Clark's Nutcracker.

I really don't have time to elaborate on this, but one thing you may not know about me is that I am kind of a fan of corvids, and this post about the Clark's Nutcracker's seed-gathering habits as related to the life of a reader... well, I liked it.

Peaceful depravity.

"Mr Bulstrode was conscious of being in a good spiritual frame and more than usually serene, under the influence of his innocent recreation. He was doctrinally convinced that there was a total absence of merit in himself; but that doctrinal conviction may be held without pain when the sense of demerit does not take a distinct shape in memory and revive the tingling of shame or the pang of remorse. Nay, it may be held with intense satisfaction when the depth of our sinning is but a measure of forgiveness, and a clenching proof that we are peculiar instruments of the divine intention. The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama. At this moment Mr Bulstrode felt as if the sunshine were all one with that of far-off evenings when he was a very young man and used to go out preaching beyond Highbury. And he would willingly have held that service of exhortation in prospect now. The texts were there still, and so was his facility in expounding them. His brief reverie was interrupted by the return of Caleb Garth..."

-from Middlemarch, chapter 53

Joys of used books.

Two characters discuss a scholar:

"'He has got no good red blood in his body,' said Sir James.

"'No. Somebody put a drop under magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs Cadwallader."

-from Chapter 8 of Middlemarch

In the margins of the copy I got from a used book store, written in pencil:

Gha!
Sickle-
cell

Two reviews.

No doubt faithful readers noticed that I abandoned this poor blog for Twitter. But if there are dark days ahead for Twitter, maybe I should take a look back at ol' Blogspot.

Anyways, since it's nice to have links that stay up at the top of the page a little longer and are properly archived, here are two reviews I've recently written:

• Review of The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, for Fare Forward - My friend Peter's starting a Christian review of ideas, aimed at millenials, and he asked me to review this book for the first issue. (My favorite essay from the issue, by the way, is Margaret Blume's "Beauty and the Beast.") I think that if I ever review another novel, I need to do more to preserve my first reactions. By the time I started writing this particular short review, I'd read the book three times and had lost all sense of perspective. But I think the space constraints kept me from messing it up too badly.
• Review of Precious Remedies against Satan's Devices, by The Welcome Wagon, for Mockingbird -  I got to see The Welcome Wagon's CD release show in Brooklyn, and enjoyed it quite a bit. Spent a few e-mail paragraphs dissecting the songs with friends, and so I had some ideas rattling around in my head. Then, when I was down in Charlottesville catching up with DZ from Mockingbird, he was interested in a record review, so it worked out nicely. I'm happy with this one. I usually try to keep my guard up about day-to-day faith when I'm writing online, aiming instead for the objective tone, but I didn't worry about that so much here.

I'm working on another book review, and if it gets published I'll post about that one as well.

From a James Wood review.

James Wood writing about the protagonist of Adam Gordon's Leaving the Atocha Station:

Adam--at once ideological and post-ideological, vaguely engaged and profoundly spectatorial, charming and loathsome--is a charming representative of twenty-first-century American Homo literatus. He is a creature of privilege and lassitude, living through a time of inflamed political certainty, yet certain only of his own uncertainty and thus more easily defined by negation than by affirmation, clearly dedicated to poetry but unable to define or defend it (except to intone that poetry isn't about anything), and implicitly nostalgic for earlier, mythical eras of greater strength and certainty.

If the book is sufficiently savvy about this guy, it's probably worth reading. I sometimes think that if not for the Holy Spirit, I'd turn into a character like this.

(Though maybe Christianity just keeps me from being either too charming or too loathsome?)

Three generations.

In the last few months I've read both Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose and Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex. The juxtaposition of these novels was accidental, but it's given me a lot to think about. Each novel is narrated by an abnormal man digging for courage and wisdom in the story of his pioneering grandparents. In Middlesex, the grandparents move from Greece and find their home in Detroit; Angle of Repose describes an East Coast woman's struggle to adjust to life in the Rockies.

Of course, the comparisons break down quickly. Stegner's protagonist's physical problems only emerged late in life, leaving him crippled and isolated from the outside world; Middlesex's Cal has an unusual genetic feature that's invisible to casual observers. And Cal strives resolutely to bridge past and future, while Angle's Lyman Ward sees the West he loves as having largely disappeared, replaced by the noxious culture of the Sixties.

It's impossible to read Angle of Repose without wanting to learn more about Mary Hallock Foote, the real-life basis for the character of Susan Beecher Ward. The book uses sections of her letters and memoirs, and these provide some really lovely passages. But Stegner brings his A game too, and I'm a sucker for the sorts of landscapes he spends plenty of time describing. It helps that a good chunk of the book takes place in Leadville, Colorado, which I visited this summer.

As for Middlesex, it's hard to imagine how a book could do more to inspire empathy for a character with a condition that many readers will find very icky at the outset. I held off on Middlesex for years because I thought of it was a "novel about a hermaphrodite" -- but it's not that; it's a novel about a person and a family. Eugenides, unfortunately, is less likely than Stegner to draw the curtain of propriety. Still, it's a large-hearted book and a good read.

I'm suddenly curious about the genre of three-generations-of-a-family novels. It's a subheading, I suppose, of family saga novels. On a first thought, Dickens and Austen didn't write them. When did they start appearing?

William Deresiewicz's list of influential postwar criticism.

From a TNR review of Harold Bloom's new book. For my own future reference.

When I think of the most important works of postwar criticism, I think of Frye’s Anatomy [of Criticism], Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin, Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight, Said’s Orientalism, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, and Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men—books that launched or largely defined, respectively, myth criticism, narratology, reader-response criticism, deconstruction, postcolonial criticism, feminist criticism, New Historicism, contemporary Marxist criticism, and queer studies. The Anxiety of Influence—idiosyncratic, impacted, hermetic—launched nothing, except more books by Bloom.

I don't know which of these I'll ever get around to reading, but I hope to make my way through a few of them. Deresiewicz also recommends Frank Kermode as a model critic.

Note-taking, and planning a work.

"Keep notes made after thinking, and with moderation. In order to avoid first-minute surprises, the effect of some passing preoccupation, or the enthusiasm sometimes aroused by a brilliant form of words, do not definitely include the passage in your notes wihtout letting some time elapse. Quietly, at the right distance, you will judge of the value of your harvest and store up only the good grain in your barns." (188-9)

"We must beware of a certain craze for collecting which sometimes takes possession of those who make notes. They want to have a full notebook or filing cabinet; they are in a hurry to put something in the empty spaces, and they accumulate passages as other people fill stamp and postcard albums. That is a deplorable practice; it is a sort of childishness, and risks becoming a mania. Order is a necessity, but it must serve us, not we it." (194)

-A. G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987.

I've had what seems to me to be a workable idea for a series of essays on Christianity and literature, and I'm going to be starting on a little research plan I've drawn up for myself. I'm hoping to keep up the variety on this site, but William Writes may take on the aspect of a niche blog for a few months. If this gets annoying to any readers, or seems like something that deserves its own blog, please speak up.

Anyway, I've been thinking about how I'm going to keep track of my notes, and I'm settling on that old favorite: notecards. But I've also wondered what the tech-savvy people do when they need to take notes. Is there software for this? Or do people still use their old notebooks?

Attracted and repulsed.

J.M. Coetzee on Australian poet Les Murray:

In the eyes of most people, higher education offers students a chance to improve themselves and perhaps move up the social ladder. This is what, back in 1957, Sydney University offered Les Murray, son of a struggling tenant farmer. The young man’s response was confused. He missed classes, failed examinations, dropped out to lead a vagrant life, yet finally returned to complete his degree. In Murray’s own account of that period of his life, he took only what he wanted from the university—the resources of its library—while resisting its more insidious sociopolitical project. But the very vehemence of Murray’s polemic against higher education—a vehemence in which there is more than a touch of hysteria—suggests a supplementary reading: that the young man was as much attracted as repulsed by the promise that submission to the rituals and mysteries of the academy would allow him to shed his origins and be reborn declassed.

[via Alan Jacobs]

A Feast for Creeps.

There was a big discussion over the weekend at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen about sexism in George R.R. Martin's popular A Song of Ice and Fire books, inspired by Sady Doyle's review, in which she justifiably concludes that "George R.R. Martin is creepy." I'm posting a version of what I said in that conversation because I had to think pretty hard about why I continue to read these books despite reservations about the content.

These books contain some really disturbing stuff, and it's important not to play that down. If Martin doesn’t win you over somewhere in the early part of A Game of Thrones, the rest of the series is going to be quite a slog. It’s really important in these discussions to distinguish between “if you’re disturbed, you’re reading it wrong” and “this stuff is disturbing, though I think there’s a point to it.”

The way I read these books, there are two reasons Martin writes creepy scenes. First, he’s trying to undermine (or maybe even “critique”) the conservative impulse to revisit feudal societies. He’s constructing an outsized version of medieval Europe with a deromanticized and Machiavellian patriarchal feudalism, and it should be clear to the reader that this is a bad system. In A Feast for Crows, Martin lets a character speak at length about the horrors that war inflicts on common soldiers; at this point in the book, we've seen that war is no picnic for the nobility, but it's hell for the troops. So a major project of the books is to flip the common tropes of fantasy literature. (As a side note: it shouldn't be taken for granted that these books give any kind of window into actual history, but that's a post for another time.) This take on Martin is, of course, nothing new. And I think this explains why he’s set up the large architecture of the novel in the way he has.

But it doesn't explain why he writes specific sections the way he does. Specifically, there's a ton of stuff that's way more intense than it needs to be: why the incest? Why the sexual abuse? Why the cannibalism? And why in such detail? I think the answer to all these questions is that Martin, as a storyteller, likes to try to get away with really dark stuff, and that's the second source of creepiness in the books. So in one instance there's a subtle implication that a man secretly kills and cooks one group of his enemies, and then proceeds to serve human meat pies to another group of enemies. If there's some kind of political-philosophical statement being made in this passage, I'm missing it. More obviously, Martin uses one subplot to give his readers an inside view of the Viking-like rape-and-pillage culture of the Iron Isles. Even if the point is to show that a culture based on rape and slaughter is not the best society to live in, I find these chapters to be incredibly unpleasant!

So, for those of us who like the books, I think it’s good to talk about what Martin is really aiming at, and to figure out where his critique falls short. But even if there’s some plausible liberal-humanist explanation of every single creepy incident in each one of the books, (a) people who find these incidents off-putting would not necessarily find them any less off-putting if they understood the purpose behind them, and (b) the very fact that bloggers are dispassionately parsing out the dynamics of consent and abuse in some of these hideous fictional situations might be off-putting in itself. Not everyone will agree or assume that these books are worth reading. That might actually be a good thing. There may yet be some decency left in this world.

On what grounds would I actually defend Martin’s writing, given how uncomfortable it makes me at times? Primarily, I enjoy the density and complexity of the narrative. In the best sections of the book, the drama comes from a clash of plausible competing interests. Clues to various mysteries are planted thousands of pages before the reveals. (Think LOST, but less ad hoc.) In short, I find the story compelling in all the ways a big novel should be compelling. Which makes me think that if I want more of that sort of thing I should finally get around to War and Peace.

Two things from our newspapers of record.

1. John Wilson, editor of Books and Culture, has an editorial in the Wall Street Journal on faith and science:

   What is at stake in these disputes is not a choice between following biblical authority on the one hand or science on the other, as the matter is often misleadingly framed. Rather, we see rival theological commitments, rival understandings of how to read Genesis.

   I think this puts it nicely, though Wilson goes on to understate the consequences of adhering to reading Genesis as a literal description of the origins of the world. Young Earth Creationists have to explain how the scientific community gets things so wrong, and so it seems rather common to consider the scientific establishment as mendacious, incompetent, or ideologically biased to a terrifying degree. If the scientists are so bad at geology, how could they do any better on climatology? So while Young Earth Creationism is not essentially a "disdain for science," such disdain tends to follow.
2. In the New York Times, an essay on David Foster Wallace's prose style, and those on the internet who learned all the wrong lessons from it:

   I suppose it made sense, when blogging was new, that there was some confusion about voice. Was a blog more like writing or more like speech? Soon it became a contrived and shambling hybrid of the two. The “sort ofs” and “reallys” and “ums” and “you knows” that we use in conversation were codified as the central connectors in the blogger lexicon. We weren’t just mad, we were sort of enraged; no one was merely confused, but kind of totally mystified.
   
   [...]
   
   How we arrived at the notion that the postmodern era is the first ever to confront the tension between sincerity and irony despite millennia of evidence to the contrary is no mystery: every generation believes its insights are unprecedented, its struggles uniquely formidable, its solutions the balm for all that ails the world. Why so many of our critics are still, after all these years, making their arguments in this inherently self-undermining voice — still trying to ward off every possible rejoinder and pre-emptively rebut every possible criticism by mixing a weird rhetorical stew of equivocation, pessimism and Elysian prophecy — is another question entirely.

   That's a stew I like making more than eating. This is worth thinking about.

A judgment I'll never be able to make for myself.

Ambitious writing in the eleventh century is nearly always obscure, full of heavy pedantries and strange words--the relics of the learning of a former age. Clarity was a quality achieved by the best writers of the eleventh century, but it was achieved with difficulty: we can appreciate the difficulties when we try to follow the arguments of so accomplished a writer as Berengar of Tours. He lacked the vocabulary for subtle argument and the writers who aimed at stirring the emotions lacked the art for doing so. Of course, limitations of language can themselves be a source of strength, and St. Anselm (alone among the writers of his century) was the master of a language equally capable of conveying profound and subtle argument as of expressing the outpouring of an intimate devotion. But his language could never form a model for others: it was a mirror of his own mind and sensibility, a finely polished language of carefully cultivated art. It was not a popular language.

-R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages. New York: Hutchinson's University Library, 1953. (215)

I look at my plans, and there's no place in them for learning to read eleventh-century Latin and making judgments about style. Of course, the road may swerve, and so forth.

I'll note that Southern's not the only one who likes Anselm's style.

What in water...?

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and donwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent overflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomatic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, iceflows: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the wandering moon.

Happy Bloomsday, everyone.

"(as our shadows still walk without us)"

From Shakespeare's Timon of Athens IV.iii.436-40:

The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears.

Professor Charles Kinbote's re-translation of the passage from a Zemblan edition:

The sun is a thief: she lures the sea
and robs it. The moon is a thief:
he steals his silvery light from the sun.
The sea is a thief. it dissolves the moon.

I'm very much enjoying Nabokov's Pale Fire on my second trip through. Lolita might be the more artful/significant work (who am I to say?), but Pale Fire hits the sweet spot between it and what I've read of Pnin.

Why aren't you reading Alan Jacobs yet?

Alan Jacobs announces that he will be leading a faculty seminar at Wheaton next fall called “Christianity and the Book: Histories and Futures.” If patterns hold, the discussion will be spilling over onto Jacobs's excellent blog, Text Patterns.

For now, though, that initial post looks like a fantastic starting point for anyone interested in the history of Christianity or the history of books.

Theological aesthetics: Lewis and Hart.

From the description of the eldils (basically angels) in C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength:

“In their eye s the normal [human] modes of being—engendering and birth and death and decay—which are to us the framework of thought, were no less wonderful than the countless other patterns of being which were continually present to their unsleeping minds. To those high creatures whose activity builds what we call Nature, nothing is ‘natural.’ From their station the essential arbitrariness (so to call it) of every actual creation is ceaselessly visible, for them there are no basic assumptions: all springs with the willful beauty of a jest or a tune from that miraculous moment of self-limitation wherein the Infinite, rejecting a myriad possibilities, throws out of Himself the positive and elected invention.”

-C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength. New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1965. (202)

Surely this passage came out of conversations with J.R.R. Tolkein, whose writings work out a theory and terminology for the aesthetics of sub-creation. I'm sure that someone out there has written about Lewis and Tolkein from the perspective of theological aesthetics after Hans Urs Von Balthasar, but I haven't yet found that work. There's clearly a sympathetic resonance between the passage above and this passage from David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite:

“It is in Bach's music, as nowhere else, that the potential boundlessness of thematic development becomes manifest: how a theme can unfold inexorably through difference, while remaining continuous in each moment of repetition, upon a potentially infinite surface of varied repetition. […] In Bach's music, though, motion is absolute, and all thematic content is submitted to the irreducible disseminations that fill it out: each note is an unforced, unnecessary, and yet wholly fitting supplement, even when the fittingness is deferred across massive dissonances by way of the most elaborate contrapuntal meditations.”

-David Bentley Hart. The Beauty of the Infinite. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman's, 2003. (283)

If anyone knows of an essay that compares Hart/Balthasar with Lewis/Tolkein, I'd love to read it.

New ignorance.

In The Narnian, Alan Jacobs repeatedly recommends English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama) as the best-written book by C.S. Lewis. Every other work, Jacobs says, could have used at least one more revision; English Literature in the Sixteenth Century was a scholarly work with an unusually long gestation. The introductory essay, “New Learning and New Ignorance,” is strong stuff; I recommend it to anyone who wants to see Lewis in full force. From page 26 of the 1954 edition:

“In the fourth chapter of Eothen Kinglake draws a contrast between a child reading Homer (in Pope's version) and a ‘learned commentator’. The child, he says, is ‘nearer by twenty centuries to the old Greeks’ because he is ‘not grubbing for beauties but pressing the siege’. In some ways this is a parallel to the difference between the medieval and the humanistic reader. The latter never really cares about the siege: he is too interested in literature, literature conceived almost exclusively as style, and style valued chiefly as a model for imitation.”

And, a little further, on page 27:

“Chapman's Homer might almost have been written to show that the real Homer was in that age impossible for us to assimilate. The great age of Greek influence is not the sixteenth century but the nineteenth. Shelley, Landor, Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Ruskin, and even Morris, were all, in their different ways, more receptive of the Greek spirit than any Elizabethan.”

The whole thing is like that: a whirl of names whose work you feel you should have read, a familiar perspective on imagination and beauty freshly applied, and an utterly lucid line of argument.

(By the way, Lewis's line on the humanists is pretty similar to James Franklin's in the “Renaissance Myth” essay I mentioned last month.)

Colombian aphorisms.

If internet self-publishing has degraded the essay by giving undisciplined writers, of whom I am the chief, an editor-free channel to the world, then it's good that they can't tarnish good aphorisms. There's not really any such thing as a bad aphorism; a failed aphorism is just a statement, which we judge to be true or false and go on our way.

The RSS feed system works pretty well for wisdom literature, at least judging by how I've enjoyed Don Colacho's Aphorisms, a site that posts English translations of Nicolás Gómez Dávila's work at four-hour intervals. Just from this weekend:

• #2,445: "Loyalty to a doctrine ends in adherence to the interpretation we give it.
  Only loyalty to a person frees us from all self-complacency."
• #2,435: "To scandalize anyone today, it suffices to suggest to him that he renounce something."
• #2,347: "History shows that man’s good ideas are accidental and his mistakes methodical."

Of course, it takes an extraordinary mind to generate a large set of such statements. Or, as Jaron Lanier appropriately expressed it, "you have to be someone before you can share yourself."

If the Renaissance is a myth…

Freddie DeBoer's The Name of the Rose reading group is going well, not least because the book turns out to be really good.

My guess is that most modern readers would think of this story as happening on the verge of the Renaissance, taking place in the final centuries before the light of culture breaks through. One of my favorite polemical essays would turn this myth on its head, though. James Franklin argues against the idea of Renaissance as high watermark:

[T]he "Renaissance" was a period when thought declined significantly, bringing to an end a period of advance in the late Middle Ages. … Now if there was a Dark Age, it might be argued, with some show of reason, that there must have been a renaissance to end it. This is perfectly correct. There was one, and it happened in the twelfth century.

It's surprising how many of the late Middle Age achievements Franklin mentions have already made their appearance in Eco's book — most obviously, the protagonist, William of Baskerville, carries reading glasses, which seems like an anachronism when it happens. At the same time, Franklin identifies an obsession with allegory as the principle intellectual vice of the stagnant period between 1350 and 1650, and Adso's rapt absorption in the carvings on the abbey church doorway is the best representation of the allegorical mindset I've come across.

But leaving intellectual historiography to the side, I still can't help reading as a story set in twilight rather than before dawn. The bulk of the narrative takes place in 1327; just over two decades later, in 1348, Europe was hit by The Black Death, one of the most devastating plagues in human history. (Presumably Adso is setting down the story in the years after the plague.) So whatever our judgments about the accomplishments of the Renaissance, it seems right to consider the abbey in The Name of the Rose as a tragic setting.

Agreeing with Steve Sailer.

So Freddie's online read-through of The Name of the Rose starts today. Since this week's dedicated to the first day in the narrative, I decided to go ahead and read the preface and prologue last night so that I'd be able to start with the body of the narrative on this morning's train ride.

Steve Sailer -- notorious for stances that his friends would describe as "non-PC," his enemies as "racist" -- left a comment on Freddie's blog, and it turns out that I can agree with this comment, and I can do so without reservation or qualification:

"The fictional preface is a pretty hilarious Nabokov/Borges parody."

True. Sample:

"If something new had not occurred, I would still be wondering where the story of Adso of Melk originated; but then, in 1970, in Buenos Aires, as I was browsing among the shelves of a little antiquarian bookseller on Corrientes, not far from the more illustrious Patio del Tango of that great street, I came upon the Castilian version of a little work by Milo Temesvar, On the Use of Mirrors in the Game of Chess."

-Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose. trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994. (3)