Notebook

My friend Donna found this; we'd been talking about Nicholson Baker's new book about the Second World War, Human Smoke. This is Holland House Library, London, 1940.

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A found poem at the National Gallery in London. The above are two sides of an altarpiece by Cranach the Elder, painted in 1506. Here is the caption to the painting; only the line breaks are mine.




















St Genevieve of Paris holds a candle
which she miraculously relit
when the Devil blew it out.
St Appollonia, next to her, holds the pincers
with which her teeth
were extracted under torture.
St Christina stands on a millstone.
The stone miraculously refloated
after she had been tied to it
and then thrown into a lake.
On her left is St Ottilia of Alsace,
a Benedictine nun. She displays
a pair of eyes, a reference
to her miraculous cure from blindess.

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Marjorie Perloff in The TLS on Martin Amis's book of essays, The Second Plane:
'The war against cliché has a curious way of morphing into the cliché against war. Consider the following, from a passage praising secularism as the only reasonable alternative for the twenty-first century: “Secularism contains no warrant for action. One can afford to be crude about this. When Islamists crash passenger planes into buildings, or hack off the heads of hostages, they shout, ‘God is great!’ When secularists do that kind of thing, what do they shout?” The question is meant to be rhetorical. But there’s a simple answer: they shout “Heil Hitler!”'

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Me 'n' Peter Carey, somewhere in the West Village... read the interview here. Cheerful photo by Adam Nadel.

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Until the idea of space flight became credible, there were no aliens; instead there were green men who hid in the woods. In the same way, psychotic delusions keep up with scientific change: the people once pursued by phantasms of the dead are now pestered by living celebrities who watch them from inside their TV sets, and those who used to confess themselves possessed now say there is a bomb inside them. The dictionary attests to the power and antiquity of the need to believe we are sharing the planet with beings not animal and not human, with ‘little greys’ from spacecraft, with goblins and domestic deities: beings who suspend the laws of nature wherever they pop up, and suspend moral laws too, for household sprites and pucks often have a fierce, childlike sense of justice, and retaliate without fear if they are slighted; aliens who want sex never ask nicely. One the lonely road by moonlight, the parts of ourselves oppressed by our intelligence come out to play. We meet ancestral selves, neither gods nor demons but short semi-humans with hairy ears and senses differently attuned – the eyesight of an eagle, the nose of a hound. The phenomena are internal, generated by the psychological mechanisms that connect us to each other and to our evolutionary past.

Hilary Mantel reviewing the Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained, edited by Una McGovern, in The London Review of Books, January 24, 2008

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"If no one wants to be rich, then we have a significant economic problem, because flourishing economies require that people continually procure and consume one another’s goods and services. Market economies require that we all have an insatiable hunger for stuff, and if everyone were content with the stuff they had, then the economy would grind to a halt. But this is a significant economic problem, it is not a significant personal problem. The chair of the Federal Reserve may wake up every morning with a desire to do what the economy wants, but most of us get up with a desire to do what we want, which is to say that the fundamental needs of a vibrant economy and the fundamental needs of a happy individual are not necessarily the same. So what motivates people to work hard every day to do things that will satisfy the economy’s needs but not their own? Like so many thinkers, [Adam] Smith believed that people want just one thing – happiness – hence economies can blossom and grow only if people are deluded into believing that the production of wealth will make them happy. If and only if people hold this false belief will they do enough producing, procuring, and consuming to sustain their economies."
from Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness

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