"In 1925, Dr. Samuel Sheppard, at the time an emulsion scientist working for Kodak, traced impurities in photographic gelatin back to the particularities of a cow's diet. Sheppard discovered that cattle who had eaten mustard seed yielded better film speeds, because a sulfuric substance in mustard oil accentuated the light sensitivity of silver halide crystals suspended in an emulsion. Sheppard's findings suggested that the failure of Eastman's plates in 1882 had been due not to the presence of an impurity in the gelatin but rather to the absence of an impurity: mustard seed had been missing in the diets of the animals from which gelatin was rendered. The head of Kodak's research laboratory, Dr. C.E. Kenneth Mees, later recounted Sheppard's emulsion breakthrough to a lecture audience: 'Twenty years ago we found out that if cows didn't like mustard there wouldn't be any movies at all.'"

from Animal Capital by Nicole Shukin

(Note: I am writing this post on Monday afternoon and scheduling it to go up later this evening – I am not blogging from the Granta party!)

I'm very pleased to announce that I've been named one of Granta magazine's Best of Young British Novelists.

If you're in the UK, my second novel The Teleportation Accident, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, was published in paperback last week by Sceptre.

If you're in the US, the book was recently published in hardback by Bloomsbury.

Here is a full list of my appearances over the next few weeks, many of them related to the Granta list. Click to see the whole poster.

'Freud liked to associate the system-building of paranoia with philosophy: "a paranoiac delusion is a caricature of a philosophical system," he writes in Totem and Taboo (1913). Did he sense that the analogy might run the other way too? Might the systematizing of madness in psychoanalysis be a defense against madness? There is a paranoid dimension in much postwar French philosophy as well – the alienation of the gaze in Sartre and Lacan, the power of surveillance in Foucault, and so on but – but the stake is different. As suggested above, perhaps the very critique of the subject in such philosophy is also a secret mission to rescue it. As Leo Bersani comments: "In paranoia, the primary function of the enemy is to provide a definition of the real that make paranoia necessary. We must therefore begin to suspect the paranoid structure itself as a device by which consciousness maintains the polarity of self and non self, thus preserving the concept of identity."'

from 'Blinded Insights: On the Modernist Reception of the Art of the Mentally Ill' by Hal Foster

"'I show my models deprived of their airs and graces, reduced to the level of animals cleaning themselves." – Degas

"For years I watched so-called Greco-Latin films (toga flicks, with early Christians devoured by lions, emperors in love, and son on). My only interest in those films was to catch sight of planes and helicopters in the background, to discover the eternal DC6 crossing the sky during Ben Hur's final race, Cleopatra's naval battle, or the Quo Vadis banquets. That was my particular fetish, my only interest. For me all those films, the innumerable tales of Greco-Latinity, all partook of the single story of a DC6 flying discreetly from one film to the next." – Raúl Ruiz

In December I went to Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria to write about it for the new issue of AnOther Magazine, out today.

"By 1918, the French were trying large-scale visual deception, camouflage par faux-objectifs. Giant models of the Gare de l’Est railway station, together with fake boulevards and avenues made of wood and canvas, were set up in fields north-west of the city, with strings of lights that stayed on when Paris blacked out its street lights. But the British Royal Engineers remained sceptical of these kinds of objectifs simulés as antidotes to air raids. When enthusiastic amateurs wrote suggesting ‘the erection of a replica of London at some little distance in the country, meanwhile covering the real London with imitation fields’, the ideas were (as a witty letter to The Times by Colonel J. P. Rhodes pointed out) ‘received with reverence’, but ‘reluctantly discarded as unsuited to this imperfect world’."

from Churchill's Wizards by Nicholas Rankin

"It has sometimes been said that European society is the only one which has produced anthropologists, and that therein lies its greatness. Anthropologists may wish to deny it other forms of superiority, but they must respect this one, since without it they themselves would not exist. Actually, one could claim exactly the opposite: Western Europe may have produced anthropologists precisely because it was a prey to strong feelings of remorse, which forced it to compare its image with those of different societies in the hope that they would show the same defects or would help to explain how its own defects had developed within it."

from Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss

Gossip, says Proust in Sodom and Gomorrah, 'prevents the mind from falling asleep over the factitious view which it has of what it imagines things to be and which is actually no more than their outward appearance. It turns this appearance inside out with the magic dexterity of an idealist philosopher and rapidly presents to our gaze an unsuspected corner of the reverse side of the fabric.' And as this implies, In Search of Lost Time is deeply concerned with epistemology – almost everyone is confidently wrong about almost everything almost all the time. But I wonder if anyone else has noticed that the fourth volume of the novel also contains an interesting example of what analytic philosophers call a Gettier Case?

Although the character of the Baron de Charlus is indeed a gay man, 'if in the world of painters and actors M. de Charlus had such a bad reputation, this was due to their confusing him with a Comte Leblois de Charlus who was not even related to him (or, if so, the connexion was extremely remote), and who had been arrested, possibly by mistake, in the course of a notorious police raid. In short, all the stories related of our M. de Charlus referred to the other. Many professionals swore that they had had relations with M. de Charlus, and did so in good faith, believing that the false M. de Charlus was the true one, the false one possibly encouraging, partly from an affectation of nobility, partly to conceal his vice, a confusion which was for a long time prejudicial to the real one (the Baron we know), and afterwards, when he had begun to go down the hill, became a convenience, for it enabled him likewise to say: "It isn’t me." And in the present instance it was not him to whom the rumours referred.'

Do these people – the 'professionals' – know that the Baron de Charlus (as opposed to Comte de Leblois Charlus) is gay?

For a long time philosophers tended to agree, following Plato's Theaetetus, that you can be said to know a fact if and only if you have a true and justified belief in that fact. The professionals' belief that the Baron de Charlus is gay is, first of all, true, since the Baron de Charlus is indeed gay; and, second, justified, since if you hear about a certain M. de Charlus getting caught in a notorious police raid, and you have no reason to think there exists any other M. de Charlus than the Baron de Charlus, that is, by any practical standard, evidence enough to conclude that the Baron de Charlus is gay.

So the professionals have a true and justified belief that the Baron de Charlus is gay. And yet it doesn't seem to us that they really know that the Baron de Charlus is gay, since all their 'evidence' refers to a totally different guy (Comte Leblois de Charlus). Where does that leave our definition of knowledge?

Cases like these are called Gettier Cases because they were formalised in 1963 by the American philosopher Edmund Gettier in a paper called 'Is True Justified Belief Knowledge?' When I was studying philosophy at university, we were told the following story. Gettier was on the point of losing his teaching job at Wayne State University because he'd never bothered to publish any research. This was pointed out to him and he responded, more or less, 'Oh, all right then, I'll throw something together over the weekend.' The resulting essay, only three pages long, demolished an epistemological dogma that had stood for thousands of years and became one of the most famous and influential philosophical papers of the twentieth century. Knowing that his job was now secure forever, Gettier never published anything again.

The truth is presumably a bit less satisfying. (For one thing, whatever I may have said up there about how 'philosophers tended to agree, following Plato's Theaetetus', there's some debate over whether anyone except first-term undergraduates has ever genuinely taken knowledge to be as simple as justified true belief. 'It isn't easy to find many really explicit statements of a JTB analysis of knowledge prior to Gettier,' writes Alvin Plantinga. 'It is almost as if a distinguished critic created a tradition in the very act of destroying it.') Regardless, to me, the myth presents Gettier as a very Proustian character. From Sodom and Gomorrah again, only a few pages earlier:

Mme. Verdurin 'was convinced that [Ski] would have developed that aptitude into talent if he had been less indolent. This indolence seemed to the Mistress to be actually an additional gift, being the opposite of hard work which she regarded as the lot of people devoid of genius.'

I am living in Belleville at the moment.

Saul Bellow arriving in Paris in 1947:

"The Guggenheim Foundation had given me a fellowship and I was prepared to take part in the great revival when and if it began. Like the rest of the American contingent I had brought my illusions with me but I like to think that I was also skeptical (perhaps the most tenacious of my illusions). I was not going to sit at the feet of Gertrude Stein. I had no notions about the Ritz Bar. I would not be boxing with Ezra Pound, as Hemingway had done, nor writing in bistros while waiters brought oysters and wine. Hemingway the writer I admired without limits, Hemingway the figure was to my mind the quintessential tourist, the one who believed that he alone was the American whom Europeans took to their hearts as one of their own. In simple truth, the Jazz Age Paris of American legend had no charms for me, and I had my reservations also about the Paris of Henry James - bear in mind the unnatural squawking of East Side Jews as James described it in The American Scene. You wouldn't expect a relative of those barbarous East Siders to be drawn to the world of Mme. de Vionnet, which had in any case vanished long ago."

Christopher Hitchens makes the connection again in his essay on Bellow's Augie March:

"Barely a half-century before The Adventures of Augie March was published, Henry James had returned to New York from Europe and found its new character unsettling in the extreme. In The American Scene, published in 1907, he registered the revulsion he imagined “any sensitive citizen” might feel, after visiting Ellis Island, at having “to share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with the inconceivable alien. ”On the Lower East Side, James discerned the “hard glitter of Israel.” In east-side cafés, he found himself in “torture-rooms of the living idiom.” And he asked himself: “Who can ever tell, moreover, in any conditions and in presence of any apparent anomaly, what the genius of Israel may, or may not, really be ‘up to’?” The Master was by no means alone in expressing sentiments and sensitivities of this kind. With The Adventures of Augie March, and its bold initial annexation of the brave name of “American,” his descendants got the answer to the question about what that genius was “up to.”"

"Bülow, working under Wagner's instructions, needed to add more musicians to the orchestra; this, however, meant the removal of some thirty stalls for the public. When informed of his, Bülow cried 'What difference does that make, whether we have thirty schweinehunde [pigs] more or less in the place?' Bülow had spoken in a dark theatre, unaware that anyone might be listening to his devastating words. But a reporter from the Neuste Nachrichten, sitting unnoticed in the hall, quickly ran back to his paper, and Bülow's offhand remark became the following day's front-page headline. Deeply embarrassed, Bülow wrote a letter of apology, stating, not very convincingly, that he had not been referring to the 'cultured Munich public' but rather to the anti-Wagerian critics. The Neueste Nachrichten printed the letter and accepted the apology, but other papers were quick to seize any opportunity to humiliate Wagner and his supporters. The Neuer Bayerischer Kurier, for example, printed the same headline, 'Hans von Bülow is Still Here!' every day for a week, in increasingly large letters, in an attempt to drive the conductor from Munich and thus ruin the premiere of Tristan und Isolde."

from The Mad King by Greg King

"In one particularly successful exercise in Patriarch-baiting, Photius had even gone so far as to propound a new and deeply heretical theory that he had just thought up, according to which man possessed two separate souls, one liable to error, the other infallible. His own dazzling reputation as an intellectual ensured that he was taken seriously by many – including Ignatius – who should have known better; and after his doctrine had its desired effect, by making the Patriarch look thoroughly silly, he cheerfully withdrew it. It was perhaps the only completely satisfactory practical joke in the history of theology, and for that alone Photius deserves our gratitude."

from The Popes by John Julius Norwich

"[Bernard] Williams suggests that loving a person is, basically, loving a particular body. But this kind of love, or lust, is at most extremely uncommon. What is more common is a purely physical or sexual obsession with a person’s body, an obsession that is not concerned with the psychology of this person. But this is not love of a particular body. As Quinton writes, in the case of such obsessions, ‘no particular human body is required, only one of a more or less precisely demarcated kind’. Suppose that I was physically obsessed with Mary Smith’s body. This obsession would transfer to Mary Smith’s Replica. This would be like a case in which the body with which I am obsessed is that of an identical twin. If this twin died, my obsession could be transferred to the body of the other twin. Ordinary love could not be so transferred. Such love is concerned with the psychology of the person loved, and with this person’s continuously changing mental life. And loving someone is a process, not a fixed state. Mutual love involves a shared history. This is why, if I have loved Mary Smith for many months or years, her place cannot be simply taken by her identical twin. Things are quite different with her Replica. If I have loved Mary Smith for months or years, her Replica will have full quasi-memories of our shared history. I have claimed that, if I do not love Mary Smith’s Replica, it is unlikely that the explanation is that I loved her particular body. It is doubtful that anyone has such love, or lust."

from Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit

"Let us imagine a man whose wealth is equalled only by his indifference to what wealth generally brings, a man of exceptional arrogance who wishes to fix, to describe, and to exhaust not the whole world – merely to state such an ambition is enough to invalidate it – but a constituted fragment of the world: in the face of the inextricable incoherence of things, he will set out to execute a (necessarily limited) programme right the way through, in all its irreducible, intact entirety."

from Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec

"... haunting, cold, but wearing an entirely human expression that was practically aglow with the blinding certainty of its absolute power which promised new and supremely inventive forms of ruthlessness; that it was he who was directing each and every movement of this irresistible march, including Valuska's own trials and tribulations as he stumbled down the desperate stations of complete collapse, though something in his manner suggested that the brutally instructive drama he unfolded before Valuska, while dragging him along by the arm, was in some way intended to serve as a form of cure, a cure that entailed a certain amount of necesary suffering (no gain without pain), and that this was a situation he was clearly enjoying. Valuska stared at that face, and as he examined it he began to understand that the 'hauntingly cold' expression he found on it was growing ever less enigmatic, since the ruthless mask might only be the unforgiving mirror of something that he, in his thirty-five years of muddle and sickliness, had perhaps been incapable of seeing..."

from The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai