightly so since they set the tone and either welcome or drive away potential readers. Endings get some attention as well, but authors and readers alike bog down in the problematic middle, especially around three-fifths of the way through.

In revising, you can start from the beginning and just go as far as you can, or all the way to the end, repeatedly, but this will likely result in a mid-book slump. You can also just identify the most important parts, or the parts that need the most work, and concentrate on them, sanding down the rough patches one after another.

If you’re working in short bursts — in breaks in your day job, for example – you might want to test the water by just dipping in here and there. But, if you’re like me, your dipping is not likely to be very random, so you’re not really doing a good test.

There’s a site called random.org, where you can generate a random sequence of numbers within a certain interval. According to the site, “The randomness comes from atmospheric noise, which for many purposes is better than the pseudo-random number algorithms typically used in computer programs.”

A random sequence, as opposed to a random set where numbers can be repeated, is like pulling numbers from a hat, where once a number is used it can’t be used again. So I’ve generated a random sequence of numbers between 1 and 384, and I’m reviewing pages in the that order. I’ll do this a few times with a few different random sequences.

Is this a good idea? I’m not sure, but I think it might be a helpful corrective, or at least complement, to the kind of directed attention that you’re going to give your manuscript anyway.

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image from kevindooley’s photostream

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Randomized Editing

More fun with computer morphing. What did Shakespeare look like? It’s possible one of these computer morphs might provide a clue. The image on the left morphs the Sanders and Chandos portraits. The image on the right morphs in three equal parts the Sanders, Cobb, and Chandos portraits.

For a full discussion of what’s going on here, see this previous summary of Shakespeare portraits, with a morph of the Chandos and Cobb images. I have made these new morphs in response to Jim Hale-Sanders’s arguments in favor of the Sanders portrait.

For reference, here are all three morphs, with the original Chandos/Cobb on the right:

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New new Shakespeare portraits

What did Shakespeare look like? I will come to how I created the above image in a moment. First we need to review the existing portraits that are claimed to be of Shakespeare.

All of the three or four likeliest images of him are problematic in one way or another. The three likeliest portraits are the Cobbe portrait, which portrays the forty-something Shakespeare as a gallant young courtier; the Chandos portrait, which presents him as a comfortably well-off bohemian; and the Droeshout portrait — the familiar one from the first folio — which is so inempt and cartoonish that it gives little sense of any real person. (A Scientific American article once put forth the bizarre theory that it actually depicts Queen Elizabeth). Brice Stratford has helpfully assembled the three portraits, along with some supporting text, on this page. As you can see from the details below, all of the portraits share points of similarity, notably the high forehead, deep-set eyes, and long nose.

The problem with the Droeshout portrait (right) is that its young and inexperienced artist never met Shakespeare. He may have worked from the Chandos portrait, although this is speculation. Still, Ben Jonson and others who knew Shakespeare seem to have approved the image.

The problem with the Chandos portrait (middle) is that its ultimate provenance is unknown, and the sitter is not identified as Shakespeare. Still, the National Portrait Gallery in London, which has researched the issue, believes that this is probably Shakespeare, though there is no proof of that. I like this candidate because it is from the right period — the first decade of the seventeenth century; the black robes suggest affluence, and we know Shakespeare was doing pretty well by this time; and the rakish earring suggests a bohemian or artistic lifestyle. Moreover, this image simply has more presence than the others.

The Cobbe portrait (left) only came to light recently. It had been in the possession of the Cobbe family for 300 years. They had thought it a portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh but it is now believed that it may be a portrait of Shakespeare. It too dates from the right period, and there is at least a tenuous provenance for it, as the Cobbe descent can be traced back to a patron of Shakespeare. Stanley Wells, chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and co-editor of the Oxford Shakespeare, vouches for the authenticity of this one. The problem that I have with it is that it does not appear to depict a man in at least his mid-forties as Shakespeare would have been at the time the painting was made. In addition, the Cobbe family had good reason to think it a portrait of Raleigh, since it depicts its subject as a nobleman rather than a working playwright. (Although by the time this painting was made the status of playwrights had risen, and Shakespeare had even obtained a court of arms.) Nor does the hairline conform to the other images. But it’s conceivable that the artist simply went overboard in the direction of flattering the sitter.

A fourth image is a bust in Stratford-upon-Avon. This one was made by Gheerart Janssen, an artist who lived near the Globe theater during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and it was presumably approved by people who knew the playwright well. The problem with it is that the painted features had been removed and then reapplied in the eighteenth century, long after anyone who remembered him was alive. In addition, it is likely that the conservative Stratford community wished to make their native son look more like a respectable burgher than something as doubtful as a frequenter of London’s rowdy theater scene. The bust looks like this:

I reject the Droeshout image because it is more of a cartoon than a portrait, and the Statford bust because the loss of the original paint compromises the image too grossly. Despite serious doubts, I am inclined at least for now to entertain the idea that the portraits claimed as images of Shakespeare on the authority of the National Portrait Gallery and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust convey something of his appearance (these, if you have been paying attention, are the Chandos and Cobbe portraits).

For my Shakespeare, therefore, I computer morphed those two portraits into a new image of Shakespeare — splitting the difference if you will; the midpoint morph makes him a little less rough than the Chandos Shakespeare and a little less prettified than the Cobbe Shakespeare. If both of those portraits are indeed Shakespeare, then this intermediary version should probably be a fairly reasonable likeness. On the other hand, if the Cobbe portrait actually represents someone else — Sir Thomas Overbury has been suggested — well then we have something like an Overbury-Shakespeare morph. In any case, I think the result is an interesting image. Do you agree?

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UPDATE: In response to Jim Hale-Sanders’s arguments in favor of the Sanders portrait (in the comments below), I have made new Shakespeare morphs incorporating the Sanders portrait.

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A new portrait of William Shakespeare

Today I initiate what I am hoping will become a more or less weekly feature here at blog.rightreading.com — a report on book news from newspapers and journals around the world. (I say “more or less weekly” because I am currently working on a big project that is taking most of my time, and this has reduced my blogging, which had been steadily daily up for years until a few months ago; more on that project in time.)

I think I will eventually move this feature to Thursdays. My plan is to spotlight one interesting story selected from a variety of sources of world book news, include a screen shot linking to the original, and briefly recap or comment on the story. Please let me know if this would be of interest, and I would love to hear suggestions regarding international sources I should include when looking for stories (in my languages: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian).

Today’s story may be a little different from most because it’s more of an entertaining feature than news about book publishing or authors and books. It’s a fun story from the Guardian (London), which surveys a number of writers — Elmore Leonard, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, PD James, AL Kennedy — and asks them to list 10 tips for writers.

Leonard wasn’t actually consulted for the article — he had already done his 10 rules for good writing, and they served as inspiration for the piece. Following is my selection of 13 favorites chosen from those offered by the contributors to the article.

1
Diana Athill: Read it aloud to yourself because that’s the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK (prose rhythms are too complex and subtle to be thought out – they can be got right only by ear).

2
Margaret Atwood: You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

3
Roddy Doyle: Do not place a photograph of your ­favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

4
Helen Dunmore: A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.

5
Geoff Dyer: Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov.

6
Anne Enright: Try to be accurate about stuff.

7
Richard Ford: Try to think of others’ good luck as encouragement to yourself.

8
Jonathan Franzen: Never use the word “then” as a ­conjunction – we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.

9
Esther Freud: Don’t wait for inspiration. Discipline is the key.

10
Neil Gaiman: The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

11
David Hare: The two most depressing words in the English language are “literary fiction.”

12
PD James: Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

13
AL Kennedy: Defend yourself. Find out what keeps you happy, motivated and creative.

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World book news: 13 rules for writers

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J. D. Salinger

When the ancients wrote books they were trying to get at reality and transmit spirit. But all they could convey was a general idea, in order to help lead people to the truth. Much of their spirit, their energy, their words and laughter and actions, could not be captured.

When modern generations write books they ape the form of the ancients. To show how clever they are they add false analyses and additions. And so they get farther and father from the truth.

–Wang Yangming, 1471-1529

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On the loss of vitality in writing

Mark Bromberg of Bellemeade Books writes on the subject of Jonathan Williams, author and publisher of the Jargon Society (we published his The Magpie’s Bagpipe at North Point Press) and generously includes the above scan of a Jargon Society publication, which I take the liberty of sharing.

… I have been a long-time reader and admirer of the late Jonathan Williams and his Jargon Society Press, the website here now run by his friend and collaborator, Thomas Meyer (A selection of 1960s correspondence between Davenport and Williams about publishing, art, and life can be found here).

I thought you might enjoy this cover image of “Elite/Elate Poems” (Jargon, 1975) — with authentic-era coffee stains! — and a BellemeadeBooks post about Mr. Williams from the archives. You will be able to access the entire blog with more timely posts once you are there.

Thanks, Mark!

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Mailbag: Bellemeade Books and Jonathan Williams

This is Julio Cortazar, enormisimo supercronopio, reading chapter 7 of his novel Rayuela.

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I touch your mouth . . .

I am reading and enjoying Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. It is my misfortune, I realize, to be so sensitized to colonialist attitudes as to imagine I detect in the book a faint taint of colonialist condescension.

But I am not here today to rant about colonialism but rather to share the following amusing passage from the book. The detective, Mma Ramotswe, muses about her feelings about hospitals and doctors. After reflecting that she is not ashamed of her weight or her corns she continues:

Now constipation was quite a different matter. It would be dreadful for the whole world to know about troubles of that nature. She felt terribly sorry for people who suffered from constipation, and she knew that there were many who did. There were probably enough of them to form a political party — with a chance of government perhaps — but what would such a party do if it was in power? Nothing, she imagined. It would try to pass legislation, but would fail.

Here in California the Constipation Party — with its two warring wings — is already in power. Will it also dominate our national politics, currently focused on the struggle to pass health insurance legislation?

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Image from the blog of the LA Times

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The Constipation Party

Answer after the break . . .

• The Bendrix title appears in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair
• Caulfield is from J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
• Darkbloom is from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
• de Selby is Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman
• Hibbard is from Rex Stout’s The League of Frightened Men
• Penrose is from David Lodge’s Nice Work
• Trigorin is from Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull
• Vane is in Dorothy Sayers’ Strong Poison and others

It must be said that the list is rather imbalanced at the moment, with some obvious omisions and a great deal of Gilbert Sorrentino and Anthony Powell.

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What do these books have in common?

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The dangerous world of butterflies

This should be a big book. If no one in the U.S. has snatched it up yet, some enterprising publisher should get in touch with Carmen Balcells right away.

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Major new Cortazar book appearing this week

In his 1913 classic (if that’s the right word) publication entitled Poets Ranked by Beard Weight, Upton Uxbridge Underwood (1881–1937) ranked poets according to the gravity of their beards, assigning each one a “pogonometric index” score. (So I have learned from A Journey Round My Skull, which informs me that Underwood was “a deipnosophist, clubman, and literary miscellanist with a special interest in tonsorial subjects.”) A score of 10, for example, was “very very weak,” whereas a score of 58 was “very very heavy.” Leaving aside for the moment the particulars of his methodology, let’s see how the poets stack up.

Beard gravity increases as we move from left to right and top to bottom:

• Row 1
  • Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
    Beard type: Hibernator
    Typical opus: O Captain! My Captain!
    Gravity (UPI rating): 22
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
    Beard type: Dutch Elongated
    Typical opus: The Village Blacksmith
    Gravity (UPI rating): 24
  • Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618)
    Beard type: Van Dyke
    Typical opus: The Lie
    Gravity (UPI rating): 27
• Row 2
  • Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
    Beard type: Wandering Jim
    Typical opus: Within the Circuit of This Plodding Life
    Gravity (UPI rating): 29
  • Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)
    Beard type: Maltese
    Typical opus: Crossing the Bar
    Gravity (UPI rating): 33
  • James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)
    Beard type: Queen’s Brigade
    Typical opus: Commemoration Ode
    Gravity (UPI rating): 34
• Row 3
  • John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)
    Beard type: Full Velutinous
    Typical opus: Snow-bound
    Gravity (UPI rating): 38
  • Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882)
    Beard type: Italian False Goatee
    Typical opus: The Blessed Damozel
    Gravity (UPI rating): 38
  • Edwin Markham (1852–1940)
    Beard type: Box
    Typical opus: The Man With the Hoe
    Gravity (UPI rating): 39
• Row 4
  • Sidney Lanier (1842–1881)
    Beard type: Spade
    Typical opus: The Song of the Chattahoochee
    Gravity (UPI rating): 41
  • William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878)
    Beard type: Van Winkle
    Typical opus: To a Waterfowl
    Gravity (UPI rating): 43
  • John Burroughs (1837–1921)
    Beard type: Claus-esque
    Typical opus: Waiting
    Gravity (UPI rating): 43
• Row 5
  • William Ernest Henley (1849–1903)
    Beard type: Spatulate Imperial
    Typical opus: Invictus
    Gravity (UPI rating): 47
  • Joaquin Miller (1837–1913)
    Beard type: Mock Forked Elongated
    Typical opus: Kit Carson’s Ride
    Gravity (UPI rating): 51
  • Samuel Morse (1791–1872)
    Beard type: Garibaldi Elongated
    Typical opus: What Hath God Wrought
    Gravity (UPI rating): 58

So there you have it! Whitman is the lightest poet and Morse is the heaviest. (And he was the first code poet too.)

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All of this unabashedly stolen (though  it did take me some while to arrange the poets in order) from A Journey Round My Skull, where you can see larger images and read more. There, for example, you will learn that “Poets Ranked by Beard Weight is the centerpiece of Underwood’s estimable, if fetish-fueled treatise on pogonology, or the study of whiskers and associated lore…. This quaint publication takes the reader on a fascinating excursion through such topics as False Beards, Merkins, and Capillamenta (chin wigs); Effusions of the Scalp and Face; Celebrated Chaetognaths (chaetognathous = hairy-jawed); and even includes an affectionate mini-essay about the wooly mammoth!”

You could check it out.

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Poets ranked by the gravity of their beards

Jim Houston was a good, disciplined writer who put together eighteen or nineteen solid books, divided almost equally betweeen fiction and nonfiction. He was a craftsman whose understated style belied his carestaking attention to every detail of his texts.

If he was frustrated that he probably remained best know for Farewell to Manzanar, which he wrote in 1973 with his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, about her family’s detention in the Manzanar war camp, he never revealed it.

He was one of the truest westerners I know. I don’t mean just in his choice of subjects, although he generally wrote about California and the west, but in his spirit. Ted Hoagland said that you don’t have to choose between city and country — you can divide your time between them — but you have to decide between being a westerner and an easterner. I don’t know about that, but being a westerner came naturally to Jim Houston, who was born San Francisco, grew up listening to Hawaiian slack key guitar on the family radio (he played the ukulele), and lived for many years in Santa Cruz.

Most of all what I remember about Jim Houston, though, is that he was a good guy. He was courteous and thoughtful, a real gentleman. He was completely genuine. I regret that I hadn’t seen much of him in recent years — I don’t get out as much since I’ve been working at the Asian Art Museum — and I’m sorry to see him gone.

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photo via metroactive

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Jim Houston, 1933-2009

Considering that there has been a sizeable full-time Shakespeare industry churning away in academia for at least a hundred years, I think this claim must be taken with many grains of salt until verified. It would be interesting to see the works though. English writing has been all downhill since Shakespeare.

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Shakespeare, again

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Shakespeare’s likeness

[It] did not feel like Phyllis’s. Smoother, somehow simpler, its wetness less thick, less of a sauce, more of a glaze . . .

Yes, it was John Updike; he is in the running for the 2008 Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award.

I think this is overdue. He should have won in 1994 for his novel Brazil.

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Bad sex

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But we can make an exception for Joe Lieberman.

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via thedailyaphorism.com/

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BTW, There are a few quotations here at rightreading.com as well, including this one from Wilde.

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Advice to the victors