Prufrock: Thomas Hardy in London, the Problem with “Poetic Naturalism,” and North Korea’s 28 Websites

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H. G. Wells writes James Joyce: “Now with regard to this literary experiment of yours. It’s a considerable thing because you are a very considerable man and you have in your crowded composition a mighty genius for expression which has escaped discipline. But I don’t think it gets anywhere. You have turned your back on common men—on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence, and you have elaborated. What is the result? Vast riddles.”

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New technology used to read previously unreadable Dead Sea scroll: “Nearly half a century ago, archaeologists found a charred ancient scroll in the ark of a synagogue on the western shore of the Dead Sea. The lump of carbonized parchment could not be opened or read. Its curators did nothing but conserve it, hoping that new technology might one day emerge to make the scroll legible. Just such a technology has now been perfected by computer scientists at the University of Kentucky. Working with biblical scholars in Jerusalem, they have used a computer to unfurl a digital image of the scroll.” (Hat tip: Scott Redd)

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The problem with Sean Carroll’s “poetic naturalism”: “For poetic naturalism, the reality of concepts like consciousness, causality, and organism is only linguistic; they perform functions in particular narratives. The discussion is thus a nominalist discussion about concepts, not a realist discussion of what is true about nature. Yet, when Carroll turns to fermions, bosons, and the quantum wave function, he does think that these terms refer to the fundamental furniture of the universe. At this level of discourse, he is a realist; whereas in other areas he is a nominalist. For Carroll, what emerge from the microscopic world are concepts, not things. Is the science of biology, that studies cells and organisms, for example, only a convenient ‘way of talking’? Thus, in discussing our knowledge of the way things are, he seems to be at once both a realist (when referring to particle physics) and a nominalist (with respect to other natural sciences). Eliminative materialism (which Carroll rejects) seems more coherent than poetic naturalism.”

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North Korea’s Internet has 28 websites.

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The ridiculous crusade for gender-neutral toys.

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Essay of the Day:

In The Times Literary Supplement, Mark Ford explores Thomas Hardy’s relationship to London:

“Thomas Hardy is famous as the creator of Wessex. While he only gradually became aware of the importance that the concept of Wessex might have for his imagination, as well as for his sales figures, once he had embraced the notion that he could link his various novels and stories, and later his poems too, into an ongoing chronicle of a half-real, half-fictive region, he held fast to the idea. But the success of Wessex as a literary construction has obscured the importance of London to his career and development. It was in London that Hardy found fame, but it was also in London that he suffered his deepest anxieties and most wounding humiliations. His oscillations as a young man between the routines and concerns of Higher Bockhampton, his birthplace and family home, and the excitements and dangers of London were crucial to his profound personal sense of self-division, of being torn between worlds that were mutually dependent but often mutually uncomprehending. Although the capital may not feature on the maps of Wessex that came to preface all his novels, it was in London that they were edited and published, and it was in London that judgement was passed on them by a class of person that Hardy came to detest – the metropolitan reviewer.

“After the five crucial years he spent there in his early twenties, Hardy lived on and off in London and its suburbs until his early forties. In 1885, when he was forty-five, he and his wife Emma settled in Max Gate, the substantial red-brick villa that Hardy designed, and had his father and brother (who were both in the building trade) construct on the outskirts of Dorchester. This by no means, however, signalled the end of Hardy’s and Emma’s London lives, for they would spend several months each year in the capital, attending parties, going to concerts, plays and exhibitions, paying social calls, and visiting their clubs. They rented flats or houses at a variety of fashionable addresses – Bayswater, South Kensington, Holland Park, St John’s Wood, Marylebone and Maida Vale – from which they sallied boldly forth to salons and soirées and crushes and dinners. (After the enormous financial success of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, they even experimented with bringing up their own servants from Max Gate so as to ensure that their domestic needs were fully catered to in their London lodgings.) Hardy’s flirtatious encounters in the city with various literary and Society women to whom he was attracted in the 1890s generated, as well as many fascinating diary entries and the drawing-room scenes in The Well-Beloved, a handful of urban poems that veer between the witty and the plangent.

“But it would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Hardy’s first experience of living in London as a young man. In the summer of 1856 he had started work as an apprentice architect in the office of John Hicks in Dorchester, and six years later he left for the capital ‘to pursue the art and science of architecture on more advanced lines’, as he recorded in The Life of Thomas Hardy (the biography published posthumously in two instalments, in 1928 and 1930, under the name of Florence Hardy, his second wife, but written largely by himself). He did indeed, to some extent, further his architectural career there. He also became a writer.”

Read the rest.

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Image of the Day: Glencoe, Scotland

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Poem: Johnny Cash, “California Poem”

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