I wrote about the links between smell and memory for the April issue of the APS Observer, the magazine of the Association for Psychology Science. Now, before you go read it, let me warn you: the formatting of the page is kind of weird, so when it refers you to a sidebar in the second paragraph, it’s actually talking about the two slightly offset paragraphs at the bottom of the text, about Proust and the madeleine. If you don’t know about Proust and the madeleine, I recommend reading that before you read the rest of the story, “Fragrant Flashbacks.”

Fun fact: Multiple sources mentioned Proust. When you’re talking about smell and memory, that’s pretty much the go-to cultural reference. Although I also really like the scene in Ratatouille when the cranky old food critic eats a bite of Remy’s ratatouille and is transported to his childhood, coming in sad from the outdoors and sitting down with his mom’s ratatouille. That scene makes me kind of teary.

Yeah, call me a philistine, but I’d take Pixar over Proust anytime. (Well, I say that, but really all the Proust I’ve ever read is this one passage. He’s probably pretty good.) (You like how I just described one of the most important French novelists ever as “probably pretty good”?)

Recently I’ve been feeling a bit down about writing and this book kept wandering by me. People were mentioning it on freelance listservs. So I decided it was time to reread it.

You never know what will happen when you reread books. If you haven’t read Pride and Prejudice since your early 20s, I recommend it–it is a completely different book now. I was surprised to learn when I read it last year that Mr. Bennet is kind of a jerk, and an awful lot of the characters are very immature young people. It’s still a very good book, it’s just different.

Bird by Bird hasn’t changed that much in the last 10 years. It still makes me laugh out loud and the chapter entitled “Shitty First Drafts” is still totally inspirational. Here’s an excerpt from that chapter:

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

Anne Lamott. She’s a funny lady.

The main surprise is that the book is mostly about writing fiction–I’d forgotten that. But fortunately a lot of the principles are the same. In fact, nonfiction seems a little easier. I don’t have to clear my mind so I can listen to my characters and figure out what they want to say. I already know what they said, because they are real people who said it to me, and if I need to I can call them back and get them to say more things.

I haven’t finished my reread, but I’m already feeling better. I’ve been surprised how many of my writer friends haven’t read this one–you should really pick it up.

Amazon link (Or go to a bookstore. Sigh. Remember bookstores?)

While I was incapable of keeping up with RSS feeds through my computer’s web browser, I check the Google Reader app on my phone all the time.

One of the blogs I’ve come across is from the Field Book Project at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The museum owns a ton of field notes, and the project is about cataloging all those notebooks full of written observations and drawings. They’ve been posting pictures of interesting notebooks on their blog.

One recent entry was a set of drawings of fish in a Hawaiian fish market in the summer of 1901, with detailed notes on the colors. Fish colors change quickly, so you want to record them right away–and color photography wasn’t exactly an option.

And I loved reading about the different ways books can be flexible–I’d never thought about it, but bindings and papers have different amounts of bendiness, and you have to get the right combination if you want your book to open right. For the particular book in that blog post, they decided the pages were so brittle that it wasn’t worth trying to preserve it as a book, and now the pages live neatly stacked in a box (with the spine label and covers).

These books represent good old-fashioned natural history, where people go out in the field (dressed like this), look at things, describe them, and come up with hypotheses about how the world works. I love that kind of science.

But I do have this:

Visitors enter the new center at the top level, via an elevator from the house where Lincoln died, then wind their way down past the galleries via this spiral staircase.

In the middle is a huge stack of  books written about Lincoln. Ok, it isn’t actually made of paper books. It’s a sculpture made of lightweight aluminum replicas of books. But still. Impressive. There’s even a little book of Lincoln stickers near the bottom.

I wonder if someone who wants to write a book about Lincoln would find that inspiring or daunting? What on earth could you find to say about our 16th president that one of the other thousands of authors hasn’t thought of?

I learned today from NPR that this is only about half of the 15,000 books about Abraham Lincoln.

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photo: me

Now, I had no idea what the Jefferson Bible was. I assumed it was just a Bible owned by Thomas Jefferson. But no, Thomas Jefferson was more radical than that. He took passages from the first four books of the New Testament and pasted them together in an assemblage he called “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.” So he skipped the bits he considered later additions, like the miracles, and stuck to Jesus’s life and teachings.

Look closely – this is literal cutting and pasting. He actually cut up books in four languages to make it. Each column is a different language. From left to right, that’s Greek, Latin, French, and English.

The two books in the back of this next picture are the two English-language Bibles he cut his passages out of.

Jefferson didn’t intend this for publication, but the Government Printing Office published a facsimile in 1904; that’s one in front. Until the 1950s, when copies ran out, newly elected senators were given a copy like this one.

The museum explains this book as part of Jefferson’s general Enlightenment-era revolutionariness. This is the guy who drafted the Declaration of Independence, after all, and why stop with the monarchy? He was a fan of Jesus, but he questioned the way he’d been portrayed.The book is on display now because the museum finished a big conservation project on it last year. (This was a book for private study, not a book to last through the ages; the 18th-century glue and the many kinds of paper and ink made it a special challenge.)

You can read the book for yourself on the American History website.

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I wrote a chapter about Chris’s and my Bering Sea expedition. Hugh Powell wrote about Adélie penguins in Antarctica, Lonny Lippsett wrote about exploring the Arctic floor from an icebreaker, and Amy Nevala wrote about Greenland’s glaciers. Of course, Chris’s fantastic photos fill the book.

It’s been fun revisiting my memories of the Bering Sea in the last few days, since my copy arrived. I also answered some questions by e-mail for this nice item about it…and went on much too long. I just kept remembering all these lovely details about the trip. It was a great experience.

The book, Unlikely Friendships: 47 Remarkable Stories from the Animal Kingdom, is about animals that are buddies. There’s a monkey that befriends a kitten, a hippo that follows a tortoise around, a snake that hangs out with a hamster – all sorts of good stuff. Sure, it’s not investigative journalism, but who doesn’t want to read about a monkey that adopts a kitten?

Jenny’s a beautiful writer, and I can’t wait to read the book myself – I just added one more sale to those Amazon stats.

Here’s a nice item about the book in today’s issue of Parade.

It doesn’t look like much from the outside. Well, it looks like something. It looks like a hopeless victim of the ’60s.

See? Hopeless. But the story’s different when you go inside. The entrance is on the ground level. From the outside, in the picture above, the ground level looks like a cave, but there’s actually quite a nice glass-enclosed lobby there.

From the lobby you go up a wide staircase and you’re in this:

All those white panels you saw on the outside of the building are actually 1.3-inch-thick slabs of marble. The light filters through them and gives the whole space this sort of warm, wood-panelled-library feel. On the right you can see part of the central column of stacks – six floors of rare books behind glass. It’s like a zoo for books.

I don’t think banging on the glass is a good idea – it’s also not a good idea in zoos, they say – but I did take some pictures through it. Look, old books:

The library had a temporary exhibit on the effect of psychoanalysis on American writers and thinkers. They also have a few treasures on permanent display. This is a page from John James Audubon’s Birds of America:

The book is so big it’s called the Double Elephant Folio. Something I didn’t know about Audubon: He was born in Saint Domingue – you may know it better as Haiti – and raised mostly in Nantes. He emigrated at the age of 18, hung out in Pennsylvania for a while, migrated to the frontier, and eventually set out to paint every bird in America. Read about him here.

They also have a Gutenberg bible.

Oh, you Ivy League types, you think you’re so hot, with your…Gutenberg Bibles. Ok, yeah, I can’t really dispute the coolness of owning a Gutenberg Bible.

Gratuitous arty shot of exterior:

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

They first spotted it on Thursday and it was still there as of this blog post Friday. Actually, the Thursday blog post is funnier:

Will you be releasing any other wildlife into the Main Reading Room?

Staff are contemplating that, both to keep themselves alert and on their toes, and also to prevent researchers from taking long naps.

Photo: from the LoC blog

The Killer of Little Shepherds sort of made me feel better about our modern times. People look back at The Past as this time when things were glowy and perfect, but here was this serial killer, roving the countryside, cutting throats, doing horrible things to the bodies, cleaning himself up, and zipping off to another jurisdiction, over and over and over again. Today, his fingerprints/DNA/whatever would have done him in pretty early on, because he’d had a run-in with the law before his whole countryside killing spree, after he tried to murder a woman he was obsessed with.

Even if you weren’t being killed by Joseph Vacher, it was a tough time. In France alone at that time, something like 400,000 “vagabonds” wandered the country looking for work. Mechanization was taking away agricultural jobs; there was little or no social safety net. So they wandered, and got blamed for all the crime and social problems. (Ok, in the case of Vacher, blaming a vagabond for crimes happened to be appropriate.)

I really enjoyed all the stories along the way about how Lacassagne, the doctor, was solving crimes with science – a case in which a body was delivered to the morgue in a trunk, for example, and he looked at the injuries and how the blood had pooled and stuff and figured out that the story being told about how the body got in there was totally not true.

Here’s an episode of the World Science podcast in which Doug Starr talks about the book – you can also watch the video for just a taste of some beliefs about guilt and blood in 19th-century France.