Literary dust

W.G. Sebald’s comments about dust and my own efforts to rid some books and shelves of dust just prompted me to think about dust in literature.

Can you think of a work of literature in English in which dust plays a significant part? I can think of three; there may be many more. Leave your answer(s) in a comment, and we’ll see how things add up.

Sebald: “dust everywhere”

W.G. Sebald recounts a visit to the house of a London publisher, and the comfort of being in “a house where the dust has been allowed to settle”:

He had still some business to attend to when I arrived, and his wife took me up to a sort of library room at the very top of this very tall, very large, terraced house. And the room was all full of books, and there was one chair. And there was dust everywhere; it had settled over many years on all those books, on the carpet, on the windowsill, and only from the door to the chair where you would sit down to read, there was a path, like a path through snow, as it were, you know, worn, where you could see that there wasn’t any dust because occasionally somebody would walk up to that chair and sit down and read a book. And I have never spent a more peaceful quarter of an hour than sitting in that particular chair. It was that experience that brought home to me that dust has something very, very peaceful about it.

From “Ghost Hunter,” a 1997 interview with Eleanor Wachtel. In The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007).

Related reading
All OCA W.G. Sebald posts (Pinboard)

Sebald: “out in the sticks”

W.G. Sebald, on living “in hiding”:

Well, where I am now is very much out in the sticks. It’s in a small village near Norwich in the east of England. And I do feel that I’m better there than I am elsewhere in the center of things. I do like to be on the margins if possible.

From “Ghost Hunter,” a 1997 interview with Eleanor Wachtel. In The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007).

Related reading
All OCA W.G. Sebald posts (Pinboard)

Unity Day

[Click for a larger view.]

Today is Unity Day, an anti-bullying initiative. Its color is orange. Its focus is on kindness, acceptance, and inclusion.

[Insert dark memories of middle school and high school here.]

I read the papers (as people used to say) and watch the news. But I learned of Unity Day, only this morning, from Zippy and Zits.


[Zippy, October 24, 2018.]

Recently updated

Earl Greyer, correcter The story has a good ending.

John Gruber reviews the iPhone XR

John Gruber, in a lengthy review: “The iPhone XR is everything Apple says it is, and it’s the new iPhone most people should buy.” And: “The sweet spot for most people in 2018, in my opinion, is one tier above 64 GB [that is, 128 GB].” And: “Dollar for dollar, the XR is almost certainly the best iPhone Apple has ever made.”

Holy cow — I chose well. (I hope.)

Hot-dog stands and poetry

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955).

Elaine and I just finished re-reading Lolita. As we discovered, we each marked this passage while reading. Elaine has already posted her transcription on her blog.

Humbert Humbert’s observations (and the first-person plural pronoun) remind me of what Proust’s narrator says about the “contrast between the way individuals change and the fixity of memory.” More than coincidence, I think.

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

MSNBC, sheesh

On MSNBC this afternoon, someone, I wish I knew who, suggested to Nicole Wallace that television talkers stop calling Mohammed bin Salman “MBS.” I have had the same thought. As the commentator pointed out, Prince Mohammed is not a Marvel Comics villain. Nor, I would add, is he a rapper or Supreme Court justice. Prince Mohammed is, as the commentator put it, “an autocratic thug.” The last thing our public discourse needs is another trivializing nickname.

And soon enough, Katy Tur was on the air, speaking of “MBS.”

Related reading All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

“Scroll. Like. Move on.”

“Scroll. Like. Move on. Scroll. Like. Move on. Comment. Move on. Feel disconnected. Try again. Try again later. Feel hopeful that someone will engage. Move on. Feel foolish. Feel disconnected. Rinse and repeat”: Elaine Fine writes about the illusion of social media. Her perspective: that of a veteran of the classical-music blogosphere.

Rolling back existence

From The New York Times:

The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

If, as Wittgenstein suggests, the limits of one’s language mean the limits of one’s world, this initiative goes beyond rolling back recognition and legal protections. Recognition presumes the existence of that which is recognized. This initiative seeks to roll back existence, erasing identities and insisting that persons are who the government says they are. I think of Syme in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?”

[Ludwig Wittgenstein describes solipsism in the Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus 5.62: : “The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.”]