Novels in Three Lines

Clerk, journalist, editor, publisher, Félix Fénéon (1861–1944) worked for a time at the French daily newspaper Le Matin, for which he wrote 1,220 brief news items, miniature narratives of crime, misadventure, and mystery. All but 154 of them are collected in Novels in Three Lines, trans. Luc Sante (New York: New York Review Books, 2007). Barns burn; poor boxes disappear from churches; telephone wire is stolen by the mile. Line by line, the population drops, with lives lost to disease, accident, murder, and suicide. The overall effect is wearying, but then these items were never meant to be read all at once. The more startling ones have something of the casual, sudden brutality of the incidents that form much of the material of Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony: The United States (1885-1915) Recitative (1978, 1979). Three Fénéon samples:

The Blonquets stank of drink. A saloonkeeper in Saint-Maur dared refused them service. They slew him with an indignant dagger.

Responding to a call at night, M. Sirvent, café owner of Caissargues, Gard, opened his window; a rifle shot destroyed his face.

In Oyonnax, Mlle Cottet, 18, threw acid in the face of M. Benard, 25. Love, obviously.

In lighter moods, Fénéon suggests the terse strangeness of a caption to a drawing by Glen Baxter or Edward Gorey:

Equipped with a rattail file and deceptively loaded with a quantity of fine sandstone, a tin cylinder was found on Rue de l’Ouest.

Since the church in Miélin, Haute-Saône, has been barricaded, the faithful have been climbing in through the windows for services.

The sinister prowler seen by the mechanic Gicquel near Herblay train station has been identified: Jules Menard, snail collector.

To the sound of a bagpipe, the strikers of Hennehont closed their meeting at the union field with dancing.

Novels in Three Lines is one of the more unusual NYRB volumes. Not everyone’s cup of tea, perhaps not even mine, but certainly worth tasting.

[Luc Sante’s introduction mentions Rezknikoff. But the thought was mine long before I read the introduction.]

Pat the chair

Have you noticed how often Jerrold Nadler’s Democratic colleagues give him a pat on the back as he makes his way to or from his place as chair of the House Judiciary Committee? Such a toxic environment — it’s like the worst meeting in the world raised to the hundredth power. In such a setting the human touch has to help, no?

Ben Leddy hosts The Rewind

Here’s the latest installment of WGBH’s The Rewind, “What Does WGBH Stand For?,” hosted by our son Ben. You can find all episodes of The Rewind at YouTube.

All dais long

They keep saying \ˈdī-əs\.

The Merriam-Webster app has \'dā-əs\. M-W Online gives \ˈdī-əs\ as “nonstandard.” The more we hear members of Congress sounding a long i, the more difficult it becomes to hear the long a as right.

What?

Representative Matt Gaetz (R, Florida-1) just referred to the Rorkshire — or was it Yorkshire? — inkblot test.

[It’s Rorschach.]

“The Standing Family Joke”

Seymour’s take on his brother Buddy’s fiction:


J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction (1963).

Buddy Glass, writer, bears a more than passing resemblance to a certain Salinger.

Related reading
All OCA Salinger posts (Pinboard)

Nadler’s Jotter

The New York Times has an array of photographs online, “Inside the Private Moments of Impeachment.” Among those (semi-private?) moments: Representative Jerrold Nadler (D, New York-10) signing draft articles of impeachment with a Parker T-Ball Jotter. Go to the Times the full photograph.

Related reading
Other Parker T-Ball Jotter posts

-ic

In the House Judiciary Committee: Rep. Doug Collins (R, Georgia-9) must really be losing it. He just referred to the Democratic (not “Democrat”) Party.

M-W’s Word of the Day

For an English major of a certain age, sodden , like sempiternal , immediately suggests T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”:

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown

Other words, other works of lit
Apoplexy, avatar, bandbox, heifer, sanguine, sempiternal : Artificer : Expiate : Fuliginous : Gutta-percha : Ineluctable : Iridescent : Magnifico : Opusculum : Palaver

Borrowing privileges

Inside Higher Ed asks, “How many books should a professor be able to check out?” I take no position on the borrowing privileges described therein. But reading the article made me recall a happy moment from Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain (1948).

The scene: the library at St. Bonaventure College (now St. Bonaventure University). Robert Lax is introducing his friends Merton and Ed Rice to Father Irenaeus Herscher, the college’s librarian:

“They were at Columbia too,” said Lax.

“Ah, Columbia,” said Father Irenaeus. “I studied at the Columbia Library School,” and then he took us into his own library and with reckless trust abandoned all the shelves to us. It never occurred to him to place any limit upon the appetites of those who seemed to like books. If they wanted books, well, this was a library. He had plenty of books, that was what a library was for. You could take as many as you liked, and keep them until you were through: he was astonishingly free of red tape, this happy little Franciscan. . . .

Presently we came out of the stacks with our arms full.

“May we take all these, Father?”

“Sure, sure, that’s fine, help yourself.”

We signed a vague sort of a ticket, and shook hands.

“Good-bye, Mr. Myrtle,” said the Friar, and stood in the open door and folded his hands as we started down the steps with our spoils.

Merton adds:

As far as I know, Father Irenaeus has never been robbed of his books on a larger scale than any other librarian, and on the whole, the little library at Saint Bonaventure’s was always one of the most orderly and peaceful I have ever seen.

No wonder: εἰρήνη [eiréné ] means “peace.”

Related reading
All OCA Merton posts (Pinboard)