Among the fascinating tidbits in David Grann’s The Lost City of Z. is a mention of a “Gumption-Reviver machine” used by Francis Galton — Darwin’s cousin and an adventurer, statistician, and inventor (later in life he would expand on and warp Darwin’s theories to create eugenics) — while he was an undergraduate at Cambridge.
I’ve been putting in a lot of writing time at my desk lately and the idea of a Gumption-Reviver is infinitely appealing. A couple sources credit Galton with the machine’s invention, but in the same letter excerpted below he mentions that a tutor recommended it to him so it may have already been in use at the college. The basic idea: A portable funnel suspended overhead drips a steady stream of water on your head to keep you awake. As Galton writes, “We generally begin to use this machine about 10 at night and continue it till 1 or 2; it is very useful.”
Should you want more specific instructions to create your own, I direct you to Galton’s letter to his father on the subject, found in Karl Pearson’s Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton. All you’ll need is a funnel with graduated stopcock, a supporting apparatus, a napkin and a servant to keep the funnel filled with water!

My dear Father,
I should have sent a letter to you yesterday if it had not been that the one that I had written was spoilt by an accident in my Gumption-Reviver machine which covered it with water. This machine as it has perhaps come into use since your time I describe to you.
[Sketch of the Gumption-Reviver machine: a student sits reading at a table, elbows on table and hands support head, lamp in front to right; funnel dripping water which runs off a cloth bound round head to left. Additional sketches of gallows to carry funnel and of method of arranging cloth.]
A large funnel is supported on a double stand about 6 ft. high, it has a graduated stopcock at the bottom by which the size of the aperture can be regulated. This as you read is placed above your head and filled with water. Round the head a napkin is tied, dependent on one side where the bow and end is so [arranged] that the water may drop off. Now it is calculated that as the number of hours of study increases in an arithmetic ratio, so will the weariness consequent on it increase in a geometrical ratio, and the stream of water must in that ratio be increased…

Galton explains that your “gyp” (Cambridge slang for servant) should refill the funnel every quarter-hour. You will not wish to spread a sheet or towel across your clothing as their wetness is desirable; as Galton says, “damp shirts do not invite repose.” However, the mention of the ruined letter makes me think that you may want a protective guard for your notebook or laptop.

• Patti Smith on Bolaño Bolaño Bolaño part 1 and part 2 .
• Werner Herzog talks about the blending of fact and fiction in his films:

Facts per se are not so interesting for me. Facts do not illuminate; they create norms. The Manhattan phone directory has 4 million entries which are factually correct, but as a book it doesn’t really illuminate you. I’ve always said we have to look beyond realism, beyond facts.

Earlier in the interview Herzog mentions that students at his Rogue Film School receive a “mandatory reading list” but alas no specific titles are mentioned. (Via.)

Our house is on the east side of Asheville, near the area known as Swannanoa. There’s a bluegrass song called “Swannanoa Tunnel” I like because it sounds like an aural transcription of the landscape around here: Winding, mountainous, gray-topped. I had thought the song was an instrumental but yesterday I came across a nice article, written by Lyle Lofgren and originally published in Inside Bluegrass, that contained lyrics for it. Lofgren notes that the song’s a variant on the work song “Nine Pound Hammer.” The Swannanoa iteration developed during the construction of the Swannanoa Tunnel, one of the railway tunnels that connected Asheville, then a raw scrap of city, to the rest of the country. Tunnel-digging was dangerous work. According to Lofgren, 300 men lost their lives during the project (another source places the number at 125).
As Lofgren recounts, the song was first transcribed by the Englishman Cecil Sharp and his protégé Maud Karpeles. But “[w]ithout a recording machine, they had to transcribe the words and tunes while people were singing them, and the North Carolina accents misled them badly on this song: ‘Tunnel’ became ‘town-o’ and ‘hoot owl’ was transcribed as ‘hoodow.'” (The two were also reportedly perplexed by the song’s oft-repeated chorus, “blinded by the light / wrapped up like a douche in the middle of the night.”)
Here are the lyrics:

I’m going back to that Swannanoa Tunnel,
That’s my home, baby, that’s my home.
Asheville Junction, Swannanoa Tunnel,
All caved in, baby, all caved in.
Last December, I remember,
The wind blowed cold, baby, the wind blowed cold.
When you hear my watchdog howling, somebody around,
When you hear that hoot owl squalling, somebody dying,
Hammer falling from my shoulder all day long,
Ain’t no hammer in this mountain outrings mine
This old hammer, it killed John Henry, it didn’t kill me,
Riley Gardner, he killed my partner, he couldn’t kill me,
Riley Rambler, he killed Jack Ambler, he didn’t kill me,
This old hammer rings like silver, shines like gold,
Take this hammer, throw it in the river,
It rings right on, baby, it shines right on.
Some of these days I’ll see that woman, well, that’s no dream.

The instrumental version of the song I know best is Martin Simpson’s, which is available on iTunes. Or you can listen to this version, different than Simpson’s, on YouTube.

Sorry I’ve been absent here so long. My dad, who was in fragile health for a couple years, went through a sharp decline in early November. He died on Dec. 2. He was 88, lived a long full life, and died in his bed with my mom holding his hand. We have a lot to be grateful for, I know, but I miss him terribly each day. I had the task of writing his obituary and you can read it here. The ideal version, though, would have a pile of footnotes. Next to the description of him as “indefatigable,” for example, there’d be an asterisk offering this translation: “He wasn’t easy — but on the other hand, we were never bored.”
Here is a little more that’s not in the obituary: My dad was born to parents who were advanced in years and didn’t much want a child, let alone an “indefatigable” one. Then the Depression came and his father lost everything, including the will to go on. My dad spent most of his teens hanging out at the Marlborough firehouse because he didn’t feel welcome at home. I remember him telling me once that he was always hungry. In an attic somewhere there’s a copy of a letter he wrote at 16 to an area businessman asking for advice on how he could get on in the world. Then he joined the Navy and shipped off to the South Pacific. I write this to point out that my father understood hard times and loneliness, and the gifts he had — his scrappiness, his sense of humor, his generosity to others, his tolerance — seem bound up to me with the boy he was.
I remember once coming home from school, feeling bleak in that hopeless way that happens when you’re a kid and can’t even begin to express what’s going on to adults. I forget what the specific trouble was, but it must have been a time when I was “out” at school. That happened once in a while. My mom spoiled me but she didn’t understand; she was (and remains) the sort of person who’s largely impervious to the idea of fitting in (one of the first sayings she taught me was: “F**k ’em if they can’t take a joke”), which is a great quality but one I didn’t inherit. I remember my dad — who could be loud and impatient, who usually wanted me to come hold a lawn bag open for him while he raked up leaves or help him pick up dog crap in the backyard — sort of peering at me when I came in, and then later that afternoon he made me milk-on-toast in a bowl, something I had never had before, and we sat on the high stools in the kitchen looking out the window together, and I felt immeasurably comforted. I don’t remember talking to him about what was going on. I didn’t have to. He could be good company like that. He must have been 60 then; he’d recently retired against his own inclination (he had become “out” at work), and it was still strange to have him at home.
My stepson wrote my mom a beautiful letter after my dad’s death, and he’s given me permission to quote from it, “Dana to me was a presence of wry joyfulness. He had a rare talent for making fun of things without reducing their value. I always got the feeling that his humor was coming from a sincere and intimate place. He was an easy guy to be around — though I should take care not to oversimplify him because I know he could certainly stir things up when he felt like it. I never had to wonder with Dana whether I was getting the whole picture or not, and that always made me feel comfortable.” My stepdaughter’s card also made me cry. It said simply, “We’ll miss him too.”
We’re holding the memorial celebration this coming Sunday, on what would have been his 89th birthday. I’m looking forward to being with my mom, my three half-siblings, a handful of nieces and nephews, as well as an amazing number of the friends my dad made as he went through the world. Please think of us and raise a toast if you can.

Goodness gracious, the dithering I’ve done since I wrote here that I’d only be reading Herman Melville in November. Melville’s an author (like Nabokov and Dickens) I’m always sort of in the midst of reading — which is why I initially thought he’d be a good choice. My affection for him felt big enough, burgeoning enough, that it could last out a month of one-on-one fidelity. Also, the writing itself is so varied, with so many moods and voices, that it wouldn’t be such a narrow diet. But no sooner had I stated publicly, “It’s Herman, nothing but Herman,” then I began to feel hollow the way you do when you’re telling a lie and panicked that I’d chosen wrong. I padded into the library, got one of his Library of America books off the shelf and opened it to a random page. It fell open to this passage from White-Jacket:

“The Sultan, Indiaman, from New York, and bound to Callao and Canton, sixty days out, all well. What frigate’s that?”
“The United States ship Neversink, homeward bound.”
“Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!” yelled our enthusiastic countryman, transported with patriotism.
By this time the Sultan had swept past, but the Lieutenant of the Watch could not withhold a parting admonition.
“D’ye hear? You’d better take in some of your flying-kites there. Look out for Cape Horn!”

Christ, I thought, I’ll never make it. By Wednesday night I had decided on Nabokov instead, with a focus on the Russian novels (i.e., Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift, Laughter in the Dark, etc.). This would make a neat segue to reading Pushkin and Gogol in December (a Russian Soul odyssey), as well as allow for a day trip to The Original of Laura. Then yesterday it was Eudora Welty — a writer I’ve never read but always meant to. And so on … (The terrible thing: As tiresome as this recital is, it actually represents a radical condensation of interior vacillation.)
I’m now calmed down and it’s back to Melville (Herman, nothing but Herman). The proposed syllabus: Typee (first time); Redburn (partly read, loved, yet inexplicably abandoned halfway); Moby-Dick (a reread); and, time allowing, The Confidence-Man (first time), which makes an arc from the start of his writing to the near-end.
Two things that brought me back to Melville. First, this famous note from Hawthorne’s journals about a visit the two had in England*:

… on the intervening day, we took a pretty long walk together, and sat down in a hollow among the sand hills … and smoked a cigar. Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated;” but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists–and had persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before-in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth of immortality than most of us.

(Excerpt taken from Elizabeth Hardwick’s marvelous Penguin Life study.)
The second, if you can bear it, has to do with the opening of his story “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” which, as I’ve recalled it and let it play in my head, has gradually overridden the panic engendered by the White-Jacket passage. Here is how it starts:

It lies not far from Temple-Bar.
Going to it, by the usual way, is like stealing from a heated plain into some cool, deep glen, shady among harboring hills.
Sick with the din and soiled with the mud of Fleet Street — where the Benedick tradesmen are hurrying by, with ledger-lines ruled along their brows, thinking upon rise of bread and fall of babies — you adroitly turn a mystic corner — not a street — glide down a dim, monastic way flanked by dark, sedate, and solemn piles, and still wending on, give the whole care-worn world the slip, and, disentangled, stand beneath the quiet cloisters of the Paradise of Bachelors.
Sweet are the oases in Sahara; charming the isle-groves of August prairies; delectable pure faith amidst a thousand perfidies: but sweeter, still more charming, most delectable, the dreamy Paradise of Bachelors, found in the stony heart of stunning London.
In mild meditation pace the cloisters; take your pleasure, sip your leisure, in the garden waterward; go linger in the ancient library, go worship in the sculptured chapel: but little have you seen, just nothing do you know, not the sweet kernel have you tasted, till you dine among the banded Bachelors …

Read the rest here.
* Hawthorne’s journal also notes that Melville ” … arrived in Southport with the least little bit of a bundle, which, he told me, contained a night shirt and a tooth-brush. He is a person of very gentlemanly instincts in every respect, save that he is a little heterodox in the matter of clean linen.”

This weekend I realized how much my reading habits have come to resemble my Internet-surfing. I skip from book to book, dipping in, skimming and grazing, as if each book were an article I was reading online. If the book isn’t amazing, I rarely get past the first quarter — let alone finish it. Of course, at least once in a while, I’m abandoning the book out of shrewish old age. I have less patience for terrible books than I used to. But most of the time, I have to admit, it’s not the books that are bad, it’s me: I’ve become a terrible reader.
The first, most obvious reason: Online reading has trained my eyes to be more peripatetic on the page. The favored online writing style is zippy and fast – you get the takeway even as your attention is skittering away, onto the next link. The other night as I was reading, I noticed my eyes were shifting up and down the page, instead of left to right, a sign that I read more on a monitor most days than on a page, but also a symptom that I was out of condition for any sort of complicated sentence: “Where’s your kicker, Henry James? Your bullets? Your boldfaced exclamations?” And my brain was roving around just as much as my gaze was: mentally rummaging in the kitchen cupboards (chips?), wondering if I had any new email (probably not), and brooding on my petty jealousies and everyday activities (endless).
The above has been well recorded in many places. With the next, I wonder if it’s strictly personal, or if others of you have noticed this about yourselves too. It’s the observation that the Internet for all its virtues — and let me interject here and say that I love the Internet, some of my best friends are the Internet, etc. — has given me an overly inflated sense of my own ability to learn and appreciate new things. I’ve always liked to read several books at once (do you want to read a book about volcanoes tonight, or a novel? Who knows? Better have them both with you!), but this weekend I counted and I had some twenty books in different stages of being read around the house, ones I felt I couldn’t bear to return to the library or put back on their proper shelves because “I’m reading it.” I’ve fallen into the habit of bringing a stack of three to four into bed with me at night — picking them up from around the house as I turn off lights like a grocery shopper ambling through the produce section picking whatever pretty fruit strikes the fancy. On the one hand, thus has it always been — people who like books will have books in their bed, will have far more books on their reading list than they will ever finish, etc. On the other, I think when you casually read a couple hundred little news items, interesting posts and articles online in day, it get frightfully easy to carry a glib sense of engagement away with you from the computer — to want to click along to the next book whenever you’re bored. And on some deeper level, I wonder if the Internet with its ready and immediate access to anything I want to know, has given me a false sense that I’m capable of knowing it, i.e., that I can suck in all that knowledge like Evil Willow draining books at the magic shop. Even as my reading habits have gotten sloppier, have I come to think I’m someone who’s capable of reading three or four books before bed? That I’ll wake up and suddenly be the man who knew everything? Put another way: If the Internet is infinite, has it made me forget that I’m finite?
Again, none of these are new habits of mind, but they feel exaggerated by my Internet use. So it’s with sorrow but determination that I announce I’m signing off of it forever. Ha ha, just kidding! But what I am doing is orchestrating a new reading regime, a sort of course correction, to make myself a better reader offline. I’ve used this system in the past when I felt like my Gemini brain had gotten disorderly, and it’s worked well. It’s to read one author and one author only for a month. No leaping around within the oeuvre, either. It’s one book at a time. Front to back. After a lot of thought and vacillation, I’ve decided November is Herman Melville month. Nothing but Herman until December.* So good-bye, Orlando, Lolly Willowes, Daniel Deronda, and Oryx and Crake; goodbye, Werner Herzog in Brazil and fascinating academic book about Russian Byronism; goodbye, Rebecca Solnit and Randall Jarrell; good-bye, promising if potentially infuriating book** about Charlotte and Emily Bronte’s Belgian school essays; good-bye I Lost It At The Movies; and even you, Nabby, good-bye. You’re all wonderful, but I will see you later.
* Allowable exceptions: My bookclub book for this month, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided; the rest of Sarah Hrdy’s Mother Nature (I’m almost through!); and any research books for the novel. But with the latter the same one at a time rule applies.
** Complete non sequitur but: I’ve noticed this trend among Bronte scholars to be snide about Charlotte, as if in order to properly appreciate Emily (or even Anne or Branwell) it were somehow necessary to knock Charlotte down several pegs. Juliet Barker, author of an otherwise excellent biography, I’m looking at you. And Elizabeth Hardwick, you too (except I love you so I’m not looking that hard). This makes me furious. Some day, I tell you … well, I’ll storm into a Bronte Society Meeting and create quite a scene.
UPDATE: Oh, the Internet. No sooner did I prepare this post then I saw The Elegant Variation has started a discussion on this same topic, using this essay by David Ulin as a jumping-off point.

Ever since I saw Bright Star, I’ve been wanting to go back and see it again. It’s a gorgeous and tough-minded film; I’ve seen it praised in a couple places for its “restraint” and while that feels like an appropriate description, it might, used in the context of a movie about John Keat’s love affair with Fanny Brawne, leave a reader with the impression that Bright Star is a soft or quiet film, which it most definitely isn’t. I think the restraint being praised is actually rigor; as if Campion had a bolt of silk and shot it through every yard or so with whalebone. Yes, it’s beautiful, but it also stands up straight.
For a more extensive critique, I direct you to Dana Steven’s review. For now I just want to ooh and aah over Janet Patterson’s costumes for the film, especially the ones worn by Fanny Brawne (played by Abbie Cornish). At the beginning of the movie we learn that Brawne makes her own clothes, and throughout the film her sewing is shown as her creative outlet, an expression of being on the level of a poem or a painting. Knowing this before the film, I thought this aspect of the Fanny character might feel overly intrusive and “herstory”-ish — one of those instances where a historic figure is given modern habits and attitudes just so the audience can commend her (and along the way, itself) for being so enlightened (e.g., The Duchess) — but within the universe of Bright Star, Fanny’s dressmaking seems like a true and inspired thing. Her dresses aren’t just garments then, they’re expressions of self, crucial bits of character development — and Patterson does an amazing job with them, making them a little ludicrous and over-the-top for the occasions on which they’re worn, but also completely beguiling and graphically sophisticated. Fanny may not always be dressed appropriately, but she has a marvelous eye for beauty.
I’ve been searching for stills from the film but can’t find many that do justice to the costumes. A couple, though:

A party dress worn early in the film. As Brawne tells Keats when she sees him at the party, “This is the first frock in all of Hampstead to have a triple-pleated mushroom collar.” Just out of frame: Her lilac gloves.

This costume, a striped jacket worn to a picnic on the day they first kiss, was one of my favorites. The strawberry color is so sharp and joyful.

Patterson also served as the film’s production designer, and, as shown in this still, there’s a lovely interplay between the costumes and their settings.
There’s more about the film’s scene-setting and costuming in the little clip below. After watching it, I desperately want to run off and go to work as some sort of Campion-Patterson apprentice/lackey/fabric finder.

* I’m already anticipating how much I’m going to be rooting for Patterson to win an Oscar for them.

For Terry’s friend who protests the growing trend of quote misattribution, the most egregious example I’ve seen recently. Poor Dorothy! (Spotted by Gwenda.)