¶ Chesterfield’s letter to his son of 22 February 1748 is so full of good advice for bloggers and other Internauts that I have dug up a link to it at Google Books.

Some learned men, proud of their knowledge, only speak to decide, and give judgment without appeal; the consequence of which is, that mankind, provoked by the insult, and injured by the oppression, revolt; and in order to shake off the tyranny, even call the lawful authority in question. The more you know, the modester you should be: and (by-the-bye) that modesty is the surest way of gratifying your vanity. Even where you are sure, seem rather doubtful; represent, but do not pronounce, and if you would convince others, seem open to conviction yourself.

Advice that I’m afraid I must give myself every day, like a tonic. (more…)

¶ Matins: Can’t make a difference? Do like Luis Soriano, the librarian with “4800 books on ten legs.” At least figure out how to get the man another burro and a few hundred extra books.

¶ Tierce: Best cheeky story in today’s Times: Stephanie Clifford reports on Ivanka Trump’s latest venture, a collaboration with ConAgra in which the entreprenootsie plugs prepared lunches that will last for up to a year in your desk drawer. No refrigeration required! “Office Workers, Ivanka Trump Is Thinking of You.” Yeah, sure.

¶ Sext: Another chapter of the terrible and unnecessary collateral damage of drug-prohibition: Mexican children coarsened by gangland slaughter. Marc Lacey reports.

¶ Compline: Bird & Fortune explain it all to you: Chronicle of the crash foretold:. But people were laughing then, way back in 2007.

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¶ Lord Chesterfield denies the existence of unconditional love. To his son:

Neither is my affection for you that of a mother, of which the only, or at least the chief objects, are health and life: I wish them both most heartily; but, at the same time, I confess they are by no means my principal care.

My object is to have you fit to live; which, if you are not, I do not desire that you should live at all.

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Before Mao Zedong, China swarmed with largely unsupervised American missionaries. When John Pomfret studied history at Nanjing University in the early Eighties, he was one of a highly-scrutinized handful of Yanks. In Chinese Lessons, he combines a measure of his own experiences with the lives of his classmates, most of whom suffered terribly in the Cultural Revolution. A great deal of insight is packed into this engaging account.

I’ve just finished Goldengrove, the new novel by Francine Prose, and I’m riven by a double vision. Is it sentimental? Or is it vital? Narrated by a bright but healthily vernacular thirteen year-old girl, Goldengrove takes the concept of the unreliable narrator to a degree of fine-grained transparency that only the most sophisticated novel could attain. For starters, aren’t all thirteen year old narrators ipso facto unreliable?

At the end, that narrator, Nico, goes to Rome.

I loved the arches, the Colosseum, the monumental reminders of how time layered over everything, cementing in the gaps, reparing or covering what was cracked or broken, pressing it down into the earth and building on top, and on top of that. At every moment, or, to tell the truth, every other moment, I thought how Margaret would have loved it. But Margaret had never been there, and no matter how hard I tried to see it through her eyes, I was the one who twisted throught the dark alleys and squinted when a plaza went off like a flashbulb. by the time I blinked, the open space had become a circus. Fried artichokes, mosaics, incense, the spires and the domes of churches. Even the car exhaust was sexy. I felt that the city was revealing itself in glimpses that I alone saw — sights saved for me, intended for me, as if the city knew me, because I was someone who could be known, who would love certain things and not others.

“Even the car exhaust was sexy.” Is that the sort of preciously cute thing that women say to drive men away? Or is it exactly the clasp of loving being alive? Plazas going off like flashbulbs? Goldengrove reminds me of the box that the Reverend Mother, in Dune, wants Paul Atreides to stick his hand in.

In the end, I cast my vote for the novel, and because of just this passage. At the beginning, Goldengrove is a novel about what the living lose to death: by dying, the loved one steals a part of ourselves, the part that we shared. At the end, Goldengrove is about what happens in the end: by living, we keep a part of the late lamented with us. And that is sexy.

¶ In Moby-Dick, a wearying, garrulous chapter about dining opportunities aboard the Pequod. Melville’s stab at jocular whimsy sails right by me. The sketch of the “Dough-Boy” who waits table — “naturally a very nervous, shuddering sort of little fellow, this bread-faced steward; the progeny of a bankrupt baker and a hospital nurse” — is rather nasty. (more…)

I wish that this illustration didn’t bring Barack Obama to mind. Maybe it’s only me. I’ll bet not, though.

A better issue than usual, which is not saying much. I’ve decided to give up trying to parse Susann Cokal’s reviews, and I’m trying to be humble about it. I can’t expect myself to find every critic intelligible. It’s just that Ms Cokal has a way of making every book sound like a beach book, whether she likes it or not.

¶ In La Rochefoucauld, a phrase fit for a sampler, to be looked at, stitched upon a sofa pillow, every day:

Le caprice de notre humeur est encore plus bizarre que celui de la fortune.

I find that I can’t translate this to my satisfaction. “The caprice of our humour is even more bizarre than that of fortune” doesn’t begin to do justice to the elegant thought of the original; we don’t think in that way about that sort of thing in English. (more…)

¶ Matins: Head scarves for women — in Turkey! How transgressive! But, wait: Does this mean that Orhan Pamuk completely fabricated the head-scarf controversy that kicks off his last novel, Snow? It was translated into English, by the way, four years ago.

¶ Prime: Once again, Kathleen and I will be spending Thanksgiving at a pleasant old place on St Croix. But if it weren’t so far away, I’d prefer to do my beachcoming along the Gill Sands, on that remote and longed-for Indian Island jewel, San Serriffe.

¶ Tierce: I thought that it would be very clever to say that I’m having my head examined today, but I Googled the phrase first, and it led me to the creator of FeedDemon. I don’t know anything about this app, but it looks very useful. Unfortunately, as a head case, I can’t deal with technology today — I’m leaving that to the doctors.

¶ Vespers: Wow! Christopher Buckley has (a) endorsed Barack Obama and (b) resigned from The National Review. (Thanks, evilganome.)

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I often feel that people spend too much attention to words in isolation, and not enough to putting them together with elegant coherence. And there’s a reason why I don’t use words that I’ve found in the dictionary: my vocabulary comes from my general reading, not from reference books. But I’m glad that Ammon Shea spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary, since he writes about the experience with wit and passion.

¶ In Chapter 32 of Moby-Dick, “Cetology,” we have a crisp and timeless portrait of the Crank, the autodidact who plunges into the vasty deeps of his own ignorance with a few rough-and-ready ideas about System, and proceeds, more often than not, to get everything wrong. (more…)

I’m already looking forward to reading The Maias a second time. Of course, I shall have to read all of it a first time before that can happen. (more…)

¶ Matins: Regular readers will have learned to sigh when I mention the name of Alan Greenspan. I have certainly felt like something of a crank on the subject of this man’s failure to stanch the market’s foolishness. So I felt rather transfigured by the discovery that I was not alone: witness Peter S Goodman’s “Taking Hard New Look at a Greenspan Legacy.”  

¶ Prime: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

¶ Tierce: Cook County Sheriff Thomas J Dart has called a halt to foreclosure evictions in Chicago. John Leland reports. In many cases, diligent renters are unaware of a property owner’s default until the marshalls would show up to evict them.

¶ Sext: Nom de Plume sent me the link to a curious video, of unexplained provenance (and 1999 vintage), concerning, straight-faced, the unlikely bond between a crow and a kitten. I watched it in wait for a surprise, but there was none.

¶ Compline: No sex please; we want to live forever: Clara Meadmore, of Perranporth, Cornwall, attributes her longevity to virginity. She’ll be 105 on Saturday.

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¶ In Moby-Dick, Stubb’s dream of Ahab’s kick — a lot of Shakespearean hoo-ha if you ask me. “But mum; he comes this way. Coming up: “Cetology,” which just may constitute the entirety of a Morning Read next week. (more…)

Reading, this afternoon, that Emily Gordon is stepping down as editor of Emdashes, the great New Yorker-centric Web log, I felt my toes curling in envy. How I’d love to give up this self-appointed weekly review of The New York Times Book Review. This week, especially. What a lackluster lot of books!

The Book Review is mired in a cesspit of publicists and chits. But it’s all we have. As soon as there’s an American version of Lire, I’ll quit. Gladly.

¶ Lord Chesterfield presses home the indispensability of good manners in the world — something that doltish, obstinate people perversely continue to regard as a failing of the world:

You may possibly ask me, whether a man has it always in his power to get into the best company? and how? I say, Yes, he has, by deserving it; provided he is but in circumstances which enable him to appear upon the footing of a gentleman. Merit and good-breeding will make their way everywhere. Knowledge will introduce him, and good-breeding will endear him to the best companies; for, as I have often told you, politeness and good-breeding are absolutely necessary to adorn any, or all other good qualities or talents. Without them, no knowledge, no perfection whatever, is seen in its best light. The scholar, without good-breeding, is a pedant; the philosopher, a cynic; the soldier, a brute; and every man disagreeable. (more…)

¶ In Moby-Dick, the two “Knights and Squires” chapters. There’s a lot of Whitman here; it’s fashionable nowadays to find such manly gushing about manliness “homoerotic,” but I can’t abide the anachronism of it. (more…)

Philip Ball’s Universe of Stone treats Chartres Cathedral as a doorway onto Gothic art and craft. The book is literate, instructive, and a great pleasure to read. It almost cannot help being a compact refresher course in the medieval worldview.

¶ Matins: Sam Harris’s Newsweek piece, “When Atheists Attack“ gets to the heart of the Palin phenomenon — and why I call her “The Infernal Machine.” For a Democrat or a Progressive to notice her is to contribute to her magnetism.

¶ Tierce: From the editorial pages of the Times, today’s moving piece by Lawrence Downes on Vets 4 Vets, a network of veterans of the War on Terror (a/k/a Iraq) who get together to talk about what they can’t tell anyone else; and an  Op-Ed piece by Roger Cohen, “Kiplin vs Palin,” datelined yesterday but not to be found in “The Week in Review,” about what we might call Sarah Palin’s larger heedlessness (the lady appears to be rivetedly mindful of her own career).  

¶ Compline: Just what the world needs right about now: the authorized sequel to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Authorized by his heir and great-grand-nephew, Dacre Stoker; he’s going to write it, too. (“Dacre”? What were his parents thinking. He can’t not have been “Dracu” all through school.)

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It is about half-past three in the afternoon, so far past morning that I’m tempted to schedule this for tomorrow morning. But who knows where we’ll all be tomorrow?

¶ La Rochefoucauld:

L’interêt, qui aveugle les uns fait la lumière des autres.

Interestedness, which blinds some people, enlightens others.

Better in French, where “interests” aren’t as detachable as they are in English.

¶ Chesterfield puts his finger on what strikes me as a pervasive distinction between the men of Anglophone and Continental upper classes:

These would be my pleasures and amusements, if I were to live the last thirty years over again; they are rational ones; and moreoever, I will tell you, they are really the fashionable ones; for the others are not, in truth, the pleasures of what I call people of fashion, but of those who only call themselves so. Does good company care to have a man reeling drunk among them? or to see another tearing his hair, and blaspheming, for having lost, at play, more than he is able to pay? or a whore-master with half a nose, and crippled by coarse and infamous debauchery? No; those who practise, and much more those who brag of them, make no part of good company; and are most unwillingly, if ever, admitted to it. A real man of fashion and pleasure observes decency: at least neither borrows nor affects vices; and if he unfortunately has any, he gratifies them with choice, delicacy, and secrecy.

Dr Johnson would have complained that the Continentals want candour.

¶ In Moby-Dick, two chapters of almost grotesque padding, even if the chapters themselves are not very long (the second one doesn’t fill a page). “The Advocate” argues that whalers “don’t get no respect.” The climax of this silliness is that whale oil is used to annoint monarchs.

But the only thing to be considered here, is this — what kind of oil is used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, not macassar oil, nor castor oil, nor bear’s oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil. What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?

Sorry, Herman, but it not only can be olive oil but is. Whale oil! The idea!

¶ Chapter XXII of Don Quixote is noteworthy for two things. First, our hero finds his helmet, in the guise of a barber-surgeon’s brass bowl. Second, as translator Edith Grossman lets us know in a footnote, he summarizes the plot of the standard chivalrous romance quite perfectly. When Sancho asks why they’ve got to poke about in Spanish backwaters instead of finding adventure in war, Don Quixote outlines the drill, which prevents him from trying to serve a king or an emperor until he can boast of many valorous deeds. Just as well!

Sancho is quick to note that, for his own sake, Don Quixote had better not abduct any fair princesses, because then he won’t be awarding any of his angry father-in-law’s fiefdoms to his faithful squire. I see that Sancho’s foil isn’t that he’s any wiser than Quixote, but only that he’s absolutely not a dreamer.

¶ I read a lot more of Squillions today than I meant to do. That’s because I fell into Coward’s correspondence with Enid Bagnold, author of National Velvet and The Chalk Garden, which Coward starred in in 1956. The “correspondence” consists of several long letters from Bagnold, and none from Coward. Will someone please remind Barry Day of the title of his book? It really ought to have been called, Noël Coward: A Life in Letters (and Chatty Antinote). There was also the now-famous letter to Edward Albee in which Coward makes this enviable claim:

I have enjoyed sex thoroughly, perhaps even excessively all my life but it has never, except for brief wasteful moments, twisted my reason.

¶ Today’s chapter of After the Edwardians is an elegant and engrossing composition on the popularity, in inter-War Britain, of puzzles and mystery novels. It crosses quite impalpably across the theme bridge of English Elegy to a discussion of the non-modernist painting of Stanley Spencer and John Piper. One would have liked a little more about John Cowper Powys.