In The Times Literary Supplement, Mary Beard writes about the difficulty of organizing books: “Every so often—when I come to try to organise the books at home—I am overcome with admiration for the skills of librarians (and, as for Mr. Dewey Decimal, he seems a saint). In order to try to get the upper hand in the battle with the books, we have just had some new shelves built in the bedroom (there, still a bit inchoate, above), unilaterally decreed this to be the fiction library, and a perfect place to gather together all the novels stuffed in odd places all over the house. A good idea but only the start of the trouble…One possibly sensible way of organising this collection would have been straightforwardly alphabetical. But after a few minutes following this scheme, I soon resisted it. I am a great admirer of Jane Austen and Margaret Atwood, but I wasn’t sure that they sat easily next to each other on the shelf. And if they didn’t, then certainly the same went for Chaucer, Camus and Amanda Cross (that’s Amanda Cross of Death in a Tenured Position, in case you don’t know). I came down to the revised view that old classics (apart, that is, from the Greek and Latin and other ancient Classics) should best live separately from ‘modern’ novels.”
Austen and Atwood don’t sit “easily next to each other”? Dear Mary, whatever do you mean? That’s the great pleasure of organizing books alphabetically—running your eyes over names and titles centuries apart (but sitting right next to each other there on the shelf) and occasionally thinking about how different and, at the same time, how similar they are. (I love the idea of Chaucer sitting next to Camus. On my roughly alphabetical shelves, Pynchon sits next to Platonov, Petrarch, J. F. Powers, and Pasternak. It’s delicious.) One problem with thinking of literature in terms of periods (which I wrote about in a previous life) is that it blinds us to how writers working at different times (and in different places) can have more in common with each other than writers working at the same time and in the same place. I’m not saying one should never organize literature by periods—all works have contexts—but one should be aware that there is an arbitrariness to it that is not that different from the arbitrariness of the alphabet. Heck, even writers working in the same year in the same country can sometimes hardly be said to share much in terms of “context.”
So how should you organize your books? Well, as Mary Beard would surely agree, however you like, and the more personal, the better. Here’s Sloane Crosley extolling the virtues of not putting books on bookshelves at all and organizing them according to “memory and association”: “It’s the halfway point between alphabetical and aesthetic. And, in my case, each book’s placement corresponds not just to when I read it and how I felt, but to whatever activity takes place beneath it now. They are thus animated in a way they might not be otherwise. Like it or not, I am in constant, real-time conversation with their contents.”
In other news: James Pogue writes about fly fishing in New York: “I realized that I could fish every day, even while living in New York. Anyone could. It turned out that my book editor, whom I already knew to be a fellow fly-fishing obsessive, had been staking out a spot on the Bronx River, a place where he could fish for carp regularly without jeopardizing his career or neglecting his newborn. I caught a huge brook trout in a little creek running by a Toyota dealership on Long Island.”
Thomas Sowell’s inconvenient truths: “The idea that disparities are guilty until proven innocent is central to anti-discrimination law and politics… When economist Thomas Sowell sees disparities, he, like Ibram Kendi, sees bias driven by hatred or ignorance. Unlike Kendi, however, Sowell sees other causes also at work.”
In search of England’s lost king: “Recovering and identifying the bones of dead kings has been much in the news recently. Richard III’s skeleton was famously rediscovered under a car park in Leicester in 2012, while in 2014 fragments of a skull found buried in front of the high altar at Hyde Abbey were identified as probably belonging to Alfred the Great, or possibly his son Edward the Elder. There have been countervailing let-downs: recent excavations have shown that the bones under the grandiose marble tomb of the Viking Rollo, founder of Normandy, in Rouen Cathedral cannot possibly be his, whatever the inscription says. Nevertheless, Francis Young thinks it should be possible to retrieve the body of St Edmund, and argues furthermore that it is time for St Edmund to make a comeback and be recognised as the true, and native, patron saint of England, rather than the interloper St George, just when England needs a new and firmer identity.
The art of taking a walk: Gracy Olmstead remembers walking with her grandfather. “Many write about walking as pilgrimage, as a stepping out into the unknown, a voyaging away from home and hearth. Like J.R.R. Tolkien’s protagonist Bilbo Baggins, we see the road as an invitation into strangeness and foreign territory, a means to adventure and change. Kierkegaard roamed the streets of Copenhagen, Dickens trekked through London, Whitman patrolled the streets of New York, and Rousseau rambled through Paris. These thinkers and literary men saw something exotic and freeing in the city streets. Walking, for them, was an individualistic and artistic endeavor. But Grandpa’s walking was neither of these things. He followed the same paths, past the same homes and shops, for decades. His walking was not a reveling in new turf or strange faces, but rather a ritual of commitment to the same earth, brick, and human components of place.”
What’s the difference between chamber music groups and string quartets? Quite a lot: “I remember as a young musician puzzling over a certain convention of chamber music festivals: professional musicians newly acquainted with each other wouldn’t bat an eye at pulling off a performance of Beethoven’s ‘Archduke’ piano trio or Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet on only a handful of rehearsals but would never in a million years consider doing the same with most string quartets. Maybe an early Haydn quartet could be done. But a late Beethoven quartet? Never. Over the years, my puzzlement was answered by attitudes and beliefs I acquired at summer camp, in coachings or lessons, or at conservatory. String quartets were, I learned, much too serious and too intimately expressive of their composers’ inner lives to be performed by a motley crew of new acquaintances. String quartets could only be adequately performed by a string quartet, that is, four individuals fiercely dedicated to the quartet repertory and to a long-term cultivation of a group sound. Consequently, for me and my peers, the quartet ensemble had a kind of aura, as if it were composed of a tetrarchy of Vestal Virgins chastely preserving the sacred fire of musical truth and bonded together by their shared ardor. After all, it was common knowledge that being in a string quartet was like a ‘marriage without the benefits.’”
Essay of the Day:
In Vanity Fair, David Ewing Duncan writes about a deplorable new trend: cloning pets. Here’s a snippet:
“It has been more than two decades since the world collectively freaked out over the birth of Dolly the Sheep, the first-ever mammal cloned from an adult cell. The media jumped on the fear implicit in creating genetic replicas of living beings: Time featured a close-up of two sheep on its cover, accompanied by the headline ‘Will There Ever Be Another You?’ Jurassic Park, meanwhile, was terrifying audiences with cloned T. rexes and velociraptors that broke free from their creators and ran amok, eating lawyers and terrorizing small children. But over the years, despite all the Jurassic sequels, the issue faded from the public imagination, eclipsed by the rapid pace of scientific and technological change. In an age of gene editing, synthetic biology, and artificial intelligence, our dread of cloning now seems almost quaint, an anxiety from a simpler, less foreboding time.
“Then, last March, Barbra Streisand came out as a cloner. In an interview with Variety, the singer let slip that her two Coton de Tulear puppies, Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett, are actually clones of her beloved dog Samantha, who died last year. The puppies, she said, were cloned from cells taken from ‘Sammie’s’ mouth and stomach by ViaGen Pets, a pet-cloning company based in Texas that charges $50,000 for the service. ‘I was so devastated by the loss of my dear Samantha, after 14 years together, that I just wanted to keep her with me in some way,’ Streisand explained in a New York Times opinion piece, after the news provoked an outcry from animal-rights advocates. ‘It was easier to let Sammie go if I knew that I could keep some part of her alive, something that came from her DNA.’”
Photo: Old Man of Storr
Poem: Maria Terrone, “Edgar Allan Poe Dines at Thomas Jefferson’s Home”
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