I’m finally back from Armenia, just in time for the beginning of the churn und drang of the new school year. Wish me and your other educator friends luck as we continue trying to jury-rig a working version of post-COVID education from scratch. Meanwhile, links! Some of these were gathered from airport reading while travel, and some are from the last few days. Which ones are which will be left to the reader as an exercise.
Galileo, Galileo
A famous Galileo manuscript has been uncovered as a forgery. For decades, the University of Michigan has proudly kept and displayed a page in Galileo’s hand, dated to 1609, and thought to be the earliest known astronomical data collected by telescopic observation. The forgery was uncovered by Nick Wilding, a kind of forgery hunter with his own fascinating career, as the Smithsonian Magazine reports:
Wilding has an eye for this sort of thing. He teaches a class titled “Forgeries, Facsimiles and Sophisticated Copies” at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School, and he has uncovered forgeries before—namely, the forgery of a copy of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius that purportedly included Galileo’s original watercolors of the moon.
Wilding first got suspicious about the letter when researching its provenance and finding that it was once owned by the notorious forger Tobia Nicotra. In the world of bibliography, Nectar was practically a comic book villain: prolific, sophisticated, and charismatic, he managed to churn out hundreds of fake documents in the 1920s, selling them to institutes and museums around the world. He even had a lair, described by the police after his arrest as looking like a small publishing house—and this was separate from the several apartments he kept around town for his mistresses. That’s all to say: it’s a very bad sign for a document when it was previously “owned” by Nicotra.
The giveaway, as it turns out, was the watermark: Wilding was able to pin the paper’s design down to a 1760s Austrian imprint, more than a century after Galileo died.
Sayaka Murata really is that weird
Murata, the author behind The Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings, is a mad-genius satirist in a time when they are even more rare than usual. I read both in a single sitting, though my howls of laughter at Earthlings was occasionally interrupted by how much it made me want to vomit. She is, as Thu-Huong Ha’s Wired profile describes, responsible for more than a couple scenes of “sensual cannibalism” in her novels. She also has more than a little in common with her characters’ sense of alienation, detachment, and weirdo fantasies, as Ha finds out. Having 30 imaginary friends (including one lover!) must come in handy for a novelist.
But there’s always a point to Murata’s weirdness. At the core of Convenience Store and Earthlings is a simple question: What does it take to become perfectly happy in a society that you are powerless to change? Both novels suggest that it would take a very damaged personality to fit snugly into the niches left for us by tradition and consumerism. Convenience Store, especially, reminds me of Don Quixote: our hero is, objectively speaking, a lunatic, but there’s something charming and very human about a person able to find so much dignity and solace in an outmoded, ridiculous tradition (chivalry, the service economy).
Anyway, Murata has a new book out in English soon. I’m going to read it.
Life Ceremony uncovers Murata’s preoccupation with our species’ norms writ large, beyond gender, sex, and reproduction. Several stories imagine near-future worlds in which bodies find new uses after death. In one story, recently deceased humans are repurposed to make tables, sweaters, and shimmering veils. The effect is strangely tender; the narrator feels it’s “marvelous and noble” that her corpse should be of practical use. “I would always feel that I too was a material,” she says. In another story, funerals have morphed into loving, sexy, generative dinner parties called “life ceremonies,” for which the body of the recently deceased is served as a multicourse meal. The ceremony guests, energized by a collective duty to solve an imminent population crisis, then pair off in the night to have sex and get pregnant.
The Sarajevo Library Burning, 30 Years Later
Thirty years ago, during the Siege of Sarajevo, the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina was destroyed by Serbian forces. Needless to say, the library had no military significance whatsoever: the point, for the Serbians, was to simply pile more terror and humiliation onto their starving victims, and erase as much of their history as possible. It remains the single largest act of biblioclasty (destroying books) in modern history. Serbian snipers even took potshots at the firefighters and fleeing librarians, killing one. You can read more here, in Dan Sheehan’s article for LitHub.