Prufrock: The Left’s War on Science, the Story of the OED, and Harlan Ellison

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Never-ending map-making: “Three new atlases of strange, improbable places show that, even with GPS, islands have a weird habit of appearing and disappearing”

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The story of the Oxford English Dictionary: “The work of lexicography, safe to say, is more like fishing than shooting prisoners. Simpson, who seems to credit his being hired in 1976 to a lucky draw of conversational topics during his job interview, distinguished himself at the OED by his appetite for research. On the same page he recalls volunteering to investigate the lexicons of punk and Rastafarianism, he mentions buying a used set of 18th-century novels, which he brought on vacation and dutifully marked up. Such is his taste for busman’s holidays that, on another day off, he drives to an old diocesan archive to pursue a suspicion that an early citation for pal was being misinterpreted.”

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Some slang words are much older than previously thought according to Jonathan Green’s latest Dictionary of Slang: British lexicographer and author Jonathan Green’s GDoS is the largest slang dictionary in the world, collecting terms from the United States, England, Australia, and everywhere else English is the dominant language…Green, who has published numerous books about language and been working on GDoS since 1993, cites the increased availability of newspaper databases as the biggest transformation of his research in the past five years: ‘And what you find is . . . that things are older than we believed.'”

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What has the Turner Prize done for the British public? Not much, according to Rachel Cooke: “Januszczak thinks it was responsible for turning the British into a nation of modern-art lovers. I disagree. Much as many of us love modern art (trend alert: a lot of people still hate it), the opening in 2000 of Tate Modern, complete with the adult playground that is its Turbine Hall, had a far greater effect. Besides, contemporary art and modern art are entirely different things. The sombre types who pack out shows by Matisse and Rothko are wildly different from those people who, even as I write, are staring up at Project for Door (After Gaetano Pesce), Anthea Hamilton’s installation at this year’s Turner show, wondering if it’s some kind of super-prescient commentary on Donald Trump, or just a giant arse.”

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Matthew Continetti on Harlan Ellison’s accomplishment: “Who is Harlan Ellison? Novelist, essayist, short-story writer, television critic, anthologist, screenwriter, lecturer, activist, gadfly, he is the author of dozens upon dozens of books, and the winner of numerous awards. You can read a partial list here. Praised by Isaac Asimov (‘He is never anywhere without you knowing he is there’), Michael Crichton (‘He is a genuine original, one of a kind, difficult to categorize and unwilling to make it any easier’), and Stephen King (‘The man is a ferociously talented writer’), Ellison’s career has been marked by disputation, controversy, and braggadocio. He can be frustrating, off-putting. But he is also inspiring…What enraptures the reader, especially the adolescent one, is the very force of Ellison’s personality: mischievous, erudite, emphatic, poetic, committed. The words cross the page at terminal velocity as Ellison involves you in the daily life of a writer in Hollywood: pitch meetings, contract disputes, story conferences, the thousand interactions with the petty and unimaginative and bourgeois that give Ellison and his young audience a sense of moral and intellectual superiority. In his prefaces, introductions, and comments, as well as in the stories themselves, Ellison is determined to convince the reader that the act of writing matters, that the profession of writer is a noble one, and that imagination and dedication and ethical behavior still count. Not only does his work contain vivid characters—Harlequin, Ticktockman, Deathbird, Vic and Blood, Maggie—it is also the production of a character: Ellison himself.”

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British Library acquires P. G. Wodehouse archive: “On Thursday, the British Library will announce that the Wodehouse archive is about to join its 20th-century holdings, a collection that includes the papers of Arthur Conan Doyle, Evelyn Waugh, Mervyn Peake, Virginia Woolf, Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, Beryl Bainbridge, JG Ballard and Angela Carter. This rare and brilliant archive not only casts fascinating new light on Wodehouse’s comic genius, and painstaking daily revisions of his famously carefree prose, it also holds the key to the controversy that has tormented the writer’s posthumous reputation, the ‘Berlin broadcasts’. Yet, unlike many authors, he made no attempt to protect this collection, which is all the more authentic for being free of authorial intervention and contrivance.”

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England considers restoring house that is said to be the inspiration for Pemberley in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The British Jane Austen Society thinks it’s a terrible idea: “‘There is absolutely no evidence that Jane Austen ever traveled further north than Lichfield in Staffordshire,’ the Jane Austen Society of the United Kingdom said after the announcement…’Jane Austen, herself only too keenly aware of the value of money, and of the need for veracity, would have been savvy enough to know that a building the size of Wentworth Woodhouse with its estimated number of over 300 rooms and its estate of over 15,000 acres could not possibly have been supported on Mr. Darcy’s reported income of a mere £10,000 per annum,’ the statement continued.”

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Essay of the Day:

In Standpoint, Charles Saumarez-Smith asks if museum-going has replaced church-going in Britain:

“As a lapsed Anglican and descendant of several generations of Anglican priests on both sides of my family, there is an issue which I would expect to have been discussed: that is, as fast as there has been a decline in church-going and religious belief in the postwar period, so there has been a corresponding rise in the number of visits to museums and art galleries. Are the two perhaps in some way connected? Can one understand something about the nature of public artistic experience — the experience of going to a museum or an art gallery or an art exhibition — by considering it as in some ways analogous to what used to be — or, at least, what was intended to be — the experience of going to church: the search for the sacred; for the questioning of the meaning of existence; for trying to understand the nature of the unknown, as part of a public ritual; a communal and shared experience of the idea that there can, and should be, important aspects of life which are not part of the everyday and which can be interpreted by people who have special skills and insights into the subject.

“Let me begin by considering some statistics of the decline of church-going as compared to the rise in visiting museums. In a recent article by Andrew Brown, the Guardian‘s religious correspondent, I read that now, for the first time for at least a millennium, the majority of people under the age of 40 regard themselves as having no religion whatsoever, although, interestingly, only 40 per cent are convinced that there is no God or so-called ‘higher power’. Brown and Linda Woodhead, a sociologist at the University of Lancaster, have recently published a scurrilous book called That Was the Church that Was: How the Church of England Lost the English People (Bloomsbury, £16.99) which documents the phenomenon of the progressive decline in church-going. It parallels, and is itself a symptom of, a corresponding decline in religious belief. In January 2016, it was announced that, for the first time, weekly attendance at church services had dropped below a million, with regular Sunday attendances falling to 760,000, a drop of 12 per cent over the last decade to a point where less than 2 per cent of the population go to church regularly. The church loses approximately 1 per cent of its congregation every year through death and this number is not being replenished by new recruits. The habit of church-going, the presumption that there was something worthwhile in the ritual of going to church, is being lost. If people feel the need for quiet contemplation, for thinking about their place in history and the world, for enjoying the unknown, they are no longer finding it in church.

“Look at the equivalent figures for museum-going. In May 2016, the latest month for which figures are available, there were 3.6 million visits in a single month to the museums funded by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport — that is, to the big national museums, including the British Museum, the National Gallery and the Tate. The Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (ALVA), which publishes annual figures for the number of visits to museums, records that last year just under 7 million people visited the British Museum, just under 6 million the National Gallery (when I was there only a decade ago, the figures were somewhere between 4 and 5 million so there has been a big increase over the last decade), and just under 5 million visited the Tate overall. The National Portrait Gallery, which when I started as Director in 1994 had about 500,000 visitors, now has more than 2 million. There was publicity recently to do with the fact that there was an increasing number of tourists visiting museums and a decreasing number of domestic visitors.”

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“Are these two phenomena in some way related? Can one help to understand and interpret the big increase in museum visiting as some form of compensation for the growth of secularisation?

“It is worth examining the experience of some of the recent exhibitions at the Royal Academy, what leads so many people to come and visit them, and what sort of experience people get out of them. Let me begin with the Anish Kapoor exhibition which was held in autumn 2009. I’m slightly unusual in that I saw a version of the same exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich the previous year, which included a version of his big work, Svayambh, which consists of a large red wax railway train which glides imperceptibly slowly through a set of grand gallery spaces. What does it mean? Kapoor himself is reticent about attaching a particular meaning to the work and it is not a question that one is necessarily expected to ask. But it is obvious that it is, in some way, ill-defined, about the nature of the relationship between the material and the immaterial, about something larger than what it is physically. Is it a train? Does it contain memories of the trains which went to Auschwitz? Is the red of the wax symbolic of blood? We don’t know. The point is that it is about something large and outside our normal everyday experience. The work takes us out of ourselves into the experience of scale and — I think it is legitimate to use the word — transcendence. As Kapoor himself wrote of his work early in his career, when he had an exhibition at the ICA, ‘I don’t wish to make sculpture about form . . . I wish to make sculpture about belief, or about passion, about experience that is outside of material concern.” Or elsewhere, “Material somehow always leads on to something immaterial.’

“This sense of something larger happening beyond the character of the individual works was more evident at the Royal Academy, where I think everyone who visited the exhibition was aware that there was something unorthodox about it, something about the experience of the exhibition which went beyond the experience of the individual works. The biggest of the individual works, other than Svayambh, and the one which people are probably most likely to remember, was the big cannon which fired red wax at a wall and the wax gradually accumulated in a big pile on the floor, causing, incidentally, big problems in the management of the exhibition. Again, one is not expected to ask, or to know, what the meaning of the work is. The point is that it is both meaningless and meaningful: a grand ritual, pregnant with undisclosed and immanent meaning in which the people who were involved in the firing of the cannon did it with unplanned ritual pomp. It is surely not an accident that one is inclined to use the language of religion and spirituality to try to interpret it.”

Read the rest.

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Image of the Day: Iceland

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Poem: Jennifer Reeser, “One Brother Suffers”

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