Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

Lifestyles of the rich and famous, 1852 edition

"They are evidently man and wife," wrote the journalist George G. Foster, of two customers in one of 19th-century New York's upscale ice cream parlors, "though not each other's!"

I write about adulterous ice cream and other dark secrets in my chapter on old New York's high life and low life in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York. I'll be giving a short reading from my chapter at the launch party, free and open to the public, this Sunday night, May 2nd, at 8pm at the Bowery Poetry Club.

In my chapter, I take a quick tour of the literature of the down and out, but since the 19th-century down and out have been fairly well studied of late, I spend most of my page count describing a group of writers less well remembered: the chroniclers of the mid-19th-century rich, including such odd ducks as Charles Astor Bristed, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Régis de Trobriand, Ann S. Stephens, Donald G. Mitchell, George Templeton Strong, and George William Curtis. I discuss such vexing questions as how to mix a sherry cobbler properly, how to throw a party when your brownstone is only twenty-five feet wide, and what to do about the dangerous rash of flirtations between middle-aged women and much-younger men, as satirized in cartoons like this one, from 1852:

The caption, in case the scan is too grainy to read:

Young New York at a Party
Lady of the House.— Charlie, why don't you ask Miss Brown to dance?
Charlie.— Cawn't. Too demn'd young.

Figures of song

If a writer describes a dog as saying woof, the word woof is onomatopoeia: the word not only references the sound a dog makes but also reproduces it. Onomatopoeia is one of the earliest figures of speech children learn, and is only one of many ways to use language's musical aspect to evoke things and even ideas. The back of my old copy of Smyth's Greek Grammar has an extensive catalog, including repetition, rhyme, rhythm, assonance, alliteration, and many more. Figures of speech are what distinguish artful use of language from merely referential use of it. What do you call it, though, when a thing or idea in the real world is reproduced in music? Strictly speaking, perhaps the answer should be "language," but that completes the circle without answering my question. It may be easier to explain what I mean with examples.

The most straightforward way to represent something in music is to dub it in. In the age of sampling, a musician can easily insert the sound of, say, a telephone ring or a clock alarm. "The Big Picture," by Bright Eyes, for example, starts with an extended recording of a car trip, including jingling keys, the reassuring clump of a car door slamming shut, and an ignition turning over.

The Big Picture (sample)

At the next level of artistic transformation, the phenomenon that I'm talking about closely resembles onomatopoeia. At the end of The Clash's "Somebody Got Murdered," a single drum stroke seems to be meant to sound like a gunshot.

Somebody Got Murdered (sample)

In Radiohead's "Videotape," the limited progression of piano chords repeated throughout the song suggest the rotation of a videotape, and the rhythm that the drum track settles into by the end sounds, at least to me, like the slap and flutter of the loose end of a tape circling on an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder (or of the loose end of a reel of film turning on a projector)—so that the song manages to evoke the recording technologies of two different eras.

Videotape (sample)

Some of these "figures of song" represent the real world more abstractly. Regina Spektor's "On the Radio" is busy with words, and one of the song's pleasures is the way the words tumble over and into one another. When Spektor describes hearing the song "November Rain" twice during a single radio broadcast, however, she breaks her own talky rhythm by stretching out the word "sleep" in the short line "because the DJ was asleep" so as to reference the DJ's snooze. Note that she doesn't repeat herself to reference snoozing; her allusion, more abstractly , is to the way a sleeper's oatmeal boils over, or the way a sleeper's pencil flatlines if she drifts off while taking notes.

On The Radio (sample)

The most sophisticated example I can think of is in the refrain of Belle & Sebastian's "The Blues Are Still Blue," when Stuart Murdoch sings that when he meets up again with the girlfriend he has left in the launderette, "the black will be white and the white will be black, but the blues are still blue." The melody meanders up and down during the first part of the refrain, reproducing the circling motion of a laundry machine. But when Murdoch sings the words "The blues are still blue," the vocalists accompanying him sing all the words at a single pitch, reinforcing the concept of blue's identity with itself.

The Blues Are Still Blue (sample)

To call something like this "onomatopoeia" seems a little Procrustean. The sound of laundry isn't being mimicked; the melody is tracing the shape the laundry makes, and then the accompanying voices are tracing that of identity. It seems like another terminology is called for; maybe a musicologist will steer me to it?

As if

I read Daisy Miller last week. It's solid, though it doesn't deserve to be exponentially more famous than other short fiction by Henry James. It didn't seem to me artistically superior to "Diary of a Man of Fifty," for example, which handles more or less the same material: a man fussier than he is kind, who errs on the side of fussiness when challenged by the moral ambiguity of sexuality as it is really lived. The modern reader is tempted to wonder, with these and many other James stories, whether the fussy hero is gay, because the baffling sexuality happens to be a woman's, and the hero becomes dodgy about it in a way that reads to a modern eye as closeted (but see The Spoils of Poynton, where the same shoe is on the other gender's foot). Trying to address this issue in his introduction to the Penguin paperback, the novelist David Lodge writes,

By the mid-1870s, not long before he wrote 'Daisy Miller,' he had decided that he would not marry. How far this decision was due to his determination to dedicate himself fully to his art, and how far to a growing awareness of his own ambiguous sexual nature, is hard to say. Edel, and the majority of his other biographers, believe that he never had a physical relationship with anyone of either sex, but in the last analysis they must admit that it is impossible to be certain on such matters and leave further speculation to novelists. What is clear is that he was not a closet gay writer, like, say, E. M. Forster, who had no real interest in heterosexual love and was obliged to fake the representation of it in his fiction. The man who wrote, 'he had never yet enjoyed the sensation of guiding through the summer starlight a skiff freighted with a fresh and beautiful young girl' was not a stranger to 'straight' romantic attraction. Henry James wrote some of the greatest novels in modern literature about love, and the betrayal of love, between men and women, and no one has written better about marriage this side of the bedroom door.

I haven't looked into the question of James's personal sexual history, but it seems worth pointing out that among Lodge's assumptions there is a certain amount of poisonous nonsense. Straight writers rarely write about gays in love, and are therefore by and large free of having to worry about any accusation that they have "no real interest in [homosexual] love and [are] obliged to fake the representation of it." But if they did write about gay love, and they succeeded, would critics accordingly decide that they must be gay? That would be, um, a little crude, wouldn't it? (That said, I have a friend who was so smitten with Denise of The Corrections that she declared herself in love with the lesbian trapped inside Jonathan Franzen. But she knew she was joking. I think.) Straight writers do, however, often write about characters in love who are not of their gender. When they succeed, do critics declare that they must really be transgender? Imagination, when fully indulged, takes the imaginer beyond the confines of his social identity. Faking representation is what novelists do. If a critic determines that E. M. Forster's portraits of heterosexual love are stiff, and Henry James's are rich, then he has discovered something about their relative skill as novelists. He hasn't learned anything about their sexual orientations.

Moreover, the sentence quoted by Lodge hardly convinces me that James was a he-man woman-lover. Try the simple experiment of substitution: "He had never yet enjoyed the sensation of guiding through the summer starlight a skiff freighted with a fresh and beautiful young man." I for one am reminded of certain passages in my distinctly non-heterosexual youth.

Finally, the warfare here is asymmetrical. Generally speaking, a straight man can grow up happy and safe while in complete ignorance of what gays feel when they fall in love. For as much of his development as he is obliged to remain closeted, however, a gay man has no parallel luxury. He makes a close study of what his straight peers are doing and saying about love, so as to be able to pull off a reasonable impersonation. After coming out, a gay man may no longer have to masquerade, but he nonetheless belongs to a minority, and members of a minority are always obliged, as a matter of survival, to know the shibboleths and customs of the majority, and to have a decent working model of the majoritarian psychology so as to manage interactions with them.

Annals of translation

The China Reading Weekly has published an abridged translation by Guo Yu of a 1999 Lingua Franca article of mine about Milan Kundera's vexed relationship with his translators.

I'm guessing that this is my name: 凯莱布•克雷恩文.

Jetsam

Another thing I've long meant to blog about: car diapers. I wonder whether they exist outside Park Slope. In how many American neighborhoods do parallel parking, overprotectiveness, and automobile vanity co-exist? The car diaper is a large sheet of rubber that is draped over a car's rear fender in order to protect it from the scratches and scrapes incidental to parallel parking. They aren't called car diapers, of course, by their purveyors. Indeed they seem to have sort of self-consciously aggressive names, like "Bumper Bully" and "De-Fender." But car diapers is what they look like. Some are attached by shutting them half in and half out of the trunk, so they flop over the fender, usually with a cut-out so that the license plate remains visible. A driver rarely scrapes up another car's rear fender while parallel parking, because one always has a clear view of the other car's rear fender. It's one's own rear fender that one scrapes, by misjudging the distance behind. So a car diaper is a responsible and civic thing to own—an admission of one's incontinence as a driver, or anyway, as a parallel parker. Still.

To be fair, I am in no position to make fun of car diapers, seeing as how I am an inveterate user of book condoms, also known by the trade name Brodart Just-a-Fold III Archival Covers.

Probably I am willing to mock car diapers because of the same character flaws that have made me a cyclist. So while I am bashing car culture, I might as well throw in this observation: On the streets of Park Slope, the most dangerous driving seems to occur when drivers are in the throes of the illusion that they are "catching up." To explain: If a driver feels that a safe and pleasant speed on a residential street is 15 miles an hour, but an obstacle (such as a double-parked delivery van) temporarily forces the driver to slow down or even stop, he often responds, once he has passed the obstacle, by "catching up." That is, he suddenly accelerates to thirty miles an hour, and holds that speed for half a block or more. What he is "catching up" to is where he thinks his car would be if he hadn't been forced to slow down. It wasn't his choice to slow down; it was (and I am rankly indulging here in a fantasy of driver's psychology, which isn't such a stretch for me because I, too, drive) somehow unfair that he had to slow down. By revving the engine, he expresses his anger at this injustice and recovers for himself the timespace that the universe, in the form of a double-parked delivery van, had tried to take from him. On a bicycle, too, I suppose, one might try to "catch up" to one's fantasy-unobstructed self after an obstacle, but I don't think it happens very often. I don't find myself ever doing it, maybe because it would take a burst of muscle power that isn't generally available. In a car, though, the engine is always ready to give you more speed than is safe; the cost of "catching up" in a car isn't to one's energy supply as a human organism; it takes the form of an added hazard to oneself and to those who have the misfortune to be sharing the street with you while you're doing it. Car drivers, become more zen! You are where you are. You do not have to catch up to where you think you are.

To be fair and balanced, now that I have dissed place-anxious drivers, I will say a few words about a similar risky and unpleasant habit among my fellow bikers. This long-harbored meme goes in my head by the name of, How Fixies Cause Global Warming. Not really, of course, or anyway, not by very much, but let me explain. What I am objecting to is a practice that has been well described by Bike Snob NYC: when a hipster on a fixie comes to a busy intersection, he does not stop on the near side of the pedestrian crosswalk and wait for the light to change. Oh no, he considers that the momentum that he has built up in his bicycle is too precious to squander by stopping, so he passes over the pedestrian crosswalk and then, just inside the intersection, circles back and forth, in a sort of flattened figure 8 pattern, hoping against hope that there will be a break in the crosswise traffic that will allow him to sneak through. When he does find such a break in the traffic, I sigh with relief. He is gone from my life, at least until I catch up to him at the next intersection. When he doesn't find a break, however, he himself becomes a considerable obstacle. He almost always finishes his flattened-figure-8 performance with his bike stationary after all and positioned sideways, blocking my path into the intersection. He almost never realizes when the light has finally turned green, because (1) he is too far into the intersection to have a proper view of the traffic light, and (2) he is too "street" to pay any attention to traffic lights generally. So when the light turns green and I'm ready to go, he's sideways, in my way, and squinting in the wrong direction. And the final aggravation: when he does start moving, because he's on a fixie, he's starting his bike in the equivalent of seventh gear or whatever, and he . . . moves . . . the . . . ped- . . . -als . . . ve- . . . -ry . . . slow- . . . -ly . . . . If he had a real bicycle, with some low gears and some high ones, he would be able to start quickly from a full stop, and get out of my way.

The reason momentum is so precious to fixie-riders isn't because they have a better grasp of physics than other people, nor necessarily because they're in worse physical condition, but because it's hard to start riding a bike in seventh gear from a full stop. So fixie riders try not to stop at all, and they end up cluttering intersections whose lights have turned green. Once this is understood, it is a short step to realizing that the decision to forgo gears must be a tremendous waste of human energy generally, and any waste of energy, even the energy generated by hipsters eating power bars, is a contribution to global warming, so fixies cause global warming. Q.E.D. (As I admitted before, not by very much. But, you know, some.)

Flotsam

As I was coasting down the Manhattan Bridge's final slope into Chinatown this afternoon, I realized that the orange-line train to the left of my bike, descending the same slope, was tracking my speed exactly, and when I turned I saw the conductor grinning at me. He must have been waiting to see if I would notice. He waved, and I waved back with a wave that nearly knocked off my own bike cap, so when I recovered I waved again for good measure.

I'm trying to shift my attention, this week, from one project to another, and all I seem to be able to think of are disconnected anecdotes, some of which I have carried around for more than a year now. For instance, there's the story of the local church book fair. Attending it a few years ago, I found a first edition in its dust jacket of a not terribly well-known novel from the 1930s, which, I knew from having looked the title up on Bookfinder not long before, some booksellers priced in the thousands of dollars. I bought it for two dollars! I was tiresome about it at dinner parties for months afterward, though of course the profit to be made remained theoretical, because I couldn't bear to sell it, and it sits on a shelf a few yards from this keyboard as I type. (Moreover, as long perusal of the blog Bookride has taught me, books that are priced on the internet at ridiculous prices do not necessarily sell at such prices.) At next year's church book fair, I was prepared to score triumph after triumph, but when I arrived, a few hours into its progress on a Saturday morning, I found it filled with college-age people carrying handheld scanners. They picked up book after book—bleeping their bar codes, checking prices on the internet, and plopping all titles worth more than a predetermined threshold into large boxes between their feet. Automated capitalism had destroyed another niche of humanism, I moaned to friends, making myself tiresome in a new way at that year's dinner parties. A friend pointed out that it could be argued that the injustice was actually in the previous state of affairs, when card counters like me knew that particular 1930s novels harbored literary value, and that the internet-connected scanners merely evened the playing field. (They didn't even it completely, of course, because 1930s first editions don't have bar codes. They don't even have ISBNs.) But it was strange to watch a technology that gave to people who didn't even necessarily have the habit of reading books the ability to judge their value. At the time I had also been bewailing the disappearance at the local YMCA of the Plexiglas book holders for the elliptical trainers. One by one the book holders had cracked and been discarded, in a process as gradual and inexorable as the upgrading of the elliptical training machines themselves, which were alwyas replaced, when they broke down, by machines with pre-installed television monitors. In the end, every elliptical trainer in the gym had a television monitor, and there were no more Plexiglas book holders. Instead there was a thin ridge beneath each television screen, where it was possible to prop up a glossy magazine, if the magazine wasn't perfect-bound. Without the restraining lip of something like a Plexiglas book holder, however, perfect-bound magazines and books tend to get jiggled shut by the vibrations of an elliptical trainer in use. I tried for a while artfully folding a towel over the corners of my books' pages, to keep them open by weighing them down. But the towel had to be refolded every time I turned the page, and there was in addition the social pressure of being the only person in the gym to insist on reading a book when so many nice television screens had been made conveniently available. Somehow the two phenomena—the deployment of the handheld ISBN scanners and the vanishing of the Plexiglas book holders— seemed of a piece, at least in my mind, as if technology and the pursuit of economic efficiency were rationalizing the reading of books out of existence. Not long afterward, I quit the gym, because I was riding my bike all the time anyway.

At this year's church book fair, which took place not too many weeks ago, there were fewer dealers with handheld scanners, and none of them seemed to have hired college students to help them for the day, as they had the year before. The books themselves seemed to be of lower quality; maybe the church had invited a bookseller to buy the better titles for a higher price beforehand. This time around, the economic metaphor, if there was one, seemed to be that in a recession people were pleased to have an opportunity to buy cheap things in large quantities—to fill a cloth shopping bag with books and pay no more than twenty dollars. I got half a dozen Classiques Garnier paperbacks from the 1950s, in yellow covers with sewn bindings and "vellum" paper—Stendhal, Rousseau, and Voltaire, perhaps someone's college curriculum.

Crowd-sourcing a lost Melville-related index

Extracts, the Melville Society's newsletter from 1969 to 2005, is freely available online, including an index to a few dozen of the issues (number 49 to 72). Once upon a time, there also existed online an index to all the issues of Extracts. I seem to remember that this index was hosted on the site of someone not officially associated with the Melville Society. I also remember that when cross-referenced with the page images of the newsletter itself, it was very useful for tracking down odd bits of information about Melville not readily found elsewhere. But Google can't tell me where this index is anymore, if indeed it still exists. Does anyone know?