Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

"Rail-Splitting"

My review of Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals and Joshua Wolf Shenk's Lincoln's Melancholy is in the 7 November 2005 issue of The New Yorker.

Moon hits Earth; poultry breeder inconvenienced

I am as besotted as the New York Times seems to be by the polar-view map of the melting Arctic that the newspaper reprints every few days. Staring at it does not make any more comprehensible to me the notion that it is melting, and that the polar bears who fail to evolve into dolphins in the next few decades will all drown. Also bewildering is the thought that the Northwest Passage is going to thaw open. I suppose I should have been prepared for this eventuality by the news, a few years ago, that Mount Kilimanjaro will soon be brown, unless someone covers it in white canvas. It's nonetheless hard for me to assimilate. No ice up there. Will the last orts of Sir John Franklin finally surface in the melt-off? Maybe it's time for one last expedition.

Wonderful prospects of cognitive dissonance were opened by the Times article last week detailing the rush by corporations to stake a claim to Arctic shipping routes and oil fields. If you're an energy company shill, and your team's official line is that the world is not warming, how exactly do you explain what you're doing up there, investment-wise? There's great irony in the contrast between the pettiness of profiteering and the world-historical grandeur of the vanishing of what we always, in elementary school, mistook for an eighth continent.

As it happens, I recently stumbled across a literary precedent for such irony. In London a few weeks ago, Peter and I made a pilgrimage to the office of the reprint house Persephone Books, where we admired the 1930s-era railroad posters on the walls and purchased half a dozen titles. I was unable to resist The Hopkins Manuscript, by R. C. Sherriff. As a publishing enterprise, Persphone aims unabashedly at women readers; most of its titles are by women, and those by men often are often concerned with domestic life. The Hopkins Manuscript, written in 1939, was thus a bit of a puzzle, as a Persphone choice. Not only was it written by a man, but it's a work of science fiction. Civilization comes to an end, because the Moon crashes into the Earth.

I can't say how gratifying it is to have a well-written book about the Moon crashing into the Earth printed in the flawless elegance of the Persephone series, with the usual finely chosen endpapers (after a 1932 fabric whose pattern evokes an eclipse, with a touch of the secret emblem from Escape to Witch Mountain), beautiful cream pages, and crisp type. And after reading it, I did see the link to the Persephone vision. The 1930s railroad posters in their office are the key; the Hopkins Manuscript is a portrait of England in that moment, where the end of the world has the function of releasing a camera's shutter. The impending Moon is an allegory of fascism, though less schematically, I think, than the Martians are an allegory for imperialism in Wells's War of the Worlds. The world doesn't end at all suddenly, and there's pathos and, surprisingly, comedy in the decline.

From the Arctic point of view, it's the comedy that's relevant. As an amateur astronomer, Edgar Hopkins learns that the Moon is on a course of collision long before the public does. The secret makes him feel terribly important---much more so than the fellows down at the pub appreciate, to his pain. Of course this is hardly a surprise, because they had earlier failed to appreciate his achievements as a breeder of prize hens. With a reasoning not unlike the modern would-be plunderers of the Arctic, Hopkins decides that since the crash will likely dislodge a lot of crockery, he will sell all his Great Western Railway Stock and buy as much as he can of Wigglesworth & Smirkin, manufacturers of cups, saucers, plates, and dishes. For all his venality and narcissism, one ends up liking Hopkins, as much because of his provincialism as in spite of it. It's hard to resist someone who claims not to be that excited about meeting a post-apocalypse member of Parliament because, as a breeder, he "had met, at different times, almost every famous personality in the Poultry Times."

Tom Pepper's etymology

The title of this blog comes from a line in Charles F. Briggs's novel The Trippings of Tom Pepper. Over at LeavesofGrass.org, Mitch Gould has figured out why the hero of has the name he does. "Tom Pepper" seems to have been a character in folklore, "who, according to nautical tradition, was kicked out of hell for being a bigger liar than His Satanic Majesty." The innocent-seeming lies of Briggs's hero are the novel's inciting force, so the reference to folklore must be the motive behind his name.

O'Toole's White Savage

My review of Fintan O'Toole's White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America is in the New York Times Book Review of Sunday, 16 October 2005.

Courage

In Sunday's New York Times, two reporters did something quite brave. They signed their names to articles reporting that the Basra police department has been infiltrated by fundamentalist Shiite militia who use it to carry out crimes, including assassinations, and suggesting that these militia may well have ordered the killings of freelancer Steven Vincent on August 2 and New York Times stringer Fakher Haider on September 19 because of their efforts to report on this infiltration earlier. If the reporters are correct, they will have drawn a very dangerous attention to themselves. The implied tribute to their murdered colleagues is moving, and the devotion to journalism is heroic. No doubt almost all reporters in Iraq run similar risks daily, and perhaps their courage is obvious to everyone who read the articles, but it jumped out at me and seemed worth underlining.

Against rough edges

I would like to put on record my hatred of deckle edges. I only learned the word a few months ago, but I have hated the thing intensely for years. A deckle-edged book is one where the outer edges of the pages are untrimmed. Publishers almost always slice smooth the tops and bottoms, but in deckle-edged books, the industrial rotors omit to cut the edge opposite the binding.

Why? It seems to be for the sake of effect, to signal that a hardcover is particularly distinguished. I imagine that it's thought to look old, and here the implicit metaphor shows its falseness. Once upon a time in the Anglo-American book world, a customer sometimes bought the pages of a book or pamphlet as a stack of printed but loose fascicles, and then had them trimmed and bound himself. (New books in France are issued as paperbacks on this understanding, though I doubt that very many French readers still get around to binding anymore.) To leave the outer edges untrimmed evokes this era, when a customer could choose to leave one edge rough . . . if he were pretentious and not in the habit of actually reading his books.

It's wretched nostalgia, and it should be stopped. All binding is centralized today, and so no customer chooses deckle edges anymore, and no one can opt out of it, either, except by waiting for the paperback. Deckle edges absorb and retain dust with fantastic efficiency. But the truly demonic thing about them is that they turn a book into a trick deck of cards---the sort where if you flip the cards over one by one, you see all suits, but if you riffle along one edge, you see only clubs or only diamonds. If you riffle through the pages of a deckle-edged book, only certain pages flip open to your eye. Should you be hunting for a quote that happens to appear on a page whose width is not a local maximum, you're out of luck. You can try putting your thumb along the clean-cut top or bottom, and you'll get a little functionality this way. But not much. It becomes hard even to figure out what chapter you're in. O publishers of America, stop it. If you must deliver hoity-toityness, how about a nice daub of gilt on the tops of pages, or a dash of blue paint? Or you might sew the signatures together instead of gluing them. A frisson of "quality" always comes over me when I see white thread. Of course that would cost money, and I suspect that deckle edges are as cheap as they look.

The Complete New Yorker

Peter reviews the Complete New Yorker on DVD in the 27 September 2005 issue of Newsday. (Should have posted this a week ago, but I just finally figured out how to make the Wi-Fi in the hotel room work.)