Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 19

pa pa pa PAAAAAAAAA pa

n+1 held a panel discussion at Fordham back in late October last year, a reprise of an earlier discussion of "What we wish we'd known."  Moderated by Keith Gessen.  Participants, HDW and J.D. Daniels.

(An edited transcript of the event is now available on the n+1 blog, here.)

One thing I will say is that if you ever have the chance to hear J.D. Daniels talk about anything you should go.  You live in Seattle?  He's giving a talk in the inconveniently located Portland?  Expedia is your friend. This will sound crazy only to those who have not heard J.D. Daniels. You may feel like an idiot when you book the flight; when the lights go down you'll be pitying all the friends who stayed sensibly in Seattle.  Click.  Walk out the door. 

Another thing I will say is that Keith Gessen is a saint.

In the discussion a few years back people had talked about what they wished they'd read. I thought I should draw up an annotated reading list, preferably as a hand-out. Halfway through the afternoon I was scrambling to finish my reading list when I got a call from Keith on my cellphone.  I mentioned that I was preparing notes. Keith said sternly that I must not talk from notes. I turned up, chastened, at Fordham. The three of us sat at a long table with microphones. Keith asked a question; I tackled it as best I could without my notes. J.D. Daniels began to talk compellingly, charismatically; it was immediately clear that this was a man who had no need of notes. It was also clear that he disagreed with the whole enterprise and had come only as a favor to Keith. Who was he to tell people what to read? Did he have regrets over books he might have discovered earlier and hadn't? No. (If missing out on books at a formative age had given me J.D. Daniels' gift for public speaking I would probably have no regrets either, not that this was the tenor of the argument.) He talked about Bill Evans and Miles Davies and Debussy; he quoted Dante. He explained his connection with n+1: he had read Mark Greif's piece on exercise in an early issue, which described the gym as the place we turn to now that we no longer work in factories. JDD thought: We? And wrote to Mark Greif. Who was a gentleman: he invited JDD to meet for a coffee. Keith did not so much moderate as offer support for  his claim to canonification.

I felt wrongfooted somehow.

I discover books by accident and think: This is brilliant! And the accident was the result of being in a particular place in a particular time - being in Oxford, working on a doctorate, happening to discover A C Danto's The Transfiguration of the Commonplace at the Philosophy Subfaculty Library in Merton Street.  (Surely I should not have needed to get a Senior Scholarship and do a doctorate to find the book, which is, after all in the public domain. Surely everyone should know about it!!!!)

Or I am lazy and don't urge books on people when I should. My ex-husband David Levene, now Professor of Classics at NYU, specializes in historiography.  At some point, looking through my books, he discovered a translation of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah.  He picked it up and was agog. So clearly this was very bad of me, not to have brought the book to his attention, when it was directly relevant to his research.

Or I am even lazier. I think that David, who is fluent in Hebrew, would love Arabic; I suspect that he is put off by the script, which to the untutored eye looks like a lot of squiggles.  For fifteen years or so I do nothing about this.  One day I agree to meet David for lunch at Covent Garden; I draw up a few sheets of exercises introducing 8 letters (n,t,th,b,y, the 5 that look like our cursive dotted i but with different numbers and placement of dots; alif, kaf and lam). He tears through the exercises in the 10 minutes before our food arrives; after the meal we go charging up Charing Cross Road in search of a grammar.  Later, he is able to clarify a point by consulting an Arabic translation of Theocritus.  The 15 years of sloth are a source of shame.

And also, on the other hand, I think of the things I would have missed if I had not known David: Dawkins' The Selfish Gene; Amartya Sen's Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation; Zaller's The Nature and Origin of Mass Opinion; Sergio Leone, Kurosawa, Mel Brooks, Dennis Potter, Twin Peaks; Wagner, Strauss (R), Schoenberg, Webern. Keres & Kotov's The Middle Game.  Bridge! (The multi-colored two diamond!!!!) Poker! Go! Statistics!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Surely these life-changing discoveries should not be confined to a social unit of two. A social unit that came into being only because both parties got Senior Scholarships at Brasenose College, Oxford. Given that Senior Scholarships are a scarce commodity, whereas the books, films, music, games, mathematics are in the public domain.

I never did turn my notes into a proper hand-out.  So I am not really in a position to ease my conscience. I append them on the off-chance that something may be useful to somebody.




OrlandoPatterson, Slavery and Social Death. Erving Goffman,Asylums. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.  Stigma.  Marcel Mauss,The Gift.  Polanyi, TheGreat TransformationYardley,Education of a Poker Player.  Omar Sharif, Mavie au bridge.  Michel Crozier,Le phénomène bureaucratique.  Seligman,Learned Helplessness.  Michael Lewis,Moneyball. Zaller, TheNature and Origin of Mass Opinion. John Hicks, AMarket Theory of MoneyEdward Tufte,Envisioning Information. The Visual Presentation of Quantitative Information.Visual Explanations. Beautiful Evidence. Bourdieu,Distinction; Homo AcademicusDawkins, TheSelfish GeneA.C. Danto, TheTransfiguration of the CommonplaceKahneman,Thinking, Fast and Slow.Wayne Booth:Rhetoric of Irony, Rhetoric of FictionAdorno, MinimamoraliaLaffont,Incentives (principal-agent problem)Tukey &Mosteller, Exploratory Data AnalysisKen Garland, MrBeck's Subway MapBarthes (inFrench): Mythologies; S/Z; Le mort de l'auteur; L'effet du reelPierre Moron,Le suicideGordon,Structures: Why Things Don't Fall DownGigerenzer,Reckoning with Risk; Empire of ChancePeterBernstein, Against the Gods (history of risk)Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation[wish hadexisted (blogs):MarginalRevolution; Language Log; Ezra Klein's Wonkbook.]
[read atuniversity, glad I did][Edward Wilson,To the Finland Station][JasperGriffin, Homer on Life and Death][E R Dodds, TheGreeks and the Irrational][Bernard Knox,The Heroic Temper][GeorgeForrest, Athenian Democracy][Ronald Syme,The Roman Revolution][L D Reynolds,Scribes & Scholars]
[wish I hadstudied properly rather than just read:Rawls, Theoryof JusticeKant]
Faulkner, As Ilay dyingMelville, Moby Dick
Homer, Iliad;Odyssey (in Greek)Plato,Symposium (in Greek: accusative infinitive construction to set narrative at adistance, within quotations)Thucydides,History of Peloponnesian War: esp. Melian Dialogue, Stasis at Corcyra (in Greekto see grammar and vocabulary mangled by political force)
Proust, A larecherche du temps perduBorges, Laloteria de BabylonCalvino, If ona winter's night a traveler; Invisible citiesRussell Hoban,Riddley WalkerPeter Ackroyd,HawksmoorMargaretKennedy, Troy ChimneysEvelyn Waugh,ScoopAusten,S&S; P&P (for the savagery)Sterne,Tristram ShandyDiderot,Jacques le fataliste et son maîtreQueneau, Zaziedans le métroStefan Zweig,SchachnovelleDeLillo WhiteNoise &cCormac McCarthyAll the Pretty Horses
Sergio Leone;Kurosawa; Mizoguchi; Mel Brooks (The Producers, first version); Sweet Smell ofSuccess.  Dennis Potter, Penniesfrom Heaven; Singing Detective. Yes, Minister; Yes, Prime Minister.  The Wire. 
Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, Blue & Brown Books
Steiner,Chemistry Maths BookKorner,Pleasures of CountingLang,Astrophysical Formulae
Paul Nation,Vocabulary Acquisition
Russell,History of Western Philosophy
Aristotle,Poetics; Rhetoric; Nicomachean Ethics
Chase &Phillips, A New Introduction to GreekLambdon, Introductionto Biblical HebrewCowan, Introductionto Modern Literary Arabic


Oxford:Possibility toattend all university lectures for £30 a term (now £300) without matriculation
Headhunting:select university / courses after research to find out who's interesting.
[Don Fowler]Nigel Nicolson(Reed)D S Levene(NYU)Denis FeeneyMalcolm Heath(Leeds)

Fundraising:volunteer org., grassroots org. [distribution as activism]

Games:ChessBridgePoker[wish I played:Go]
[important notonly to play but to read a variety of guides: impt to understanding, indifferent contexts, strength of position. That is, how a good playerunderstands the game.  Range ofpossibilities: games of full information v. partial information; games ofcooperation, shared information v. pure competition.]
[important notjust intellectually, conceptually; ways to extend circles of people you know;sometimes, win money]
Chainsawskills; lockpicking course; bicycle maintenance; wiring, carpentry, plumbing;forex.  Barista, waitress,short-order cook.  [portability]

Python, Perl, RubyUnixJava

Within any education category, richer people vote more Re...

Within any education category, richer people vote more Republican. In contrast, the pattern of education and voting is nonlinear. High school graduates are more Republican than non-HS grads, but after that, the groups with more education tend to vote more Democratic. At the very highest education level tabulated in the survey, voters with post-graduate degrees lean toward the Democrats. Except for the rich post-graduates; they are split 50-50 between the parties.

What does this say about America's elites? If you define elites as high-income non-Hispanic whites, the elites vote strongly Republican. If you define elites as college-educated high-income whites, they vote moderately Republican.

There is no plausible way based on these data in which elites can be considered a Democratic voting bloc. To create a group of strongly Democratic-leaning elite whites using these graphs, you would need to consider only postgraduates (no simple college grads included, even if they have achieved social and financial success), and you have to go down to the below-$75,000 level of family income, which hardly seems like the American elites to me.

Andrew Gelman, Statistical Modeling... http://andrewgelman.com/2012/03/voting-patterns-of-americas-whites-from-the-masses-to-the-elites/

hinc illae lacrimae

...the thing about Lightning Rods is that of all the books in the tourney this year, it is probably the one I would be least likely to recommend. I would have to know you really well before I would suggest that you would like this novel.

A month or so ago I was in a coffee shop before school with my five-year-old and a few mothers from the neighborhood who were also there with their kids. Someone asked me what I was reading and I said a book called Lightning Rods, and they asked what it was about and I opened my mouth to reply and I looked around at these three women, friends of mine, all of them, and I looked at their preschool kids, and then I looked at the moms again and I had a hell of a time even describing it.

Kevin Guillefoile at the Morning News Tournament of Books.

Quand j'entends Sarkozy qui fait des fautes d'accord du p...

Quand j'entends Sarkozy qui fait des fautes d'accord du participe passé, je me dis que, moi l'Algérien, fier de posséder le français, j'ai au fond plus de mérite et aussi plus de grammaire que lui.

Mohamed Badaoui, quoted in La Libération by Jean-Louis Le Touzet (behind paywall)

oops

Made a rare visit to the dashboard and discovered that 20 comments were awaiting moderation. 15 or so were perfectly legitimate comments - I have no idea why they aroused the suspicion of Blogger, which is normally good at filtering out spam and publishing the rest.  Some of these go back to mid-2011. So, er, if anyone posted a comment and wondered why it had not appeared it now has, though annoyingly too late to attract much in the way of response from other readers.

rerererereading

 As I've said, a journalist wrote to me back in November asking if I'd reread any books that mattered to me and asking various questions about the importance of rereading to writers.  I wrote an insanely long e-mail in reply which some readers have said they would like to see.  


I have doubts about this, which strike me more forcefully now that I have read Sheila Heti's piece for the Globe and Mail.  I find that the business connected with publishing a book makes it hard to do any serious writing, which means that I am increasingly cut off from the things I actually care about (one of which is, of course, reading); but in the meantime it is necessary to construct and deploy a social self as a matter of professionalism.  This somehow ends up being a tapdancer with a Gene Kelly grin.  (That's the way it feels, anyway.)  I don't know if Heti feels that way too; when she shows up for public engagements she somehow comes across as genuine, so then I feel there is something wrong with me for covering up alienation with a lot of flippant remarks. Still, I have written 5000 words of a story in the last day, so perhaps the thing that used to be there is coming back.


Maybe if I had taken more time I would have written less manically and at a more sensible length; I had the feeling that if a journalist has a deadline to meet it's unhelpful to spend too much time self-editing. That might not be true. Anyway, this is what I said at the time, with some afterthoughts:


Dear Mr. Bowman

Barbara sent me your e-mail and I instantly began thinking of books and writing them down, and when I got to the end I could not BELIEVE I had left off X Y and Z and put them in, and then remembered U, V and W-- and in the end had a list of appalling length which must be far more than what you need.  As well as so many thoughts on the subject of rereading that these too had to be excessive.  So I am sending what I have in the hope that you can discard whatever you can't use.

General thoughts:

Rereading is important for writers because people in the publishing industry constantly give advice couched in terms of helping the reader.   If you are not only a reader, or even a rereader, but a rerererererererererereader, you know this is complete bollocks. "The" reader does not exist.  The 9-year-old who read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe 50 times in a year is genetically identical to the 54-year-old who has read Invisible Cities more times than she can count (if certainly not 50).  The 16-year-old who read Pride and Prejudice as historical romance (I know Austen was forbidden, but really) is genetically identical to the 54-year-old who reads it for its social analysis, its savagery.  (The 16-year-old would have had no interest in Goffman or Bourdieu; the 54-year-old sees Austen as their intellectual cousin.)  As a rereader you can't be an amnesiac: you KNOW there were books you loved and outgrew, books you hated first time, admired 20 years later.

There are probably a hundred or so books I've read two or even three times - wonder what to read, think Oh, I'll read Bleak House again.  The rereadings that stay in the mind are books reread addictively - it's not just a question of countable number of times, they are books I would always want to have around while prey to the addiction, books in comparison with which other books were pale, stale, uninteresting. 

This is crucial for a writer: you discriminate between the real thing and the also-rans, the would-be imitations. And it seems rereading is also one way to self-knowledge.  Sometimes you outgrow an addiction; you observe the passions of an earlier self (Nancy Drew. . .).  But sometimes the pleasure remains unchanged (Alice in Wonderland, say).  Sometimes you keep going back to a book because its argument is complex and you don't grasp it fully the first or even second time (for me John Hicks' Market Theory of Money and Zaller's Nature and Origin of Public Opinion would be examples).  And sometimes you keep going back because a book has far-reaching implications, and as you see it leading to more and more exciting possibilities you need to refer to the book again and again (I have been going back to Edward Tufte's books on information design for the last 15 years.)

Books sometimes feel as though reread when they're not, because present at so many other readings: Pound gave me the impetus to read follow work I loved in translation in the original language, Proust gave me a way understanding worldliness, and they seem to be with me whatever book happens to be in my hand.

Appallingly long list, more or less chronologically (the most addictive rereading in childhood and adolescence):

By proxy, age 4, The Little Engine That Could, 400 times?  Winnie the Pooh, countless times. (Loved the Englishness of it.)

Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, first time age 8, probably 20 times since (I know "The White Knight's Tale," "Jabberwocky," "The Walrus and the Carpenter" by heart).  Loved the device of stepping into another world; the logical madness.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (C S Lewis) and Ajax Golden Dog of the Australian Bush (Mary Louise Patchett): 50 times, in alternation, at the age of 10.  [Did not know of the other books in the Narnia series for 2 years; never owned the others, so read the series fewer times than I otherwise would have.]  In different ways, children leading their own lives apart from the alien world of grown-ups.

The Man in the Brown Suit: Agatha Christie (1st at age 13, then innumerable times)   A heroine with a happy beginning (Mamma died when she was a baby, Papa dies of pneumonia by the end of Ch. 1: "I had always longed for adventure.  My life had such a dreadful sameness, you see." A witty villain, Sir Eustace Pedler, combination of Mr Fairlie and Count Fosco in Collins' Woman in White (for about a year I wrote my diary in the manner of Sir Eustace).  Clever use of different sorts of documents to carry forward narrative. 

Mary Stewart's non-Arthurian "romantic thrillers,"  countless times between ages 12 and 16.  Loathed any kind of straight romantic fiction, in these the appeal (slightly odd now) was a thriller set in or in the aftermath of totalitarian or other atrocity (the Holocaust, say, or time of the Greek colonels), with a love interest. 

P G Wodehouse, Leave it to Psmith!!!! The name Psmith is a comic invention of genius, perfect for the character.  The absurdly contrived plot was one of PGW's best (and he was a master of such things); in moments of gloom I think back to Psmith, masquerading as a sensitive poet, inspecting the line 'across the pale parabola of joy' and hoping he will not be asked to explain it.  How many times have I read it? 10? 15? 20? Surely not more than 20? But if not only because I devoured as many other PGWs as I could get my hand on, because otherwise even Psmith might grow stale.

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, first at 14, then maybe once a month for 2 years? Is that possible? Loved premise of walking out the door for adventure; loved the runes and Elvish script and the philological appendices, was maddened because one could not learn the whole language. Led me indirectly to Greek; realized at some point that this offered the charms of JRRT's appendices, and a literature not written singlehandedly by J R R Tolkien.

The Three Musketeers and all sequels, maybe 5 times? Count of Monte Cristo, 3, 4? [Began reading Musketeers in French the second time around, so all this voracious reading of Dumas was probably what made me a fluent reader of French, able to tackle Proust independently...]  Implausible, convoluted plots; excellent villains; oaths: Parbleu! Mordieu!

Evelyn Waugh, Scoop. Read this first for a course on the British novel at age 18, have probably read it 5 or 6 times since, and it is always a joy.  Source of the catchphrase "Up to a point, Lord Copper." The wit, the savagery one loves in British writers.

Diminishing returns: Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim.  Read this at the same time as Scoop and thought it very funny.  Went back to it 5 or 6 years later, thought it much less funny than remembered.  5 or 6 years later returned, idiotically, thinking I might have misremembered the second time, found it virtually unreadable.  KA too invested in his character (unlike the cool distance of Waugh); too self-righteous.

Much of Henry James 2 or 3 times in my twenties.  Always a world of sinister misunderstandings.

Moby-Dick: read this obstinately at 16 (having been told I was too young), found it tedious beyond belief, reread at 33 and saw that it was a work of a genius, with a glorious use of language. 

Tristram Shandy:  Insane contortions of narrative, language. First time, could not believe anything so brilliant existed in the world.  With time one forgets, goes back, is again transfixed.

Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler: was dazzled when I read this in 1980, to the point of buying the Italian edition at Blackwell's; then bewildered, rereading in 1983, to find a slightly nauseating archness, not to say downright cuteness.  I still admire it and have reread it a couple of times since, but have to look past the cuteness.  I was also dazzled by Invisible Cities, which I also have in Italian, and this is better every time. I open it and read a chapter and then another chapter probably once a week.  The inventiveness, the perversity of the imaginary cities; the ferocious oulipian beauty of its structure.

Homer, Iliad and Odyssey, probably 3 times in Greek, keep wanting to read them again and finding work gets in the way.

Stefan Zweig's Schachnovelle (Game of Kings) - Man taken prisoner by Nazis, kept in solitary confinement to crack him and extract information, he steals a chess book from the pocket of a coat, plays chess obsessively with himself, goes mad, is released, is lured into one last game . . . I loved the madness of the book, the obsessiveness, the way the man, having played "one" last game, is offered another and says Selbstverständlich ("Obviously" - but it's so much better in German).

*Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker: Neglected equal of The Waste Land.  I love this for the extraordinary invented language, the appropriation of technical terms, meaning lost, into explanatory myths; with most novels you can "see how it's done," but here I don't. Have read it three or four times, and admire it more fervently every time.

Non-fiction.

Plato's Symposium: read first at 19, many times since. I love this for its mannerism, the embedding of a narrative within a narrative within a narrative, marked throughout by the accusative and infinitive construction with which Greek marks indirect discourse. Also for the nastiness of Socrates to Alcibiades. Also for the way the characters, setting out philosophical positions, are more real than "psychologically realistic" characters.

Aristotle: Poetics, Nicomachean Ethics: we are what we repeatedly do - relevance of this to moral action.  [And, of course, to rereading . . .]

*AC Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: Read first when I was 24, many, many times since. Danto asks how physically indistinguishable objects can be different works of art, or one a work of art one not, and elucidates an immense range of aesthetic phenomena.  Central to the way I think about fiction.

*Erving Goffman: Asylums, Stigma, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Things went badly wrong when my first novel was published, EG has a way of looking at the human in the social machine that was a comfort. 

Barthes: S/Z, Essais critiques, Mythologies, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes: Barthes has a way of looking at himself looking at the world that is never infatuated, never narcissistic; he is in love with ideas. One sees why Bourdieu was maddened, but that is the very thing that draws one back.

Bourdieu, Distinction; Homo Academicus; more observation of the human in the machine.

*Renaud Camus, Tricks: Shandean account of a series of one-night stands in pre-AIDS Paris, a tour de force.

*Edward Tufte: Envisioning Information, The Visual Presentation of Quantitative Information - attention to the perspicuous presentation of data is a form of care for truth, a moral quality inseparable from intellectual rigor; have read these many, many times in the last 15 years, they transform what I think can be done with fiction.

[I have put stars by the books too few people know; can't imagine life without them. If some obvious Great Books are missing it's probably because they are generally known anyway.]

Again, I'm sorry this is so long.

with best wishes,
Helen DeWitt


2


That is a lovely thought.  (I am dismayed to see that in my impetuosity I left off Waugh's Handful of Dust (!), Queneau's Zazie dans le métro (tempted to say that if one reads only one book in French, this should be the book), Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot, and Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but OK OK OK.)

Do you know this great quote?

"My dear Lady Kroessig, I have only read one book in my life, and that is White Fang. It's so frightfully good I've never bothered to read another."  (Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love - p. 80 in Vintage edition)

[have not been able to extract the quote in its context from Search Inside This Book, but the character is based on Mitford's father, who claimed to have read White Fang and never read another book for fear of disappointment.  Perhaps it might come in handy for your piece.]

3

[to Barbara Epler]

How lovely!

Remembered after the fact that I had forgotten to mention A Handful of Dust, Zazie dans métro, Jacques le fataliste et son maître, Flaubert's Parrot and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which is shocking but probably a good thing.

Have just been reading Helen Vendler's review in the NYRB of a new Anthology of Poetry.  She talks of major 20th-century poets, gives a list and adds in parentheses that some would include Pound.  I ask myself whether anyone who actually cares about poetry would not. Infuriating.

more bookses, precioussss

Back in November a journalist wrote asking if there were any books I had reread, why rereading might matter to a writer, a few other questions.  I spent about 8 hours, I seem to remember, writing an insanely long e-mail.  Of this, two points made it into the piece: the fact that I had reread Nancy Drew as a child; an amusing quotation from Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love.  I was a bit demoralized; what I had been trying to show was the way that the books one reread obsessively at a particular time marked different stages of the self - some one could go back to (Alice in Wonderland), others not (not, at least, without recognizing that the self who had loved them no longer existed). 

I thought this mattered for writers because agents and editors are always offering comments with a view to "the reader" - "the" reader does not exist. The 9-year-old who discovered The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is genetically identical to the 54-year-old who cannot travel without Calvino's Invisible Cities and the OCT of the Iliad; if these are not the same reader -- if between them lie many, many obsessives to whom the current occupant of the body can never return -- the project of improving a book with a view to "the" reader is obviously a non-starter.

I recently got an e-mail from Sheila Heti asking about books I had read as a young reader that one might recommend as an alternative to YA.  Her piece is now available at the Globe and Mail.  She has said much better the things I was trying to say to David Bowman about the growth of a reader.  (Not to be too hard on myself, I assume she did not write the piece in an 8-hour blitz.  I thought a quick reply would be helpful to a journalist with a deadline.)  The whole thing here.

Richard Feynman and the semi-colon?

The novelist's corrections appear to be more literary than scientific. In addition to suggested some rephrasing, Mr. Krauss, said, Mr. McCarthy "made me promise he could excise all exclamation points and semicolons, both of which he said have no place in literature." (A quick digital search through Mr. McCarthy's "Border Trilogy" and several other novels finds no examples of the offending punctuation.)

Cormac McCarthy has copyedited a new biography of Richard Feynman, Lawrence M. Krauss's Quantum Man.  HT Paper Cuts.

the writer's life

...Each stage is easy enough, but it is a combination of all the parts that create the natural-looking, dwarfed, containerized tree in an artificial environment.

Yoshimura & Halford, Japanese Art of Miniature Trees and Landscapes

Consider the humble punch card. Punch cards had been used...

Consider the humble punch card. Punch cards had been used in France to control textile looms since the early 1700s; the method was perfected by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801 with his Jacquard loom.
     Flash forward to the year 1890, when a man named Herman Hollerith invented a punch card and tabulating machines for that year's United States Census. His census project was so successful that Mr. Hollerith left the government and started The Tabulating Machine Company in 1896. After a series of mergers and name changes, this company became IBM. You may have heard of it.
     Up to the 1970s, the "IBM card" and related machinery was everywhere. The most common card was the IBM 5081, and that part number became the most common term for it -- even across vendors! The punch card was data processing back then.
     The physical characteristics of the card determined how we stored and processed data for decades afterwards. The card was the size of an 1887 United States dollar bill (3.25 inches by 7.375 inches). The reason for that size was simple: when Hollerith worked on the Census, he could get drawers to store the decks of cards from the Department of the Treasury across the street.

Joe Celko, Thinking in Sets: Auxiliary, Temporal, and Virtual Tables in SQL