Archives for November 28, 2007

• John Updike on wonky dinosaurs. (via Ed.)
• Daniel Engber to Jonah Lehrer: “Proust was not a neuroscientist.” Engber’s article closes with a call for entries for a list of the “all-time worst literary allusions in the history of peer-reviewed science.” The first submission:

“Great writers, from Dante to Joyce, often weave various meanings into their writings.”–Guigo et al. 2006. Unweaving the meanings of messenger RNA sequences. Molecular Cell 23: 150-151.

I’m up early again working on a piece, so I checked our world map of recent visitors and saw that in the past few hours we’ve been viewed in Australia, Botswana, China, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Grenada, India, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Mexico, New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa, and Sweden. Not to mention Cincinnati, Cleveland, Iowa City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Nashville, Philadelphia, Portland, Providence, Raleigh, Richmond, San Diego, San Antonio, Santa Monica, Seattle, and Tulsa.
Good morning, everybody!

Lately I’ve been dipping in and out of Louisa May Alcott’s first novel, Moods. The novel was published in 1864 (four years before the publication of Little Women made Alcott famous), and it’s one of a handful of books that she wrote for an adult audience.
The plot deals with a love triangle, and it seems to be commonly accepted that Alcott modeled the novel’s tomboy heroine after herself, and the two men she’s torn between after Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. I don’t why the idea of this love triangle tickles me so, but it does. Infinitely. I only regret there was no sequel in which the heroine, now a contented old married lady, is jarred from her knitting by a knock on the door from Merman Helville, a man of quiet but manly disposition who after decades of sea-voyaging has come home to claim his bride.
The edition I’m reading is a nice one; put out by Rutgers University Press, it contains substantial revisions to the novel made by Alcott years after its initial publication (it was republished in 1882) as well as an early review of Moods written by Henry James. If you’re a writer, I invite you to pause here to imagine what it would be like to have Henry James critique your first novel: To borrow from the language of Moods, an agitated spirit might fill your breast.
I adore Alcott — she’s a great hero of mine, has been since I was a kid (oh Jo!) — so I feel a tinge of disloyalty in finding James’ review wickedly funny. In this excerpt James first supplies some plot synopsis, then takes issue with a type of romantic lead he finds all too common in the work of “lady novelists” (note: the Warwick character is the one based on Thoreau):

The heroine of “Moods” is a fitful, wayward, and withal most amiable young person, named Sylvia. We regret to say that Miss Alcott takes her up in her childhood. We are utterly weary of stories about precocious little girls. In the first place, they are in themselves disagreeable and unprofitable objects of study; and in the second, they are always the precursors of a not less unprofitable middle-aged lover. We admit that, even to the middle-aged, Sylvia must have been a most engaging little person. One of her means of fascination is to disguise herself as a boy and work in the garden with a hoe and wheelbarrow; under which circumstances she is clandestinely watched by one of the heroes, who then and there falls in love with her.

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“Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”
José Ortega y Gasset, “In Search of Goethe from Within”