Engine Summer

This is an early Moomin picture book, notable for two reasons: its divergences from the way people are in the novels (the Hemulen loves housecleaning and the Fillyjonk is kind of creepy, which is brainbreaking), and its absolutely amazing use of cutwork and holes in the book.

You don't have to like the Moomins or know who these people are to appreciate the illustrations. The simple story involves Moomintroll looking for Little My, whom everyone believes is lost; he and the Mymble travel through forests, mountains, and caves, and each double-page spread has a different set of cutouts in the paper. All of the cutouts work both with the page after and with the page before. Some of them go down multiple layers.

So you'll get a spread of a dark forest path, in which the spaces between two trees are cutouts that show the next page, which is the meadow just outside the forest-- you can see the space outside the forest through the trees just as you would in real life. And there's a further cutout you can see just a part of, going down a second page, which gives you just one ray of sunshine.

Flip the page, and you get the meadow; the tree cutouts are now looking back into the picture of the dark forest we just left, and the full extent of the sun cutout is revealed, so we can see the whole meadow bathed in sunlight.

Every single illustration in the book is that well planned, or better. The compositions are arranged such that bits of the picture you didn't know were significant pop into relief in the cutout the second you flip the page.

It is such a tour de force that it almost feels petty to mention that the translated text is terribly rhymed and scanned, and also doesn't make very much sense. Honestly, I'd ignore it entirely-- you can follow what plot there is perfectly well from the pictures. And should. This is one of those picture books everyone can examine and be dazzled by.

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Michèle Sacquin is the curator at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. She also likes cats.

This is a set of drawings, engravings, and illustrations depicting cats, from the library's collections. There's also text, which talks about the role of the cat in culture and literature and its importance to painters and writers and its association with children sometimes and women sometimes and sex sometimes, but honestly we have all seen that sort of thing before repeatedly; what makes this book, the reason I sat down with it after flipping through it, is the images.

Victor Hugo's doodles of cats down the side of the manuscript of Les Misérables. A portrait of Huysmans, staring at you round-eyed, black cat around his neck like a scarf as it bats at the white marble statue of the Virgin on the mantel. An ukiyo-e print of a sleeping courtesan whose kimono has been disarranged by a stretching cat, which had evidently been curled up in an area that suggests the Japanese have some of the same puns English does (and indeed the text confirms that). An inexpressibly lovely Berthe Morisot drypoint sketch of her daughter, Julie Manet, with kitten, which Renoir would later paint but not as well. A page from the manuscript sketches for a twelfth-century physiology book, tangles of the human body in several positions, studies of various insects and plants in neat clear outline, and at the bottom one carefully limned cat in one of those improbable washing-oneself knotworks. A Mughal lady trailing the end of her scarf for a cat that looks more like a lion to pounce on.

There's just about every sort of art on paper here but paintings. Sacquin doesn't think people paint cats very well.

She does reasonably with the historical notes, too. I was fascinated by the brief account of the siege of Arras (the one of which Cyrano de Bergerac was a veteran)-- the Spanish put on the city gate 'When the Spanish surrender the town of Arras, rats will defeat and capture cats', and after the French took the city, they changed it slightly, so that it read 'When the Spanish defend the town of Arras...'. And sure enough there is a finely wrought copperplate engraving, made by a Frenchman, showing the dashingly dressed and well-combed rats relieving a rather effete-looking army of Spaniard cats of their swords. It is definitely the first time I have seen patriotic propaganda in which a country depicted themselves as an army of rats. I really can't imagine that that's happened very often.

The book is not terribly well-organized (honestly it is not perceptibly organized at all), I would have liked even more detail about the provenance of some of the drawings than was provided, and the attempts at analysis of the cat in literature do not go beyond the 'people like to write about cats sometimes for some reason' level. But if you want a really adorable and unusual art book full of pictures one can't find on the internet (I've been trying to find some to link to, and no), this will give you a fascinating half-hour.

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This is today's book, so I am now officially caught up, yay.

When I was six years old, I saved up a lot of birthday and Christmas money and bought a teddy bear, for sixty dollars. It was the most money I'd ever had, and the most I'd ever spent on anything, and my parents were not happy about it but allowed themselves to be talked into it. I had not at that point read Michael Bond's Paddington Bear books, but the bear is a Paddington, at the time I bought him taller than I was; I could wear his duffel coat. Twenty-three years later, he's lost his coat, hat, boots and label but he is on my bed where he's always been. I don't travel with him much anymore now that he's old enough to vote, but he's the first thing-that-can't-move-by-itself that I'd grab in a fire.

I didn't read the books for several years after that, actually, I'm not even sure I knew about them, so my history with the Bond version of Paddington is that I consider the books good fun but the personality of Paddington in them definitely non-canonical as the author had not met my bear.

I found out as an adult that Paddington is considered one of the most impressive instances of successful toy merchandising of all time, and I have to say that from personal experience that does seem to be the case. I don't know why I had to have that particular bear, so much as to save up for months, but I did have to. This book is a history of the writing of the original books by Bond (who was apparently a BBC cameraman at the time, who knew), but also a history of the merchandising and spin-offs-- there were stop-motion animated films made, and of course the basic stuffed bear had happened not long after the books, but the animated films cost so much that Bond started licensing all sorts of other Paddington things in an effort to pay for them, and then the whole thing hit Japan and now Bond is basically running his own industry. The sheer number of Paddington objects out there is really kind of frightening.

As with any official corporate history, this is slightly more adulatory than one might really desire, and does not wish to go into any of the messiness that might exist between people-- various reconfigurations of business partnerships are presented with a great insistence that everyone has always been happy about all of it, at all times. And of course there are directions in which it does not wish to talk about money, such as, for instance, how much of that might be involved in a general sort of way.

But as a look at how really successful business licensing works, it's mildly interesting, and I had no idea the animated films even existed and am now rather curious about them. So not a waste of time, and pleasant for me personally as it explains some things about how and why my bear might have got to the store in which I bought him. I do suspect this of not being a book of general interest, however. It's too official-biography for that.

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A reference book B. had lying around.

This is decidedly not the reference book you want if you want to learn anything about Freemasonry. It is an unredeemable disaster.

It is, however, moderately entertaining if you enjoy unredeemable disasters. The question, of course, is in what direction the book will be terrible next. Will there be yet another uncaught typo? An inappropriate and uncaptioned illustration? A myth presented as unequivocal fact? A paragraph (or several) spun from the words 'it seems likely that', extrapolated upon so wildly that by the end of the page nothing seems less likely? The usual answer is, in fact, all of the above at once. I can't remember the last time I saw a book presented as fact that cited its sources less. There is no bibliography. There is no works cited page. There is no index. There is no list of photo credits, for crying out loud.

And the book states that it actually believes that the Masons were both literally descendants of the builders of Solomon's Temple and founded/carried on by the Knights Templar.

This is the sort of book where I would want to fact-check it if it were to tell me that two plus two is four.

It isn't even a good source for the usual conspiracy theories, because the writing isn't good enough to present them comprehensibly if you don't know what they are already.

I had a good time wincing and laughing, but in general: avoid avoid avoid.

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Antonio Beccadelli's Hermaphrodite (1425-6) is pretty much the most scandalous book of the Italian Renaissance. Bernardino da Siena held book burnings, and so did a lot of other people; several popes threatened to excommunicate people found reading it.

It's a collection of Latin epigrammatic poetry, based on the idea that the ancient authors, such as Catullus, Martial, Pliny, etc. often wrote bawdy or scurrilous poetry, even those among them who were famous for having virtuous personal lives, and that therefore writing extremely well-done filthy verse is a way of righteously following the ancient examples. Beccadelli was a young man when he wrote it, not thirty yet, but it became his most famous and controversial book for two reasons:

1) it's really, really filthy. Latin, as a language, has several registers of obscenity that English doesn't. Beccadelli, who had access to all of the rich and varied vocabulary of Catullus, Juvenal, and Lucan, coined his own obscene neologisms because the older ones weren't precise and nasty enough. There is something to offend everybody in here. Everybody. I don't care who you are. That said, he's generally pleasant and rollicking, equally kind and unkind to both sexes and devoted to everyone having a good time-- it's just, this is a level of graphic that is really amazingly condensed. His poems are epigrams, and therefore manage to pack what in English would be entire paragraphs of technically descriptive language into single words and short sentences. I don't think I can write a sentence in English with the sheer connotative bawdiness of one of his. I am not sure it is linguistically possible. The only author I have seen with a similar degree of obscenity is Martial; Beccadelli has comprehensively outdone Catullus in this particular direction.

2) it's really, really good. He has a couple of issues based on the fact that Italian Latin at this point had no codified rules for how to use the reflexive, but Virgil would be happy about his word order, and his meter and assonances are just ludicrously brilliant. He's actually as good as he thinks he is, and he thinks he's immortal. He mostly only uses one form, the epigram, but I defy you to find better ones on a sheerly technical level. They are certainly and obviously head and shoulders above the standard of Latin epigrammatical composition at the time.

The combination of these two traits made his contemporaries, and in fact most readers since, completely unable to cope. He was too good to be banned, too filthy to be admired, too over-the-top to be imitated, too brilliant not to be an inspiration. In a late edition of the Hermaphrodite, Beccadelli included between the book's halves a letter from Poggio Bracciolini (a renowned manuscript-finder and academic), which can be summarized very neatly as follows: OH GOD IT'S GENIUS WON'T YOU PLEASE STOP IT. Beccadelli's response to Poggio, at the end of the book, was that everyone was confusing his life with his art (probably true) and that his poems should not be taken to reflect anything other than a deep love of the same authors everyone around him also loved; that if Plato could write about sex, so could he, and that people should stop treating him like a moral degenerate because after all Homer never invaded Troy. This helped nothing. His later career would include a long and distinguished stint as poet laureate to the Emperor Sigismund, an academic slapfight with Lorenzo Valla that included copious lawsuits and accusations on both sides of poisoning and sodomy, and the founding of the Academia Neapolitana, which is still there today. His most famous book would always be his first, the book which in my edition a prefatory quote from a reputable historian claims helped cause the French Revolution, or, worse, the Reformation. This is probably overestimation, but you see how critics are still failing to deal.

Unsurprisingly, most editions of the Hermaphrodite have been relentlessly expurgated. The new edition from Harvard's I Tatti series of Italian Renaissance literature definitely isn't, and includes not only a biographical essay and copious notes but a series of relevant letters, poems, epigraphs, and legal papers by Beccadelli and others surrounding the controversy. It gives a good portrait of why the book was important, how people reacted to it at the time, and what its legacy was, although I would have liked a deeper look at the book's history between the fifteenth century and this one.

But I cannot recommend it if you don't read Latin. I'm sorry. It's a literal translation and it will do you no good whatsoever in realizing how good a poet Beccadelli was. It gets (some of) the obscenity and none of the elegance. It gets the matter but not the means. A fine English poet was required to get this work across and that did not happen here. If you are using the translation as a crib to read the actual text, it is totally usable for that, and this is a book you should go out and read immediately because it is interesting and worthy. If not, let us hope an English poet decides to do it in the not-too-distant future-- one could totally use this edition as a scholarly apparatus for it.

I may attempt it myself someday, if I ever have the hubris to think I could live up to it, and if I can get over the fact that he consistently and with malice aforethought makes me blush at his sheer filthiness, which, seriously, not many things can do that to me.

( Some quotations, for those of you who are interested and read Latin. )

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This is the sort of book I read when I'm tired because I think it's hilarious, but your mileage may vary.

Allow me to quote the title page: "By the Same Author-- The Eleusinian Mysteries-- Masonic Legends and Traditions-- Robert Burns and Freemasonry-- Roman Catholicism and Freemasonry, Woman and Freemasonry, etc., etc." Copyright 1924. If that gives you an idea.

Unfortunately, this is mostly a compilation of essays written by the author as speeches to be delivered on public occasions which wanted a Masonic speaker, which means that the essays are written for an audience of the world in general and consequently are a lot less cryptically allusive than one might want, although they are still pretty cryptic. The joy in this sort of thing is in watching the writer insist that the Masons are a) older than Christianity b) more universal than all religions c) totally not incompatible with and not a threat to Christianity and d) not to be considered a religion. Sometimes he insists all of these within the same paragraph. I got the strong general impression at some points in this book that the author did not wish Freemasonry to be considered a religion because it serves a Higher and More Moral Truth (than religion), which causes me to go hey wait a minute are you actually following your own rhetoric and do you understand your own train of thought?

Probably not. Bad rhetoric is a marvelous thing. Again, quotation here is the better part of valor:

"Freemasonry can never grow old. It is ever young. We relegate antiques to the show case and never make use of them, fearing to risk the possibility of damaging or destroying them. We gaze upon them with awe and admiration, but they are for ornament, not for use. We look at the warming pan, but we make use of the hot-water bottle, even preferring the modern India rubber variety to its older stone predecessor. Such is the tendency of life."

My personal hot-water bottle of obscurantist speechifying, whether made of the most modern India-rubber or not, was, I hope, punctured long ago by, as Sarah Caudwell puts it, the secateurs of a keen intellect.*

If most of the book were like this, I would actively recommend it, but the author does not often rise to these heights. Most of the book is simply a series of exhortations to read more, study more, be nicer to other Masons, not act like members of an elite secret society in public unless you have been specifically asked to do so on an occasion such as giving a speech, etcetera. There is a lovely sequence on the wartime classifications of men as fit for service or not and how this can be extended as a metaphor to cover, well, everything else in life; the author's tendency to draw illuminating anecdotes from pseudo-Buddhism and obscure Biblical corners does not blend well with his insistence that everyone be an A-1 man. But this segment lasts only five pages.

In short, I found the book entertaining, but not amazingly so, and it is sufficiently outdated that I suspect it does not have much to do with anything currently Masonic, besides being so cryptic and preachy that it shouldn't be used as an informational source anyhow. If like me you enjoy reading this sort of thing for the few magnificently terrible sentences sometimes provided, I still think you could do better elsewhere; but it gave me some interesting moments.

ETA: Oh, and I initially forgot to mention-- the title page also has an interesting and intricate line-drawing of a seal which features what I can only describe as beavers rampant. They are so well drawn that I know I am not mistaken: those are actually beavers. It's very impressive. They are supporting between them a shield and treading underfoot a motto, and they are looking rather bored.

* No, she actually does. See Thus Was Adonis Murdered, p. 1, if you haven't already; and there's your real book recommendation for the evening.

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This book gets an entry to itself because it needs one. I read it on the plane from Boston; it was another present from sovay, who says that I am the person she thought of upon seeing on the bookstore shelf a novel in verse that was, from the back cover, very obviously slash of Herakles and the monster cattle-herd Geryon, only updated into a contemporary setting.

I repeat: novel in verse. Mythological slash. The person I'd have thought of is lnhammer, but it was fair to think of me.

The thing is, Anne Carson is both a moderately well-known poet and a moderately well-known writer on the classics, whose Eros the Bittersweet I was assigned in college and whose translations of Sappho are Not The Way I'd Do Them but so very much so that they absolutely fascinate me because I just wouldn't have thought of it like that. So I went into this confidently expecting it not to suck, despite the novel-in-verse-ness, which I usually take as a warning sign.

I-- hmmm. I am going to have to reread this at some point, is the thing. It is very rare for me to look at a book and say that I just don't get it, that I can't even tell whether there is something to get but that I think there might be and I don't know what it is. Over my head at bird-height, this went. At least, the primary chunk of it did. There are several portions of this book, and the first oh five pages or so are brilliant and worthy. A large part of what we know of Geryon, who was killed by Herakles as part of that hero's tenth labor, comes from the fragments of a poem by Stesichorus, a poem we have in sketch and quotation but not entirety. Stesichorus is most well known as the author of the Palinode: he had written a poem insulting to Helen of Troy and from the aether she struck him blind. Knowing the cause, he sat down and wrote a very brief poem saying that none of it was true, that she had never been to the city of Troy, and she restored his sight. The Palinode is a perfect little piece. Carson's book, being about Geryon, begins with Stesichorus, and the first few pages are a metatextual meditation on the truth behind the story of the composition of the Palinode, a meditation so tangled that it intentionally bites itself in the small of the back, a dazzling piece of postmodernist rhetoric after which I wanted to applaud. It was witty and sweet and touching.

( Then the rest of the book started. )

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People on Livejournal-- this is a manual crosspost of the DW post which went up last night here. For some reason or other, despite the fact that none of my settings have changed, it failed to crosspost. Does anyone have any idea why it might have done that?

This book does do what I wanted it to do, which is to sort out the mass of references to shinobi in accounts of the wars surrounding the rise of the Tokugawa shogunate into 'historically probable', 'historically possible', and 'totally and completely mythical'. (The vast majority fall into that last category.)

However, it's, well. There is not much material, period, about ninjas that isn't incredibly full of myth and speculation, and there certainly isn't much in English. The author has therefore resorted to printing the speculation-- it's pretty clearly marked, but he keeps doing a thing where he'll say 'the following could not possibly have happened' and then go on for three paragraphs about it. This would be more forgivable if he were telling the popular version, but sometimes he is clearly just going on about what it would have been cool to have a ninja do in the circumstances, which is both unnecessary and, to me personally at least, kind of boring. Also, the illustrations are incredibly sensationalistic, and he reprints a lot of plates from the seventeenth-century Bansen Shukai, a collection of ninja stuff, without ever talking much about what that collection is or whether it was intended to be factual; this makes me less inclined to trust him over the things he puts into the category of 'historically probable'.

You can't have it both ways, really. Either you can have a book about the nature of covert operations in Japanese warfare and how the idea of covert operations interacts with samurai ideology and how all the myths arose and where the Western ideas about ninjas came from, which is a book I would like to read very much, thank you, or you can have a book about how cool it would be if all those myths were historically true and wouldn't it have been awesome if Hattori Hanzo were as badass as everybody says he is in anime, and honestly I don't need that book as there is all this internet in the world. This book was trying to be both at once and therefore probably not succeeding at either to anyone's real satisfaction, because people who want to hear about Cool Stuff may well be annoyed at the author continually pointing out that none of the devices people have claimed ninjas used to walk on water actually, you know, work, and the rest of us can certainly be annoyed at the general tone.

Not recommended. Does anyone know a better reference work on the same topic?

Oh hey only three hundred books left to read. Cool.

After yesterday's Infinity Of Tristram Shandy I wanted to read something relaxing and, above all, short. This is a cute little guide-book to Japanese youkai (the word has concepts of spirit, demon, ghost, goblin, revenant, etc., but is essentially untranslatable). I know a fair number of youkai categories and classifications from anime and other books and having done some gruntwork for an Utagawa Kuniyoshi print show at the Boston MFA a few years back-- this is my favorite of the prints they had-- and I have for some time been wanting an English translation of Shigeru Mizuki's youkai encyclopedias, which are actually based on him having gone out into the countryside in the late 1960s and asking people in extremely rural areas for stories.

However, this book does meet my basic criteria for success in its field: it has information I did not know, and its illustrator was one of Mizuki's assistants. And it has an impeccable bibliography.

So yeah, this has a lot of neat trivia about the circumstances under which household objects come to life if they reach more than ninety-nine years old, and why demon cats drink lamp oil, and why you should never eat a block of tofu offered to you by a small child in the road because it may well be full of demonic spores that will eat you within minutes. Spirits of foxes and otters, spirits of rice paddys and antique cutlery, spirits that are dangerous and spirits that are silly and spirits that are simply totally inexplicable (there's this one kind of monstrous giant that bestrides a distance of twelve miles and is only ever seen washing its hands in a river between its feet; it never interacts with anybody). Giant disembodied feet. Giant invisible sentient walls. Things that are attested folklore and things that were made up by one author in one anthology and things that are modern urban legends that have seriously caught on.

I'm happy with this. It does exactly what it should and intends to in a mildly cheesy but not annoying format, and it's entertaining without sacrificing accuracy and clarity. And the illustrations are very good and make continual reference to various ukiyo-e artists, sometimes as outright citation. Goodness knows, I have seen far worse reference books: this is a useful one.

Now here is a book one should not read in a day. It is, as far as I can tell, all the best of the eighteenth century, meaning that it is brilliant and charming and witty, light on its feet and filthy in its humor and long as only an eighteenth-century author with the bit in his teeth can manage. I had seen the movie (which is extremely good, and successfully films an intrinsically unfilmable novel) and read various excerpts, including the chapter which is primarily a series of curving lines, but had not read the thing itself. I have spent vast portions of the day and night reading the thing itself, and loving every minute of it, but I do think it was unfair of it to keep growing another hundred pages every time my back was turned. I also think that it is unfair of the edition to begin its pagination over every time it gets to the end of one of the original volumes, as it means that you keep thinking that you have two hundred pages left, when in fact you have seven, or eight, or quite possibly twenty hundred. For as Tristram Shandy declares that he wishes it to be, I think this is the original expanding novel, which will eventually put out its tendrils and devour life as we all know it. He states that even if he produces two volumes a year till he dies, his memoirs will never catch up with himself, and this is a fair metaphor for the work it gave me as a reader.

I could, in terms of how high its quality is and how much I love it, wish it twice as long: but not in one day, dammit.

( Anyway, I digress, which is appropriate... )