Alomar came to the United States in late 2008 to join his mother and older brother who had emigrated in the 1900s. The fact that he was willing to leave behind and established career as a writer for an uncertain life speaks to the hopelessness of the situation in Syria even before its decent into open Civil War. He and I made these translations together in difficult circumstances: most were done in the front seat of his taxi in a Chicago suburb heavy with the ache of immigration and the unimaginable pain of watching one’s country implode from afar. With books and dictionaries piled on the dashboard, hoping the taxi line wouldn’t advance too quickly and force us to break our concentration with another “load,” we were able to make some part of that lost world in Damascus live again, however briefly. This pamphlet is some of the fruit of that soul-affirming work.
C.J. Collins, Fullblood Arabian, from the translators note, pg 62.
Osama Alomar‘s Fullblood Arabian deserves more attention. It’s a perfect book for returning to the office. You can get through five or six short stories while eating your lunch in the shade. Five or six meaningful stories while eating your lunch in the shade.
C.J.’s depiction of the translator’s life, sitting in Alomar’s Chicago taxi cab, getting through pages, stacked dictionaries on the dash, all the while hoping the taxi line doesn’t move, is a reminder of the hidden work that brings a book to life.
I cherish writers, like C.J. who bring you back to a moment with specific, clear, descriptions. It’s like I was in the backseat of the cab, watching a dream unfold.
The founding fathers had a general physician. His name? Benjamin Rush. The name sounded familiar, but truth is I knew nothing about him. But after an introduction from Brett McKay and Stephen Fried, I wasn’t surprised to learn he kept a commonplace book.
Brett McKay: Even the founding fathers did it. Something that really… You really hit home. And it really impressed me about Rush. Ever since he was a child, very curious, this self-starter, and something that he did that a lot of young upstarts did back in 17th century, 18th century, is he had a common place book and the guy just wrote down everything. How did that mental habit shape him for the rest of his life?
Stephen Fried: He did. And you know, what’s interesting, I found… I had the same question you had, and then I looked into it and I saw that even then there’s apparently a debate about how memory works. Of course, we’re still debating that, and the debate was, do you take notes and that makes you remember, or do you listen and not take notes, and that makes you remember? Most of Rush’s teachers thought you shouldn’t take notes, but Rush took notes. And so, what’s wonderful was after a certain point, we have them. I mean, a lot of things that Rush wrote are gone, I’m still hoping they will bubble up somewhere, but his commonplace books are wonderful. And part of the value of them is, of course, he did it when he was a kid, he did it when he was a student, and then when he was in the Continental Congress, he kept them about what it was like to be in the Continental Congress.
He would write little sketches about what he thought about the people in the Continental Congress, no holds bar. So he just… He wrote a lot, and so we have a lot of it, and we’re missing a lot of it, but everything we have is… What’s really nice about it also is that he wasn’t a formal writer. So he wrote in a style that we would today think of as almost like magazine writing. And it’s part of the reason that he was such an accessible intellectual and such an accessible writer is because, his writing style and of course, his penmanship were really readable, and when you read them today, they seem quite contemporary.
John Adams kept a journal. Spared no thought or criticism. Emotions splattered on the page:
Keeping as full and honest a diary as he did was part of the inheritance passed on from his Puritan ancestors; but it was also an inevitable response to his acute self-awareness. None of his colleagues and in fact no American in the eighteenth century kept a diary like that of Adams. In it he poured out all his feelings — all his anxieties and ambitions, all his jealousies and resentments.
It takes courage to keep a diary as Adams did. Surely he must’ve known it would be read by the public at some point in time. To record one’s insecurities and shortcomings is therapeutic and brave.
Wood continues:
Adams used his diary to begin a lifelong struggle with what he often considered his unworthy pride and passions. “He is not a wise man and is unfit to fill any important Station in Society, that has left one Passion in his Soul unsubdued.” Like his seventeenth-century Puritan ancestors, he could not have success without guilt.
John Adams was TMI. Thomas Jefferson stayed mysterious:
It is impossible to imagine Jefferson writing such a journal. Jefferson was always reserved and self possessed and, unlike Adams, he scarcely ever revealed much of his inner self. Jefferson seemed to open up to no one, while Adams at times seemed to open up to everyone. He certainly opened up to his diary. “Honesty, Sincerity, and openness, I esteem essential marks of a good mind,” he wrote, and once he got going his candid entries bore out that judgement.
Thomas Jefferson in contrast, ditched the diary. He recorded facts:
Jefferson kept no diary, and if he had, he would never have expressed any self-loathing in it. Instead of a diary, Jefferson kept records — records, it seems, of everything, with what he called “scrupulous fidelity.” He religiously recorded the weather, taking the temperature twice a day, once in the morning and again at four in the afternoon. He entered into memorandum books every financial transaction, every source of income and every expenditure, no matter how small or how large — seven pennies for chickens or thousands of dollars for a land sale.
No surprise then Thomas Jefferson kept an array of commonplace books:
He kept a variety of specialized books, including several commonplace books — a legal book, an equity book, and a literary book, in which he copied passages from his reading that he found important or interesting. He also kept a case book and a fee book, for tracking work and income from his legal career as long as it lasted; a farm book, in which he entered, among other things, the births and sales of slaves as well as farm animals; and a garden book. In his garden book, he made such notations as how many peas he was planting would fill a pint measure, how much fodder a horse would eat in a night, and how many cucumbers fifty hills would yield in a season.
Fascinating how John Adams and Thomas Jefferson’s personalities were reflected in their daily writing habits. The pugnacious Adams’ confessionals, and Jefferson’s facts only approach.
An “irrepressible reformer” (as his biographer, Wayne A. Wiegand, calls him), Dewey devoted most of his life to pressing for social change: railing against alcohol and tobacco, promoting the metric system, and even agitating to simplify English spelling (even going so far as to change the spelling of his own name to the phonetically correct Melvil Dui). Dewey invented his Decimal Classification while still an undergraduate at Amherst College, drawing on the earlier work of important library thinkers like Cutter and William T. Harris, whose cataloging scheme for the St. Louis Library had drawn directly on the concept of Francis Bacon and his division of all learning into three high-level categories: history, poetry, and philosophy.
Could there have been a librarians version of the PayPal mafia?
Frederick Winslow Taylor inspired Melvil Dewey, who collaborated with Charles Cutter, and both of them were inspired by Francis Bacon’s division of learning.
Dewey didn’t stop after the success of the Dewey Decimal System. He later founded the Library Bureau, the 18th century version of Staples. Which is still in business today!
Ostwald also believed in using the methods of advertising to propagate scholarly work. Up until then advertising had served primary commercial interests. Ostwald argued that it could be pressed into the service of scholarship and education, helping to provide a platform for popularizing scientific findings and connecting the general public and the scholarly community. “The engineer cannot talk,” he said, advocating that schools should put a special emphasis on ensuring better communication and what today we might call presentation skills.
Paul Otlet’s contemporary Wilhelm Ostwald understood that to build a “global brain” the general public needed to understand it’s value. It needed to be made, well, popular. And he saw that advertising could be a tool to build public support.
The trick is to maintain a kind of naive amazement at each instant of experience-but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are.
How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne, In one question and twenty attempts at an answer. Sarah Bakewell. Chapter 2 Pay Attention, pg 37.
This could be a productive writing exercise. 200 words describing the closest object near you.
I’ve been waiting months for this podcast episode. Tyler Cowen and Lydia Davis did not let me down.
For a writer of her stature, Lydia openly admits she finds very long books hard to approach:
COWEN: Do you think the late Thomas Pynchon became unreadable, that somehow it was just a pile of complexity and it lost all relation to the reader? Or are those, in fact, masterworks that we’re just not up to appreciating?
DAVIS: Since I hesitated to even open the books, I can’t answer you, because I do find — not all long books — but very long, very fat books a little hard to approach, and some of them, I try over and over. If I sense that it’s really a load of verbiage, I really don’t. I fault myself for not having the patience to get through at least one, say, late Pynchon, but I haven’t.
Don’t despair! Lydia Davis also struggled to read Ulysses. It took two cracks and a move to Ireland for her to finish:
I had a problem a long time ago trying to read Ulysses by Joyce, and started it twice, and finally read it when I lived in Ireland, which made it much easier because I had his context. That too — I suppose because it had different chapters, each of which approached the ongoing story in a very different way — I found that possible too.
I’m believing more and more, that what great books do, what the internet at it’s brightest light does, is make introductions.
Today’s introduction? The Catalan writer Josep Pla:
There’s a book by a Catalan writer called Josep Pla that’s called The Gray Notebook. That’s very fat, but I keep going back to it and delighting in it, but I’m not reading it all at once. I’m going back to it and just sort of nibbling away at it. It was an amazing project. He took an early, very brief diary of his when he was 21, I think, and it only covered a year and a half. He kept going back to it rather than publishing it. He kept going back to it and expanding it with more memories and more material, and I love that idea. Maybe that’s why I can read it.
Lydia admits the Harry Potter series didn’t captivate her. She preferred the writing in Philip Pullman’s The Dark Materials trilogy. But she understands, Harry Potter’s greatest value is hooking kids on reading:
COWEN: How would you articulate why you don’t like the Harry Potter novels?
DAVIS: That’s fairly easy, although I should have a page in front of me. It’s always better if you have the page, and you can say, “Look at this sentence, look at that sentence.” At a certain point, my son was reading Harry Potter as kids do and did. I think he was probably 11 or 10 or 11, 12, 9 — I don’t know. Also, the Philip Pullman trilogy, whose name I always forget. I thought it would be a lot of fun to read the Harry Potter books because I knew a lot of grownups were reading them and enjoying them. I thought, “This is great. There are a lot of them.”
But when I tried to read them, I didn’t like the style of writing, and I didn’t like the characters, and I didn’t like anything about them. Whereas, I opened the first Philip Pullman book and read the first page and said, “This is wonderful. The writing here is wonderful.” I really think there’s an ocean of difference. I wouldn’t put down the Harry Potter books because, as we know, they got a lot of kids reading and being enraptured with books. I think that matters more than anything, really — getting kids hooked on reading.
Brilliant and insightful. Do give it a listen or read the transcript in full here.
Sometimes I read straight on without going back, but often, when I learn one word, it explains the meaning of other words that came just before it, so I look back, and, one by one, each newly acquired word gives me the clue to the next one. Knowing Tom had gotten onto his knees before climbing into bed gave me the answer to another word: rezar = pray. And another, later: arrodillarse had to mean “kneel.” Reading a sentence several times over is often enough to teach me most of the mysterious words.
Lydia Davis, Reading Las Aventuras de Tom Sawyer, pg 93, Essays Two
The essay Reading Las Aventuras de Tom Sawyer makes owning Essays Two entirely worth it. Lydia Davis’ passion for translation and foreign language led her to read a Spanish translation of Tom Sawyer by Sara Gomez. In the essay, Davis describes the little games she devised to bolster her understanding of Spanish. One game was, she decided to not look up any word in the dictionary while reading through the book. The idea being, to learn words from context only.
Lydia again reminds us of the power rereading a sentence. Here though, it’s to reveal the meaning of “mysterious” Spanish words. My guess is, not only did the rereading reveal the meaning, but it would likely have embedded the meaning into her memory.
