The Black Isle

From the chapter “Ululation” in IN GHOSTLY JAPAN by Lafcadio Hearn:

I have only one fault to find with her: she howls at night. Howling is one of the few pathetic pleasures of her existence. At first I tried to frighten her out of the habit; but finding that she refused to take me seriously, I concluded to let her howl. It would have been monstrous to beat her.

It begins with a stifled moan, like the moan of a bad dream, — mounts into a long, long wail, like a wailing of wind, — sinks quavering into a chuckle, — rises again to a wail, very much higher and wilder than before, — breaks suddenly into a kind of atrocious laughter, — and finally sobs itself out in a plaint like the crying of a little child. The ghastliness of the performance is chiefly — though not entirely — in the goblin mockery of the laughing tones as contrasted with the piteous agony of the wailing ones: an incongruity that makes you think of madness. And I imagine a corresponding incongruity in the soul of the creature. I know that she loves me, — that she would throw away her poor life for me at an instant’s notice. I am sure that she would grieve if I were to die. But she would not think about the matter like other dogs, — like a dog with hanging ears, for example. She is too savagely close to Nature for that. Were she to find herself alone with my corpse in some desolate place, she would first mourn wildly for her friend; but, this duty performed, she would proceed to ease her sorrow in the simplest way possible, — by eating him, — by cracking his bones between those long wolf’s teeth of hers. And thereafter, with spotless conscience, she would sit down and utter to the moon the funeral cry of her ancestors.

One of my favorite passages in Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, and just about the best description of a ghost that’s not a literal ghost.

Penguin paperback edition, pp. 194-195:

Grenouille garnered his first individual odour in this Hôpital de la Charité. He managed to pilfer sheets that were supposed to be burned because the journeyman sackmaker who had lain wrapped in them for two months had just died of consumption. The cloth was so drenched in the exudations of the sackmaker that it had absorbed them like an enfleurage paste and could be directly subjected to lavage. The result was eerie: right under Grenouille’s nose, the sackmaker rose olfactorily from the dead, ascending from the alcohol solution, hovering there — the phantom slightly distorted by the peculiar methods of reproduction and the countless miasmas of his disease — but perfectly recognizable in space as an olfactory personage. A small man of about thirty, blond, with a bulbous nose, short limbs, flat, cheesy feet, swollen genitalia, choleric temperament and a stale mouth odour — not a handsome man, aromatically speaking, this sackmaker, not worth being held on to for any length of time, like the puppy. And yet for one whole night Grenouille let the scent-spectre flutter about his cabin while he sniffed at him again and again, happy and deeply satisfied with the sense of power that he had won over the aura of another human being. He poured it away the next day.

THIS goes on my blogroll PRONTO!

NOTE TO SELF

Currently reading:
SEA OF POPPIES by Amitav Ghosh
The Annotated APOCRYPHA
Frederick Seidel POEMS

Want to read this summer (before the list expands/bursts):
CHILD 44 + THE SECRET SPEECH by Tom Rob Smith
some entries in THE VAMPIRE ARCHIVES, compiled by Otto Penzler
LAST EVENINGS ON EARTH by Roberto Bolaño
PURGATORIO + PARADISO (Everyman’s edition) by Dante Alighieri
selections from Pliny the Elder’s NATURAL HISTORY
SERVITUDE & GRANDEUR OF ARMS by Alfred de Vigny

Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder) on Oysters, From “Natural History”:

168-9. Sergius Orata was the first to lay down oyster-beds — in the Bay of Baiae, at the time of the orator Lucius Crassus, before the Marsian War. His reason was not gluttony but monetary greed. He also obtained good financial returns from his great ingenuity as the inventor of the shower-bath, and then from selling country houses fitted out with showers. He was the first to rate Lucrine oysters as having the best flavour, because some kinds of fish are of better quality in different places: for example, the pike in the Tiber between the two bridges; the turbot at Ravenna; the lamprey in Sicily; the sturgeon at Rhodes; and similarly other kinds, not to make this culinary review exhausting. The shores of Britain were not yet under our control when Orata made the Lucrine oysters famous.

For more oyster lore, see also “A History of the Oyster and the Oyster Fisheries” by T. C. Eyton, 1858: FULL TEXT HERE, which contains such diaristic passages:

” July 7. — Examined a large number of oysters ina fishmonger’s shop in London ; they were said tocome from Jersey, and had all spawned, the ovariesbeing flat and flabby. Obtained a small quantity ofwhitish liquid from the ovary. The ova were veryminute, but some in motion, probably more wouldhave been so, but the oysters had evidently been takensome time, and were exposed in a basket to the lightin a shop window. These oysters had all the appear-ance of being what are technically termed sea-oysters,or such as had not been moved, the shell being coveredwith weed, stones, and other rubbish.

” July 9th. — Examined a large number of oystersat another fishmonger’s shop, from Jersey, some ofwhich had spawned ; these oysters appeared to havebeen moved, as they were much cleaner than the last :this may be explained by the Jerseymen taking oystersat the latter end of the season, laying them down inshore, and sending them to the London market duringthe illegal months, which I am informed is the case.About three in 1000 had the spawn (PI. V. b) exudedbetween the bronchise ; some of this spawn was placedin a tube bottle with salt water, and lived forty-eighthours, although part of the time in my pocket.

” July 11. — Went on board the fishing-smack ‘ Iris,’the property of Mr. Laban Sweeting, who accompaniedme, dredging in the river Crouch with the light dredges,for the purpose of collecting oysters to lay down forthe London market in September. Examined animmense number of oysters of all sizes, but found nosmall ones in spawn, or presenting the appearance ofhaving spawned. Mr. Sweeting is of opinion that theydo not spawn until they are three or four years old ;they are considered fit for the London market at four,five, and six years old, according to their growth,which depends upon the feeding. Very few (three)were found which had not parted with their spawn,out of many basketfuls looked over : there was noappearance of white spawn, as it is called, in any.Among the shells were dredged up quantities of oldshells, stones, and other substances, completelysprinkled over with spat (PI. IV. fig. 4), as the spawnis called by the fishermen : the rubbish called ‘ cultch,’consisting of dead shells, unsizeable oysters, &c., wasreturned to the river.

50 Best Designed Book Covers of 2008, according to the AIGA.

The Makioka Sisters cover is especially nice:

Mark Lamster has located the most beautiful crapper in the world. Thanks to bookjones.

Read this on the plane ride home.

p. 53:

There were abysses within abysses and trees rose like towers from the deep underground levels. They saw gaudy flowers open, large and small, some with paws, others with rounded kidneys of apple flesh. In the streams there were siren-like molluscs and, at the bottom, always swimming against the current, legions of pink salmon the size of lambs. The deep green of the auraucaria trees thickened to a velvety black or parted to reveal floating landscapes that always seemed upside down. Around the lakes, forests of delicate myrtle, with trunks like tubes of yellow rubber, smooth to the touch and cold as ice. Moss plumped up to form wilderness sofas; the airy lacework of fern fronds quivered nervously.

WOW!

From The New Yorker, Jill Lepore on Edgar Allan Poe’s survival in a time of economic collapse and panic, the 1830s:

… Gothic stories—supernatural tales set, often, in medieval ruins—had been popular for decades. They were fun to write on a rainy day, as Mary Shelley had discovered, and even more fun to parody, as Jane Austen found out (both “Frankenstein” and “Northanger Abbey” were published in 1818, when Poe was in England). The genre had since gone to seed, but it still sold well. A philosophy of composition? No, what Poe developed was a philosophy of the literary marketplace. He had little choice. “The general market for literary wares is in a state of stagnation,” he reported, during one of the worst years of the depression. …