This month, I’ve been looking at yokohama-e, or “Yokohama pictures,” depictions of foreign fashions and customs that were popular in early Meiji Japan, as the country opened up its ports to Western traders and tourists. You can find the whole collection at the Public Domain Review. They have nothing to do with these links: I just like having a bit of visual jazz to throw in, and I like them.
Recovering the Lost Library of Herculaneum
Considering that location of Pompeii and Herculaneum have been known for two and a half centuries, it’s wild to think that there are still many crucial sites that have been barely excavated. One of them, a mansion that probably belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, is thought to contain the only surviving private library of ancient Rome—or at least, we think it is, based on the boxes full of papyri that have been found in its courtyard, evidently packed up for evacuation during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. The boxes alone contain 1,800 scrolls. We have no idea how many more could be inside, but huge swathes of the Villa of the Papyri have yet to be excavated.
As for the scrolls that we do have, the heat of the eruption carbonized them into hard, coal-like lumps, impossible to read with the naked eye. But in the last few years, researchers have learned how to use high-resolution x-ray photography and AI reading programs to reconstruct the writing on these scrolls. Now, their team is opening up their software for other researchers to use, and offering cash bounties of up to $700,000 to anybody who can reconstruct these ancient texts. The Vesuvius Challenge will continue for the rest of the year.
What’s really exciting, as Dr. Richard Carrier writes over at his blog, is that based on the few scrolls we have recovered, the library’s owner had good taste. The high presence of Epicurean philosophy in the crates suggests both good organization by subject and a strong commitment to learning. Epicurus and his school was held in contempt in early imperial Rome, so anybody who kept in him in stock was more likely to keep other kinds of unfashionable books that weren’t popular enough or acceptable enough to survive. Assuming the rest of the villa is as well-stocked, further excavations might uncover all kinds of important books we only know by name or reputation, like Pliny’s history of Rome or Ovid’s calendar of holidays. Carrier’s full list of likely finds is worth reading, and I’ll be following the Vesuvius Challenge closely.
The Cursed Scroll
Speaking of scrolls, I was going to write about Joel Warner’s new book The Curse of the Marquis De Sade, but John Galbraith Simmons did everything I tried to do better in The Los Angeles Review of Books. Since discretion is the better part of blogging, I just bookmarked it for my April links, and now I share the introduction here:
STRANGE, REPELLENT, compelling, and sublime: the scroll. Forty feet long, just four inches wide, comprised of 33 sheets of paper glued end-to-head, with minuscule script densely crawling across both sides: the handwritten draft of Marquis de Sade’s notorious novel The 120 Days of Sodom. It contains 157,000 words the prisoner set down in 1785, rapid-fire over the course of 37 evenings, in a dank cell in the Bastille, the 14th-century fortress in the middle of Paris, soon to become the symbol of the French Revolution and the people’s triumph over despotism. It was his eighth year of mostly solitary confinement.
Simmons’s review is worth reading, as is Warner’s book. The funny thing about Sodom is that the text itself is easily the least interesting part. Once you’ve read a few chapters of gleeful ultraviolence, you pretty much get the point and say that you’ve read the world’s worst book. But the story of the scroll, and how it wound its way through book collectors, Europe’s pornographic publishing underground, the Surrealist circle, and the biggest pyramid scheme in literary history is a great story. Highly recommended.
Free Borges!
Maria Kodama, wife of Jorge Luis Borges, died last month. Since her husband’s death, she had been the sole proprietor of the Borges brand, managing his work, manuscripts, and legal rights. Evidently, she didn’t leave any kind of will or plan for the Borges estate after her death. That means, under Argentine law, that all the goods of the Borges estate will default to the state. Will “The Library of Babel,” “The Aleph,” and all the rest become public works, or will the state of Argentina sell the works themselves? The courts are currently sorting it out, as it only took one day after Kodama’s death for five self-proclaimed nephew of Borges to emerge and claim that they are the rightful heirs of Borges.
Nobody really knows what happens next, though if you ask me, I’d have the treasury minting Zahir coins ASAP. And come to think of it, the affair of the classic author, his deceased executor, five mysterious claimants, and the metaphysical tangle of copyright law and literary estates would make a great Borges story…
AI Typography
File this one under AI use cases nobody was expecting: an anonymous group of researchers were able to train the Stable Diffusion image-making AI to bend the letters in a word to imitate its meaning. You can spell “Cat” in cat-shaped letters, or “Book” in book-shaped letters, or “Disestablishmentarianism” in letters shaped like the belief that church and state should be legally separated. (I wanted to try that last one, but the demo wasn’t working when I tried.)
I was quite impressed by “Word-As-Image for Semantic Typography” even though typography nerds were quick to tell me that these AI-generated images are tacky. You can see Geoffrey Bunting’s professional opinion over at Wired, which is surely more informed than mine. Even better, Bunting has all kinds of juicy references to much older attempts at avant-garde typography, like Kurt Schwitters’s 1927 Systemschrift, which allowed for modulations in size and shape for each letter in order to alter their pronunciation. Bunting is probably right that it’ll be a long time, if ever, that AI comes up with some kind of type that we’d actually want to use, but I’m all for more wacky experiments in the meantime.
Barack Obama’s Secret Reading Habits Revealed!
That headline is something like what Sophie Vershbow thought she would be writing when Esquire assigned her to look into the former President’s famous reading lists. Though his lists can often read like a digest of books discussed on NPR, he’s certainly got a more interesting, compelling taste as a book club organizer than Oprah or Reese Witherspoon. (Anybody who likes When We Cease to Understand the World is, in my book, a person of good taste.)
In fact, Obama’s tastes are, to many, suspiciously close to the brainier, liberal side of American publishing. A low hum of skeptical cynicism often surrounds discussions of Obama’s lists, and how much publishers make from receiving his nod—and how much work they might put into getting it.
But as far as Vershbow could find, Obama doesn’t have any hidden partnerships with publishers, and nobody on his team has any influence on his reading. The guy just likes to read.
The question of how the most powerful man on the planet found time to read Fates and Furies amid major world events like the Arab Spring and the killing of Osama bin Laden is a perfectly valid reason for skepticism—the guy was and is busy!—but Schultz says Obama found time to read because he sees reading as necessary, and he makes it a priority on his schedule. “He considered [reading] part of being a good leader, part of being a good president, part of being a good father, a good husband, and a good man,” Schultz said.
In other words, Obama subscribes to the Ted Gioia school of constant reading.
Mao Zedong’s Secret Reading Habits Revealed!
Mao Zedong was a murderer, war criminal, dictator, imperialist, bad poet, and a worse human being whose leadership directly led to the death of tens of millions. He was also a total book nerd and, briefly, a librarian. Catherine Halley has the story over at JSTOR Daily. After graduating from high school, Mao spent most of the next six months hanging out at the Hunan Provincial Library, immersing himself in world literature. As he told a biographer:
During this period of self-education I read many books, studied world geography and world history. There for the first time I saw, and studied with great interest, a map of the world. I read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and Darwin’s Origin of Species, and a book on ethics by John Stuart Mill. I read the works of Rousseau, Spencer’s Logic, and a book on law by Montesquieu. I mixed poetry and romances, and the tales of ancient Greece, with serious study of history and geography of Russia.
After his little gap year, Mao enrolled in university at Beijing, where he quickly fell in with other radical groups. To make ends meet, a mentor hooked up Mao with an assistant librarian position, managing the newspapers desk at Peking University Library. Like graduate students everywhere, Mao quickly figured out that he was being exploited by a cadre of tenured elites who had no intention of promoting him, so he left after a few months. The same man who later plastered giant portraits of himself over one-sixth of the world and forced every student in China to buy his shitty chapbook of political poetry decided that he was done with the “vanity and egotism of the intellectual classes.”
Is Journalling Good For Your Health?
David Robson, writing for The Guardian, makes the case that creative writing—and specifically, keeping a journal—can have measurable, positive health effects over time. One psychology study in the 1980s that Robson cites charged two groups with writing four 15-minute essays over four days. The first group was asked to write about a traumatic or painful experience as honestly as possible, while the other was asked to write about trivialities and piffle. The result: short-term spikes in negative emotions for the honest group, but long-term benefits. Robson writes:
The students in the first group described feelings of guilt over a grandmother’s death, anger over their parents’ divorce and torment about their sexuality. Confronting their feelings was not easy, and many left Pennebaker’s lab feeling sadder than when they came in. Over the following six months, however, they paid around half as many visits to the student health centre as the participants in the control group.
The researchers even found that the experimental group’s white blood cells were replicating at a faster rate than the control group. Now, this was only a pair of N=50 studies conducted four decades ago, but Robson cites several other related experiments with similar findings. Why is this? Robson thinks that the constraints of writing force us to create “psychological distance” from our experiences, allowing us to see them from a different perspective and place them in a larger, more significant self-narrative. Journalling, like the old saying goes, lets you turn something that happened to you into something that happened for you. Anyway, I guess I’m going to try keeping a diary again.
This Month in Musement
This was not an active month for me, thanks to that De Sade essay mentioned above going nowhere. I’ve discarded it, though bits of it might appear in the future. But I’m very proud of my piece on the literature of new online religions and a Jewish shtetl in the middle of the Amazon:
I was also hugely gratified by the large response I got for my curmudgeonly screed against Substack’s ill-defined, ill-fated attempt at launching a social media network:
And that’s all for this month. I have a few essays lined up that I’m very excited to share in the coming weeks.
Until then, happy reading!