My Life and Thoughts

Yesterday was Luba Golburt’s presentation on Pushkin and the Historical Novel with the Stanford Working Group on the Novel. It was so great! I learned a lot about minor characters. The Working Group is co-organized by Alex Woloch, director of the Center for the Study of the Novel and author of an interesting book on minor characters, which my former classmate Na’ama Rokem gave me for my birthday in 2005.

Alex Woloch The One vs. the Many	Ilya Bernstein Self-Portrait entelechy: mind & culture

I recently realized that Alex Woloch and I are further connected, like two minor characters in the Bildung of some romantic monster, through the central life-problem of the magazine n+1.

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I was just preparing some questions for Luba Golburt’s upcoming presentation on Pushkin and the historical novel, when I made an interesting discovery. If you go to Google Books and look up The Historical Novel by Georg Lukács, the book whose cover is displayed is not The Historical Novel by Georg Lukács, but, rather, Famous Indian Chiefs I Have Known, by Major General O. O. Howard.

Seriously: check it out.

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It seems like just yesterday that I was at Stanford’s Building 460, reading with n+1 magazine; but already the time has come for me to make another appearance in this fine edifice. On January 23 at 5pm in Building 460, Room 429, I will be a respondent for Luba Golburt’s presentation on Pushkin and the historical romance, sponsored by the Working Group on the Novel.

The idea of the Working Group is that everyone reads a paper and a designated novel in advance; then, at the appointed time and place, they all confront the author of the paper, who sits at a long table with a respondent (me), who “kicks things off” with some hard-hitting questions that cut through the rhetoric and get to what really matters to you and me. Dinner will be provided. Think you can handle it? Here are the readings: Alexander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter; and Luba Golburt’s “Seeing History: The Russian Historical Novel between Sir Walter Scott and Les Jeunes-France.”

You don’t actually need a very firm idea of who the Jeunes-France were, in order to appreciate Luba’s paper; nonetheless, I share with you the definition from the Tresor de la Langue Française Informatisé:

A group of eccentric young writers and artists, wearing long hair, forked beards, velvet doublets, and soft fedoras, who, from 1830 on, exaggerated the theories of the Romantic school, drawing notice with their behavior and with their literary and artistic opinions, which tended to alarm the “bourgeoisie”… The most flattering thing for a Jeune-France at that time was to persuade his parents to let him wear a sky-blue habit and the yellow breeches of a young Werther (SAINTE-BEUVE, Literary Portraits).

Alphonse Daudet	Young Werther

Members included Alphonse Daudet (above), who was possibly wearing yellow breeches when that picture was taken… unless the yellow breeches were part of a different look from the forked beard and floppy hat…? I’ll be asking Prof. Golburt when we’re playing “hardball” next Wednesday. (more…)

Where did we leave off? Ah yes—with the direct empirical proof of the existence of McCone Hall, and the retreat of the bearded “doubter,” proclaiming, like the Apostle Thomas, the truth of the Word. At that point there were still 20 minutes before the reading. I had left home early, hoping to have time for coffee with the literary historian Luba Golburt.

Instead, what I had time for was hanging out alone in the basement of McCone Hall. Dear reader: if what you look for in a basement is spaciousness, solitude, and a faint buzzing sound, then you will love McCone Hall. I had a moderately good time observing some silicate boulders. I also read some faculty bios, posted in the same glass display case with the boulders. One professor had actually attended the University of Colorado, at Boulder.

The basement of McCone Hall also houses a computerized micromill used for high-resolution sampling across “fish otolith growth bands.” Fish otoliths are calcified stones that you can find in the inner ears of fish. A week ago, I didn’t even know that fish had ears, let alone earstones.

Otolith segment from a juvenile chinook salmon; image by Reg Reisenbichler, US Geological Survey.
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