This morning's Lull Report …

… courtesy of Dave Lull:



… Dream lover: De Quincey's pharmakon — Text Patterns — The New Atlantis.

… just as there are technologies that dissipate human power, so too there may be technologies that concentrate it in dreams ….

… Living without a script: The Cost Of ‘Narrative Collapse’.



… Great endnotes: TT: From yon to hither.




I reviewed Meyers's biography, and "workmanlike" is a fair judgment. But I think that is what Maugham needed at the time, rather than some attempt at "high criticism," which I don't think Meyers would be all that good at.



… After a good start — Lowder then bombs.



… A mystery solved: The Patron and the Panhandler.



… Away from the prairie: Willa Cather’s New York.

Set around the turn of the century and somewhat after, these stories portray New York as a place of unspeakable elegance and civilization, a contrast to the “raggedness” of the Western and Midwestern cities from which many of her characters come. In those years there was still a high degree of Englishness afloat in New York. People took tea, lived in flats, sat on sofas called Chesterfields. Social engagements might begin as late as ten o’clock. Gentlemen had men servants to help with their attire, donned smoking jackets at home, fastened their cuffs with “sleeve buttons,” wore top hat, gloves, and cane to breakfast out. Ladies, too, dressed with a degree of formality once they were “out of short dresses.” An outing in winter meant putting on one’s “furs,” and perhaps carrying a muff. Some of Cather’s characters are artists and divas who dress dramatically, in “a dark purple velvet carriage cape lined with fur and furred at the cuffs and collar,” for example, or in “black velvet with long black feathers and a lace veil” (in daylight).

… Still truckin' — THIS OLD MAN.

I’ve endured a few knocks but missed worse. I know how lucky I am, and secretly tap wood, greet the day, and grab a sneaky pleasure from my survival at long odds. The pains and insults are bearable. My conversation may be full of holes and pauses, but I’ve learned to dispatch a private Apache scout ahead into the next sentence, the one coming up, to see if there are any vacant names or verbs in the landscape up there. If he sends back a warning, I’ll pause meaningfully, duh, until something else comes to mind.