"Among his favorite parts of the book... are two short lines on the penultimate page: 'First we feel. Then we fall.'"

"The lines are simple and undistorted, Dr. Slote said. 'It’s the plot to every human life.' Other parts, however, are considerably more complex. For example, a sentence on the fourth page reads: 'What clashes here of wills gen wonts, oystrygods gaggin fishy-gods!' Another line: 'bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-nuk!'"

From "A Book Club Took 28 Years to Read ‘Finnegans Wake.’ Now, It’s Starting Over. The group in California started on the notoriously challenging novel by James Joyce in 1995. In October, it reached the end" (NYT).

I blogged a Guardian article about this reading group last month, but this is new material. 

"Oystrygods gaggin fishy-gods" — I could only think of male and female genitalia and oral sex, but a quick google tells me also to think of Ostrogoths and Visigoths. Which goes to show, it's not enough to think of one thing. You have to keep thinking. 

"There is no next book. We’re only reading one book. Forever."

 From "'It never ends: the book club that spent 28 years reading Finnegans Wake/The group in Venice, California, started the difficult James Joyce book in 1995. They reached its final page in October" (The Guardian).

The book took 17 years to write, but there are book clubs that continue to meet, going at a rate of 1 or 2 pages per weekly meeting, and going back to the beginning every time they reach the end.

"The last sentence of the book ends midsentence and then it picks up at the front of the book. It’s cyclical. It never ends."

"ChatGPT doesn’t just get things wrong at times, it can fabricate information. Names and dates. Medical explanations."

"The plots of books. Internet addresses. Even historical events that never happened. When ChatGPT was recently asked how James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin first met — there is no evidence they ever did — this is how it responded: 'James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin met in Zurich, Switzerland in 1916. Both men were living in exile in Zurich during World War I. Joyce was a writer and Lenin was a revolutionary. They met at the Cafe Odéon, a popular gathering place for artists and intellectuals in Zurich.' Fabrications like these are common...."

 
From "When A.I. Chatbots Hallucinate" (NYT).

From the comments over there: "It's interesting that the chatbot brought Lenin and Joyce together in Zurich, just as Tom Stoppard's play 'Travesties' imagined them both in the Zurich library during World War I. I'm guessing chatbots scrape their information from available fiction as well as non-fiction? And what we get is Webster's literal definition of travesty: 'a debased, distorted, or grossly inferior imitation.'"

Ha ha ha. Great comment. And I love the play "Travesties." Here's what I wrote in 2014 when we saw the play (twice!):

A nice, precise 10 for today. Here it is, Althouse-curated TikTok. You can rank them, like that lady ranked the lyrics of "It's Corn."

1. The vacation on TikTok vs. Reality.

2. The price of an overnight stay — with breakfast and a beautiful view — in Kyrgystan.

3. What country is longest, north to south?

4. The lines of "It's Corn" — ranked.

5. Spend $80,000 on a truck....

6. Sometimes a m-f talks nice to your face...

7. The phrase "we love that for you."

8. She believes she is still 70.

9. Ricky Gourmet reads the letter his 12-year-old self wrote him.

10. Trying to read.

"He talks a bit about famous customers he’s served, including Patti Smith, who shares his fondness for Robert Louis Stevenson’s essays."

"Philip Larkin would come in, looking for first editions of his own books. He sold a copy of 'Finnegans Wake' to Johnny Depp, who was 'trying incredibly hard not to be recognized and with predictably comic results.'"

From "Love the Smell of Old Books? This Bookseller Would Like You to Leave./In his grouchy, funny memoir, 'A Factotum in the Book Trade,' Marius Kociejowski writes about what a good bookstore should feel like, famous customers he’s served and more" (NYT).

The review is by Dwight Garner — note: "garner" is fine as a name! — and the reason Kociejowski would like you to leave — if you walk into his store and say "I love the smell of old books" — is that a thousand people have walked into the store and said the same damned thing.

The Robert Louis Stevenson essays Patti Smith might have bought is "An Apology for Idlers," which I've blogged about many times, including:

"James Joyce’s 'Ulysses'... was published in Paris on Feb. 2, 1922 — 100 years ago [today]...."

"Readers who journey with Joyce’s Leopold Bloom as he navigates the shoals of everyday life on an unremarkable summer’s day in Dublin become deeply familiar with his inner world and the quirky crevices of his mind.... In Bloom, [Joyce] created a settled, contented individual, 'a good man,' as he once described him, a counterpoint to the noisiness of the world around him. In 1919, W.B. Yeats wrote apocalyptically that 'things fall apart; the center cannot hold,' but Joyce, in the same period, pitched his antihero’s tent firmly on the center ground.... In a passage at the heart of Joyce’s message to the troubled world around him, Bloom sets out his credo: 'Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred.' It is 'love,' the opposite of hatred, he insists, 'that is really life.'... In the 'Circe' episode... Bloom appears as a political reformer with a charmingly idealistic manifesto: 'The reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile. Three acres and a cow for all children of nature.'... At a time like ours, when narrow partisan opinions thrive in places and prejudice continues to flourish in plain sight, I [like] Bloom’s centrist appeal to transcend force, hatred and history...."

Writes Daniel Mulhall, Ireland’s ambassador to the United States and author of "Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey" in The Washington Post.

"I may be skeptical of the metaverse but I’m way more skeptical of the singularity. The singularity imagines a world in which our consciousness can transcend our bodies..."

"... where the virtual world of the metaverse would be the collective space our disembodied consciousness inhabits. Every few years, someone writes a book assuring us that the rate of technological change is so high that computers will increase beyond the complexity of the human brain and either we will be uploadable into the Matrix or machine intelligence will so outpace human intelligence that the machines will be where it’s at. I’m skeptical because human bodies are hard. I’ve been a Type 1 diabetic for more than 35 years. Get me a functional mechanical pancreas that can actually manage my chronic disease as well as I manage it with insulin shots and then maybe we can talk about uploading my consciousness into silicon."

Said Ethan Zuckerman, an associate professor of public policy, quoted in "Is Meta’s Facial Recognition Retreat Another Head Fake?" (NYT).

That reminds me... I've been reading Jonathan Franzen's new book, "Crossroads," and I encountered the word "metempsychosis." A 15-year-old boy — we've been told and shown that he's a genius — is watching his younger brother running in a heavy snowstorm:

"Hyper-educated?! Who's hyper-educated?"

 

Here's the column: "What happens if the progressive vanguard talks mostly to itself?" (WaPo, Megan McArdle). 

McArdle is reacting to the Ezra Klein piece about the progressive election analyst David Shor that we talked about back here. She writes: 

Shor thinks the left has a major problem with its youthful and well-educated activist base, which staffs left-leaning newsrooms and runs campaigns. They focus, naturally, on issues that excite them, and Shor told Klein “the things that are most exciting to activists and journalists are politically toxic.”... 

As Matt Yglesias pointed out on Twitter, “A closed circle of young, college educated staffers is likely to end up further off-center the more they talk to themselves.”... 

Democrats cannot afford to cater only to that hyper-educated class — not in a country where only a third of the population has a bachelor’s degree.

I don't even know if I'd call people who've gone to college educated. Especially these days. But hyper-educated? What the hell is that? Is it like hyperventilating — it goes to your head, makes you dizzy?

Hey, I looked it up in the OED. Not only is the prefix "hyper-" defined — it means beyond/over — but there's a separate entry for "hypereducated" and the one historical quote is from James Joyce, from "Dubliners" (1914): 

Had she really any life of her own behind all her propagandism? There had never been any ill-feeling between them until that night. It unnerved him to think that she would be at the supper-table, looking up at him while he spoke with her critical quizzing eyes. Perhaps she would not be sorry to see him fail in his speech. An idea came into his mind and gave him courage. He would say, alluding to Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia: “Ladies and Gentlemen, the generation which is now on the wane among us may have had its faults but for my part I think it had certain qualities of hospitality, of humour, of humanity, which the new and very serious and hypereducated generation that is growing up around us seems to me to lack.” 

"Don’t just play, feel the notes softly come out from your fingers and heart. The main melody comes many times, must be played with different shapes, colors, characters."

Said Lang Lang, quoted in "Lang Lang: The Pianist Who Plays Too Muchly/On a new recording of Bach’s 'Goldberg' Variations, the superstar artist stretches the music beyond taste" (NYT).

Does "beyond taste" turn out to be something positive? The critic, Anthony Tommasini, says "I and many others have long found Mr. Lang’s performances overindulgently expressive and marred by exaggerated interpretive touches."

What does it mean to feel the notes come from your heart?... That approach risks making the music seem mannered, even manipulated.... What does it mean to play expressively? Compare classical music to film. Film buffs recognize overacting in a flash, and won’t put up with it. Mr. Lang, I think, does the equivalent of overacting in music; his expressivity tips over into exaggeration, even vulgarity.

Isn't nearly all pop music the equivalent of overacting? Why would classical music consumers retain a resistance to musical "overacting" when the whole rest of the culture has a taste for exaggeration and thrills. Look at our political discourse, and aren't the actors "overacting" these days? I haven't listened to Lang Lang, but for the purposes of reading Tommasini, I'm going to assume that Lang Lang is a man of our times.

He has won ardent fans for the sheer brilliance and energy of his playing. But many also respond to moments of deep expression, when he sure seems to be doing something to the music, almost always reflected in his physical mannerisms...

Musicians have always engaged us visually with physical mannerisms.

Taste is, of course, a subjective thing. But there is reason to question Mr. Lang’s.... Mr. Lang plays the Romantic repertory with a great deal of freedom, especially rhythmic freedom — what’s known as rubato. Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations certainly invite flexible approaches to rhythm and pacing. But it’s a question of degree, style, taste....

It’s like he’s attempting to show us how deeply he feels the music, to prove that it’s truly coming from his heart. But as a listener I don’t care about his feelings; I care about mine. He has to make this music touch me, not himself.

Tommasini dabbles in the risqué. Why isn't Lang Lang touching himself touching to Tommasini? That's the question I'm pondering at 5:56 in the morning!

AND: Here. You can listen and watch the notes coming softly out of the fingers:



ALSO: I wondered if "muchly" — a word in the NYT headline — is a word in bad taste. I looked it up in the OED and I see that as long ago as 1621 it was used to mean "Much, exceedingly, greatly," and it was in "later use" that it became a word deployed "with conscious humour." In 1922, James Joyce used in it "Ulysses": "Respectable girl meet after mass. Tanks awfully muchly."

"Democrats worry Feinstein can't handle Supreme Court battle/Colleagues fear the oldest senator may struggle to lead Democrats on the Judiciary Committee."

Politico interviewed more than a dozen Democratic senators and aides" about Dianne Feinstein, 87, who might not be up to the challenge of leading the opposition to Trump's nominee.

A Democratic senator, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said a group of Feinstein’s colleagues want Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) or Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) to serve as the top Democrat on the Judiciary panel for the upcoming nomination hearings, which are expected to be extraordinarily contentious. This senator is worried that potential missteps by Feinstein could cost Democrats seats.

“She’s not sure what she’s doing,” the Democratic senator said of Feinstein. “If you take a look at Kavanaugh, we may be short two senators because of that. And if this gets [messed] up, it may be the same result. I think it could impact a number of seats we can win,” the senator added.

Another Democratic senator said party leaders were “in an impossible position,” pointing out that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y) and other senior Democrats can’t replace a female senator for hearings on an expected female nominee to replace a deceased female Supreme Court justice....

A third Democratic senator put it this way: “She can’t pull this off.”...

ADDED: "Pull off" is a funny phrase. I looked it up in the OED. It has many meanings that are not at all what the third Democratic Senator meant. For example, in U.S. slang, it means "To steal, esp. by picking a pocket":

1883 ‘M. Twain’ Life on Mississippi lii. 511 I pulled off an old woman's leather; (robbed her of her pocket-book).

And it means, in "coarse slang," "To masturbate (a man); to cause (a man) to ejaculate by masturbation":

1909 J. Joyce Let. 8 Dec. in Sel. Lett. (1975) 184 I pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways.
1922 J. Joyce Ulysses iii. xviii. [Penelope] 711 How did we finish it off yes O yes I pulled him off into my handkerchief pretending not to be excited.

I'm using high prestige authors to illustrate the lowly meanings.

But the perfectly appropriate meaning is "To succeed in accomplishing, achieving, or producing (something); to carry off." Not necessarily some sort of sneaky caper!

1923 H. G. Wells Men like Gods i. i. 6 He was not really clever enough to pull such a thing off.
1960 ‘Miss Read’ Fresh from Country (1962) xviii. 197 ‘And good luck to the old girl, say I!’ continued Joan warmly... ‘Let's hope she pulls it off!’

"In 1988, he stunned Joyce scholars... by revealing that he had destroyed about a thousand letters he had received from his Aunt Lucia, James Joyce’s daughter..."

"... who spent decades in mental institutions; even more, he said, he had discarded correspondence that she had received from the Irish expatriate playwright Samuel Beckett, Joyce’s onetime secretary, with whom Lucia had fallen in love. 'No one was going to set their eyes on them and re-psychoanalyze my poor aunt,” [Stephen] Joyce told The New York Times that year. 'She went through enough of that when she was alive.... I didn’t want to have greedy little eyes and greedy little fingers going over them. My aunt may have been many things, but to my knowledge she was not a writer.... Where do you draw the line? Do you have any right to privacy?... What are people going to do to stop me?'... His refusals to grant access to the Joyce archive could seem arbitrary. He rejected the request of one author whose work was being published by Purdue University because he deemed the nickname of Purdue’s sports teams, the Boilermakers, to be vulgar."

From "Stephen Joyce Dies at 87; Guarded Grandfather’s Literary Legacy/The last direct descendant of the author of 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake' was a fierce protector of James Joyce’s estate, to the frustration of scholars" (NYT).

"I come to this blog for the hodology!"

Said kwenzel, in the first post of the day, which is about the meaning of "path."

Wikipedia knows...



... what the OED does not:



"Homology" is the quality of sameness.


"Podology" is the branch of medicine that deals with the feet — a less-familiar alternative to "podiatry."

"Chorology" is the study of the geographical extent or limit of something (for example, crayfish).

"Horology" is the science of measuring time. The "hor-" attached to "-ology" just means "hour."

"Codology" is a specifically Irish sort of hoaxing. The OED quotes James Joyce — "The why and the wherefore and all the codology of the business" — and the Daily Express (1928) — "There is in Ireland a science unknown to us in England called Codology... The English is ‘leg-pulling’... When I received an invitation to breakfast at the Dublin Zoo I thought that I could detect the hand of the chief codologist."

It's the "-ology" ending stuck on "cod," which is a slang term for a hoax or joke. Here's James Joyce again:

You went there when you wanted to do something... And behind the door of one of the closets there was a drawing in red pencil of a bearded man in a Roman dress with a brick in each hand and underneath was the name of the drawing:

Balbus was building a wall.

Some fellow had drawn it there for a cod. It had a funny face but it was very like a man with a beard.... Perhaps that was why they were there because it was a place where some fellows wrote things for cod....

But back to "hodology," which Wikipedia says is "the study of pathways." I click on the Wikipedia links to "Psychology," "Philosophy," "Geology," and "Neuroscience," and the word "hodology" appears on none of the pages. Is this a cod? I don't know. But I love the drawing on the page for neuroscience...



Drawing by Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1899) of neurons in the pigeon cerebellum. It takes me back to one of my favorite subjects, How to Draw Like Paul Klee.

"In the Philippine capital, Manila, meat is recycled from landfill tips, washed and re-cooked."

"It's called 'pagpag' and it's eaten by the poorest people who can't afford to buy fresh meat." BBC video:



ADDED: I'm trying to understand the Britishism "landfill tips." As an American, my first thought was that people are hearing the news — getting a "tip" — that meat has been deposited in a landfill. But I think the "tip" is the deposit of garbage into the landfill. A container is dumped or tipped, and where we say "dump," they say "tip." I looked it up in the OED, which has "rubbish tip" — with no definition — in its entry for "rubbish." 3 quotes are offered, perhaps to orient us, and one is the deliberately weird: "On a step a gnome totting among a rubbishtip crouches to shoulder a sack of rags and bones." That's James Joyce, "Ulysses." Google Books gives me the larger context. I scroll up to get a running leap into it and find: "Peep at his wearables. By mighty! What's he got? Jubilee mutton. Bovril, by James. Wants it real bad. D'ye ken bare socks? Seedy cuss in the Richmond? Rawthere! Thought he had a deposit of lead in his penis. Trumpery insanity...."

My favorite linguistic issue ever: What if Trump didn't say "shithole" but "shithouse"?

Have you seen this one? National Review editor Rich Lowry was on "This Week" yesterday and this happened:

STEPHANOPOULOS: It's pretty clear [President Trump] said what's been reported. By denying it, he puts his supporters in the most difficult position.

LOWRY: He used a different -- my understanding from the meeting, he used a different, but very closely related vulgarity. He said s-house, and not s-hole. That's not going to make a difference to anyone. But the general remarks -- yes -- I'd like to have a transcript, because everyone is putting so much weight on this to see exactly what was said in what ways, but the general tenor of the discussion has been reported accurately.

Not going to make a difference to anyone?! Now I'm determined to find a shithouse/shithole distinction.

Historically, going back to the 1600s, "shithole" first meant "The rectum or anus." (I'm using the OED.) "Shithole" took on other meanings in the early 20th century: "a wretched place," "a toilet." And in the late 20th century, it also became an alternative to "asshole" to mean "a despicable person."

"Shithouse," going back to the 1600s, meant "toilet," usually an outdoor toilet — a "privy" or "outhouse." The oldest published usage is (like Trump's purported use) metaphorical:

1659 J. Howell Ital. Prov. Let. Ital. Prov. sig. A4v, in Παροιμιογραϕια If Florence had a Sea Port, she would make a Hortyard of Pisa, a Counting-house of Ligorn, and a shitt-house of Luca.

Like "shithole," "shithouse" came to mean "a wretched place" in the 20th century. The first published use was in 1949, in Henry Miller's "Sexus": "You leave the toilet and you step into the big shithouse. Whatever you touch is shitty."

And here's Martin Amis in "London Fields" in 1989:

The class system just doesn't know when to call it a day. Even a nuclear holocaust, I think, would fail to make that much of a dent in it. Crawling through the iodized shithouse that used to be England, people would still be brooding about accents and cocked pinkies, about maiden names and settee or sofa, about the proper way to eat a roach in society. Do you take the head off first or start with the legs?

Ha ha. Settee or sofa. It's so like shithouse or shithole. And yet so different.

Anyway, "shithouse" also came to mean "despicable person" in the 20th century (at least in Britain). And it's been an adjective meaning "contemptible, bad, disgusting" at least since 1966, when Charles Bukowski wrote in a letter, "The flunky fired from his shithouse job, the guys like me."

There are also the phrases: "To be in the shithouse" (as in "Fleetwood Mac's career was definitely not in the shithouse") and "shithouse rumor" ("All you had was a shithouse rumor" (heh, that's all we have about Trump and "shithouse")) and the well-known "shithouse rat" ("Cute as a shithouse rat," wrote the lowly, lowry cur James Joyce in that shithouse book "Ulysses").

I've got to say, if Trump said it, I hope he said "shithouse." First, I like the resonance with his real estate career. It's the humblest real estate, a shithouse. "Shithole" has more of an anatomical whiff to it — not that Trump doesn't also have his connection to body parts (tiny hands, grabbed pussies, differently sized penises).

ADDED: There's also the subtle topic of what goes on in the mind of a person who hears "shithouse" and later drags "shithole" up out of his memory. If the wrong word was reported, what caused the house-to-hole substitution? Phobia about human anatomy?

"What remains enthralling, though, are Millett’s close readings, her exposés of the naked emperors of the literary left."

"'After receiving his servant’s congratulations on his dazzling performance, Rojack proceeds calmly to the next floor and throws his wife’s body out of the window,' is Millett’s deadpan description of the aftermath of the hero’s sodomization of a maid in Mailer’s An American Dream. Millett then observes, 'The reader is given to understand that by murdering one woman and buggering another, Rojack became a "man."'"

Writes Judith Shulevitz in "Kate Millett: ‘Sexual Politics’ & Family Values" (New York Review of Books):

For a glorious moment, this very bookish literary critic was the face of American feminism. The New York Times called her the “high priestess.” After “Prisoner of Sex” became the talk of the town—and the revered Harper’s editor Willie Morris was fired for publishing it—Mailer organized a riotous debate known as “Town Bloody Hall,” which was filmed by Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker and is now streamable. It was a circus, and it was Millett who set it in motion, even though she refused to show up. Mailer aimed a torrent of insults at the feminists who did agree to take the stage or appear in the audience, among them Greer, Diana Trilling, Susan Sontag, Betty Friedan, and Cynthia Ozick. They rolled their eyes and gave as good as they got—much better, in most cases—and the crowd roared with delight. Try to imagine a public clash of ideas being so joyously gladiatorial today.

Here it is:



ADDED: The word "bugger" (for anal sex) is rare these days. Did you know the word is related to "Bulgarian"? From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

bugger (n.) "sodomite," 1550s, earlier "heretic" (mid-14c.), from Medieval Latin Bulgarus "a Bulgarian" (see Bulgaria), so called from bigoted notions of the sex lives of Eastern Orthodox Christians or of the sect of heretics that was prominent there 11c. Compare Old French bougre "Bulgarian," also "heretic; sodomite."

bugger (v.) "to commit buggery with," 1590s, from bugger (n.)...

The earliest use of "bugger" to express "annoyance, hatred, dismissal, etc.," is, according to the OED, in the diary John Adams, in 1779: "Dr. W[inship] told me of Tuckers rough tarry Speech, about me at the Navy Board.—I did not say much to him at first, but damn and buger my Eyes, I found him after a while as sociable as any Marble-head man."

AND: Here's a William Safire column (from 1995) on the word "bugger," written after some Congressman said "We're here to nail the little bugger down" (and the "little bugger" was Bill Clinton). How disrespectful was it?

"The confluence of North Korea’s nuclear testing and Mr. Xi’s important public appearances is not a coincidence...."

"It is intended to show that Mr. Kim, the leader of a small, rogue neighboring state, can diminish Mr. Xi’s power and prestige as president of China, they said. In fact, some analysts contended that the latest test may have been primarily aimed at pressuring Mr. Xi, not President Trump. 'Kim knows that Xi has the real power to affect the calculus in Washington,' said Peter Hayes, the director of the Nautilus Institute, a research group that specializes in North Korea. 'He’s putting pressure on China to say to Trump: "You have to sit down with Kim Jong-un."' What Mr. Kim wants most, Mr. Hayes said, is talks with Washington that the North Korean leader hopes will result in a deal to reduce American troops in South Korea and leave him with nuclear weapons. And in Mr. Kim’s calculation, China has the influence to make that negotiation happen."

From "North Korea Nuclear Test Puts Pressure on China and Undercuts Xi" (NYT).

What makes a nation a "rogue"? A "rogue" was, originally, "An idle vagrant, a vagabond; one of a group or class of such people." (I'm using the unlinkable OED, as I take a break from thinking about nuclear war to contemplate a quirk of language.) These days, a "rogue" is "A dishonest, unprincipled person; a rascal, a scoundrel." Or "A mischievous person, esp. a child; a person whose behaviour one disapproves of but who is nonetheless likeable or attractive. Frequently as a playful term of reproof or reproach or as a term of endearment." Playful. Endearment. Oh, North Korea, you rogue!

But "rogue nation" and "rogue states" are, of course, standard terms. Other standard terms are: rogue cop, rogue hero*, rogue lawyer, rogue operation, rogue priest, rogue radical, rogue soldier, rogue word**, rogue trader, rogue wave.

When we say "rogue state," we mean "a state perceived to be flouting international law and threatening the security of other nations." That is, whoever is using the term is doing the perceiving.
___________________

* "1899 F. W. Chandler Romances Roguery i. i. 6 The Roman de Renart also, with its masquerade and bold parody, and its rogue hero, the fox, went a long way toward preparing for the advent of the picaro" (OED).



** "1922 J. Joyce Ulysses i. iii. [Proteus] 47 Roguewords, tough nuggets patter in their pockets" (OED).

There are 2 serious books out right now about a man trying to live like a particular nonhuman animal.

These are nonfiction books, and they are being taken seriously. I read about them in Joshua Rothman's article in The New Yorker, "The Metamorphosis/What is it like to be an animal?"

Two men — Thomas Thwaites and Charles Foster — independently conceived of their projects. Thwaites, an artist, tried to be a goat and wrote about it in "GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human," and Foster, a veterinarian/lawyer/columnist, tried to be a fox and a badger and wrote about it in "Being a Beast."

These projects were entirely different from fictional efforts at inhabiting the existence of a nonhuman animal, such as Tolstoy's "Strider" (about a horse) and James Joyce's "Ulysses" (with a bit about a rat). As Rothman sums those up:

In these pastoral and sensual portrayals of the animal self, different critiques of the human self are embedded. For Tolstoy, the problem with people is that they’re marooned in their egos. The clearheaded directness of animals is a remedy for that self-obsession. For Joyce, the problem is that people are sleepy, numb, and incurious. We could learn, he thinks, from animals’ eager sensuality. Tolstoy’s animals teach us to be good; Joyce’s teach us to be alive.

What Thwaites and Foster were doing was different from that: They were using the animal not to understand humanity but as an escape from something they already believed about human beings. Thwaites finds "human personhood... stressful, absurd, and—worst of all—narcissistic" and wants to lose his ego. Foster finds human personhood dull and seeks a more vivid existence.

Rothman ends his essay like this:

There is an irony to these books: the more Thwaites and Foster try to change into animals, the more fully they become Thwaites and Foster. That’s not to say they never transform themselves... “Real, lasting change is possible,” Foster writes, “to our appetites, our fears, and our views,” and despite that change the self persists. This ability to endure through change is the miracle and mystery of selfhood. Rethinking who we are; dreaming up new ways of living; taking ourselves apart to build ourselves back up—for human beings, these activities are natural. They are our never-ending hunt.

That is, thinking beyond what is natural and trying being what you are not is even more human than continuing your conventional ways. A nonhuman animal would never even think of such a project, let alone attempt to execute it. And, that's why these projects are, on their own terms, incoherent. You're never less like a nonhuman animal than when you are trying to be a nonhuman animal. Only a human being would do such a thing.

"'My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions'..."

"... James Joyce wrote in a letter to his brother at the beleaguered age of 25.... Martin Amis... and Vladimir Nabokov... suffered 'catastrophic tooth-loss' while in their 40s... Virginia Woolf['s] teeth were pulled on the bizarre theory that they caused her mental disorders.... Dostoevsky's Underground Man masochistically glories in the 'malignant' pain in his mouth. Handsome Count Vronsky is deformed by toothache after Anna Karenina's [SPOILER ALERT] suicide. Abscesses and botched extractions mark the decline of the Buddenbrook clan. John Updike's 1955 short story 'Dentistry and Doubt' places a seminary student in the dentist's chair and carries out a primer on theodicy. 'Even his toothbrush,' thinks the young cleric, his mouth filled with metal instruments, 'which on good days presented itself as an acolyte of matinal devotion, today seemed an agent of atheistic hygiene, broadcasting the hideous fact of bacteria. Why had God created them . . . ?'"

The beginning a Wall Street Journal piece about a novel where the main character is a dentist.

An awful lot of what seems like scientific information about nutrition deserves to be called "nutritional folklore."

According to George Johnson, who cites extensive research into cancer that has found "little evidence that fruits and vegetables are protective or that fatty foods are bad." Back in 1997, there was a big authoritative review of over 4,000 studies that pushed green vegetables to prevent lung and stomach cancer,  and broccoli, cabbage and brussels sprouts for thyroid and colon cancer. Onions, tomatoes, garlic, carrots and citrus fruits seemed generally helpful in the fight against cancer. But 10 years later, it was all taken back.

The pro-produce advice had relied on interviewing people about what they remembered eating in the past, and the newer, more rigorous studies used "'prospective' protocols, in which the health of large populations was followed in real time." And:

With even the most rigorous studies, it is hard to adjust for what epidemiologists call confounding factors: Assiduous eaters of fruits and vegetables probably weigh less, exercise more often and are vigilant about their health in other ways...

All this badgering about eating lots of fruits and vegetables, all the cabbage and broccoli we've been pressured to buy and wash and cut up and cook and choke down! There was never good evidence for it. Obviously, it seemed good to people because it fit what we already thought was supposed to be good. But why?!

***

Let me show you this passage I've remembered for a long time, from James Joyce's "Ulysses" (scroll to line 7825):

Only weggebobbles and fruit.... They say it's healthier. Windandwatery though. Tried it. Keep you on the run all day. Bad as a bloater. Dreams all night.

ADDED: A poll:

How much vegetables would you eat if you found out, for sure, that there was no particular health benefit? (Not counting potatoes!)
	I eat a lot of vegetables now, and I like them and would continue to eat a lot.
	I eat a lot now, but I'd cut way back, perhaps to almost none.
	I'd do what I already do but feel much better about it: Not eat much.
	I don't each much now, because I don't like them, so I'd cut out nearly everything.
pollcode.com free polls

AND: What is the environmental cost to producing all these vegetables and trucking and flying them about? What of all the money families spend on vegetables, because they've heard the propaganda, money that could be spent on more satisfying, concentrated protein? What of all the torment we've caused schoolkids giving them lunches they hate that leave them hungry and running for the vending machines for junk food? Where is the science?

"Mr. Joyce was not teaching early Egyptian perversions nor inventing new ones."

"Girls lean back everywhere, showing lace and silk stockings; wear low-cut sleeveless blouses, breathless bathing suits; men think thoughts and have emotions about these things everywhere — seldom as delicately and imaginatively as Mr. Bloom (in the 'Nausicaa' episode) — and no one is corrupted."

Funny the way literature was defended on the ground that it wasn't going to affect us. But that was a literary device, used to portray the social conservative as unsophisticated — cringing at phantoms.