COLLECTING MANDELSTAM.

It's very strange: I've been reading and memorizing great swatches of Mandelstam (I'm working on "Tristia" now), and just last night I was thinking that perhaps he was the greatest poet of the twentieth century; today I ran across an essay "Collecting Mandelstam" (pdf, Google cache) by R. Eden Martin (in the Caxtonian, November 2006) that makes the same suggestion:

Who was the greatest poet writing in any western language during the 20th Century? Many would answer: Osip Mandelstam...

Russia produced many excellent poets during the past century. Cab drivers in Petersburg regularly quote Pushkin at length. The very best Russian poets of the 20th Century would certainly include Akhmatova, Blok, Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva—and one could make a case for dozens of others. I believe that many of these Russian poets were greater artists than any poet writing in America at the time, including Frost and Stevens. And some experts in a position to make such judgments believe that Mandelstam was the greatest of them all.

You needn't agree with such an extravagant claim, however, to enjoy Martin's essay, which provides a handy summary of the poet's life and—since he is a book collector—includes photographs of some rare editions and (perhaps my favorite) an enticing one of a complete run of Apollon magazine ("the greatest Russian literary and arts journal of the pre-War era"), 1909-1917, as well as the title page of the August 1910 issue that included Mandelstam's first published poems. I've just sent off for Clarence Brown's 1978 biography Mandelstam; I'll have to take Omry Ronen's widely praised An Аpproach to Mandelstam (Jerusalem, 1983) out of the library, since it doesn't seem to be available for love or money.

Incidentally, while we're on the subject of Russian literature, I also ran across a blog I'm surprised I haven't seen before, Lizok's Bookshelf, written by Lisa Hayden Espenschade, who says "I'm a writer and Russian tutor/teacher who loves reading fiction, particularly Russian novels," and has very informative notes on Russian books she's read or that have won prizes. Definitely worth a bookmark.

Oh, and happy new year! May 2009 be better for all of us.

WHY CZAR?

Ben Zimmer has a Slate article about the use of "X Czar" to mean "official in charge of dealing with X" ("drug czar," "energy czar," etc.). There's all sorts of interesting history in there, but what grabbed me was this:

Czar first entered English back in the mid-16th century, soon after Baron Sigismund von Herberstein used the word in a Latin book published in 1549. The more correct romanization, tsar, became the standard spelling in the late 19th century, but by that time czar had caught on in popular usage, emerging as a handy label for anyone with tyrannical tendencies.

As it happens, Herberstein's book, Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii, is online (you can find versions in other languages linked from the end of the Wikipedia article), and sure enough, he writes "Czar Rhutenica lingua regem significat" ['in the Ruthenian language czar means king'; the entire paragraph is below the cut].

The question is: why on earth did he choose such an odd spelling? (Incidentally, there's an amusing dispute about the proper rendition of the word at Latin Vicipaedia.) Any ideas?

The full Herberstein passage:

Czar Rhutenica lingua regem significat. cum autem communi Slavonica lingua, apud Polonos, Bohemos, & alios omnes sumpta quadam consonantia, ab ultima, & ea gravi quidem syllaba Czar, Imperator seu Caesar intelligatur: unde omnes qui Rhuteni cum idioma seu literas non callent, item Bohemi, Poloni, atque etiam Slavi regno Hungarico subditi, alio nomine regem appellant,nempe Kral, alii Kyrall, quidam Koroll: Czar autem solum Caesarem, seu Imperatorem dici existimant: unde factum, ut Rhuteni interpretes audientes Principem suum ab externis nationibus sic appellari, coeperunt & ipsi deinceps Imperatorem nominare, nomen que Czar dignius esse quam Regis (licet idem significent) existimant.

FORVO.

A simple idea, well executed:

Forvo is the place where you´ll find words pronounced in their original languages. Ever wondered how a word is pronounced? Ask for that word or name, and another user will pronounce it for you. You can also help others recording your pronunciations in your own language.

When I visited, the "Language of the day" was Slovenian, and one of the "Top pronunciations" was Ljubljana; I clicked on the little triangular symbol and heard "ingridzb (Female from Slovenia)" say it. Addictive and educational. (They're coy about what "forvo" means, but apparently it's something close to "FOR-VOcalization.") Thanks, Kári!

AN INTERVIEW WITH HELEN DEWITT.

Dan Visel (of The Institute for the Future of the Book, and I can't help but wonder how Visel is pronounced: VYE-z'l? vi-ZELL?) has put online a long, fascinating, infuriating interview with that amazing writer Helen DeWitt, who should by rights have had a dozen or two books published by now but who instead has seen The Last Samurai on actual bookstore shelves and has sold a few pdf copies of Your Name Here (and gotten a review by Jenny Turner in the LRB). The whole thing is worth reading (and I don't say that just because she has nice things to say about me), but what I thought I'd excerpt here is a section full of thought-provoking ideas about books and what they might be:

When Ilya and I were working on YNH, one thing that interested me was the way that a text is the result of all sorts of discussions and constraints that normally aren't visible. Every single published book is governed by a contract, a text readers don't see, and it is generally the result of an enormous amount of scurrying around behind the scenes. So I thought: how can we possibly assess the texts we see when we don't know the contractual restraints on the author? when we don't know whether the publisher was willing to respect the contract? when we don't know whether the author had a powerful agent or a weak one, whether the published book was substantially what the author wanted or the result of a lot of arm-twisting off-stage? Editorial comments are never made public; why not?

So I thought, not that all this material should be included in a book, but that it would be interesting if all the background correspondence and the contracts and so on where available on a CD. For that matter, why not include earlier versions of the book, or at least significant earlier versions?

I like books, actual printed books, a lot. It seems to me, though, that the culture which produces the ones we see has some misplaced anxieties. We live in a culture where standards of 'correctness' and consistency are applied to the printed word, so that 'properly' published books are expected to eliminate the traces of composition. A text is not supposed to bear the marks of the circumstances of its writing. That seems to me to be an unnecessary concern – but you don't really need the Internet to stop fretting about it.

There are some things you can do more easily if you can draw on the resources of Hypertext. You can write a text in several languages unselfconsciously, or maybe I mean, without obtrusive consciousness of the reader. You can just have a couple of characters speaking Spanish, or Arabic, or Japanese, and readers who can read the languages can read the text, but those who can't can click through to a translation. So you can make use of the textures of those different languages without giving the primary text a lot of extra baggage – and still make it comprehensible to readers who need more in the way of explanation. This isn't especially relevant to YNH, but it's the sort of thing I think could more easily be done online or in an e-book than in print-on-paper. I came across a wonderful website a while back with graphics which enabled you to drill down on results of Grand Prix racers, if one did this in a work of fiction online one could have something very stylish whereas if one tried to do it in a book it would feel not just long but cumbersome and messy.

Why not package books the way Criterion does DVDs, with alternate takes and translations and commentary from the author and informed readers and... well, who knows what all? Why is a book expected to stand on its own (unless it's a Classic, in which case it gets a solemn Classic Edition with obtrusive footnotes), while a movie is thought to benefit from as much auxiliary information as possible?

I won't even get into what she has to say about the hell that is commercial publishing, with its ignorant editors and unkept promises, and the terrible financial pressure that makes writers stifle current work they're excited about to try and sell long-finished work they're bored or nauseated by, because it gets me too upset. Why do zillionaires give zillions to museums and operas and never think of, as she says, sponsoring an admired writer's travel expenses or offering them six months' writing time at a vacation home? If I were a zillionaire, that's the kind of thing I'd want to do... but of course to become a zillionaire I'd have to care about money and the making of same in large quantities, and then I'd be a different person and probably never think about the problems of writers. It's a conundrum.

ORIENTAL INSTITUTE ONLINE.

A letter from Charles Ellwood Jones (head librarian at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World) in the October 23 issue of the NYRB contains the following enticing information:

Indeed, the Oriental Institute has taken the bold and laudable decision to make all the published products of its research programs accessible without charge. A convenient list of the more than one hundred volumes of scholarship currently accessible can be found at oihistory.blogspot.com/2008/04/oriental-institute-electronic.html. Much of it documents the intellectual and material remains of the people who inhabited Iraq in the past.

Here's the actual catalog; click on the categories to get the lists of publications. I hope this generous policy is imitated by more institutions. An informed public is a public that is likely to purchase scholarly publications.

XMAS REPORT.

I'm still digesting filet mignon and Yorkshire pudding and asparagus (all washed down with pinot noir), but before I collapse completely I thought I'd give a brief report on some of the goodies I got. Pride of place goes to the magnificent Criterion edition of Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz (based on the 1929 Döblin novel, of which I have a beat-up and much-annotated copy); I saw the whole 15½-hour series when MOMA did a retrospective in 1997, and ever since I've longed to own it so I could watch it at my leisure, novel and maps at my side. Then there are Kate Brown's A Biography of No Place, about the dreadful 20th-century fate of a borderland between Russia and Poland that's been ethnic-cleansed and homogenized to within an inch of its life, and David Garrioch's The Making of Revolutionary Paris, about the history of 18th-century Paris (a city in whose history I have an inordinate interest), and the winter boots, and the slack-key guitar CDs, and various other goodies. A thousand thanks to those who made this a memorable day: you know who you are!

LINGONBERRY.

Even as I type, my wife is cooking up a huge batch of Norwegian meatballs for our traditional Christmas Eve dinner, and one of the accompaniments (along with akvavit) is lingonberries. Well, I wanted to know how to say "lingonberry" in Russian (because I want to know how to say everything in Russian), and my dictionaries weren't helping me; fortunately, Wikipedia came to my rescue, and I learned that the word I was looking for was брусника [brusnika]. This is not defined as "lingonberry" in my trusty Oxford, but as "foxberry; red whortleberry (Vaccinium vitis idaea)"; as a matter of fact, the Wikipedia entry isn't called "lingonberry" but "Vaccinium vitis-idaea," and it opens with this remarkable list of alternatives: "often called lingonberry also called cowberry, foxberry, mountain cranberry, csejka berry, red whortleberry, lowbush cranberry, mountain bilberry, partridgeberry (in Newfoundland and Cape Breton), and redberry (in Labrador)." And the OED qualifies "lingonberry" as Canadian, which seems odd since none of us who use it here in my extended family (in the States) think of it as Canadian. (Incidentally, the OED's first cite for the word is 1960 J. J. ROWLANDS Spindrift 156 "In Sweden the cranberry is known as the lingonberry," and the most recent is 1971 D. NABOKOV tr. Nabokov's Glory (1972) vi. 24 "Supper at the station (hazel hen with lingonberry sauce).")

So I have two questions for you all. If you are familiar with this tasty little berry, what name do you know it by? And if you call it "lingonberry," do you think of that word as Canadian?

KING LEHAR.

I've written about Karl Kraus here and here; Adam Kirsch's NYRB review of The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, by Paul Reitter, discusses Kraus's more wild-eyed ideas (he apparently seriously thought journalists were more responsible for war than anyone else, and he said things about Jews and Jewish influence that have kept the label "self-hating Jew" attached to him for a century now), but leads into the more distressing stuff by talking about his more likable (if still wild-eyed) fixation on language. He attributed to misprints the same sort of significance that his nemesis Freud gave to slips of the tongue:

In 1912, for instance, he published an item titled "I Believe in the Printer's Gremlin," which reproduced a provincial newspaper's announcement of a performance of "King Lehar, a tragedy in five acts by W. Shakespeare."

To Kraus, who revered Shakespeare, the conflation of Lear with Franz Lehar, the operetta composer he regarded as the acme of kitsch, was "no laughing matter. It's horrible," he wrote in his gloss on the item. As with a Freudian slip, precisely the fact that the mistake was accidental is what makes it significant: "The printer was not trying to make a joke. The word that he was not supposed to set, the association that got into his work, is the measure of our time. By their misprints shall ye know them." No wonder Kraus proofread each page of Die Fackel [the magazine he wrote and published from 1899 until his death ini 1936] up to a dozen times, not just insisting on correct spelling but making sure that every comma appeared exactly halfway between the adjoining letters.

I laugh, but I'm also glad I don't have to set type for this blog, because I'd probably be almost as obsessive about the commas.

ISSUE 1.

This is old news, and anyone who's plugged in to the world of contemporary poetry doubtless knows about it, but it was new to me when the Growler told me about it, and I'm sure it will be new (and hopefully amusing) to many of you: at the start of October there was an announcement of a new online publication, Issue 1, "edited by Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter. Now available here as a 3,785-page PDF (3.9 MB). This issue features new poems by Nada Gordon, Evelyn Reilly, Julianna Mundim ... [hundreds of names elided] ... and Snezana Zabic." The thing is, the poems aren't actually by those people, and as word spread (more or less instantaneously, as is the wont of the internet age), many of them left outraged comments at the announcement site (as you'll see if you scroll down). There's a good discussion in a Nation article by Barry Schwabsky, one of the poets "represented":

What first caught my eye was that I couldn't recall ever having submitted my work to its editors. And when—thank goodness for that "find" function—I saw page 2,039, I knew why: "my" poem was one I'd never written. Neither had any of the other thousands of authors written theirs. The anthology's "editors," Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter, using a computer program of Carpenter's devising, were responsible for its entire contents—and thereby for the most provocative hoax to hit the poetry world since the Araki Yasusada scandal in the early '90s. ...

I rather liked "my" poem, not as a poem in my own style, naturally, because it isn't, but as an example of one particular present-day period style. But neither I nor anyone else has read the whole book, so none of us can come to grips with the totality of the oeuvre. Random dips into it also turn up some pretty boring pages—still in the same style—but then the same is sure to be true of any fairly prolific poet. ...

...That a computer can generate better poetry than some poets can write should not be shocking. Remember Kleist's great essay on the marionette theater, where his interlocutor proves to him that a puppet has the potential to be made to dance more gracefully than any human, because "grace will be most purely present in the human frame that has either no consciousness or an infinite amount of it, which is to say either in a marionette or in a god." There's a glimmer in Issue 1 of what poetry written without consciousness might be—but just a glimmer, luckily, because were it entirely so, we flesh-and-blood poets might not stand a chance any more than the chess players do. For now, it's a good reminder that we really ought to try and write better than a computer, while we still can.

And some of the other "victims" had what I consider healthy reactions; F. James Hartnell wrote: "A splendid spoof. Well done indeed. Can't believe that some people actually got annoyed. I was so honoured to read my own perfect gibberish."

ODD LEGAL TERMS.

Roger Shuy at the Log has a post about the legal use of inure, which the OED defines as "To come into operation; to operate; to be operative; to take or have effect," used in the context of something being for someone's benefit:
1651 G. W. tr. Cowel's Inst. 137 This Legacy shall inure not only to A. but to B. and his Heires also.
1879 PARKMAN La Salle 92 The results.. were to inure, not to the profit of the producers, but to the building of churches.
Shuy's example is from the Montana Department of Revenue: "No part of the net income of a Montana tax-exempt organization can inure to the benefit of any private stockholder or individual." As he points out, this is confusing to non-lawyers, since everybody else is familiar with it only in the context of getting used to something bad:
1781 COWPER Hope 7 The poor, inured to drudgery and distress.
Shuy says:

I challenged the use of inure in this letter, but the lawyers in the tax department strongly objected. I argued that these tax letters are replacing a word with one meaning that lay people know with a word that has another meaning known only to lawyers (probably) and accountants (possibly). But the lawyers informed me that inure is one of those magical words that is absolutely necessary for legal reasons.

The other usage that caught me by surprise recently is an odd use of the verb trespass. You might not think it's a transitive verb, and if you accept that it could be used transitively you might think only laws and the like could be trespassed, but these days it's said of people; the best explanation I've found is in Charles A. Sennewald's Shoplifters Vs. Retailers (New Century Press, 2000):

Some stores will "trespass" a person caught shoplifting. ... To be "trespassed" simply means the customer has become a "persona non grata," a person not wanted.

I can't say I care for it, but the English language doesn't seek my approval before moving on. I'm not sure if this is used by lawyers or only by security personnel, and I also don't know how far back it goes. It doesn't seem to have reached the dictionaries yet.

OWL EYES AND FOX WALK.

Recently my brother sent me a copy of Deep Survival (website), by Laurence Gonzales, telling me it was one of the best books he'd read recently. Since I respect his opinion, I put it on the mental pile of "books I intend to get around to sometime in the foreseeable future" and went back to Tolstoy. But then during a phone call he asked me if I'd started it yet, assuring me that I'd really like it, and I said "OK, I'll read it, I'll read it," and with a dutiful sigh I picked it up... and found it (with apologies for the cliche) impossible to put down. It's not at all the kind of macho "I'm tougher than you can possibly imagine, and if you follow my training program you too can kill alligators with your bare hands" kind of book I took it for; he tells a lot of hair-raising stories (a seventeen-year-old girl fell out of an airplane into the Peruvian rain forest... and survived!) and passes on fascinating facts (did you know that one of the demographic groups most likely to survive in the wilderness is children six and under?), but his focus is always on the habits of mind necessary for survival in tough circumstances, and even this bookworm who avoids anything more strenuous and perilous than hiking and cross-country skiing in well-marked areas, finds it riveting and educational.

But what I wanted to pass along was a particular passage on pp. 189-90, where he's describing a survival course he took in Vermont:

As we hiked through trailless forest, Morey stopped every 20 or 30 yards to point out something, and we'd examine and discuss what we found. After we'd followed him deep into the woods, he asked us to close our eyes and point the way home. It is a humbling experience to find that you can't. I'd been following him, which is never a good idea. I had not walked my own walk, and as a result, I was lost.

Morey directed our attention to the last place we'd stopped to talk. We could still see it from where we stood. "Remember, we talked about the bittersweet vine there?" We'd taken a sample from a vine that's good for making cordage. So we hiked back to that spot. Then he pointed to another spot, where he'd shown me ways of seeing and walking that were used by Native American trackers and other Aboriginal peoples. He called it "Owl Eyes and the Fox Walk," that full-body alertness I'd seen when he listened to the birds. It can put you in an altered state of perception, he said. We returned to that spot. From there, we could see the place where we thought we'd found the hoof print of a deer, but it turned out to be the entrance to a vole tunnel. We had squatted there to discuss the difference between voles, moles, and mice.

Thus, hopping from one conversation to the next, we were able to retrace our steps exactly and to remember in great detail not only where we'd been but what we'd said and done at each spot. In what seemed to be a featureless and homogenous forest, Morey had given us tangible cues, like road signs, which we could easily follow home. He had discovered an effortless way to embed a reliable mental map in our brains.

At this point I was thinking "songlines!" The very next paragraph read:

"It's called song lines," he said. "And it's an ancient navigational technique used by Australian Aboriginals."

Somehow it never occurred to me that you could apply songline techniques in another part of the world, but of course you can. It's just a matter of being attentive to your surroundings.

AUSTLANG.

Anggarrgoon says:

AUSTLANG is now public. It’s an absolutely fabulous resource for Australian languages and there should be a huge round of applause for Kazuko Obata at AIATSIS who did most of the legwork.

So what is Austlang anyway? It’s a web database of information about Australian languages. It includes summaries of speaker estimates, genealogical classification in a variety of publications, an estimate of degree of document, and there’s a nice interface with google maps.

I have nothing to add except: what a great thing, and bless the internet that allows us to use it!

GAS, BLAS, AND DEGAS.

I had known that J. B. Van Helmont (1577-1644) invented the word gas based on Greek χάος 'chaos'—it makes sense if you know that in Dutch, the letter g is pronounced kh—but I had no idea he also created blas for "a supposed ‘flatus’ or influence of the stars, producing changes of weather" (OED). You can read all about it, with a funny quote from Richard Franck's Northern Memoirs, Calculated for the Meridian of Scotland; To Which is Added, The Contemplative and Practical Angler. Writ in the Year 1658, at Mark Liberman's post at the Log, and the comment thread there brings up the question of the family name Degas, originally De Gas: Ray Girvan points out that "Degas' paternal grandfather, Rene-Hilaire De Gas, was a baker from Orléans" and the commune Gas "is very close to Orléans." To which Bryn LaFollette adds:

Well, that leads to the question of where the commune Gas gets its name. There is surprisingly little information on either the French or English Wikipedia pages, nor on any of the easily found pages on les communes de France.

Of course, it may be that there is no known etymology for the name of such an obscure commune, but I'll bet Brichot would have a theory.

"DES IMAGISTES" ONLINE.

Some students at MIT have created an online edition of Ezra Pound's famous 1914 anthology Des Imagistes. (The linked Wikipedia article has a great Richard Aldington quote about the title: "What Ezra thought that meant remains a mystery, unless the word 'Anthologie' was assumed to precede it. Amy's anthologies were called Some Imagist Poets, so she may have supposed that Ezra thought 'Des Imagistes' meant 'Quelques Imagistes.' But why a French title for a collection of poems by a bunch of young American and English authors? Search me. Ezra liked foreign titles.") Unfortunately, it's a somewhat careless job—Joyce's poem "I hear an army charging upon the land" is pretty much spoiled by the typo "My heart, have you no wisdom thus to dispair?"—but fortunately there's a pdf of the anthology that allows you to read from the book itself, and a beautiful thing it is. (Via MetaFilter, where I wrote "It's pretty funny to see poor Amy Lowell facing W.C. Williams across the gutter, and if you turn the page you're confronted by Joyce and Pound—those were the days!")

SLANG, PRIVATE AND PUBLIC.

A Caleb Crain review (in The Nation) of a couple of new slang dictionaries (Stone the Crows: Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, edited by John Ayto and John Simpson, and The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English, edited by Tom Dalzell) has some interesting things to say about slang in general, and makes this nice point about the impossibility of pinning it down:

To a lexicographer, slang's abundance may present an even greater challenge than its definition. Although humans coin words as prolifically as bees make honey, dictionaries of standard English only include lexemes that have become a stable currency among strangers. Slang is not confined by this useful limit. My boyfriend and I refer to going online as checking our bids, in memory of a bygone fascination with eBay. Because we once elaborated the no-chicken label on a box of vegetarian broth into a fowl-friendly warning—"No, no, chicken! Keep away from the boiling water!"—we now always call the broth no-no chicken. The glossy young rich who crowd us out of our favorite restaurants are known to us as kittenheads, on account of a bus-side ad I once saw that juxtaposed an enormous fluffy white feline head, a crystal goblet full of glistening diced organ meats and the slogan "Next Stop, Uptown." This is just the tip of the iceberg of our private slang, and we're only two people. Multiply our sample by all the groups, large and small, who improvise with the English language for their own convenience and pleasure, and you see the problem. Slang is virtually infinite.

Thanks, Paul!

NABOKOV INTERVIEW.

This USA Arts interview with Nabokov was filmed, I believe, in early 1965, since he says he's still working on the Russian translation of Lolita, which he'd finished by March of that year; its 25 or so minutes are broken up into four parts. He starts off talking about how difficult it is for him to speak extemporaneously, making a comparison to the "beautiful, limpid" speech of his father, "with an aphorism here and a metaphor there ... I can't do it! ... I have to write it down laboriously; I don't think like that." He complains about the "crude, medieval" Freud; then, after the titles and a quick summary of his biography (the announcer claims he learned English before Russian, which is of course untrue; he once claimed to have learned to read English first, but I'm not sure that can be taken literally either) he reads the start of Lolita in English and then in Russian, and from there on it's completely absorbing if you care about Nabokov. (We also get to hear him chatting in French with the proprietor of a kiosk.) It ends with him playing chess with his wife (and laughing heartily, as he had earlier when talking about throwing out the index cards he wrote his novels on when they became too overwritten) and comparing writing to composing chess problems, with deception being part of the pleasure in each case. Thanks for the link go to Anatoly (whose commenters point out the oddity of Nabokov's having such a strong accent in English, considering that he learned it as a child, attended Cambridge, and had spent twenty years in America).

MENTOR.

I'm still reading David A. Bell's The First Total War, and in explaining his theory of how, paradoxically, the new concept that war was an aberration that could and should be eliminated led to the modern type of "total war" ushered in by the Napoleonic Wars, Bell traces the popularity of the idea back to François Fénelon, who had been nothing but a name to me, dimly recalled from high-school French classes with the severe Mme Ruegg. In 1699, Fénelon published a novel, Les Aventures de Télémaque (The Adventures of Telemachus), that "more than anything else... saved him from the thickets of scholars' footnotes and made him a sizable figure in European history and literature"; a sequel to the Odyssey, it "caused an immediate sensation, going through fifteen French editions in 1699 alone and at least sixty more over the course of the eighteenth century. Translated into every major language, it had particular success in English, where it appeared in at least fifty separate editions before 1800. Today, it is exasperatingly difficult to see why...." (Google Books has an 1857 American edition here, if you want to investigate for yourself.) And "in each of its eighteen long sections, Fenelon insistently put forth the claims of conscience, denounced war, and urged Christian pacifism on Christian rulers."

Now, throughout the novel "Telemachus has by his side the drearily wise counselor Mentor, who ensures that his pupil's slightest surrender to temptation meets with quick and loquacious correction," and on p. 64, Bell writes "The word 'mentor,' which we owe to Fenelon, remains a telling sign of its appeal." I regarded this claim skeptically, having always assumed the word was taken from Homer, but lo and behold, when I went to the OED I discovered that the entry for mentor, revised just this last June, says:

[< French mentor (1735 in sense 2 in a book title, 1749 in sense ‘guide, adviser’) < Mentor, the name of a character in F. de S. de la Mothe-Fénelon's Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699), after ancient Greek Μέντωρ, the name of a character in the Odyssey, in whose likeness Athena appears to Telemachus and acts as his guide and adviser. Compare German Mentor (1725 in sense ‘court tutor, adviser’ in a book title), Italian mentore (a1789), Spanish mentor (1785 in a book title).
  N.E.D. (1906) notes that the emphasis Fénelon places on the role of Mentor as a counsellor is key to the currency of this word in English and French. Fénelon's work was one of the most popular political novels of its time, and had been translated into English by 1699-1700, German by 1700, and Italian by 1719: numerous English adaptations in prose, verse, and drama appeared in the course of the 18th cent., including a translation by Smollett.
  The ancient Greek name is recorded as a historical personal name in the 4th cent. It may be cognate with MIND n.]

(The original OED etymology just said it was "a. F. mentor, appellative use of the proper name Mentor, Gr. Μέντωρ.") You never know what you're going to learn from a history book.

SOME WORDS.

Leafing through Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, I happened on the word standish "a stand for writing materials : inkstand." Well, that's an odd word, thought I, and turned to the OED, where I found it qualified as "Obs. exc. Hist. or arch." with the etymology "Commonly believed to be f. STAND v. + DISH n.; but evidence is wanting for such a use of dish as would account for the assumed combination." The latest citation is from 1864 (Athenæum 11 June 801 "When the veteran,.. is about to lay his pen to rest in the standish"), and given the way the world has turned since then, it is unlikely to experience a resurgence in popularity. What on earth is it doing in M-W at all, let alone unattended by an "obsolete" sticker?

The frighteningly literate Conrad pointed me to the revision of the OED's entry for paparazzo. The former etymology read, in its entirety, "[It.]," and the first cite was from 1968; the revision (from last December) takes it back to 1961 (two quotes, both from Time) and adds a much fuller etymology:

[< Italian paparazzo (1961) < the name of the character Paparazzo, a society photographer in F. Fellini's film La Dolce Vita (1960). See also PAPARAZZI n.
  The selection of the name Paparazzo (which occurs as a surname in Italy) for the character in Fellini's film has been variously explained. According to Fellini himself, the name was taken from an opera libretto; the comment is also attributed to him that the word ‘suggests.. a buzzing insect, hovering, darting, stinging’. It is also used as the name of a character by G. Gissing in By the Ionian Sea (1909), which appeared in Italian translation in 1957 and has been cited as an inspiration by E. Flaiano, who contributed to the film's scenario. (For further possible expressive connotations of the name, it has also been noted that in the Italian dialect of Abruzzi, where Flaiano came from, paparazzo occurs as a word for a clam, which could be taken as suggesting a metaphor for the opening and closing of a camera lens; the Italian suffix -azzo (variant of -accio < classical Latin -āceus: see -ACEOUS suffix) also has pejorative connotations.)]

Finally, I've just started a well-reviewed history of war in the Napoleonic period, David A. Bell's The First Total War, and on p. 26 he says the young Napoleon "not only read obsessively through the great works of the Enlightenment but also took copious notes and even kept a file of obscure expressions to sprinkle ostentatiously through his own writings (rhizophage, cacique, tomogun)." Now, rhizophage and cacique were child's play, but what on earth was tomogun? It wasn't in my dictionaries, so I hit Google, with not much success except that it seemed to be from Voltaire—in his Essai sur les Moeurs, he writes:

Voici un morceau des plus singuliers du Veidam: « Le premier homme, étant sorti des mains de Dieu, lui dit: Il y aura sur la terre différentes occupations, tous ne seront pas propres à toutes; comment les distinguer entre eux? Dieu lui répondit: Ceux qui sont nés avec plus d’esprit et de goût pour la vertu que les autres seront les brames. Ceux qui participent le plus du rosogoun, c’est-à-dire de l’ambition, seront les guerriers. Ceux qui participent le plus du tomogun, c’est-à-dire de l’avarice, seront les marchands. Ceux qui participeront du comogun, c’est-à-dire qui seront robustes et bornés, seront occupés aux oeuvres serviles. »

("Veidam" is short for Ézour-Veidam, a fake Veda written by one P. Nobili.) So "tomogun" means 'avarice,' and is presumably Sanskrit... except that I can't find any trace of it elsewhere. Fortunately a scanning error helps out; in a Google Books search I get a hit for this (Message of the Upanishads, p. 27), where the word turns out to be tamogun. Now things proceed easily; Platts has it under "tamas (in comp. tamo), s.m. Darkness (physical or moral), gloom; the quality of darkness incident to humanity," with its subentry "tamo-guṇ, s.m. The third of the qualities incident to creation or the state of humanity, viz., the quality of darkness or ignorance (=tamas, q.v.)." So "avarice" was Nobili's misinterpretation or distortion, and all is clear. But without the internet, I don't know how I would ever have found out what that odd sequence of letters meant.

CALL FOR CURSES.

Almost a year ago I announced the publication of the U.K. edition of the book of curses and insults I coauthored, Uglier Than a Monkey’s Armpit; next year the U.S. edition should be coming out, and the publisher has asked me to make some changes to the section on American English. Specifically, the Dr. Dre line I was so fond of has to go because quoting song lyrics is a problem, but they also feel the selection is a little lackluster in general, and I have to agree. The thing is, when I signed on to the original project, I wasn't given much time to provide a whole bunch of material, so I was pretty much grabbing at whatever I could turn up, and I was disappointed in my U.S. section. I know my native country has been a world leader in invective and cursing, and I want better evidence! So if you know of a good, punchy line from a story, novel, or other nonmusical item that shows off the vulgar inventiveness of these United States, or a word that arose here (besides pissant, which is already included), please add a comment or drop me a line. If it winds up in the book, you may wind up in the acknowledgments! (Needless to say, if you own the U.K. or Australian edition and have noticed errors, by all means mention those.)

The entries that could stand to be replaced (besides the Dr. Dre line) are the fairly boring ones I've reproduced below the cut.

silk stockings
This term, at the end of the eighteenth century simply a reference to the well-to-do in the brand-new United States, a century later had insulting overtones. It had plenty of company: the upper crust (a term used from the 1830s on) were also called fancy-pants, high-hats, Mr Moneybags (or Gotrocks), snoots, stuffed shirts, and (in New York City, where their natural habitat was Fifth Avenue) Avenoodles (a term used by Walt Whitman in 1856 and still in use in 1900).

Hell's Kitchen
This vivid term for what in the late 1850s was a mixed black and Irish slum on the west side of Manhattan is still in use, though real estate values in the neighborhood have risen considerably (and realtors are trying to persuade people not to call it that). Other unsavory neighborhood names (no longer in use) listed in Irving Lewis Allen's comprehensive The City in Slang: New York Life and Popular Speech are Misery Row, Bandit's Roost, and Mixed-Ale Flats.

SEARCHING MAGAZINES ON GOOGLE.

I don't normally update you all on the latest bells and whistles introduced by Google, but this is a huge addition to the material available for searching, and their announcement starts with an etymology, so how could I resist?

The word "magazine" is derived from the Arabic word "makhazin," meaning storehouse. Since Daniel Defoe published the world's first English magazine back in 1704, millions of magazines catering to nearly every imaginable taste have been created and consumed, passed from person to person in cafes, barber shops, libraries, and homes around the world. If you're wondering what cars people drove in the eighties or what was in fashion thirty years ago, there's a good chance that you'll find that answer in a magazine. Yet few magazine archives are currently available online.

Today, we're announcing an initiative to help bring more magazine archives and current magazines online, partnering with publishers to begin digitizing millions of articles from titles as diverse as New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Ebony...

Explore other publications, like Popular Science, New York Magazine, or (for you physics enthusiasts) the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, to rediscover historical interviews, do-it-yourself articles, and even a piece on canine eyewear.... You can search for magazines through Google Book Search. ... Magazine articles are tagged with the keyword "Magazine" on the search snippet.

Via stavrosthewonderchicken at MetaFilter, where I note with sadness but no surprise the following comment: "There are a number of missing issues of several of the magazines."

UCLA PHONETICS LAB ARCHIVE.

Another amazing resource:

Welcome to the UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive. For over half a century, the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory has collected recordings of hundreds of languages from around the world, providing source materials for phonetic and phonological research, of value to scholars, speakers of the languages, and language learners alike. The materials on this site comprise audio recordings illustrating phonetic structures from over 200 languages with phonetic transcriptions, plus scans of original field notes where relevant.

It was a project of the late Peter Ladefoged, a great phonetician and teacher about whom you can read some reminiscences (including a mention of his work as linguistic consultant on the film My Fair Lady) at the MetaFilter post from which I got the link.

FICTION IN TRANSLATION.

From the LA Times blog:

Today, Three Percent announced its long list for the best translated novel of 2008. The 25 titles include works originally published in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Hungarian, German, Arabic, Greek, Catalan, Icelandic and Hebrew. The Times has reviewed some (the complete list, with links to our reviews, after the jump), but we haven't reviewed all of them. I asked Three Percent's editor, Chad Post, a few questions about the focus on works in translation.

It's an interesting discussion, and the list should be useful for those who like to keep up with world literature. (Here's the Three Percent website, which looks worth bookmarking.)

MANDELSTAM ON LANGUAGE.

I keep going back to Mandelstam, one of the most important writers to me even though I often find his thought hard to follow, and my latest attempt at his 1922 essay "On the Nature of the Word" (О природе слова) brought to my attention a passage I thought I'd translate and pass along:

As such a criterion of the unity of the literature of a given people, a conventional [or "conditional" or "theoretical": uslovnoe] unity, only a people's language can be recognized, for all other signs/indicators [priznaki] are themselves conventional, transient, and arbitrary. But language, even though it changes, does not stiffen into repose even for a minute, [moving] from one point to another, [each] blindingly bright in the consciousness of philologists, and within the bounds of all its changes it remains a fixed quantity, a constant, it remains internally unified. For each philologist such an identity of personality in application to the (self-)consciousness of the language is natural. When the Latin language, having spread throughout the Roman lands, blossomed with a new flower and put forth the shoots of the future Romance languages, a new literature began, childish and poor by comparison with Latin, but already Romance.

When there sounded forth the living speech of the "Lay of the Host of Igor," full of images, thoroughly secular, worldly, and Russian at each turn, Russian literature began. And when Velimir Khlebnikov, a contemporary Russian writer, plunges into the thick of Russian root words, into an etymological night dear to the heart of an intelligent reader, that same Russian literature, the literature of the "Lay of the Host of Igor," is alive. Russian literature, exactly like Russian nationality, is compounded of numberless adulterations, interbreedings, graftings, and alien influences, but in one thing it remains true to itself, until our own kitchen Latin sounds forth for us as well, and on the mighty ruins spring up pale young shoots of new life, like the Old French song of the martyr Eulalie:

Buona pulcella fut Eulalia.
Bel auret corps bellezour anima.

(Original below the cut.)

Таким критерием единства литературы данного народа, единства условного, может быть признан только язык народа, ибо все остальные признаки сами условны, преходящи и произвольны. Язык же, хотя и меняется, ни одну минуту не застывает в покое, от точки и до точки, ослепительно ясной в сознании филологов, и в пределах всех своих изменений остается постоянной величиной, «константой», остается внутренне единым. Для всякого филолога понятно, что такое тождество личности в применении к самосознанию языка. Когда латинская речь, распространившаяся по всем романским землям, зацвела новым цветом и пустила побеги будущих романских языков, началась новая литература, — детская и убогая по сравнению с латинской, но уже романская.

Когда прозвучала живая и образная речь «Слова о полку Игореве», насквозь светская, мирская и русская в каждом повороте, — началась русская литература. А пока Велимир Хлебников, современный русский писатель, погружается в самую гущу русского корнесловия, в этимологическую ночь, любезную сердцу умного читателя, жива та же самая русская литература, литература «Слова о полку Игореве». Русский язык так же точно, как и русская народность, сложился из бесконечных примесей, скрещиваний, прививок и чужеродных влияний, но в одном он останется верен самому себе, пока и для нас не прозвучит наша кухонная латынь и на могучих развалинах не взойдут бледные молодые побеги новой жизни, подобно древнефранцузской песенке о мученице Евлалии:

Buona pulcella fut Eulalia.
Bel auret corps bellezour anima.

NOOSES GIVE.

Anatoly recently posted a Russian translation of Dorothy Parker's 1925 poem "Resumé" along with the original, a gem long familiar to me:

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

But, as he writes me, there's an argument in the comments section about the exact meaning of "nooses give" in the original: some say that the noose may break off under the weight of a body, while others advocate for the meaning of "stretch, become looser." As I wrote him in response,

Now that I think about it, I realize that line has never completely made sense to me: how exactly does a noose "give" (OED: "yield, give way"; M-W: "to yield to physical force or strain; to collapse from the application of force or pressure")? A rope can break, sure, but can a noose, the knotted part around your neck, "yield, give way"? Doesn't seem likely. My guess is that she knew it was inexact phrasing but went with it because of the rhyme.

But I don't trust my own judgment on this, so I throw it (like a juicy bone) to the assembled multitudes. Snap, stretch, or poetic license?

THE WRITER'S CAPITAL CRIME.

From the preface to Remy de Gourmont's Book of Masks (Le Livre des Masques, 1896):

Conformism, imitativeness, submission to rules and to teachings is the writer's capital crime. The work of a writer must be not only the reflection, but the larger reflection of his personality. The only excuse that a man has for his writing is to write about himself, to reveal to others the sort of world that is mirrored in his own glass; his only excuse is to be original; he must speak of things not yet spoken of in a form not yet formulated. He must create his own aesthetics - and we must admit as many aesthetics as there are original spirits and judge them for what they are, not for what they aren't.

Via The Daily Growler; the French is below the cut. (Incidentally, there is no accent on Remy; someone more knowledgeable in the ways of Wikipedia than I should change the title on the entry there.)

Update. Helen DeWitt has some interesting thoughts on this over at paperpools, comparing languages to games and saying "If originality is seen in terms of breaking rules, though, that presupposes that art is still comprehensible only in terms of constraints which already exist - originality is to be embedded in the sort of Oedipal drama at the heart of Bloom's Anxiety of Influence. It's as if one is actually incapable of understanding a form in which the rules one knows have no purchase." Read it!

Le crime capital pour un écrivain c'est le conformisme, l'imitativité, la soumission aux règles et aux enseignements. L'oeuvre d'un écrivain doit être non seulement le reflet, mais le reflet grossi de sa personnalité. La seule excuse qu'un homme ait d'écrire, c'est de s'écrire lui-même, de dévoiler aux autres la sorte de monde qui se mire en son miroir individuel; sa seule excuse est d'être original; il doit dire des choses non encore dites et les dire en une forme non encore formulée. Il doit se créer sa propre esthétique,—et nous devrons admettre autant d'esthétiques qu'il y a d'esprits originaux et les juger d'après ce qu'elles sont et non d'après ce qu'elles ne sont pas.

THE LAZ HAZELNUT SHIBBOLETH.

Joel of Far Outliers tells a fascinating story about the Laz, a people of the Caucasus who have wound up in northeastern Turkey, and the unfortunate situation they find themselves in, quoting from Michael E. Meeker's "The Black Sea Turks: Some Aspects of Their Ethnic and Cultural Background," International Journal of Middle East Studies 2 (1971):318-345:

It is said that the Laz when conscripted [by the Turkish state] are automatically placed in the navy … because Anatolians associate Black Sea men with the sea, even though many of them have little or no experience as sailors or fishermen. The eastern Black Sea men, realizing that the period of service for the navy is three years, while that for the army is only two, naturally try to hide their origins, but the recruiting officer simply asks each man to pronounce the word 'hazlenut.'

Follow the link for details.

LANGUAGE IN 19TH-CENTURY RUSSIA.

Earlier this year I wrote briefly about the linguistic situation in War and Peace; now I'm reading Orlando Figes's Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia and finding more material, which I will quote here for those interested. (I suspect Figes is oversimplifying the situation, and as always would welcome responses from those who know more than I.) Talking about the fact that aristocrats were "so immersed in foreign languages that many found it challenging to speak or write their own" (pp. 55-56):

Princess Dashkova, a vocal advocate of Russian culture and the only female president ever of the Russian Academy of Sciences, had the finest European education. 'We were instructed in four different languages, and spoke French fluently,' she wrote in her memoirs, 'but my Russian was extremely poor.' Count Karl Nesselrode, a Baltic German and Russia's foreign minister from 1815 to 1856, could not write or even speak the language of the country he was meant to represent. French was the language of high society, and in high-born families the language of all personal relationships as well. The Volkonskys, for example, a family whose fortunes we shall follow in this book, spoke mainly French among themselves. Mademoiselle Callame, a French governess in the Volkonsky household, recalled that in nearly fifty years of service she never heard the Volkonskys speak a word of Russian, except to give orders to the domestic staff. This was true even of Maria (née Raevskaya), the wife of Prince Sergei Volkonsky, Tsar Alexander's favourite aide-de-camp in 1812. Despite the fact that she had been brought up in the Ukrainian provinces, where noble families were more inclined to speak their native Russian tongue, Maria could not write in Russian properly. Her letters to her husband were in French. Her spoken Russian, which she had picked up from the servants, was very primitive and full of peasant slang. It was a common paradox that the most refined and cultured Russians could speak only the peasant form of Russian which they had learnt from the servants as children...

This neglect of the Russian language was most pronounced and persistent in the highest echelons of the aristocracy, which had always been the most Europeanized (and in more than a few cases of foreign origin). In some families children were forbidden to speak Russian except on Sundays and religious holidays. During her entire education Princess Ekaterina Golitsyn had only seven lessons in her native tongue. Her mother was contemptuous of Russian literature and thought Gogol was 'for the coachmen'. The Golitsyn children had a French governess and, if she ever caught them speaking Russian, she would punish them by tying a red cloth in the shape of a devil's tongue around their necks. Anna Lelong had a similar experience at the Girls' Gymnasium, the best school for noble daughters in Moscow. Those girls caught speaking Russian were made to wear a red tin bell all day and stand like dunces, stripped of their white aprons, in the corner of the class; they were forced to remain standing even during meals, and received their food last. Other children were even more severely punished if they spoke Russian—sometimes even locked in a room. The attitude seems to have been that Russian, like the Devil, should be beaten out of noble children from an early age, and that even the most childish feelings had to be expressed in a foreign tongue.

Later, talking about the Siberian exiles who had participated in the Decembrist revolt (p. 97):

And all of them were forced, for the first time in their lives, to become fluent in their native tongue. For Maria and Sergei [Volkonsky], accustomed as they were to speak and think in French, this was one of the hardest aspects of their new existence. On their first encounter in that Nerchinsk prison cell they were forced to speak in Russian (so that the guards could understand), but they did not know the words for all the complex emotions they were feeling at that moment, so their conversation was somewhat artificial and extremely limited. Maria set about the study of her native language from a copy of the Scriptures in the camp. Sergei's Russian, which he had written as an officer, became more vernacular. His letters from Urik are littered with Siberian colloquialisms and misspellings of elementary words ('if, 'doubt', 'May' and 'January').

And on the patriotic effects of the Napoleonic Wars (pp. 102-03):

It became a fashion for the sons of noblemen to learn to read and write their native tongue. Dmitry Sheremetev, the orphaned son of Nikolai Petrovich and Praskovya, spent three years on Russian grammar and even rhetoric as a teenager in the 1810s—as much time as he spent on learning French. For lack of Russian texts, children learned to read from the Scriptures—indeed, like Pushkin, they were often taught to read by the church clerk or a local priest. Girls were less likely to be taught the Russian script than boys. Unlike their brothers, who were destined to become army officers or landowners, they would not have much business with the merchants or the serfs and hence little need to read or write their native tongue. But in the provinces there was a growing trend for women as well as men to learn Russian. Tolstoy's mother, Maria Volkonsky, had a fine command of literary Russian, even writing poems in her native tongue. Without this growing Russian readership the literary renaissance of the nineteenth century would have been inconceivable. Previously the educated classes in Russia had read mainly foreign literature.

In the eighteenth century the use of French and Russian had demarcated two entirely separate spheres: French the sphere of thought and sentiment, Russian the sphere of daily life. There was one form of language (French or Gallicized 'salon' Russian) for literature and another (the plain speech of the peasantry, which was not that far apart from the spoken idiom of the merchants and the clergy) for daily life. There were strict conventions on the use of languages. For example, a nobleman was supposed to write to the Tsar in Russian, and it would have seemed audacious if he wrote to him in French; but he always spoke to the Tsar in French, as he spoke to other noblemen. On the other hand, a woman was supposed to write in French, not just in her correspondence with the sovereign but with all officials, because this was the language of polite society; it would have been deemed a gross indecency if she had used Russian expressions. In private correspondence, however, there were few set rules, and by the end of the eighteenth century the aristocracy had become so bilingual that they slipped quite easily and imperceptibly from Russian into French and back again. Letters of a page or so could switch a dozen times, sometimes even in the middle of a sentence, without prompting by a theme.

(Note the inconsistency in rendering women's names: Maria Raevskaya, but Ekaterina Golitsyn. Tsk.)

BRITISH COLLECTIVE PLURALS.

Most of us probably have a general sense that U.K. usage favors "the [group] are" where Americans say "the [group] is"; if you're curious about the details, check out Mark Liberman's post at the Log. He investigates committee and government, and discovers that the singular is favored overwhelmingly for the former and significantly for the latter; various commenters point out, however, that the plural is used for sports teams ("Arsenal have scored again") and rock bands and record labels ("U2 are on tour," "EMI have signed the Sex Pistols"). Interesting stuff; it's always good to have a look at the facts before sinking into the easy chair of generalizations.

LIBRARIES, PUBLISHING, AND THE WEB.

I had an interesting e-mail chat with librarylis, one of MetaFilter's many excellent librarians, about the problems of libraries, with which she is infinitely more familiar than I, and she recommended "Reality Checks, by Andrew Richard Albanese. Albanese summarizes the discussions at a recent Media Tools of Change (TOC) conference and then provides "ten reality checks—broad observations about the web, libraries, and publishers, where there is value to be found or added, where there is danger, and, of course, where users are going." I can't summarize it, so I'll just give you a snippet to whet your appetite:

Certainly, publishers are right to want their own footprint on the web. Oxford University Press’s Scholarship Online (OSO), essentially an all-inclusive database of its book content, is an example of how that can be done right in-house. There’s no shortage of vendors to help, either. Ebrary, for example, has proven itself a durable, nimble service, with a powerful, easy-to-use platform that integrates digital book content with all digital collections—a key point, librarians say. Ingram’s MyiLibrary and Lightning Source, meanwhile, are surging fulfillment and POD services—virtual warehouses for publishers—that allow publishers to squeeze money forever from their greatest asset: the backlist.

The problem with both Random House and HarperCollins, however, is that they are more interested in driving web users back to physical books than driving a new market. Only now are they “experimenting” with selling chapters online or giving away content—and those experiments seem rigged to fail. Random House, for example, is selling chapters of Chip and Dan Heath’s Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die for $2.99 each—a good choice but a curious price point, given the physical book is available online for under $10. HarperCollins is offering free downloads of some titles—including a new novel by Paulo Coelho—but those editions are only available for one month, and readers can’t download them to their computers or print them.

Limiting online activities to the marketing of physical books avoids any real engagement with the future....

Thanks for the thought-provoking read, lis!

A YEAR IN READING 2008.

C. Max Magee of The Millions has an annual tradition of asking people to talk about books they've read and enjoyed during the previous year, and he has gotten into the flattering habit of beginning the series with my contribution; here it is. (If anyone comes over from The Millions and is curious as to my final thoughts about Proust, here they are. More about Tolstoy, doubtless, to come in the months ahead!)