I maintain my own daybook, where I have recorded events by date that are significant to me (there is a link near the top of the left sidebar). But my effort pales beside the project called Ordinary Finds, which, if I’m not mistaken, is produced by Bent Sorensen of Aalborg, Denmark (this is hard to determine from the site itself). Ordinary Finds collects remarkable photos and adds cogent remarks regarding cultural figures associated with the various dates of the calendar (mostly through their birthdays). For example, for December 9, this year the site includes the interesting photo of Lucian Freud above along with extended reflections on Wilfredo Lam and Diego Rivera, as well as Freud, and shorter entries (with intriguing photos) on Jean Sibelius, Jim Morrison, and Camille Claudel. Nice work!

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Extraordinary finds

One of the applications of this line of research is for machine translation. How does the translation engine determine, for example, whether the word lead in a text refers to the heavy metal or to the concept of leadership?

One way to try to answer that question is to look for patterns in the denotative and connotative qualities of  the lexicon of the passage. Looking for themes that interlace the selection of words might help to determine the sense in which they are being used and also help to highlight the passage’s main concerns.

Consider, for example, the opening of Flaubert’s Salammbo. (I picked this text up from a website that did not identify the translator but simply gave the credit “etext prepared by John Bickers”)

It was at Megara, a suburb of Carthage, in the gardens of Hamilcar. The soldiers whom he had commanded in Sicily were having a great feast to celebrate the anniversary of the battle of Eryx, and as the master was away, and they were numerous, they ate and drank with perfect freedom.

The captains, who wore bronze cothurni, had placed themselves in the central path, beneath a gold-fringed purple awning, which reached from the wall of the stables to the first terrace of the palace; the common soldiers were scattered beneath the trees, where numerous flat-roofed buildings might be seen, wine-presses, cellars, storehouses, bakeries, and arsenals, with a court for elephants, dens for wild beasts, and a prison for slaves.

Fig-trees surrounded the kitchens; a wood of sycamores stretched away to meet masses of verdure, where the pomegranate shone amid the white tufts of the cotton-plant; vines, grape-laden, grew up into the branches of the pines; a field of roses bloomed beneath the plane- trees; here and there lilies rocked upon the turf; the paths were strewn with black sand mingled with powdered coral, and in the centre the avenue of cypress formed, as it were, a double colonnade of green obelisks from one extremity to the other.

Far in the background stood the palace, built of yellow mottled Numidian marble, broad courses supporting its four terraced stories. With its large, straight, ebony staircase, bearing the prow of a vanquished galley at the corners of every step, its red doors quartered with black crosses, its brass gratings protecting it from scorpions below, and its trellises of gilded rods closing the apertures above, it seemed to the soldiers in its haughty opulence as solemn and impenetrable as the face of Hamilcar.

Looking at this passage we can easily pick out certain themes and observe how the author’s vocabulary reinforces them. (This is just a quick demonstration and not an attempt at a fully worked-out critical analysis.) Clearly Flaubert meant to impress us with the magnitude, exoticism, and lushness of his setting and with the concepts of military authority and its obverse of excess and lack of restraint. He works hard to create an intensified vividness of setting. Notice how his words align to emphasize certain concepts.

I limited myself to six columns for fit in my text window. Of course there are many words relating to feasting and celebration. There is also an element of danger and impending violence associated with the martial aspect and references to scorpions and the like that I could have picked out, as well as a sort of architectural exoticism, but these six topical groupings fairly well underscore the main themes of the passage. In fact, they predict pretty well the overall themes of the entire book.

Now fast forward to the present. I this that search engines use a similar analysis to determine the topicality of web pages. Some such analysis could be done on the page itself. Web search specialists use the term keywords to describe the words they hope to rank for in search engine results pages. But notice that this sort of analysis can help to determine not just the keywords but the context in which they are being used. A similar analysis could be done to the anchor texts and surrounding words in links leading to the web page.

Poets and other literary types have always been sensitive to these sorts of word associations. Even in nonliterary prose, the careful web author would be wise to do likewise.

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Topicality in literary writing, and its implications for web search optimization

I was doing okay until I got to Samuel Butler.

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100 best novels quiz

This is an excellent choice. Copper Canyon has been a reliable publisher of international poetry for decades, and all of their books are prepared with care and attention to detail. Bravo!

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Copper Canyon to publish Chinese anthology

Cortazar’s Around the Day in 80 Worlds was my first book-length literary translation. We corresponded a bit but he died before the project was completed.

Wow! A literary president!

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image by tc

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Cronopios and Famas

“The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation — a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.” — From a letter of Kafka to Oskar Pollak.

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via Book of Joe

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The books we need

Dear readers:

Did you miss us? We missed you. It’s only been a brief eon but the idiots have taken over the world, and the internet is seducing us all into trading in our brains for beads. Welcome back to the Post-Katrina Resurrection Corpse, back from a dank hiatus of one year in a formaledehyde-poisoned FEMA trailer. We festered, we raged, we contemplated suicide, and in the end, voted for life because we are a Corpse already and we hate to keep on dying, just like the ideals of the Republic. Our guest-editor for this issue is the formidable poet, publisher, New Orleanian, and homme-du-monde -et-de-lettres, Bill Lavender. Bill has ploughed through the accumulated debris in our trailer, turning over towers of submissions and lovingly removing mold and giving new lustre to tarnished but potent weapons of poesy, crit, and story-time. We will continue to exalt, irritate, surprise, be loving, merciless, and obscene, just like you. Our Bulgarian genius, Plamen Arnaudov, has updated our technology so that the Corpse may flow continually, with updates posted as quickly as the zeitgeist requires. We also welcome Vincent Cellucci, poet and chef to Our Gang, so that we might eat well while we tryst and plunder. Reader, please come back, visit, and, most importantly, re- register to join our raiding parties, and ride with the Resurrected Corpse. You don’t need to bring your own horse to the raiding parties because we are planning (secretly) to offer ship cruises to our subscribers. (It costs nothing to subscribe). And let your list know that the Corpse is back: http://www.corpse.org

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Corpse reborn

The result is a list of 86 books. Looking at this list, the first thing that strikes me is how few of them I have read. West with the Night was our first bestseller at North Point Press, and we also published Ted Hoagland and M.F.K. Fischer. At Mercury House we reissued some Robert Lewis Stevenson as part of our neglected classics series. A few others I read here and there, but I haven’t read the majority of these books. Is it an especially peculiar list or have I just neglected my travel reading? Maybe a bit of both, but I think the list is a little odd because of the methodology of just collecting nominations — I mean, how can Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan not make a list of great travel books? Anyway, here’s the list. For more information about the nominated books, go to the CNT page.

Along the Ganges, Ilija Trojanow
Arabian Sands, Wilfred Thesiger
An Area of Darkness, V.S. Naipaul
As They Were, M.F.K. Fisher
A Barbarian in Asia, Henri Michaux
The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer, Eric Hansen
Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, Lawrence Durrell
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West
Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon
Captain John Smith: Writings
Chasing the Monsoon, Alexander Frater
Chasing the Sea, Tom Bissell
Cross Country, Robert Sullivan
Dark Star Safari, Paul Theroux
Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff, Rosemary Mahoney
The Emperor, Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski
Endurance, Alfred Lansing
Eothen, Alexander William Kinglake
“Exterminate All the Brutes,” Sven Lindqvist
Farthest North: The Voyage and Exploration of the Fram, 1893–1896, Fridtjof Nansen
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
The Fearful Void, Geoffrey Moorhouse
From a Chinese City, Gontran De Poncins
Great Plains, Ian Frazier
The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux
Hindoo Holiday, J. R. Ackerley
The Histories, Herodotus
The Impossible Country, Brian Hall
In a Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson
India: A Million Mutinies Now, V. S. Naipaul
The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain
In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin
In the Country of Country, Nicholas Dawidoff
In Trouble Again, Redmond O’Hanlon
Iron and Silk, Mark Salzman
I See by My Outfit, Peter S. Beagle
The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition
Journey to Portugal, José Saramago
Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indians, George Catlin
Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile, 1849–1850, Florence Nightingale
Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain
London Perceived, V. S. Pritchett
The Long Walk, Slavomir Rawicz
The Lycian Shore, Freya Stark
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, Suketu Mehta,
The Muses Are Heard, Truman Capote
The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, Matsuo Basho
News from Tartary, Peter Fleming
The Nomad: Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt
No Mercy: A Journey into the Heart of the Congo, Redmond O’Hanlon
Notes from the Century Before, Edward Hoagland
Old Glory, Jonathan Raban
The Pillars of Hercules, Paul Theroux
The Pine Barrens, John McPhee
Riding the Iron Rooster, Paul Theroux
The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald
The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan, Winston Churchill
The Road to Oxiana, Robert Byron
Rome and a Villa, Eleanor Clark
Roughing It, Mark Twain
Arabia, Peter Theroux
Sea and Sardinia, D. H. Lawrence
Shah of Shahs, Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, Eric Newby
Siren Land, Norman Douglas
Skating to Antarctica, Jenny Diski
Slowly Down the Ganges, Eric Newby
The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin

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86 recommended travel books

Candida Höfer‘s photographs of Portuguese libraries, now on display at the Sonnabend Gallery, 536 West 22nd Street in NYC, presents libraries as places of opulence. In these settings the books, clearly precious objects, convey an almost religious authority.

Shown is Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra VI 2006.

Via If:Book.

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Portuguese libraries, photographed by Candida Höfer

An excerpt from del Paso’s Palinuro of Mexico, translated by Elizabeth Plaister, is included in New World / New Words: Recent Writing from the Americas, A Bilingual Anthology, now at the printer.

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Fernando del Paso to receive FIL Literature Prize

The Guardian asked 50 writers to nominate neglected books that deserve a second chance with the public. “The majority of books fall stillborn from the press, never living up to their authors’ hopes for recognition or dreams of a large, admiring audience,” Robert McCrum, who introduces the list, writes. “So those bestseller lists and crowded festival appearances create a misleading impression of the true circumstances of literary life. For every book that tickles public taste, captures the zeitgeist and hits the jackpot, there are thousands that do not appeal to contemporary readers, fail to find a sufficient audience and almost disappear.”

The list, strong on the classics, is very different from one that U.S. authors would produce. How badly does Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas need a second chance, and what are the odds that Howard Jacobson’s nomination will be the deciding factor that will put that title over the top nearly 250 years after its initial publication? Do writers such as Flannery O’Connor, Jose Donoso, Julien Green, or Edith Wharton really cry out for renomination over more truly neglected authors?

Still, if you like lists of books as fodder for rumaging through the shelves — and what book person doesn’t — the Guardian list might inspire some new choices.

Image: Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds (detail)

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50 neglected classics

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Archer Returns

But where in the text does this phrase appear?

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Come in

The Daode jing (Tao Te Ching) is an interesting case. Daily Lit’s web page for that book shows an image of the cover of the Stephen Mitchell edition. If you click on the book it takes you to the book’s Amazon page. But the Mitchell rendering is not public domain. The sample text Daily Lit shows begins like this:

PART 1.
Ch. 1. 1. The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name.
2. (Conceived of as) having no name, it is the Originator of heaven and earth; (conceived of as) having a name, it is the Mother of all …

That doesn’t sound much like Stephen Mitchell to me. The Mitchell version starts this way:

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal name

The unnameable is the eternally real
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

For comparison, here the version I published, by Red Pine:

The way that becomes a way
is not the Immortal Way
the name that becomes a name
in not the Immortal Name
the maiden of Heaven and Earth has no name
the mother of all things has a name

Why does Daily Lit link to a copyrighted version of the book from which they are offering public domain snippets? I suppose they monetize their site through the Amazon Associates program, figuring after a few months of e-mailed bits of a book you might be hooked enough to actually buy the book. Why you would do so by clicking through from Daily Lit isn’t clear to me, but I imagine the link is included in the feeds and e-mails. Is that a viable business model?

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Daily Lit

Plus, I am awesome.

How about you?

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I’ll take that score

Here‘s a cool web feature for lit types. Clicking the map (the image above is a detail) takes you to a section of an 1859 map of London. Once at the map detail you can get further information about that part of town. For example, you can click a “dictionary” button, which takes you to a description of that location taken from the 1879 Dickens’s Dictionary of London by Charles Dickens Jr. Or you can see an aerial photo of the area today, from Google maps.

The site is the brainchild of David Perdue. It’s a good illustration of how disparate data can be related to create, in effect, new content. Nice job!

(via Splodinvark)

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Boz’s London

The site is curiously terse. I wonder who the host, “PK,” is. Can anyone enlighten me?

This is also the first site other than my own FriscoVista that I’ve seen that uses del.icio.us tags for site navigation.

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BibliOdyssey

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The Ballets of Celine

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Note to Self

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Copyediting Shakespeare