Found objects    As befits a holiday, I managed to do nothing in particular today. I did catch up on my newspaper reading. There was a nice review of James Dean

Rebel With a Surprising Legacy
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/movies/29raff.html

and a report on that perennial Big Red oddity, the Cornell Brain Collection.

In Search of Answers From the Great Brains of Cornell
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/24/science/24brai.html

If I’m not mistaken, I think Professor E.B. Titchener, the founder of the department, is one of the greats of American psychology—a disciple of Wilhelm Wundt—and his own brain is on view in that display case on the second floor of Uris (or was, when I was there).

One fer th’ th-th-censor    I’m still tickled at mistaking Banyuls’s Italian obscenity for a French one. I’m glad that’s what it was, or else my understanding of French declension would be as bad as I’d thought. (Then again, it probably is.) I also thought it was kind of amusing that one of the usage examples in the Dictionnaire érotique for enculé is «Le Russe gamahuche et l’Italien encule» (attributed to one L. Protat, from the XIX^e s.). I think in the Anglo world gamahucher is “the French way” and enculer is “the Greek way”—bringing to mind how (supposedly) our “Russian roulette” is “X roulette” to the Russians, “Y roulette” to the Xs, “Z roulette” to the Ys, …

Found object    I was just reminded of this intriguing story by a post of FL_boi. Stateside followup understandably hasn’t been meticulous (as far as I’ve seen). The accounts I saw differ in the assessment of his reported virtuosity. Maybe I’m too cynical for my own good, but I do hope that he’s a genuinely lost soul and ends up being helped—and that it’s not some sort of stunt.

Worldwide response to ‘Piano Man’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4557619.stm

À bigglesworth    et tout les Proustophiles! (If that’s not a word, it ought to be.)

The Kolb-Proust Archive
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/kolbp/

It seems a little weird to think of such a celebrated figure as Proust doing something as ordinary and familiar as filling out a questionnaire.

Perstonal Shtuff    Alas, I think I’m going to have to knock it off with the midnight breakfasts. They give me the oddest nightmares. Last night I had an especially pornographic one. Str8 porn too, no less.

Oh boy, a holiday tomorrow. Not that it makes much difference to my routine—I’ll be working on a freelance project—but I suppose one ought to get into the spirit of things. Maybe I’ll cook. I stocked the cupboard this weekend with canned goods and stuff from the dollar store, plus a nice serving dish and serving fork and spoon. (I’m getting addicted to shopping there.) It’s a toss-up between a tripe stew and a Chinese-style steamed/poached whole fish. I’m leaning toward fish because it’s easier, and I’ve been meaning to try a

Recipe    “Meat” Sauce for Steamed Fish   I think the “meat sauce” can be any bottled meat or steak sauce, like A-1, Worcestershire, or Escoffier, but I’m not 100% sure. 1. Combine 2 T. each meat sauce, light soy sauce, oyster sauce, bean sauce, hoisin sauce, sugar, chopped scallions, and chopped garlic; 1-1/2 T. minced fresh ginger; and some minced hot peppers (optional). 2. Heat 1/4 c. vegetable oil, add the meat sauce mixture, and bring to a boil, stirring. 3. Serve hot over the fish.

That’s from Craig Claiborne and Virginia Lee’s Chinese cookbook. Seems easy enough, especially if I cheat with the bean sauce and use stuff out of a packet.

Mysteries of my existence     (Such as it is.) The other day I woke up with a black-and-blue bruise on one side of my right knee, and today there’s one on exactly the opposite side. I don’t remember ever hitting it. And even if I rolled over in my sleep and hit the wall next to the bed hard enough to leave a mark without waking up, twice, you’d think they’d both be on the same side, not two opposite sides. I think the wicked right-knee fairy is visiting me at night and whacking my patella with her little mallet.

Observations du jour   I wouldn’t recommend it, but apparently a bit of water and two minutes in the microwave will sort of resuscitate a plate of leftover beans on toast and fried egg that’s lain out all night.

Eleven ducklings in tow behind Ma Duck in the creek on campus today, and the Goose family in the drainage pond for said creek next to my place is seemingly living the life of Reilly—Dada and Mama and six goslings, all eatin’, taking a dip in the pond to cool off, then eatin’ some more. One of the kids seems to like to wander off apart and Dada has to keep nipping him back.

Found object   A marvelous backgrounder on the “intelligent design” movement that’s supposed to be a scientifically valid alternative to evolutionary theory.

Devolution: Why Intelligent Design Isn’t (by H. Allen Orr)
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050530fa_fact

Book quiz    By way of ABlogWalksIntoABar by way of radmama. I should mention that I index books for a living and so to keep to the spirit, I do have to exclude a lot—although everything I read, whether by choice or by compulsion, influences me.

1. Number of books owned   Like radmama, too many to think about comfortably. Certainly in the hundreds, probably 1000+, accumulated over the years. The scary thing to me is not that I’m profligate in acquiring them (I’m not, or don’t think I am)—but that even limiting yourself to the most worthy, enriching, and empowering of purchases, you can end up with a severe storage problem.
   
2. Last book purchase   Nonfiction: John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language on the scientific case for a primordial human mother-tongue, which evidence suggests must have existed. It should be a good companion for Merritt Ruhlen’s The Origin of Language, which I’ve been chewing through for a while now. Fiction: My tastes have lately turned toward historical fiction, especially thriller-dramas, and especially if they’re not only smart but have a gorey or seamy aspect to them—like Caleb Carr’s detective novels, or Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose or Foucault’s Pendulum. The last such was probably Charles Palliser’s The Unburied with its hardscrabble Edwardian boarding-school setting. I particularly enjoy conceptual conceits, though—like the gruesome whodunit built around Andreas Vesalius’s anatomical drawings in Barbara Hodgson’s The Sensualist, or the fantastic conspiracy in Lawrence Norfolk’s Lempriére’s Dictionary. Best of all, though, is when you have a tale that’s true, like John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil—and I am most looking forward to Andrea di Robilant’s A Venetian Affair. Alas, so many books, so little time!
   
3. Last book read   The aforementioned The Unburied by Charles Palliser. I’m also in the middle of Peter Straub’s Koko, though.
   
4. Five most meaningful books   I honestly can’t name any such. It’s like trying to name the five most significant moments in your life. For some, there are certainly some singular experiences; but for the rest of us, we’re the combination of all of our experiences, no one of which figures significantly above all the others. Indeed, as shown by my earlier responses, I rather associate with the main character in Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War:
   

   … in the library in Bologna where Alessandro did most of his work, it was often cold enough to see breath turn white. One afternoon, an hour or so before darkness, only a few scholars were in the reading room, which was so enormous that a large woodstove heated only a shallow layer of air near the ceiling. With his legs pressed together to conserve heat, and his collar buttoned up around his neck, Alessandro was bent over half a dozen volumes spread out on a long table. He often read six books at once, not because he enjoyed it, but to check one against the other and to compare arguments and accounts. The truth was often great enough to cover in its self-contradictory expanse at least six points of view, and where one was weak or incomplete the others continued the narrative. Alessandro examined the books as if they were witnesses, and despite having to turn pages back and forth almost continuously to bring various incidents into alignment, he employed this technique to considerable advantage, for the compilation of accounts seemed to yield a product rather than a sum.

   That product is what keeps me going!

Found objects    I must say, it’s kind of nice when the annoying right-leaning replacement for the annoying right-leaning Bill Safire on the Times Op-Ed page and the left-leaning temporary replacement for Maureen Dowd happen to write columns that are sort of in concord.

Taking Luck Seriously
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/21/opinion/21miller.html

Darth Vader’s Family Values
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/21/opinion/21tierney.html

Perstonal Shtuff    I was pretty lucky with media purchases this week. There was a DVD of the documentary film The James Dean Story by Bob Altman and George W. George (didn’t the latter co-produce My Dinner With Andre too?) at the local Dollar Deals, and then Teach Yourself Romanian rang up for $2 less than marked at Borders, and just today now a philosophy of language textbook rang up for $5 less than marked at Barnes and Noble. Woo hoo! Ka-ching!

The James Dean documentary was interesting, especially in light of the recent PBS documentary on him that had basically the same structure: built around Dean’s three major films and trying to depict his psyche. I’ve never seen any of the films and have always thought of Dean in terms of today’s standards of superficial and manufactured celebrityhood. But these documentaries, myth-reinforcing as they clearly are, still do make me wonder if there was not only room in the past for real craftsmanship and authenticity, but also a need for it, as part of any commercial success. Prolly every generation asks the same thing about the past—but then (as the joke goes) “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.” Anyway, there’s a neat outtake from East of Eden at the end of the Altman film, showing the anguished Cal playing his recorder. *Sigh*