Taking A Break -- The Literature Page -- March 11, 2021

First this:

Why? In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, page 15, "Splash," by Marina Warner, an essay / book review of Merpeople: A Human History, Vaughn Scribner, Reaktioin, 318 pp, $27.50. 

Sophia loves unicorns and mermaids. And here we have a long, long -- 2.5 pages -- essay on mermaids, or as Scribner calls them, merpeople. This is not simply politically correct, or "woke," but sea-people can be both men and women. Even Sophia knows that. 

Marina (what an apt first name for an essay on marine people, LOL), begins:

In 1819 the French inventor Cagniard de La Tour gave the name sirène to the alarm he had devised to help evacuate factories and mines in case of accident—in those days all too frequent. The siren, or mermaid, came to his mind as a portent, a signal of danger, although it might seem a contradiction, since the sirens’ song was fatal to mortals: in the famous scene in the Odyssey, Odysseus ties himself to the ship’s mast to hear it, and orders his men to plug their ears with wax and ignore him when he pleads to be set free to join the singers on the shore. Homer does not describe these irresistible singers’ appearance—only their flowery meadow, which is strewn with the rotting corpses of their victims—but he tells us that their song promises omniscience: “We know whatever happens anywhere on earth.” This prescience inspired Cagniard: he inverted the sirens’ connection to fatality to name a device that gives forewarning.

In Greek iconography, the sirens are bird-bodied, and aren’t instantly seductive in appearance but rather, according to the historian Vaughn Scribner in Merpeople, “hideous beasts.” A famous fifth-century-BCE pot in the British Museum shows Odysseus standing stiffly lashed to the mast, head tilted skyward, his crew plying the oars while these bird-women perch around them, as if stalking their prey: one of them is dive-bombing the ship like a sea eagle. An imposing pair of nearly life-size standing terracotta figures from the fourth century BCE, in the collection of the Getty Museum, have birds’ bodies and tails, legs and claws, and women’s faces; they too have been identified as sirens (see illustration below).

So, "siren," as an "alarm," was a word coined by a French inventor. 

From the internet:
 

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The Music Page

From the same issue of The New York Review of Books, p. 31, "This Ain't No Disco," Dan Chiasson, an essay / book review on Remain in Love: Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina, Chris Frantz, St Martin's, 384 pp, $29.99.

Chris Frantz was the drummer for the Talking Heads and the Tom Tom Club.

Some time ago I posted a note about Tina Weymouth on the blog, a most fascinating woman, and then, lo and behold, someone else thought the same thing, wrote a book, and then someone else writes an essay on all of that. Amazing. 

By the way, on a completely different note, "Chiasson" is a lovely surname, isn't it?

The four members of the American band Talking Heads came from intact, midcentury American families, with kind and presentable parents who turned up at their gigs, or supplied a hand-me-down station wagon for touring, or fluffed the guestroom pillows when the band came through town. 

Chris Frantz, the drummer, was a prep school kid from Kentucky and Pittsburgh whose first memories included Christmas parties at Harvard Law School, where his father, a West Point graduate who later became an army general, was a student; later, Frantz played in the woods at Monticello, where his mother volunteered. 

When Frantz got to know his wife, Tina Weymouth, the band’s bassist, she was living in her parents’ carriage house on a leafy street in Providence, Rhode Island. Weymouth’s father, Ralph Weymouth, was an admiral who became a prominent antinuclear activist; her mother was from an old French family, and together they raised eight children. 

David Byrne’s Scottish parents, an engineer and special education teacher, had settled outside of Baltimore in a house they decorated with their son’s art projects. 

Jerry Harrison, the only child of an ad executive and a painter, came on board late, in 1977. Harrison, a veteran of the Boston band Modern Lovers, was working toward an architecture degree when Frantz, Weymouth, and Byrne turned up at his drafting desk at the Harvard School of Design and persuaded him to join the band.

The "names" that keep crossing paths here, 1973 - 1979, or who stole from whom, or who influenced whom, or who learned from whom:

• The Talking Heads
• The Tom Tom Club
• CBGB
• Suzi Quatro
• Blondie

Over-posted but no option, just the links for now:

• Wordy Rappinghood, Tom Tom Club; lyrics here;
  
• Life During Wartime, Talking Heads; this ain't no disco.

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And Finally, Because Everything Must Be Done In "Threes"

"Awful But Joyful," Deborah Eisenberg, pp. 43, an essay / book review of two books:
The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency, Tove Ditlevsen, 370 pp., $30.00; and,
The Faces, Tove Ditlevsen, 129 pp., £8.99 (paperback)

The essay begins:

By the time Tove Ditlevsen committed suicide in 1976, she was one of Denmark’s most popular and acclaimed writers. In the fifty-eight years of her life, she’d had two children and custody of a third, and four husbands. She’d soared out of poverty, and all told, she’d published about thirty books—primarily collections of poetry but also novels, memoirs, stories, and children’s books. She’d written magazine pieces, too, and, of all things, an advice column.

The information readily available about her in English is oddly sketchy, and little of her work has been translated into English, but what we have includes her memoir, The Copenhagen Trilogy, and a novel, The Faces. Both were published in Danish between 1967 and 1971, though neither was translated into English until years later.

The Copenhagen Trilogy and The Faces are very different books, but they draw on the same material—Ditlevsen’s life—and both display a distinctive style; an uncanny vividness; a gift for conveying atmospheres and mental sensations and personalities with remarkable dispatch; the originality and deadpan, trapdoor humor of the significantly estranged; a startling frankness; and a terrible commotion of unresolved conflicts and torments. Both books also accelerate from zero to sixty before anyone has a chance to buckle up.

The Faces starts right off with the protagonist, Lise Mundus, experiencing flickerings of delusion, which in short order explode into full-blown psychosis. It’s generally a poor idea to go rooting around in a work of fiction for clues to its author’s life and psyche, but the invitation here is so unequivocal it seems boorish to turn it down. Among other parallels Mundus is, like the author, a famous writer, and like the author she is suffering from marital problems as well as the inability to work that’s known rather emptily as “writer’s block”; Mundus was the maiden name of Ditlevsen’s mother (who once urged her daughter to use it as a nom de plume); and Ditlevsen herself endured several institutionalizations.

My closest friend in graduate school wanted to go into psychiatry, but for various reasons ended up in research on transplantation, at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN. He often said that there was a very, very fine line between madness and insanity, and of all the medical specialties, one could have the greatest impact if one could bring madness back across the line.