David X Novak
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The Body Farm for Literary Relics

8/31/2014

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You have literary forensics, and forensic linguistics, but I am thinking of something different. The catalyst is Death’s Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab The Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales, a book by Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson which has fallen into my possession.

It is not a topic of particular interest to me. If I’m stuck in a hotel room, I’ll watch reruns of NCIS or one of the other crime shows that—as they will nowadays—tend to dwell on ample scenes inside the forensics lab with corpse (in whatever stage of decomposition) lying face up on the table. But death has always fascinated the living, and, coupled with transgression, I suppose it supplies a winning formula for television.

The book is a memoir of Bill Bass, a true life practitioner in the field, with a focus on work-related vignettes. What I suppose the “Body Farm” to be is a laboratory for investigating the rates of decomposition of human (and possibly animal) bodies. I have not read far enough to confirm that, but his story “The Unsavory Uncle” suggests as much: “We do not know of any method by which you could tell the length of time since the cow has been killed,” he wrote to an investigator who needed to know, “I can tell you the age of the cow at death; however, I cannot tell you how long it has been since the cow was killed.”

The book is well written. I was thinking about what Ford Madox Ford wrote in the letter quoted in my last post: “I have always been mad about...the way writing should be done.” This does not describe me; but I have always enjoyed coming upon a well-turned sentence or paragraph. I did so in Bass's story:
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that bones in a creek will tend to wash downstream. The tricky part is figuring out how far downstream. Generally the smaller, lighter bones get carried farther than the skull or long bones. Complicating the picture slightly is the fact that the father downstream a bone gets carried, the farther to either side it can drift as well. If you plot it on a diagram, the scatter pattern tends to look like a skinny teardrop, with the sharp end farthest upstream. The larger the stream and the faster the current, the bigger that teardrop area gets.

I went about fifteen yards downstream from the point where the skull and most of the bones had been found, so I could work my way upstream against the current. By starting beyond the boundary of the expected scatter, I’d be less likely to step on a bone and break it or mash it deeper into the mud. Working upstream also meant that the mud I stirred up as I walked and felt around in the streambed would get washed away from the direction I was heading, rather than into it. It’s simple once you think about it, but you’d be surprised how often untrained searchers wade around at random, muddying up the water in more ways than one.
I admire the precision with which he conveys a large amount of information directly (in this case he was searching particularly for teeth). It calls back up memories.

I’ve written—slightly—about my high school journalism class. This was in lieu of sophomore year English. We studied Julius Caesar and A Tale of Two Cities, which I believe formed some kind of a state requirement, but otherwise no literature; which explains how, in high school, I managed not to get any English literature at all (save these two exceptions), but only—mostly—American. (Freshman year we did read a translation of The Odyssey, and although I have exceedingly bad memories of that class, in her own way and inadvertently my teacher provided a pivotal inspiration in the course my literary life would run.)

Journalism class was useful, in that you learned a lot of standards about how things were supposed to be done that are generally not adhered to anymore (“Put the most important information first, etc.”). But it was not a favorite class of mine or pleasant (to me) in the least. When I say I can imagine having been in the class with Daniel Pearl, I can easily see him as being our teacher’s star pupil, whereas I was considerably “out of the loop” when it came to study, preoccupied by the tailspin into my own teenaged emotional angst. We would not have been pals—unless he was exceptionally generous and gregarious, which, by all accounts, he was, or at least did become later in life.

Our teacher was preoccupied with a lot of technical detail—like style, weights, widths of fonts—all things which have become common knowledge in this PC age but which were considered arcane and specialized back then.

There was one mechanical exercise related to writing which stands out in my memory. I failed miserably, but did learn from it.

Each student was (in secret) given the name of an object in the room, and told to write a description of it—a visual description, excluding reference to function—well enough so that other students would be able to identify the object based solely upon the writing. I was given “the stapler,” and mind you, was forbidden to say “it is used to fasten together multiple pieces of paper,” so came up with a rather lengthy description of something that was “metallic, and rounded on the top” and so forth. I don’t really remember what I wrote; but it was long-winded and impossible for anyone to figure out. As it turned out—and I recognized this at the time—the quality of the description and whether it could be guessed or not more generally relied on the object which had been assigned, less on the writer’s individual skill, so the person who had been assigned “the wastebasket” had an easier job of it than someone who had something less rudimentary. But nevertheless, I understood the purpose of the exercise. (As I recall—though this may be fanciful too— Michelle Slatalla was the unlucky recipient of my description and was not shy about expressing her befuddlement.)

Still, it instilled in me an appreciation for well-appointed phrasing, as in the above description of hunting for teeth in a stream. When I write, I aim more for precision in the telling than for, say, beauty, though I understand such an objective has become popular these days. It is why one of my critics will tell me, “I’ll try to remember you don’t give a f*ck” when I explain that “I work with the material at hand, shape it as best as I can, then move on and never look back.” I look for the word to do the job—adequately is good enough for me—and I don’t think twice about it. Of course, we were discussing poetry and not “rocket science,” and my defense remains, “Alas, alas, who’s injured by my [method]?”

For me, the point is, that bad writing, at least in the field of poetics, is not a crime—a friend of mine remarked about my poem about a shipwreck, that it was "[a]lmost as dreadful as the disaster itself"—but that it is something which can be studied, plausibly even along with the good. Poets are fond of telling each other, "Time will tell," and (as Yeats famously reports of himself having said) "None of us can say who will succeed, or even who has or has not talent. The only thing certain about us is that we are too many."

Wouldn't it be interesting if we had something of a "Body Farm" for literary works, where we could study the effects of time upon them? (Obviously, none of us will live so long as to really get a handle on things—even as Yeats declared.)

My friend felt I was striving to rival "The Tay Bridge Disaster" by William McGonagall. In the literary "tit for tat" that you would imagine to ensue between friends after such a criticism, I naturally opined that the McGonagall poem should be studied for what it did right. Generations have come and gone raising it to mockery, and yet the poem stands, and the subject of the verse is remembered for it (as well as manifold treatments touching the subject).
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Ford Madox Ford to Stella Bowen: "I regarded myself as the Eel"

8/28/2014

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In a special collected edition of his works, Ford Madox Ford dedicated his previously undedicated novel, The Good Soldier, to his wife, Stella, whom he accredited with having offered him "the incentive to live". He expressed this dedication in a letter—the two being apart at the time of the reissue: "You, my dear Stella, will have heard me tell these stories many times. But the seas now divide us and I put them in this, your letter, which you will read before you see me in the hope that they may give you some pleasure with the illusion that you are hearing familiar—and very devoted—tones."

One paragraph resonated with me quite. He described having "always been mad about writing—about the way [it] should be done" but had himself at that time only "written rather desultorily a number of books" which he characterized as pastiches or tours de force, and then:

[O]n the day I was forty I sat down to show what I could do—and The Good Soldier resulted. I fully intended it to be my last book. I used to think—and I do not know that I do not think the same now—that one book was enough for any man to write, and, at the date when The Good Soldier was finished, London at least and possibly the world appeared to be passing under the dominion of writers newer and much more vivid. Those were the passionate days of the literary Cubists, Vorticists, Imagistes and the rest of the tapageur and riotous Jeunes of that young decade. So I considered myself as the Eel which, having reached the deep sea, brings forth its young and dies—or as the Great Auk I considered that, having reached my allotted, I had laid my one egg and might as well die. So I took a formal farewell of Literature in the columns of a magazine called the Thrush—which also, poor little auk that it was, died of the effort. Then I prepared to stand aside in favour of our good friends—yours and mine—Ezra, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, H.D., and the rest of the clamorous young writers who were then knocking at the door.
The feeling is perhaps common, when one has written a book, to feel exactly that way. The Requiem was my "auk's egg", and I thought—having produced it at the tender age of thirty-five or thirty-six—that there remained nothing else to be said; and I fully intended my retirement to be permanent.

As it turned out, I was wrong.
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Brooke Allen on Muriel Spark

8/26/2014

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It occurs to me that this will be a good place to put up links to anything I happen to see which interests me, and which (prospectively) may be of interest to a visitor to my site.

Brooke Allen has written a couple of books of critical essays (here and here); a book about the religious views of six crucial "Founding Fathers"; and most recently, and perhaps most unfortunately timed, a travel book about Syria. I have not read this last one, but it waits in my queue, and I suspect it may prove an important historical document about what was there (in Syria) before recent events. Almost surely what she writes about has been devastated. (Well, I notice one reviewer at Amazon writes, "Allen is a typical snivelling progressive who wants America to submit to Muslim 'dhimmitude.'" I doubt she would be so unnuanced as that.)

The latest New Criterion has a review up, of Muriel Spark's essays, headlined "The essays of slender means," a rather negative assessment of Sparks in her capacity of essayist, but a pleasant literary discussion of a writer I've never read. Hopefully, if the link still lasts, you can read it for yourself. There's an interesting discussion about the Brontes as teachers (about which Spark wrote an essay), general philosophizing on what it takes to be a good novelist vs. a good essayist--and very appealing quotes by Spark herself:
Especially now in the arts of drama and the novel we see and hear everywhere the representation of the victim against the oppressor, we have a literature and an artistic culture, one might almost say a civilization, of depicted suffering, whether in social life or in family life. We have representations of the victim-oppressor complex, for instance, in the dramatic portrayal of the gross racial injustices of our world, or in the exposure of tyrannies of family life on the individual. As art this can be badly done, it can be brilliantly done. But I am going to suggest that it isn’t achieving its end or illuminating our lives any more, and that a more effective technique can and should be cultivated. . . .

For what happens when, for example, the sympathies and the indignation of a modern audience are aroused by a play or a novel of the kind to which I have referred? I don’t know for certain, but I suspect that a great number of the audience or of the readers feel that their moral responsibilities are sufficiently fulfilled by the emotions they have been induced to feel. A man may go to bed feeling less guilty after seeing such a play. He has undergone the experience of pity for the underdog. Salt tears have gone bowling down his cheeks. He has had a good dinner. He is absolved, he sleeps well. He rises refreshed, more determined than ever to be the overdog. And there is always, too, the man who finds the heroic role of the victim so appealing that he’ll never depart from it. I suggest that wherever there is a cult of the victim, such being human nature, there will be an obliging cult of twenty equivalent victimizers.
That came from a speech given by Spark in 1970 called "The Desegregation of Art". Read on and discover a pithy reminiscence pivoting on the word "nevertheless." It does not necessarily make me want to read Spark—she is, after all, primarily a novelist—but I would be happy to glance at select essays if they fell my way.

Allen is a good essayist, and I'm always happy to turn my attention to whatever she's writing about, even though it generally falls outside of my relatively narrow sphere of interests. Novels do not beckon me—though as a lad I read some of the Brontes'—or Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, if you will. Unlikely as I am to return to them, they remain (along with Jane Austen) a touchstone in the early development of my English sensibility, and I remember fondly the days when I was able to devote myself so attentively to the fictional world of the novel. I have several on my "bucket list" (am I using that term correctly?), and hope one day to make headway into those goals. (Writing projects tend to take precedence, and I can't even fit those into my schedule these days.) The Tenant of Wildfell Hall bears the distinction of being one of only a handful of novels I've read twice—with a good decade or more in between occasions.

As I say, Allen is none too positive in her review; but she is fair, which is more important.
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A Hard Time for Journalists

8/19/2014

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The "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria," popularly known as ISIS, has today released a video which purports to be the beheading of an American journalist. I say "purports" because I have not seen the video (nor want to), and know nothing of the facts surrounding the claim.

One feels a chilling sense of deja vu. Slightly more than a decade ago, Daniel Pearl was killed in similar fashion. I identified with him, because he was nearly my exact contemporary, and I could easily imagine having been with him in my high school journalism class. (One of my classmates went on to an auspicious journalism career, but I obviously did not.)

At that time, a poem of mine was posted at the South Asian Journalists Association. Checking my emails, I was able to retrieve a copy of it. My original stanza breaks were removed, and until the original is dug up somewhere I can't recollect what they were; but here it is without stanza breaks:

In Memoriam Daniel Pearl (b.1963 d.2002)

Inviolate the sadness that we feel
Today, together, who have faced the fact
That yea, the world is cruel; cruelty is real
As we have known; but mostly men enact
The cruelty and perverted shames that have
Grown up within the heart. Can there be one
That is not moved, that one should meet his grave
In awful circumstance, and so alone?
Yet, though we mourn the death as mourn we do,
’Tis best to focus our attention on
The life as lived, and celebrate, renew
Our faith in one another: we’ll be done
With mourning at the close of life that each
Must face alone, though if God wills it, under
Happier circumstance when we do reach
That fatal juncture--though it makes one wonder
Is there a happy death? Perhaps some few,
But mostly happy deaths are only born
Of life well lived, and in this very sphere
The man we mourn, from living rudely torn,
Excelled, and sets example for us here.
For he was kind, and gentle, and sincere,
Beloved husband, soon to be a father,
Beloved son and friend, beloved brother,
Beloved colleague well-esteemed by many,
Respected and admired, without any
Trace of superbia or arrogance,
That fell into a hapless circumstance.
We mourn the man, but let us, while we say
“He shouldn’t have met death this way,” or else
“He deserved better,” let us not betray
Ourselves to thinking this death takes away
The value of a life profoundly lived.
Together people come, bereaved ones gather
To celebrate and to commemorate
The life that is not with us (for his soul
Is surely near, not least within the heart
Of each of us, that were not rendered whole
Without his presence there); thus must all hate
Be banished as we try to love each other.
Loving is not an easy task, yet it
Is something from which he did never quit,
Love of humanity, and striving to
Better communication between cultures.
That this goodheartedness, this altruism
Was taken advantage of, and was exploited,
Is something we must rue--that there are vultures
So godless as to perpetrate a crime
In furtherance of ends which now must be
Rendered as illegitimate, this we
Must see as yet another cause to rue--
Yet overwhelmingly we must accept
That love which warmly shone in him sublime
Is now in each one here uniquely kept
As light refracted through an angel’s prism.
Daniel we hardly knew ye. He arrived
Unto the gates of heaven, and this quells
Our grief perhaps a little, for we know
That we may see each other later on
If heaven’s blessing falls to us. For we
Must not despair, must not resort to anger
Or rabid thirst for vengeance in this time,
For so the world has been replete with danger
That knows no sheltered season, place or clime.
All is uncertainty, yet this we know
That when he in through heaven’s gates did go
Heaven perhaps have gained a matchless pearl,
While here on earth, that have been left, bereft,
That have been left to try to heal the cleft
Now springing betwixt man and man, we must
Within our little span from dust to dust,
Love and preach love, and watch events unfurl.
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