Hmmm...just curious: new in bookstores

curiosity cesare ripa Philip Ball is a writer to be envied -- he's a non-affiliated academic who ranges far and wide wherever his curiosity takes him.

In the case of his new book, curiosity holds up a mirror to itself -- and to all of Western civilization. With Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything (University of Chicago Press), Ball shows the long, difficult road that science has taken in order to be allowed to ask every and any question about the natural world.

The book balances on two questions which he asks  early in the book:

"[I]n the wider world mightn't there be something ill-disciplined, even improper, about a voracious curiosity that permits nothing to be too trivial or obscure?"

"Was there after all something in the old accusation that it is weak-willed to succumb to the wiles of curiosity?"

The answer, too, is given early: "[T]he problem of our times -- and also its great good fortune -- is that temptation is everywhere."

The remainder of the book is a delicious expansion on this point. Long before the Hubble Telescope or the Mars rovers, there were multitudes of truth-seekers who risked punishment and Pandora-like warnings in order to ask the simple question, "Why?" (Cesare Ripa's emblem for the personification of Curiosity, above, gives us an unfriendly-looking figure who's deeply in need of a comb.)

Ball's non-affiliation with any academic institution (according to his website, he did serve as an editor at Nature for many years) clearly shows, and that isn't a bad thing. He's spent enough time working to earn a living that he knows you don't serve yourself or your audience by writing something that's inaccessible.

When, for instance, he describes  a century's worth of evolving attitudes to curiosity, he manages to pull it off in a single, deftly-written sentence: "The turning point in Western attitudes to curiosity occurred in the seventeenth century, which began with an essentially medieval outlook and ended looking like the first draft of the modern age."

If that's all you learn about how the 17th century changed, it's more than enough. Hits the nail right on the head.

Ball is an exhilarating treat to read, either in this new book or in his others ("Universe of Stone," about Chartres Cathedral, is a personal favorite). Let your curiosity be your guide, and don't worry about it: As Ball reminds us, humanity's earned that right.

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Stop the presses

The sidewalk internet, circa 1902. Considering the hits that the print media business has taken in recent years, it shouldn't come as a surprise that CareerCast.com has identified newspaper reporting as the worst job of 2013.

It's never been an easy job -- you're constantly on call and on deadline -- but that's what makes it such an honorable profession. But the other aspects of the business today -- less job openings, constant threat of layoffs, squeezing the life out of shrinking staffs of writers -- were the deciding factors in CareerCast's assessment.

I read the item with a feeling somewhere between relief (my own relief) and sympathy for colleagues still on the front lines. And I couldn't help thinking of all those great mythic figures in art -- from Penn Warren's Jack Burden to the unnamed reporter questing after Rosebud's identity in "Citizen Kane" -- that partly inspire you to consider that profession in the first place.

What are some other reporter-characters in literature? Lucien Chardon in Balzac's "Lost Illusions" -- does he count, even though he's just a hack? Peter Fallow in Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities"? The character of "John Berendt" in "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"? Who else? Lend me your thoughts.

I envy -- and worry about -- all those young college grads with journalism aspirations. They're entering a world where headlines aren't the brightest about their chosen vocation, and yet it's an occupation that's needed the most -- without reporters, how else do you keep the rest of the world honest?

Weary, weary, weary

"There is an air of malaise within the painting," notes one critic about Laus Veneris by Edward Burne-Jones. I couldn't agree more. You ever want to think about cool things and share them on the blog, but you can't? A busy week's kept away the Call of the Siren, and it's made me feel like the unhappy-looking lady on the right side of this Burne-Jones  painting, Laus Veneris.

I think we're both feeling the same thing, but she looks way better than I do in red.

Banking on Banks

Cancer's a thief. It's not a stealthy one, though. In most cases, it doesn't sneak in and out of a window while the owners of the house snore in their beds. It's more like a robber with an extreme taste for vandalism -- it robs you of loved ones and leaves wreckage behind. Still, many artists have put a brave face on this condition (I'm sure there's a more substantial post here somewhere ... for another time). I'm reminded of a beautiful beautiful beautiful poem (it's clear that I think it's beautiful, right?) by Stanley Plumly, "Cancer," that mythologizes it:

Mine, I know, started at a distance five hundred and twenty light-years away and fell as stardust into my sleeping mouth, yesterday, at birth, or that time when I was ten lying on my back looking up at the cluster called the Beehive or by its other name in the constellation Cancer, the Crab...

The poem is found in "Orphan Hours: Poems," published by W.W. Norton & Company. At $25.95 it's a steal -- worth every penny.

Iain Banks in 2005 (credit: Szymon Sokol)

And, at the other end of that noble spectrum, there's Scottish novelist Iain Banks, who just announced a terminal diagnosis of gall bladder cancer on his website. The Guardian provides the full story.

Where Plumly is glorious and epic, Banks resorts to the type of black humor you find everywhere in his work, from his mysteries to his sci-fi Culture novels. What's the sentence in his unhappy announcement that knocked me over and then out? This one:

"I've withdrawn from all planned public engagements and I've asked my partner Adele if she will do me the honour of becoming my widow (sorry -- but we find ghoulish humour helps)".

I truly admire that voice. I'm sure there's fear and terror behind it, but it's still extraordinary to me that anyone receiving such serious news could muster the energy to make their readers smile a little in spite of it all. (I wish I could have carried such an attitude when my own loved ones suffered from it.)

The Guardian article does much more than announce this news, however. It also gives readers a taste of what Banks' work is all about (something else beautiful and strange? Banks' novel "The Wasp Factory") and an opportunity to read him while we still have the pleasure of including him in our company.

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Early Nabokov: new in bookstores

Nabokov grave, Switzerland Plays are supposed to be performed, not read — that’s the rule, right?

An acquaintance of mine once arched his eyebrows when I told him I was rereading Hamlet. "You’re not supposed to read Shakespeare," he said, rolling his eyes. (Ok, sure, but can you point me in the direction of a good, local production of Hamlet?)

In Vladimir Nabokov’s case, the opposite is probably true.

This month Alfred A. Knopf has published one of his earliest major works, “The Tragedy of Mister Morn,” and it’s a pleasurable experience to read this play (one of few by the sublime writer/butterfly-chaser).  There’s the familiar wordplay that's in his novels, and the jarring metaphors — all kindly rendered in English by translators Thomas Karshan and Anastasia Tolstoy (yes, that Tolstoy).

But I could never imagine it performed--it wasn't--and I could never imagine an actor handling some of these lines.

 Too many mouthfuls. Like the character Tremens, a revolutionary, who offers this meditation:

What is the ecstasy of death? It is a pain, Like lightning. The soul is like a tooth, God Wrenches out the soul — crunch!--and it is over... What comes next? Unthinkable nausea and then-- The void, spirals of madness—and the feeling of being A swirling spermatozoid—and then darkness, Darkness—the velvety abyss of the grave, And in that abyss....

Edmin: Enough! This is worse Than talking about a bad painting.

The language is rich and strange — have you ever thought of God as a dentist before? -- but it just seems like it would be difficult for an actor to pull off. (At least Tremens gets interrupted by Edmin.)

Be quiet, I beg you! It’s quarter to... This is unbearable! The clock-hands move Like hunchbacks; like a widow and an orphan Behind a catafalque....

Still, the publisher calls it a major work, and that feels right. This book is a necessity for your Nabokov collection. Here’s the young writer, homeless and fatherless (after the Bolshevik revolution, after his father's assassination), speaking out  in beguiling fashion at the age of 24 — just 24! -- against tyrants and revolutionaries before he firmly wrapped the greatcoat of fiction around his shoulders.

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