Joseph Marshall Flint to Florence Sabin, two of Gertrude Stein's classmates at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas:

My dear Dr. Sabin, have you seen the enclosed? What is it? Perhaps evidence that, after all, G.S. does react to the subconscious! [...] Curious person. She has contributed much to the bunk of the postwar decades, but this autobiography is well written. Critics say, 'only posterity can explain her.' I rather fancy, as in the case of Joyce, posterity will never take the trouble. (1933)

qtd. in Lynn M. Morgan. "The Embryography of Alice B. Toklas." Comparative Studies in Society and History 50.1 (2008): 304-25. Cambridge Journals. 26 May 2009. Web.

I have that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you add A Room of One's Own to a syllabus.

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I like much of what Neil Verma has to say about the defensive The Humanities Are Dead essay. He admits near the end, though, that he doesn't know what the alternative is yet. May I propose Humanities!: The Musical?

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Oh, dear. Alma mater, could you please stop doing so many embarrassing things?

We are told that Gertrude Stein tried to publish some research when she was in medical school, that the journal rejected the work, and that the two editors argued about it.

The two people arguing about it were called Dr. Barker and Dr. Knower.

Barker and Knower? Seriously?



Also: Knower won the argument.

Excellent google search string of the day: "students who feel that their classes are boring or useless." Hah!

Being understood/being believed

There are many interesting statements of feminist poetics at Delirious Hem.

It is not enough that you understand me. I would rather be believed. Imagine a kind of love that has no Greek word for it and then imagine that we could make a system in which all connections are made of this. Imagine a human system like culture that could make the public private and the private okay. I do not know what to do with the powerful except try to offer them some things to look at that they were trained not to see. Bernadette Mayer wrote “I hate power, except the power I have to show you something.” On this and many other things I require your attention, also your advice.
    -- Anne Boyer

I like Boyer's distinction between being understood and being believed. There's such a long history of "woman" being an object of investigation, as Woolf describes in A Room of One's Own:

One went to the counter; one took a slip of paper; one opened a volume of the catalogue, and the five dots here indicate five separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment. Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

To say "I understand her" places the speaker in the position of knowing; whether the woman knows anything is left very much in doubt; perhaps it is only the woman herself, as object, that is being understood. To say "I believe her," on the other hand, places the woman in the position of knowing. It is a position of power, i.e. "to show you something." To be a poet is first of all to be capable of knowledge.

(Via Silliman and his amazing technicolor Google alerts.)

The Most General Fault of the A. O. U. Check-List

Mark Twain thought it would be a really cool idea to have a newspaper called The Back Number, composed entirely of old newspaper articles. Like Twain, I have a magpie mind, and so I completely agree.

Recent events have had me reading articles from The Auk, the publication of the American Ornithologists' Union, circa 1900. Just listen to Elliott Coues wax decorously indignant about the A.O.U. Check-List:

This is a serious matter which I have hitherto refrained from bringing up, partly on account of its hopelessness, in the present arrangement and numbering of the species, partly because it is to some extent a question of ornithological expertness regarding which opinions may reason[a]bly differ. But now, having occasion to retraverse the whole ground of North American ornithology, in the preparation of the Fifth Edition of my 'Key,' the blemish I shall point out obtrudes itself continually upon my attention; I cannot longer maintain the reticence I have hitherto preserved without seeming to condone the impropriety by tacit acquiescence; and I desire to put myself upon record in the matter, lest my silence be imputed to unrighteousness. This is the first general protest I make public on certain subjects concerning which I was often found in a more or less respectable minority of one or two, when various questions were put to vote for the official decision of the Committee over which I had for so many years the honor to preside.

Yes, that's his preamble right there. He hasn't yet actually said what's wrong with the A.O.U. Check-List (it will turn out to be that the order in which orders and families are listed is inconsistent with the order in which genera and species are listed).

Notice the language of speech and reticence, of repose and assault. Coues isn't writing this article because he wants to; he's writing it because he has to. The inconsistency in the Check-List has intruded on his quiet repose and forced his hand. Had the Check-List's inconsistency not "obtrude[d] itself ... upon [his] attention," Coues might have gone on quietly, as he always hoped to do, but the obtrusion makes his tact into "tacit acquiescence," altering the meaning of silence; indeed, concerning a problem so glaring, silence itself is speech.

Thus as Coues represents it, his complaint is not uncivil, tactless, improper, or unrighteous; rather, it is the only way he can avoid being those things.

And, clearly, it is very important that he avoid being those things.

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I have yet to pick up the medieval bestiary I requested from NRLF, but I will definitely let on if there is a roc in there, or any EXTREME MAMMALS.

Elliott Coues. "The Most General Fault of the A. O. U. Check-List." The Auk 14.2 (April 1897): 229-31. JSTOR. 18 May 2009. Web.

Marianne Moore on Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

There was a young lady named Liz
Who made writing poems her biz
But when she met Bob
She gave up the job
It took all her time to read his

RML 1250/1, qtd. in Cristanne Miller, Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1995. 268n46. Print.

Campanulas

I had my students this past semester read a chapter from Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's 2007 study Objectivity. My students had a rough time wrapping their heads around the idea that "objectivity" and "science" are not the same thing, or that "subjective" and "bullshit" were not the same thing. When they saw the images that Daston and Galison used to emblematize truth-to-nature and mechanical objectivity, their first impulse was to say that the first image, an engraving of Campanula foliis hastatis dentatis, was "subjective," therefore unscientific and probably bad, while the photograph of a snowflake was "objective," therefore scientific and good.

Here is the true-to-nature image that Daston and Galison use, from Linnaeus's Hortus Cliffortianus (1737). The artist is Georg Dionysius Ehret; the engraver is Jan Wandelaar. As Daston and Galison write, "It is an image of the characteristic, the essential, the universal, the typical: truth-to-nature" (20).



Yesterday I saw some campanula growing outside the Women's Faculty Club and took some pictures with my cell phone camera. They may not be the same species as the one in the Wandelaar engraving -- IANAB (I am not a botanist).








My students greatly approved the snowflake photograph that Daston and Galison used to illustrate mechanical objectivity, "an attempt to capture nature with as little human intervention as possible" (20). A photograph is always more objective than a drawing, but my crappy cell phone pictures, precisely because there was so little human intervention (I couldn't control light or focus, for instance), show the drawbacks of objectivity. The photos are indistinct; it's hard to see what the leaves look like, for instance.


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Semi-relatedly, here is a CBC radio series on How to Think about Science. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison each have an episode! So do a lot of other brilliant science historians.

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone, 2007. Print.

"In the case of James Joyce as in the case of the zebra, a cross section will not suffice and the complete aspect is bewildering."

    -- Marianne Moore, "English Literature since 1914," The Marianne Moore Newsletter 4.2 (Fall 1980): 19. Print.

You see, there really shouldn't be a cap on the number of library books you can check out...

...because sometimes you will find out that your library has a facsimile of a Catalan version of a Tuscan bestiary and you will just need it.

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Update: it turns out we have a LOT of Catalan MSS, not just facsimiles but actual MSS, in the Bancroft. And a lot of them are scanned. JOY.

The curious phenomenon of your occipital horn

The American Museum of Natural History has a vast collection of mollusk specimens, both "dry" (shells) and preserved in fluid. We learn of these collections on a section of the web site dubbed "research"; naturalists who study mollusks might wish to consult the specimens at the museum and compare them to specimens that they themselves have observed. The pages there are practical and text-based. It is the land of the serious.



On the front page of the museum web site, on the other hand, we get something else:



That's right. Extreme mammals!

I like the link in the sidebar: "Extreme Extinction." Indeed.

Possibly the best motto ever

"Standards, sense and stability for animal names in science." Who doesn't want that?

The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature publishes the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.