LH fave Ben Yagoda has posted an expanded version of a piece he published last week in the Forward, and it provides a convincing answer to a frequently asked question. He starts with a joke his mother liked to tell, the one about the kid whose mother calls him “bubele” so constantly that when she asked him what he learned on his first day in school, he says “I learned my name was Irving.” He continues:

Years ago, I reviewed Margaret Drabble’s novel The Ice Age, which begins with an epigraph from a William Wordsworth poem, “London 1802”: “Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour.” I opened the review by quoting the line and saying it was “not, as you might expect, the plaint of a Miami Beach widow.”

The humor in both cases, such as it was, rested on “Irving” and “Milton” being stereotypical American Jewish names. The stereotype is accurate. It is easy to think of examples (Irving Berlin, Irving “Swifty” Lazar; Milton Berle, Milton Friedman), and there’s also data to back it up. In a 2016 MIT study, researchers ingeniously culled data from Jewish U.S. soldiers in World War II (median birth date: 1917) and found that Irving was the single most common given name; Milton was 13th. Those scholars, and others, have briefly commented on the popularity of those two names and some others that made the top-thirty list for Jewish G.I.s: Sidney, Morris, Stanley, Murray, and Seymour.

But the comments have missed an important point about the phenomenon, which I call “My name is Irving” (MNII). It even slipped by the late Harvard sociologist Stanley (emphasis added) Lieberson, who wrote frequently and perceptively about the factors that go into parents’ naming decisions. In his 2000 book A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change, Lieberson mentioned his own first name, plus Irving and Seymour, and described them as attractive to Jewish parents because they were “names that [were]… popular with fellow Americans.”

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Joel is still posting excerpts from Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (see this LH post), and in RLS First Tries Writing Fiction I was struck by this tidbit:

The term “short story” seems to have been used for the first time in 1884 by the American critic Brander Matthews, to describe a distinct kind of condensed and focused narrative, as opposed to a tale that merely happens to be short.

Naturally, I wanted to find out more. Sure enough, Wikipedia says:

In 1884, Brander Matthews, the first American professor of dramatic literature, published The Philosophy of the Short-Story. During that same year, Matthews was the first one to name the emerging genre “short story”.

Which is referenced to the Britannica article “Brander Matthews | American writer,” but that doesn’t mention either the book or his alleged invention of the term. So I turned to the OED, whose entry was revised just this year:

A prose work of fiction, typically able to be read in a single sitting, and (in later use) frequently conceived as a means of exploring a single incident or sequence and evoking a particular emotional response in the reader; (with the) this as a literary genre. Cf. novella n., novelette n. 1.
The proliferation of literary magazines and periodicals in the first half of the 19th cent. afforded more opportunities for self-contained, relatively short works of fiction to be published. In the Anglophone literary tradition, the artistic possibilities of this form of writing were explored and discussed by a number of writers in the mid 19th cent. (including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe), leading to its recognition as a distinct genre by the late 19th cent. Cf. Compounds C.1, Compounds C.2 for a reflection of these developments.

1822 The author of these ‘Lights and Shadows’..has published a volume of short stories, chiefly of a rural kind.
Scots Magazine July 59/2

1843 If I were writing a novel, this would be thought a great fault, but as it is only a short story, perhaps I shall be forgiven.
Ladies’ Cabinet August 115

1877 His various books have been eminently readable, in the highest sense of the adjective, and some of his short stories have been almost without a flaw in their glittering beauty.
Independent 17 May 9/2

1896 The novelist who works on a large scale..is seldom master of the art of the short story.
Publishers’ Circular 25 April 447/3

1923 Mr H. G. Wells’s definition of the short story as a fiction that can be read in a quarter of an hour.
J. M. Murry, Pencillings 82
[…]

You will notice there’s no mention of Brander Matthews, and I’m guessing his role has been exaggerated. But the question of how to tell a mere “prose work of fiction, typically able to be read in a single sitting” from the putatively more advanced version “exploring a single incident or sequence and evoking a particular emotional response in the reader” is a nice one, and I’m not sure how one could be sure which one the citations from 1822 to 1877 were using. For that matter, I’m not sure whether I myself could tell one from the other. But then I’m not a professor or a literary critic, just a humble blogger.

It’s taken me over a month — twice as long as it should have — to finish Mikhail Shishkin’s Письмовник, literally “Letter-Writing Manual” but translated by Andrew Bromfield as The Light and the Dark. It’s the most recent of his four novels, all of which I’ve now read (LH: 1, 2, 3), and much as it pains me to say it, I hope he doesn’t write any more of them. He’s probably come to the same conclusion, since it’s been fifteen years since this came out; the fact is that he’s a good writer but a bad novelist, and he’s surely clever enough to have realized it.

Why, you ask, did I plow through all 376 pages if it wasn’t working for me? Two reasons: in the first place, I figured I might as well have read all his novels so I could talk knowledgeably and fairly about them and him, and in the second, I’d already bailed out of several novels and was starting to feel like a slacker, so I called on my inner Stakhanovite and got the job done. (Also, I was curious about how he’d end it.) The basics are soon told: it’s an epistolary novel alternating between letters by Alexandra (“Sashenka” or “Sasha”) and those by Vladimir (“Volodenka” or “Volodya”), who may or may not be writing to each other. They are love letters (often containing clichéd and increasingly embarrassing avowals of over-the-top emotion) but are stuffed with details of daily life and of early memories, both usually grim. If you want more (and aren’t worried about spoilers), there’s Mia Couto at The Modern Novel (cautiously approving), Phoebe Taplin at the Guardian (a rave: “The breathlessness of Maidenhair becomes, in The Light and the Dark, a more measured brilliance”), and Carla Baricz at Words Without Borders (an even more enthusiastic rave). I’ll quote the end of the Baricz review to give you an idea:

Both of Shishkin’s books, like his other works, return obsessively, with tenderness and with great brutality, to the question of whether individual moments of existence add up to more than the sum of minutes we are given to live, and whether and how they may be salvaged through language. Shishkin’s incandescent Russian undertakes this redemptive project, rendering translation a Sisyphean task. One cannot translate Shishkin, in fact; one can only attempt to find an adequate equivalent in the target language. Andrew Bromfield works very hard to do so with The Light and the Dark, and it pays off. In English, his Shishkin becomes, to quote Shakespeare’s Ariel, “something rich and strange.”

The Light and the Dark is a sentimental book, but only because it takes as its subject matter human love, in all of its infinite varieties and with all of its bitter complications—its indefinite hopes, its moments of transcendence and grotesqueness. Which is to say, as Volodya does, that this narrative is a story about death. Death, however, is never the end of the story. In language, we are always in the eternal present, so that, in one of his last missives, Volodya can whisper: “After all, I’m alive, Sasha.” Death belongs to time, and time wavers in this remarkable narrative and finally folds in on itself: “They write from Gaul that in the evening, in the dense rays of the sunset, a fine skin grows on the cobblestones of the street. They write from Jerusalem. [. . .] As the years go by the past does not recede but moves closer.” Of course, language cannot make up for loss: “I want everything alive, here and now. You, your warmth, your voice, your body, your smell,” Volodya cries. But Shishkin holds to the idea that, despite what mortality may take from us, language can nevertheless redeem the ephemeral moment, capturing it and returning us to its present. In letters, he seems to say, we are always the people we were when we wrote them—we are always young, we are always in love, we are always reaching across the dark, like “flies in amber.” The sheer beauty and power of his prose makes us believe that, indeed, as he writes, “it’s going to be the word in the beginning again.”

The thing is that all of that is Literature 101: yes, life is suffering, we’re all going to die, and love and language are important counterweights to the bad stuff. This is what Shishkin has been saying his entire career, and it’s wasted effort, because the only point to writing is to (as my man Ezra said) make it new, and he doesn’t do that, he just retails the same old bromides. His novels are full of little slices of life that should be affecting but aren’t because they’re just narrated flatly rather than seen in their individuality, and because they don’t happen to people but to cardboard characters. See the end of this post for a more extended riff on that subject; I’ll just add that if you value ideas over people you should write essays rather than novels, and Shishkin does that well. Philosopher, stick to thy lasting values and leave messy humanity to people like Dostoevsky!

Exploring Ephemera is “The official blog from Ephemera Society”; from the About page:

Founded in 1975 by the designer, photographer and writer Maurice Rickards (1919-1998), the Ephemera Society champions the very special contribution made by ephemera to an understanding of our past. Dedicated to the collection, conservation, study and educational use of ephemera, the society’s fairs, journal, blogs and website provide opportunities for collectors and researchers to share their expertise and enthusiasm. […]

Our Pepys logo pays tribute to the celebrated diarist, Samuel Pepys (1633-1703). Probably the first ‘general ephemerist’, Pepys included in his collection trade cards, board games, labels, ballads and other street literature. The Society’s Pepys medal, for excellence in ephemera studies, has been awarded to 16 recipients.

Just scroll down the main page and you’ll see all sorts of intriguing posts, like “Undies Without Coupons” (“Who would have thought that a wartime parachute could find a second life as nightwear?”); there are more at the MeFi post where I got the link.

And if you don’t care about ephemera, try John R. Gallagher’s The Curious Question of AI-written Lists: Or, LLMs are Genre Machines; it’s full of useful observations, like:

A good way to think about the output of LLMs is not an instance. It’s not actually a concrete piece of writing. The sentences aren’t sentences. This is a fundamental misinterpretation of what LLMs are doing. LLMs, as genre machines, produce the most abstracted patterns of genre signals possible. Then they write out that abstraction as a set of sentences. That abstraction, when you just glance at it, when you just skim it, feels fine. But when you stare at it with intent, when you close read it, you realize there is nothing there but signals that require interpretation.

Thanks, Leslie!

We occasionally discuss Biblical cruxes (e.g., Daughter of Greed), and there’s a good one at Poemas del río Wang; the post begins:

I introduced the Jewish epilogue of the post on Saint Martin and his geese with this image, which, with its depiction of a goose-like bird and a signature unmistakably Jewish, proved perfect to illustrate the peculiar story of the Jews who delivered roast geese to the Habsburg emperor on Saint Martin’s Day.

But what exactly is this bird with that enormous egg?

The inscription only reads: זה עוף שקורין אותו בר יוכני zeh ʿof she-qorin oto Bar Yochnei, that is, “This is the bird called Bar Yochnei.”

All that remains is to figure out which bird is called Bar Yochnei.

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Joel at Far Outliers is reading (and sharing excerpts from) Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch, and this post is obvious LH material:

Louis picked up much of his Lallans from a shepherd named John Todd, known as “Lang John” for his height, with whom he would tramp for hours in the hills while the sheep were grazing. “My friend the shepherd,” he said later, “speaks broad Scotch of the broadest, and often enough employs words that I do not understand myself.” Louis recalled Todd in an essay entitled “Pastoral”: “He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden, loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like a picture than a face.”

But it was Todd’s eloquence that captivated Louis. “He spoke in the richest dialect of Scotch I ever heard, and this vocabulary he would handle like a master. I might count him with the best talkers, only that talking Scotch and talking English seem incomparable acts. He touched on nothing, at least, but he adorned it; when he narrated, the scene was before you.” Many of Louis’s original readers would have recognized a famous phrase that Samuel Johnson composed in Latin for his friend Oliver Goldsmith, Nihil tetegit quod non ornavit: “He touched nothing that he did not adorn.” The allusion is a beautiful tribute to the old shepherd, ranking his skill in language on a level with a writer of great distinction.

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I was reading Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker essay on child stars (archived) when I got to this passage:

The astonishing young actor known as Master Betty was the prototype of the species. An Irish boy with a stage father, Betty became a sensation in Belfast, at the start of the century, by playing adult roles, then conquered London, where he starred in “Hamlet”—the ironies of the “Players” scene must have been thick in the air—and “Richard III.” A genuine wonder, he was almost certainly one of Charles Dickens’s models for the “Infant Phenomenon” in the Crummles troupe of “Nicholas Nickleby.”

Betty’s story, remarkable as it is, has been told only once, by the acidly entertaining English historian Giles Playfair. Writing in the sixties, Playfair compared Betty to the newly minted Beatlemania, convinced that the new stars would fade as completely as the old. Yet Bettymania was the real thing. “He and Buonaparte now divide the world,” the artist James Northcote wrote to a friend after Betty’s London début. In Stockport, church bells rang to celebrate an extra performance; in Sheffield, “theatrical coaches” were dispatched from the Doncaster races to carry six eager passengers to see him. In Liverpool, the rush for seats was so great that, Playfair recounts, “hats, wigs, boots, and tippers flew about in all directions.”

I stopped reading right there, wondering what the hell “tippers” might be. I asked my wife, but she didn’t know. I googled around and got nothing useful. Finally I decided to find the original of the quote; it wasn’t easy, because it had been truncated without notice (shame!), but here it is, from Playfair’s The Prodigy: A Study of the Strange Life of Master Betty: “hats, wigs, boots, muffs, spencers and tippets, flew about in all directions.” Tippets! That word I was familiar with; a tippet is “A shoulder covering, typically the fur of a fox, with long ends that dangle in front,” and the word derives from Latin tapete ‘cloth (decorative, for use as carpet, wall hangings etc.).’ [Or perhaps not; see ktschwarz’s comment below.] So now you know, and we can join in lamenting the editing failure at the fabled magazine.

Some wonderful language in Peter Linebaugh’s CounterPunch review of Common People:

Common people used to be people of the commons. Leah Gordon & Stephen Ellcock with additional writing by Annabel Edwards, Common People: A Folk History of Land Rights, Enclosure and Resistance (Watkins: London 2025) explain this in such a lovely book. It brings together word and picture. Of the 240 pages there is scarcely an image-less page and no image without good speech quoted along with. I will say something about each but first overall on this the 500th anniversary of the German Peasants’ Revolt the book is introduced by images of Albrecht Dürer’s “Monument to the Vanquished Peasants.” […]

After this introduction we plunge right in to history and its dates, eight pages of clear timeline of enclosures and resistance. Here are the facts of the English class war between the Haves and the Have Nots. These facts form what E.P. Thompson would call “idioms” or “peculiarities of the English.” I looked up the word “idiom” in Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage and learned that it comes from a Greek word closely translated as “a manifestation of the peculiar” and Fowler explained that in the realm of speech this might refer to what is peculiar to the language of a people, the dialect of a district, or the vocabulary of a technique. The idiomatic exists alongside, though not against, abstract grammar. So it is with commoners and their powers of pasturage, estovers, turbary, pannage, piscary: all are idiomatic, that is, peculiar to language, district, and profession. Some might mistake the idiomatic with the incidental or trivial.

Look at the pictures of Crow Scaring, another of Twig Gathering, or Gleaners, or Leech Finders, or Acorn Knockers. We are invited to remember the world where Adam delved and Eve span. It is through them that we begin to find uncanny, magical, and spiritual relations. […]

The chapter on ‘Rural Rebels and Traditions’ begins with ten well-chosen illustrations with an emphasis on disguise, masking, cross-dressing, black face, fools, jesters, and mummers, and then a further two dozen photos and art of the resistance embedded in the deep folk history of opposition – the hobby horse, the straw bear, the sweep, Morris dancer, Jack-in-the-Green, oak apple day, the green man, mari lwyd, hoodening, the burryman. Like the Flora Britannica wonderfully described in Richard Mabey’s book of the same title, these popular forms are particular to place and peculiar to community life in the commons, “the granular minutiae of quotidian peasant activities.”

I have no nostalgia for the Old Ways and the life of the doughty peasantry, but I love granular minutiae and forgotten words. Thanks, Trevor!
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Here’s the start of the first chapter in How Literatures Begin (see this post), “Chinese,” by Martin Kern:

To think about the beginning of Chinese literature raises a simple question: which beginning? The one in high antiquity? The one around 200 BCE, following the initial formation of the empire, when China’s “first poet” Qu Yuan (ca. 340–278 BCE) came into view as the model that has since been embraced by public intellectuals and literati for more than two millennia? The medieval period, from, roughly, the third through the ninth century, that gave us “classical Chinese poetry”? The early twentieth century with its conspicuous break with tradition and the promotion of modern, vernacular literature in response to both the collapse of the empire and the full experience of foreign—Japanese and “Western”—literature? Sometime in between, when particular genres came to flourish, such as Chinese theater and opera under Mongol rule (1279–1368) or the Chinese novel soon thereafter? All these are legitimate choices, some perhaps slightly more so than others. They can be based on language, literary forms, political institutions, exposure to the world beyond China, the concept of modernity, and other factors. What follows is an essay on antiquity: the time that is at once discontinuous with all later periods and yet its constant point of reference.

Mythologies of Writing and Orality

For most ancient traditions, the modern notion of “literature” does not map well onto the nature, purposes, functions, aesthetics, and social practices involved in the creation and exchange of texts. In pre-imperial China, the term wen originated as broadly denoting “cultural patterns,” including those of textile ornament, musical melodies, the various formal aspects of ritual performances or any other aesthetic forms; it also was often used to refer to ancestors as “cultured” or “accomplished.” It was only over the course of the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) that the idea of “literature”—at that point just one of the many forms of aesthetic expression—was gradually privileged above all others to the extent that wen, together with its extension wenzhang (patterned brilliance), came to refer primarily to the well-developed written text. In other words, there was no early Chinese term for “literature” until wen, perhaps some fifteen centuries after its first appearance, began to be used primarily in that sense.

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A new Digital Scholarship in the Humanities article by Eetu Mäkelä, James Misson, Devani Singh, and Mikko Tolone (open access) examines Early English Books Online (EEBO):

Abstract

Digital archives that cover extended historical periods can create a misleading impression of comprehensiveness while in truth providing access to only a part of what survives. While completeness may be a tall order, researchers at least require that digital archives be representative, that is, have the same distribution of items as whatever they are used as proxies for. If even this representativeness does not hold, any conclusions we draw from the archives may be biased. In this article, we analyse in depth an interlinked set of archives which are widely used but which have also had their comprehensiveness questioned: the images of Early English Books Online (EEBO), and the texts of its hand-transcribed subset, EEBO-TCP. Together, they represent the most comprehensive digital archives of printed early modern British documents. Applying statistical analysis, we compare the contents of these archives to the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), a comprehensive record of surviving books and pamphlets in major libraries. Specifically, we demonstrate the relative coverage of EEBO and EEBO-TCP along six key dimensions—publication types (i.e. books/pamphlets), temporal coverage, geographic location, language, topics, and authors—and discuss the implications of the imbalances identified using research examples from historical linguistics and book history. Our study finds EEBO to be surprisingly comprehensive in its coverage and finds EEBO-TCP—while not comprehensive—to be still broadly representative of what it models. However, both of these findings come with important caveats, which highlight the care with which researchers should approach all digital archives.

1. Introduction

The purpose of this article is 2-fold. First, we aim to show, with major datasets often used for digital scholarship, that the collection history and composition of datasets matter, and cannot be ignored when doing research without jeopardizing the validity of results. Second, by demonstrating this principle in a descriptive manner across various dimensions of interest (including temporal, geographical, and linguistic coverage), we also wish to offer a solution: a series of practical guides for users of these datasets, with which they can make informed decisions about which imbalances they need to account for, and how. While this paper’s analyses of composition and its consequences will benefit users of the datasets of Early English Books Online (EEBO n.d.) and EEBO-TCP (n.d.) specifically, our guides offer a template which is readily usable for other collections, as evidenced by our sister publication on Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Tolonen, Mäkelä, and Lahti 2022).

It looks like a valuable read for anyone who uses those archives. Thanks, Leslie!