{"id":78394,"date":"2014-10-23T09:30:31","date_gmt":"2014-10-23T13:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=78394"},"modified":"2014-10-23T10:17:29","modified_gmt":"2014-10-23T14:17:29","slug":"another-bartleby-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/23\/another-bartleby-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Bartleby, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_78395\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/black_country_\u2013_borinage.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-78395\" class=\"wp-image-78395\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/black_country_\u2013_borinage.jpg\" alt=\"Black_Country_\u2013_Borinage\" width=\"600\" height=\"438\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-78395\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Constantin Meunier, <i>Pays noire (Black Country\u2014Borinage)<\/i>, ca. 1893, oil on canvas.<\/p><\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cOn a winter\u2019s day in 1482 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2014\/oct\/23\/early-books-exhibition-cambridge-university-ink-blots-doodles-1582\" target=\"_blank\">a scholar had an embarrassing disaster<\/a>, leaving a blood-red blot of ink on the pristine page of a valuable book. He then compounded his crime by confessing, adding a note in the same red ink still legible after 532 years. On the desecrated page of the Historiae Romanae Decades, printed in Venice in 1470, he wrote: \u2018<em>Ita macula\u2019<\/em>\u2014this stain\u2014\u2018I stupidly made on the first of December 1482.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/li>\n<li>On George Whitman, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/culture\/2014\/11\/shakespeare-and-company-paris-george-whitman\" target=\"_blank\">the eccentric founder of Shakespeare and Company<\/a>: \u201cHe could be welcoming. He could be gruff. He could be charismatic. He could be aloof \u2026 This was, after all, a man who on occasion expressed himself by throwing books at people, sometimes affectionately, sometimes less so\u2014a love-hate gesture, or so it sounds, not unlike Ignatz Mouse hurling bricks at an eternally besotted Krazy Kat.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Novelists, here is your picaresque, contemporary Bartleby: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/worldnews\/europe\/italy\/11176929\/Italian-miner-avoids-work-for-35-years-before-retiring-aged-52.html\" target=\"_blank\">an Italian coal miner who shirked work for thirty-five years<\/a> and is now collecting his pension. \u201cI invented everything\u2014amnesia, pains, hemorrhoids, I used to lurch around as if I was drunk. I bumped my thumb on a wall and obviously you can\u2019t work with a swollen thumb \u2026 Other times I would rub coal dust into my eyes. I just didn\u2019t like the work\u2014being a miner was not the job for me.\u201d<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/theappendix.net\/issues\/2014\/10\/to-russia-with-love\" target=\"_blank\">Let\u2019s trade fossil casts<\/a>: \u201cIn the first part of the twentieth century, casts of fossil specimens were key to paleo sciences. Because actual fossils were too valuable and rare to ship to international researchers, casts of fossils circulated in their stead \u2026 Paleoanthropologists would offer to trade casts of \u2018their\u2019 fossils to other researchers in different areas of the world, who had different looking specimens\u2014the casts became a social currency.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>In praise of reading plays: \u201cA great published script makes you understand what the play is, at its heart. Not just what a certain production was like, though it also ought to do a good job of that. It makes you understand <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/articles\/arts\/books\/2014\/10\/annie_baker_s_the_flick_and_the_joy_of_reading_plays.single.html\" target=\"_blank\">how the play feels as a living work of art<\/a>\u2014how it sounds and behaves inside your head, a mental effort that matters more in reading a play than in reading any other kind of literature.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cOn a winter\u2019s day in 1482 a scholar had an embarrassing disaster, leaving a blood-red blot of ink on the pristine page of a valuable book. He then compounded his crime by confessing, adding a note in the same red ink still legible after 532 years. On the desecrated page of the Historiae Romanae Decades, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[7334,425,15749,3774,545,12648,4186,103,14432,53,15748,12807],"class_list":["post-78394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-bartleby-the-scrivener","tag-drama","tag-fossil-casts","tag-george-whitman","tag-italy","tag-marginalia","tag-mining","tag-museums","tag-plays","tag-reading","tag-shakespeare-and-company","tag-work"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Morning News Roundup for Thursday, October 23, 2014<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Here is your picaresque, contemporary Bartleby, in praise of reading plays, and other news.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/23\/another-bartleby-and-other-news\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Another Bartleby, and Other News by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 23, 2014 \u2013 \u201cOn a winter\u2019s day in 1482 a scholar had an embarrassing disaster, leaving a blood-red blot of ink on the pristine page of a valuable book. 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