Category: Iconography

The Worst Novel?

May 27th, 2025
In Chapter 12 of George Moore’s Spring Days (1888), Frank Escott tells Lizzie Baker, “I want to paint you in a white dress sitting on a garden seat with a background of azaleas — something very faint in white and pink.” Frank and his creator George may have been inspired by Auguste Toulmouche’s Woman and Roses (oil on canvas, 1879), now at the Clark Art Institute (1955.877) in Williamstown, Massachusetts: “A young woman in a spotless white dress has paused, while strolling through a well-tended garden, to enjoy the fragrance of a cluster of pink roses.”
Candid Programs

Resurgam NFP is the grantseeking and grantmaking organization that kickstarts literary legacies in the digital age. If you wish to donate to George Moore Interactive, please send your money to Resurgam and earmark it for GMi.

This deft two-step will ensure that 100% of your donation gets used according to your wishes. Your donation will be objectively managed and accounted for, and the tangible results of your generosity will be reported back to you with thanks.

The two-step will also ensure that your donation is tax-deductible (if you’re located in the United States), which would not be the case if you donated directly to GMi. Here’s a Resurgam page that explains how it works.

Resurgam is an independent, 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation that echoes and reinforces the aims of George Moore Interactive but with a difference. The difference is this: GMi is kickstarting one particular literary legacy, whereas Resurgam wants to animate every legacy — literary, artistic, musical — bequeathed to our world by creative geniuses of the past.

The technology for kickstarting literary legacies has already been invented; it is known by the rubric generative artificial intelligence and is doing amazing things, though not the things that GMi is pioneering. Visit Resurgam’s Comparisons page for more about that.

With useful technology that is now available and the reliable promise of more powerful tools to come in the next few years, all that remains for George Moore to live again is to put our human feet on the kickstarter and push down forcefully.

My foot has been pushing forcefully for George Moore. Now with around 1,700 pages and posts on this website, and more appearing day by day, I can feel the rumble though the handlebars in my grip. I’m thrilled and ready to take the next steps.

But readiness begs the question: what are the next steps? How far into the future can I see when claiming that I’m poised to accept your donation? To be honest, not very far.

I founded GMi with a concept rather than a program; a vision rather than a plan. I wanted to make stuff like a builder rather than talk about stuff like a professor. That action-orientation allowed me to leapfrog important questions such as: What is my program? What is my step-by-step? What are my milestones and endgame?

The recent formation of Resurgam has forced me to step back and consider. Before now, I was happy just to crank out content, with a methodology and a sense of direction, but without a program per se. That has changed.

It changed because, after starting a Gofundme campaign that fell short of my goals, I’m now planning to ask Resurgam for financial support, and I can’t do that without a program; in other words, without short and long term plans.

I realized this as I prepared Resurgam’s bona fides as a legal not-for-profit. Part of that involved joining Forefront, and as a result of joining Forefront I joined Candid. Candid is the organization that runs the Foundation Directory and Guidestar.

To cement my membership in Candid, I needed to state Resurgam’s own program. I did that by pondering the (nonexistent) program of GMi as I had never done before.

The result is not one but four linear Resurgam programs, each of which represents fundable activities that are sanctioned by Resurgam’s mission and for which Resurgam accepts donations.

Resurgam may evolve into other programs as well, but these four are a complete statement of the work being done and planned by GMi.

Consider:

Program 1: Digital Curation

Digital Curation (DC) locates, organizes, scans, transcribes, edits, annotates, illustrates, and preserves the meaningful and influential contents of aesthetic legacies. Legacies prioritized by Resurgam are literary, artistic and musical from antiquity to the twentieth century. DC is foundational to more advanced programs supported by Resurgam.

Program 2: Access to Cultural Heritage

Access to Cultural Heritage (ACH) follows our DC program. ACH publishes and otherwise disseminates the contents of curated legacies in machine- and human-readable digital formats. ACH is limited to formats that are free and easy to use by the general public and compatible with the training of large language models owned by corporations. ACH permits few (if any) technical, financial, and geographic barriers to entry to a curated legacy.

Program 3: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (MLAI) follows our DC and ACH programs. MLAI engineers curated and published legacies to ensure they are open to computerized and human-prompted textual, visual and quantitative analysis. MLAI optimizes digital legacies for self-assembly, self-correction, self-validation, date-stamping, cross-referencing, interpretation, elucidation, and correlation with the critical heritage. MLAI synchronizes different digital legacies that have overlapping content.

Program 4: High-Fidelity Simulation

High-Fidelity Simulation (HFS) follows our DC, ACH, and MLAI programs. HFS enables curated, published, and engineered legacies to speak for themselves (by demonstrating autonomous self-awareness and dynamic self-expression). HFS manifests in interactive, lifelike conversations between aesthetic legacies and human interlocutors. HFS may be achieved in digital modalities including chatbot, natural-language processing, speech synthesis, virtual- and augmented-realities, and computer-generated imagery (CGI).

✱ ✱ ✱

Up to the present, everything GMi has achieved aligns with Resurgam Programs 1 and 2, though a lot more remains to be done in those programs. Programs 3 and 4 are still prospective, but here they are defined whereas before they were dreamlike.

When I submit my grant applications to Resurgam, and when you tender your donation, we will have to be clear about program fit. No longer happy to crank out content for its own sake, the work that may be deemed worthy of funding must explicitly advance a program objective.

The Worst Novel?

Last month I corrected my mistake in calling George Moore’s A Mere Accident (1887) the worst novel ever written. That dubious distinction purportedly belonged to Spring Days (1888). Worst according to a literary critic whom George respected; worst according to the bewildered author himself.

I promised to transcribe, edit and publish Spring Days, my way of exhuming the victim of literary malfeasance and performing forensic analysis. I have performed it, and now so can you.

The first edition of Spring Days is available on GMi; soon the ebook will arrive in the GMi Shop. All for free. You have what you need to judge for yourself.

My personal opinion of Spring Days is not rancorous. To me, it isn’t a terrible novel; it’s not even a bad novel. As usual when surveying this part of George’s legacy, I’m calling it an experimental novel.

Our ambitious author had a modernist axe to grind, a serious thematic purpose, a good dramatic idea, characters that live on and between the lines, and a richly colored mise en scène.

That said, it is also true that the novel didn’t cross the finish line as a memorable achievement. Not then, not now.

One problem is the title, which sucks (as usual). If you read the book you may wonder, on page after page, why is it named Spring Days? That vague, not catchy title has nothing to do with the plot! The actual words “Spring Days” turn up once, at the very end of the last chapter, almost like an afterthought or the relic of a different novel that was never written.

Another problem is inconsistency. Chapters range in length from 1,000 to 22,000 words. Granted there is no rule that chapters of a novel must be similar in length, but the disparities here look like flaws of construction, reminding me of the Buster Keaton movie One Week (1920) except the movie is funny and this novel isn’t.

A more serious problem with Spring Days is the changing subject matter. At first the story is about the Brookes family: the widower James, his young adult daughters Grace, Maggie and Sally, and his son Willy. The three sisters are foregrounded, like Alice and Olive Barton in A Drama in Muslin.

But no, the narrative soon drifts away from the girls in favor of their pathetic though genuine brother Willy, at first a minor character who unexpectedly grows into a significant moral presence. But that too doesn’t last.

Willy’s friend Frank Escott, at first little more than a colorful detail in the background, suddenly becomes the novel’s main protagonist.

Each of these human loci would be fine as the subject of his or her own story, but the succession of stories, without much in the way of segues, tested this reader’s enjoyment of Spring Days.

If Frank Escott truly is the unrivaled protagonist of Spring Days, that would make sense because he walks and talks like an author surrogate, somewhat like John Norton in A Mere Accident and John Harding in A Drama in Muslin.

Don’t get me wrong, these three men have as many differences as similarities, but a case can be made that George Moore performed in these novels as a ventriloquist whose speech and perceptions were at least partially embodied in Escott, Norton and Harding.

Of course it isn’t necessary for an experimental novel to have a main protagonist because, in my opinion, this novel’s raison d’être is a fictional rendering of the author’s real-life friends the Bridger family and their homes near Shoreham-by-Sea in Sussex.

That helps explain Frank’s rented home in nearby Southwick, where George Moore actually lived while writing Spring Days. From this point of view, it is easier to explain the purported differences between Celt and Saxon, that bubbled to the surface of the novel from time to time.

Frank and George living in Southwick were Irish, the Brookes and the Bridgers living in Shoreham were English. Exploring the evident ethnic differences between these tribes is probably what made Spring Days a worthy project for a renegade disciple of Émile Zola.

(Coincidentally while preparing Spring Days for GMi, I acquired cartes de visite of Harry Colvill Bridger and his daughters Florence and Dulcibella. They are published on the Bridger pages of the GMi Iconography. Use the search bar to find them.)

As mentioned earlier, apart from biographical and sociological interests, Spring Days exhibits a serious novelistic purpose. The purpose is intimated in the following quote, one of several in the book that wax philosophical:

A man’s struggles in the web of a vile love are as pitiful as those of a fly in the meshes of the spider; he crawls to the edge, but only to ensnare himself more completely; he takes pleasure in ridiculing her, but whether he praises or blames, she remains mistress of his life; all threads are equally fatal, and each that should have served to bear him out of the trap only goes to bind him faster. A man in love suggests the spider’s web, and when he is seeking to escape from a woman that will degrade his life, the cruelty which is added completes and perfects the comparison. A man’s love for a common woman is as a fire in his vitals; sometimes it seems quenched, sometimes it is torn out by angry hands, but always some spark remains; it contrives to unite about its victim, and in the end has its way. It is a cancerous disease, but it cannot be cut out like a cancer. It is more deadly; it is inexplicable. All good things, wealth and honour, are forfeited for it; long years of toil, trouble, privation of all kinds are willingly accepted; on one side all the sweetness of the world, on the other nothing of worth, often vice, meanness, ill temper, all that go to make life a madness and a terror; twenty, thirty, forty, perhaps fifty years lie ahead of him and her, but the years and their burdens are not for his eyes any more than the flowers he elects to disdain. Love is blind, but sometimes there is no love. How then shall we explain this inexplicable mystery; wonderful riddle that none shall explain and that every generation propounds?

Spring Days (1888), pages 361- 362.

By this point in the novel (the end), Frank Escott the amateur painter was becoming a novelist, exactly the life trajectory of his creator.

His mind was absorbed in a novel, which he narrated when Willy came to see him. It concerned the accident that led a man not to marry the woman he loved, and was in the main an incoherent version of his own life at Southwick.

Spring Days (1888), page 363

You’ll find a photo of George Moore’s home in Southwick on GMi. He and his fictional Frank Escott were symbolic roommates there; he and his fictional Willy Brookes (modeled by Harry Colvill Bridger) were literal roommates in Freshcombe Lodge.

Letters of 1893

The letters of George Moore, published on GMi, are now complete through the year 1893. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of George’s life in 1893 was his hard, experimental work on Esther Waters (1894). This time, the experiment ended in success!

I cannot begin to fathom how George rose, in just a few years, from the bucolic South Downs of A Mere Accident and Spring Days to the urban contest of Esther Waters, except to note that there was a segue: Esther Waters opened in a fictional version of the Bridger home, Buckingham House.

In my view, the most plausible explanation of George’s rise from A Mere Accident and Spring Days to Esther Waters (by way of Mike Fletcher and Vain Fortune) may be found the old saw: he pulled himself up by his bootstraps.

His ability to do that again and again over the course of his career is probably what endeared him most to fans like me. George was an experimentalist and, like a lab scientist, his failures were as numerous as his successes; even more numerous (maybe)!

Somehow he was not deflated or discouraged when he missed his mark. Like Samuel Beckett in another generation, he concluded with “I’ll go on.” Or to put that in George’s words:

I shivered; the cold air of morning blew in my face, I closed the window, and sitting at the table, haggard and overworn, I continued my novel.

Confessions of a Young Man (1888), page 357

Next Up

Letters from 1894-1895 will be next up in the Letters pillar of this website.

By the way, thousands of George Moore’s letters are preserved in known institutional libraries, but an unknown number of others are in private collections. For example, I own a few MSS.

Privately owned letters have turned up over the years in bookseller catalogs, but not otherwise found. I have not figured out how to track them down in the digital age, but my intuition is that there is an efficient way. Suggestions are welcome!

The novel Mike Fletcher (1889), another miss for George, will be next up in the Worlds pillar of this website and the GMi Shop. I first read it a long time ago and have zero memory of it now. Bracing myself!

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The Sensible Text

September 27th, 2024
Two paintings by Édouard Manet in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. In Gallery 89 on the left is Plum Brandy (circa 1877) depicting Ellen Andrée in the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes (where she was also painted by Edgar Degas). In Gallery 87 on the right is a crop of George Moore in the Artist’s Garden (circa 1879). Manet also painted George in the Nouvelle-Athènes, but that picture is in a different museum. Visitors to the National Gallery who view these portraits in close proximity will be tempted to imagine what the young man was like in the exuberant days he later recalled in Memoirs of My Dead Life (1906).
Impressionist Moment

These days visitors to the National Gallery, who appreciate George Moore, can get even more for the price of admission (free).

Until 19 January 2025 just a few steps from where George and Ellen hang, they can also view Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment.

This is a grand exhibition from the Musée d’Orsay that epitomizes the art and culture of Paris during George’s formative years there.

It covers both the Salon of 1874 and a momentous show of the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, et Lithographes, at the former studio-gallery of Nadar in the Boulevard des Capucines.

I recently went to the National Gallery to see George in the artist’s garden for the first time. Oh my, oh my… it’s electric! Then I was awestruck by Paris 1874.

The exhibition documents the seminal event of impressionism and is just as spectacular as the Manet/Degas exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York — and that’s saying a lot! (George and Ellen were also seen there.)

The paintings are individually and collectively… incredible!

If you can’t get to Washington in time for Paris 1874, consider reading the catalog. It’s large and heavy. I place it on a pillow on my lap to get comfortable while reading.

It contains not a single mention of George Moore, though he lived in Paris in 1874 while learning how to paint. Still, the catalog relates a great deal about the world he observed, and pondered, and interacted with, and later celebrated in the books and articles that are coming back to life on GMi.

You can order the exhibition catalog from the National Gallery of Art.

It’s lavishly illustrated of course, though nothing compares with luminous paintings on the wall.

The scholarly essays deepened my understanding of the artists’ lives and work. They offered a different way of thinking about impressionism. Truer to life; and truer to George!

More Memories

Last month I promised to publish A Communication to My Friends (1933) in Apple Books. I’ve done that, and also published Memoirs of My Dead Life (1906). Both ebooks are free to download in the GMi Shop; they’re also published in the Worlds pillar of GMi.

The closer I read George’s numerous memoirs, the harder it is to classify them. Are they autobiography, or autobiografiction, or autofiction, or even fiction?

One would think fiction of some sort because they’re written in the fluid style of a novel. Yet time and time again, the ingenuous author pauses to assure his readers that he is relating facts, not making things up; moreover that the literary value of his text depends on its fidelity to actual, lived experience.

Shall we take him at his word?

One of the benefits of a project like GMi is to subject George’s canon to textual analysis by computer; to use artificial intelligence to summon and evaluate all the evidence embodied in his art.

So eventually, the truth will out!

Meanwhile, I do take George at his word. What he says happened, in point of fact did happen according to his memory and belief.

Still, does he accurately remember everything? That’s a different question.

For example, he recalled living in the Rue de la Tour des Dames, Paris, in the afterglow of the “Impressionist Moment.” Did he really? I suspect not, though at the same time, weirdly, I’m sure he was telling the truth.

Go figure.

Next up in the Worlds of George Moore: volume II of Hail and Farewell! — Salve (1912).

Who is Octave Barrès?

In “The End of Marie Pellegrin” (chapter 4 of Memoirs of My Dead Life), George recalled sitting to an artist in Paris named Octave Barrès.

Biographer Joseph Hone mistook Octave Barrès for a writer and man of letters named Maurice Barrès. But I doubt that Maurice ever wielded brushes and a palette, and besides his full name was Auguste-Maurice, not Octave. Seems like a different person!

So who was Octave Barrès and where is his portrait of George Moore? I can’t allow that George invented Octave in order to tell a story. George insisted that he didn’t do that kind of thing.

I searched for Octave Barrès on the Internet and in my professional network, but found not a trace.

Can you help?

And what about Sargent?

If you mumbled “eh, maybe” under your breath so I wouldn’t hear, let me assure you that your efforts would not go unappreciated. When you pull back the curtain on Octave, George Moore Interactive will loudly applaud you.

And while you’re solving mysteries of art history and iconography, please consider telling me where to find the known portrait of George Moore by John Singer Sargent. What little I know about it is published here.

Unlike autofiction, this picture is real and probably owned by a private collector somewhere in the United States. I should have asked about it when I visited the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, but I forgot.

No, I didn’t forget; I was distracted by another portrait that took my breath away:

Portrait of Gertrude Stein by Pablo Picasso, finished in the year that George Moore finished Memoirs of My Dead Life (1906).

This picture is currently on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington for the exhibition Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939.

“I shall rise again”

If you download and read Memoirs of My Dead Life, be aware that George saved the best for last.

The last chapter is named “Resurgam” (look it up). It’s an exquisite blend of the lyrical and the profound, but that’s not why I’m bringing it up here.

The author fantasized about his final return to Ireland, 27 years before it occurred. In his fantasy he abhorred the prospect of being buried with his parents in the family crypt at Moore Hall.

He instead imagined being cremated on a huge funeral pyre on an island in Lough Carra, and then having an urn of his ashes suspended in the lake for all time to come.

Resurgam is a memoir projected into the future, and really moving, but of course that’s not what happened after George died in 1933.

What happened is this. He was cremated in Golders Green near London. His ashes were placed in an urn, though probably not the urn he envisioned. The urn was rowed out to little Castle Island in Lough Carra and buried under a pile of rocks near the shore.

That is what happened, and that’s why people like you and me cannot pay our respects to George Moore unless we go to a great deal of trouble — even more trouble than getting to Moore Hall in the first place.

I have said before, now I say it again: it doesn’t have to be this way. Nobody — least of all one of Ireland’s greatest writers — benefits from a grave in the middle of nowhere!

Hear my prayer. Bring him home.

The Sensible Text

I wrote last month about a way to incorporate the letters of George Moore into GMi using new scanning technology. And behold, it is happening and it’s fun.

The letters of George Moore from 1863 through 1884 are now online. Many more are in the pipeline.

Like most kinds of brainy fun, this effort depends on heuristics, or figuring things out: on deciding what is the right and best way to do something.

That’s because editing letters in the past, for a dissertation or print publication, was a hardened professional discipline. So hard, in fact, that nobody could simply read letters after they were published.

Letters were examined like depositions rather than read.

On behalf of ordinary readers, I have declared there must be a better way, though I don’t know precisely what it is. I’m still working on that.

My goal is pure and simple: to publish letters that are readable online. We can leave all the searching and analytics to machines that do it better anyway.

To reach my goal I am making editorial decisions that are unconventional, at least in academic publishing (which GMi is not). These are my (still evolving) practices:

Regarding structure…
- Publish each letter in its own WordPress page
- Title each page with date and recipient of the letter
- Place a button under the title for navigating away from the page
- Give a concise explanation of the letter’s obscure content
- Display my transcription of the letter in an embedded Google Doc
Within the embedded Google Doc…
- Repeat the title of the letter, left justified
- Under title, say in what medium the letter exists, left justified
- Next to medium, identify the owner of the letter
- Next to owner, state the number of words in the Google Doc
- Under word count, write the sender’s address on one line, right justified
  - Replace line breaks in the original address with commas
- Under address, write the date of the letter on one line, right justified
  - Add day of the week to the calendar date
- Under date, write the salutation on one line, left justified
- Under salutation, write the body of the letter, left justified
- Under body, write the close and signature, right justified
Within the body of each letter, normalize…
- Paragraph breaks
- Capitalization
- Spelling
- Punctuation
- Character spacing
Moreover…
- Replace each line break of the original letter with a space (except verse)
- Insert a blank line between all paragraphs (no hanging indents)
- Append hyperlinks to words that benefit from expansion
- Do not insert footnotes (no annotations)
I use that word “normalize” to connote common usage of British English during George Moore’s life; and also idiosyncratic usage that is typical of his published writing.

My prohibition of footnotes is to prevent editorial clutter from interfering with reader focus and attention. I don’t permit any interruptions when a reader is reading a letter.

Wait a minute!

Scholarly editors may object to both of the foregoing editorial principles, claiming that chaotic typography is potentially meaningful and footnotes likewise increase meaning.

To them I respectfully submit:

(A) The original, physical letter may be examined by anybody who wants to interpret orthography. I identify the owner of each letter, making it much easier to find than it was for me.

(B) In any case, holographic and printed language are different media. If anybody thinks they can reproduce the holograph with type, they are naive a.k.a. wrong (in my opinion).

(C) One of the benefits of interactive publishing, when done properly, is that it promotes reader exploration and discovery. Footnotes stymie same.

Footnotes are means for subject-matter experts to share their knowledge whether or not it is wanted; and the effect is to inhibit readers from making (rather than learning) new knowledge.

If readers want to know more about a person or event or thing that George mentioned in a letter, guess what, they can go search the Internet without leaving their seat.

That behavior — that act of investigation — is just as important as the knowledge they are seeking. Maybe more, depending on your philosophy.

Philosophy aside, it’s worth saying, I think, that the correspondence of great men and women (including George Moore) may be analogous to Frodo under the caressing arms of Shelob.

Why? Because in the highest academic traditions, letters are devoured rather than edited for readers.

By that I mean holographs have gotten sucked into a “word chipper,” where they lose their organic properties and become… well, the kind of text you sadly remember from homework.

Planks and blocks, littered with bracketed insertions, cluttered with superscript numbers, rigged like a mannequin with an editor’s relentless acts of informing the reader.

Such letters pass beyond writing by a human hand. They are unreadable.

Let it also be said that holographic writing is usually (not rarely) full of “organic” mistakes of all kinds: linguistic, grammatical, orthographic, stigmeological.

Some of those errors are intended to make a point. (Think about the last time you waded into Finnegan’s Wake.)

Most errors are careless and have no exclusive meaning. They are slips of the pen or keyboard. They obscure rather than enhance meaning.

My choice is not to represent holographs in type. My alternative is to present letters that are as readable as I can make them, according to the rules I have made for this project (and more than may occur to me).

Years ago I called this The Sensible Text (as in common sense). I viewed the alternative, which I produced for my dissertation, as The Sacred Text — the object of reverence, perhaps idolatry, by people who want to seem more clever than they actually are.

Yes, that was me.

I repeat: nobody reads letters that editors have treated as Sacred Text. To me, that kind of editing is like throwing a pot of paint at the Mona Lisa and claiming it adds color.

Speaking of which, if you get to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, just down the hall from George Moore in the Artist’s Garden, you should look at this miracle from the hands and mind of Leonardo da Vinci:

Ginevra de’ Benci (on the left) and Wreath of Laurel, Palm, and Juniper with a Scroll inscribed Virtutem Forma Decorat (on the right): a two-sided painting (1474-1478) by Leonardo da Vinci in the National Gallery of Art. The realistic portrait on the obverse is paired with the symbolic portrait on reverse. They are the same subject!!

French Letters

My devotion to The Sensible Text poses a challenge to editing George’s correspondence. Lots of his letters are written in French to French recipients, and they are beyond my ability to normalize.

I will require the help of a native French reader to do with George’s French what I myself do with his English: normalize it.

For now I am publishing the French letters just as they were written. That’s a stopgap, not a solution.

If a native French volunteer wishes to normalize French text for GMi, please step up. I will make it very easy and convenient for you to help, and you may have fun doing it.

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Stochastic Dialogue

June 28th, 2024
Detail from an undated photograph of George Moore with Édouard and Marie Dujardin to his right and Wanda Landowska to his left, at Dujardin’s home Le Val Changis near Fontainebleau, France. I scanned and colorized a black and white print in my collection. See the Iconography of George Moore for more images and information.
Love for Sale

Shelves in the GMi Shop are (awkwardly) kinda bare. Remember though, a shingle was hung only yesterday!

But check this out: a few things are now in the shop window: e-books of Martin Luther (1879), A Mummer’s Wife (1885), Avowals (1919), and Conversations in Ebury Street (1924). Each is edited by me, contains the text of the first English edition, and costs about the same as a cup of morning joe.

What? that’s too expensive? I agree, the price really should be free, but for structural reasons I can’t give titles away in the Kindle Store. Instead I do that in George Moore Interactive. The contents of these e-books are published hereabouts in the Aesthetics and Worlds pillars, for free.

The dual publications are not duplicative. Readers who want to enjoy Moore’s writing will do that better with Kindle editions. Those digital texts are faithful to the printed originals; moreover they aren’t cluttered with new introductions that tend, in my experience, to prevent the average reader from enjoying what follows.

Instead of opening with a pooh-bah’s footnoted explanation of what the book means to him or her or them, readers of these e-books dive in and decide what it actually means to themselves. An experience of engagement and discovery, lofted by canonical text, is attainable.

This is partly what I mean when I talk about “kickstarting literary legacies in the digital age.” Empowering everyday readers to read what and how they want, primarily for the sake of personal enjoyment rather than edification. I am guided here by (George) Moore’s Law that “education is of no help to anybody except teachers” (see Chapter 17, Conversations in Ebury Street).

Yet there is more than enjoyment to reading in the digital age.

Readers who also want to scrutinize and interrogate the canon, and explore its larger historical context, will do that better on the GMi website. Here they can see what Moore was working on before and after each of his books came out. Here they can search his texts for keywords in order to find and connect dots of particular interest to themselves (and the author).

They can even share their thoughts by attaching questions and comments to canonical writing for fellow readers to ponder and discuss. And they can view pictures of their author around the time he wrote; of people who turn up in his writings; and of places where he wrote. For an immersive experience of the “life and work.”

Of greater importance to me (text maven that I am), they can point out errors in my transcriptions of the canon — typos, formatting — that I may correct and thus make better for readers who come after. (I say may correct because some errors appear to be intentional and self-expressive; beyond my reach.)

Readers can do all of those sticky things on the GMi website. I have also unlocked the gates to GMi stacks in the cloud where all of my transcripts and scans of printed and handwritten texts are filed. Unlocking the gates allows readers to search the canon globally, rather than one document at a time.

You can tell if you glanced at my uniform e-book cover design, my goal is to publish the entire GM canon in George Moore Interactive and the Kindle Store. That way, when future visitors to the website converse with the great man himself (AI generated), and he says something intriguing or puzzling (true to form), they can follow up by seeing just where he was coming from. Instantly and for free!

Next up for digital kickstart: Confessions of a Young Man. This remarkable expat memoir of 1888 (the author was 36) is the first (to my knowledge) Irish portrait of the artist as a young man. James Joyce followed some 30 years later (when he was 34) with the second.

Stochastic Dialogue

Creative writings like plays (Martin Luther) and novels (A Mummer’s Wife) are internally all of a piece. Their linear narratives are bookended by opening and closing acts; and their mass — from 20,000 to 150,000 words — is all one thing, date-stamped on the day of publication.

Critical writings are different. Avowals and Conversations in Ebury Street are nonlinear; their various chapters are discrete essays in art criticism, literary criticism, and worldbuilding; most are in English, one is in French, several are generously endowed with French interpolations; some essays were previously published in periodicals, others appeared for the first time in hardcover; but all were ultimately arranged in no discernible order.

The essays may be read in any order; their published sequence is neither chronological nor prescriptive and does nothing to enhance the meaning or coherence of each one. In effect, the placement is random.

GMi Kindle editions of Avowals and Conversations in Ebury Street preserve the placement of essays in the printed books. Not so the pillars of George Moore Interactive, where each essay is handled as separate document (what it is, in fact).

The rhetorical format of some essays in Conversation in Ebury Street is (as you’d expect) a dialogue between people. What you might not expect, given the book title, is that some essays are not dialogues, but straightforward articles.

Same goes for Avowals, which also veers from the straight and narrow path implied by its title into the format of dialogue or a lecture written entirely in French (years before revised publication in this book).

The bottom line is this: like much of George Moore’s writing, these two books of criticism don’t follow any rules. What they have in common are contrarian principles of self-expression and open aesthetic inquiry.

The essays are “all over the place” yet somehow present in the moment, and always “wholly and irreparably given to art” as Moore wrote about himself. They are confessional, yes, for sure; and also meandering like a conversation you would enjoy with an old friend in the garden or in front of a fire.

French agon

“Shakespeare et Balzac” is the lecture in French that appears as Chapter 13 of Avowals. A bit challenging for me to transcribe with the French alphabet, but a walk in the park compared to another essay that I recently published in the Aesthetics pillar: “Le Poète Anglais Shelley.”

I obtained a human-readable scan of this 1886 article from RetroNews, but since it was not machine-readable, I had to type all 3,200 French words. This was a bona fide agon between my old and young selves.

I think I got it right for the most part. If a French-fluent volunteer wishes to check my transcript for errors and send me corrections, I will be more than a little grateful. Step up on the Volunteer page of the GMi website.

At Le Val Changis

Speaking of context, years ago I visited the elderly Marie Dujardin at her home in a suburb of Paris. She is the unnamed young woman pictured in Joseph Hone’s The Life of George Moore (facing page 400):

She was previously mentioned in Chapter 14 of Conversations in Ebury Street; that chapter was George’s impressionist memoir of Le Val Changis, the home of Marie’s much older husband Édouard Dujardin. The memoir evokes the splendor and charm of the place, where George was an annual guest for several years.

Before my visit ended, Mme. Dujardin pulled a box from under her bed and retrieved the photograph that I placed at the top of this post. I call it Les lauriers sont coupés for obvious reasons. I asked Marie what George was like, as a friend and fellow writer and houseguest, and she answered with only one word: égoïste.

I can relate…

My personal fondness for George began in the early 1970s when Professor Warren Herendeen at New York University told me to read Esther Waters. I was already fascinated by modernism, without even knowing what it was; and this novel, by this author, seemed like the acme of that “transitional” movement.

A few years later, after earning my PhD in England with research on the letters of Moore, and after a postdoc and stints of undergraduate teaching, I decided to leave academia for a lot of good reasons, which we won’t go into. My work on GM ceased and I became just a collector.

Sure as I was and am about the wisdom of that decision, now that I am back in a wholehearted quest for George Moore, I am reliving the fascination that hooked me at the beginning. And thinking about roads not taken, as one should from time to time.

All of this is preamble to a quote I stumbled upon in Chapter 8 of Conversations in Ebury Street, a quote that illustrates a point I like to make about this project: that George Moore is a major writer whose legacy has much, very much to offer readers today.

In this quote he describes himself pivoting from a first choice of career to a second. He did not regret it, he did not second-guess it, but he acknowledged that the experience helped to make the man he became:

A man who leaves his profession faces the world naked and ashamed — ashamed because to leave the road he has chosen to walk in is a confession of failure, naked because he has to put off the old man (exact knowledge), and live henceforth amid ecstasies, dreams, aspirations; humble aspirations, mayhap, but aspirations after all. Think, reader, what a shock it is for a man to leave one self without knowing that he can acquire another self. I shed tears, and the bitterest.

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One Voice

June 5th, 2024
Detail of a picture of Westport House in County Mayo, Ireland, painted and signed by G. Moore in 1761. Property of the Westport Estate.

Hi Reader. This post comes from George Moore Interactive. As usual there are bits and pieces of project news. Please subscribe to receive notifications.
Westport House

The Places gallery of the Iconography of George Moore tells an emerging story about Westport House in County Mayo, Ireland.

Westport House was the ancestral home of Louisa Browne Moore (d. 1860); Louisa was the author George Moore’s grandmother. Her father-in-law, the author’s great grandfather also named George (1729-1799) seems to have painted Westport House in 1761, while he was living nearby at his family estate of Ashbrook. Decades later, after retiring from business in Spain, he created the new demesne of Moore Hall with his considerable fortune. Moore Hall is where his grandson the author was born in 1852 and buried in 1933.

Was that confusing? Here is a birds-eye view of the Moore family tree reflecting movement from Ashbrook to Moore Hall.

I said the great grandfather seems to have painted Westport House because there are two landscape pictures hanging there that are are signed G Moore and dated 1761. A daughter of the eleventh Marquess of Sligo, the artist Sheelyn Browne who grew up at Westport House, remembers her father identifying the painter as a Moore of Moore Hall (so-called starting in 1795; before that, of Ashbrook).

As told in the Iconography, I haven’t found documentary evidence for my attribution of the paintings, but I think it’s plausible. I know of no other G Moore who was close enough to the Brownes to paint their home and create a family heirloom!

Okay, fine, but is the attribution important? I think it is, because it suggests (however faintly) that a century later the author George Moore’s aberrant ambition to become a painter, and his lifelong passion for the visual arts, was an inherited characteristic — likewise inherited by his father before him.

LitCrit

“The fact that he is something of a storm-centre for criticism lends additional interest to his views.” So said the Freeman’s Journal about George Moore in “The Irish Literary Theatre,” 13 November 1901.

In recent weeks I have transcribed several more essays of George Moore’s literary criticism, including the one just quoted, from horrendously muddy facsimiles provided by Newspapers.com and the British Newspaper Archive. These photo images are readable, often just barely, by a diligent human like me but not by a machine — even a smart machine like Textract; hence without manual transcription the essays cannot enter the digital age.

(Cue the trumpets) Stand back everybody, the essays are coming…!

Of course I am biased, but George Moore’s essays — even when pulled out of the mud and laboriously cleaned — are consistently edifying and enjoyable. For example, many essays describing his passion for theater are profoundly original and consistent over the decades they were written.

As the essays begin to circulate online after years in archival limbo, I hope that folks who are interested in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and the National Theatre in London, will learn a little something new about origin stories. George Moore was among the builders! Likewise I want fans of W.B. Yeats — Fintan O’Toole, I’m looking at you — to read Moore’s criticism for a greater appreciation of why Yeats collaborated with him. The tail didn’t wag the dog!

Avowals

In my previous post I wrote that Avowals would be the next book in the Worlds pillar of George Moore Interactive. I messed up. Not remembering Avowals accurately, I assumed it was worldbuilding, but only two of its sixteen chapters are; all the rest are literary criticism.

So for that reason, Chapters 12 and 15 of Avowals are now in the Worlds pillar of GMi; the others are in the Aesthetics pillar as literary criticism of 1919 (the year that Avowals came out). A GMi Kindle edition of Avowals, all 107,000 words, will be published later this month.

Next up in the GMi canon: Conversations in Ebury Street. I expect this book to contain only literary criticism for the Aesthetics pillar and Kindle edition. I may be mistaken. Stay tuned.

By the way, the difference between worldbuilding and criticism was not scrupulously managed by Moore. He tended to mingle genres and not stay in his lane in his writing projects.

So just to be clear: the Worlds pillar of GMi is for George’s imaginative worldbuilding. The Aesthetics pillar is for his philosophy of art, which I have divided into art criticism and literary criticism.

You could say that Worlds is subjective (interior, fictional) writing and Aesthetics is objective (exterior, factual) writing. Not sure that’s always true but it may help GMi readers to perceive the difference though the author himself sometimes ignored it. His memoirs are especially tricky.

One Voice

To me one of the endearing qualities of George Moore is his voice. I find his writing voice to be personal and personable, genuine and candid, coherent and confident, conscientious and consistent, fresh across genres and decades. George the writer was a cool guy.

But what about his speaking voice? How did the living George sound in conversation? I don’t know, and that needs to change.

This project is heading towards George’s re-animation as a life-like character in this website; one who will spontaneously discuss topics with visitors, about his world and theirs.

Sounds like a lot of fun, but how good can it be if the new digital voice doesn’t even try to sound like the actual man?

I will to try to make the written and spoken voices sound alike, and there’s a good chance I’ll succeed. There are two complementary ways forward for re-animating George Moore with one authentic voice.

One way is to use the linguistic resources in George Moore Interactive to fabricate speech that says things the way George did, and would if he were still alive. A voice that gets his idioms, grammar and semantics right.

Another is to sample voices of living human beings whose identity and background have something in common with George’s, and letting a vocal simulation emerge by averaging the samples. Getting his timbre, tone, pace and pronunciation right.

Gathering and averaging samples is necessary because there are no extant recordings of George Moore speaking, at least none that I know of.

However the technologies for synthesizing his voice do exist at companies like Elevenlabs and OpenAI. Here’s what is going to happen with their help:
- GMi will synthesize a voice that simulates the historic George
- That synthetic voice will converse with visitors using generative AI
- The voice will also perform published texts (e.g. Avowals) on command
- And later it will dialogue with other re-animations (Wilde, Joyce etc.)
If you imagine yourself in a three-way conversation (not a chat) with George Moore and William Butler Yeats, you can see the future approach. Fast.

Relevance

I mentioned earlier how Moore’s voice continues to resonate despite the years that have passed since he died. Here’s an example of his rhetoric that snagged my attention in one of those muddy facsimiles:

“People who begin by believing absurdities are soon ready to commit atrocities.” Mr. George Moore on Ireland. The Observer, 29 September 1918.

That aphorism was coined more than a hundred years ago. Here in stop-the-steal USA in 2024, I can totally and anxiously relate. It is so now!

A lot more now is in the pipeline.

Letters to the Editor

I mentioned in an earlier post that letters to the editor would be included in the Letters pillar of George Moore Interactive, and that is true. However I have decided to double-post them in Aesthetics as well, because that is where a large part of their context lives. This process has already begun.

Get Involved

At some point more people like you may become involved with George Moore Interactive. The project is large enough to welcome them, and offer meaningful ways to help.

To that end, here is a Volunteer page where they can step up, if they feel like it. The page lists several ways to donate their time, including “other” if they want to add a new one.

And here is a Donate page for those who have more money than time to spare. Their donations would pay for technical services that are required to build this site (already 900 web pages and growing).

And finally here is a Shop page that announces a commercial initiative. Eventually it will open into a bazaar for themed merchandise and experiential services like education and travel. Buyers and sellers welcome!

See you next time!

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Set Them Free

April 15th, 2024
Undated photograph of Honor Woulfe (private collection). Honora Euphrasia Woulfe (1871-1951) was a vivacious and independent Irish-American business woman and aspiring writer in Waco, Texas when she traveled to Dublin and met George Moore in 1907. It seems they had an intimate affair that inspired George’s fantasy Euphorion in Texas (1914). Their warm friendship continued for the rest of his life. More details
Iconography

In the past month I have added a gallery of Girlfriends to the Iconography of George Moore. These 22 women were his pals, not necessarily his partners; and they seem too few for a guy who claimed he “had thousands of women.”

I’m not sure why George purportedly said that; probably to create a reality distortion field. To judge from his memoirs and biography, he was not horny; he was no Casanova or Marquis de Sade, and Don Juan wasn’t his alter ego.

I think he said it because he wanted to seem familiar and engaged with many women, though not to marry or have children with one.

The Girlfriends gallery may still be incomplete. I am relying on others to identify women I have overlooked. But even as it is now, the gallery indicates that George was enchanted by creativity and spunk rather than curves when he made friends with the opposite sex; he was normally courteous, discreet, empathetic, evidently something of a feminist, and he wasn’t a philanderer.

Another gallery named Cronies is coming soon to the Iconography. Probably men only in that case, and not too many either, because George didn’t seem to encourage male bonding beyond what I would call “work friendships.”

Fair use

Each page of the Iconography of George Moore displays one or more images that I mostly found on the Internet. Most are vintage pictures in the public domain, but that hasn’t prevented some owners of the physical media from claiming copyright.

Not being a lawyer, I wasn’t sure what to make of their claims. Imagine if I likewise claimed copyright in the oil portrait of George Moore by Henry Harris Brown that I own? I would not do that because I have no such right; nor do other owners like me, in my opinion.

That said, the copyright question may be moot within a legal framework of “fair use.” You can read about that in Wikipedia as I did. In order to do the right thing under fair use, I have linked every picture to its owner when I know it; and published only low-resolution reference images that can’t be reused for commercial purposes.

History says the doctrine of “fair use” originated in common law during the 18th and 19th centuries as a way of preventing copyright law from being too rigidly applied and “stifling the very creativity which [copyright] law is designed to foster.” Fostering creativity is important to me, but my primary MO is to find and freely share new knowledge.

Aesthetics

Also in the past month I have acquired 66 additional scans of essays for the Aesthetics pillar of George Moore Interactive. I got them from the British Newspaper Archive, Newspapers.com, and HathiTrust.

Many of the scans are of inferior quality, with muddy and faded text because the pages are lifted from old microfilms. Yes, I can read them on my screen, but no, I can’t run them through a gamut of optical character recognition (OCR) to make them machine readable.

Sample of muddy text from old microfilm. OCR software hates this stuff.

I know of two ways to overcome muddy text in order to kickstart literary legacies in the digital age. One is labor intensive: manually transcribe each publication. The other is efficient: run big batches of crappy text through AWS Textract in order to distill machine-readable text.

The efficient way isn’t free of manual housekeeping chores. But one way or another, these 66 essays will soon show up in the Aesthetics pillar as hitherto uncollected art and literary criticism of George Moore.

In addition to the aforesaid 66, I recently identified 79 articles in 19 vintage periodicals that need to be scanned for the first time ever; 33 of these articles are in the Hawk newspaper, edited by George’s brother Augustus.

No microfilms have paved my way here, so I will have to order new digital scans from institutionally archived hardcopy. This is slow, expensive, a damned nuisance, but probably the only way to finish the Aesthetic pillar with every known article ever written by George Moore.

The only way unless you come to the rescue! In case I have overlooked the existence of previously photographed or scanned periodicals that you have seen, here’s a list of what I need. If I listed anything you recognize, please leave a comment.

Thankfully I have located hardcopy of these 19 periodicals, so come hell or high water I will rope them in. There are four more periodicals that I haven’t located because my friend Edwin Gilcher, Moore’s bibliographer, didn’t say enough about them to tell me where to look.

I am listing them below in case you can tell me what and where they are.
- Burlington (1881)
- Evening Post (1920)
- Phoenix (1899)
- Time (1887)
You can read more details about these four outliers in the Periodical Publications section of the Bibliography.

Bibliography

If you’re very familiar with A Bibliography of George Moore you’ll recall that letters to the editor are included in Periodical Publications. I have excluded letters to the editor from the Aesthetics pillar of this project, feeling that a better place for them is the Letters pillar.

For that reason, you can find hundreds of essays of art and literary criticism in Aesthetics, but no letters to the editor. Such letters are listed in Periodical Publications of the Bibliography but not yet available for your reading pleasure.

Time now to tip my hat to a colleague who has proofread the Bibliography and confirmed a reasonable degree of fidelity to the printed original. She prefers not to be named at present, but her contributions to the mission have been huge.

With proofreading in the rear view mirror, she has turned our attention to collecting new entries for the Bibliography; by new we mean entries that postdate Edwin’s Supplement in 1988.

Are you the editor of an edition of George Moore’s writing that is not in the bibliography? Can you identify particulars of any such editions? If you meet either of these criteria, please email your suggestions to have them included.

Worlds

The Worlds pillar currently has two titles of creative writing: Martin Luther (1879) and A Mummer’s Wife (1885). I created three prototypes of each, not being sure which would best serve their users.

Recently I learned that dynamically embedded Google Docs on GMi are searchable using the Find command of any desktop browser. That was a eureka moment because of my false belief that dynamically embedded Google Docs are not searchable in the WordPress environment. But they are!!

Now that I know better, I have removed one of the prototypes of each title and kept the other two. Prototypes of dynamically embedded Google Docs (in a white box, as shown above) remain; their text can be keyword searched using the Find command in a browser.

By the way, if a user wants to keyword search the entire canon rather than a particular part of it, I have published instructions for how to do that as well.

I should explain that “dynamically embedded” means that text in the white box is filled with a Google Doc in the cloud. That text is easily updated, so readers can be sure that the text on their screen is the latest and greatest.

People who don’t want to keyword search text but simply read an ebook can get one in the Kindle Store. The texts of my Google Docs are identical to the Kindle editions I published; and both are faithful to printed first editions.

Next up in the Worlds pillar is Avowals (1919).

Participatory Publishing

George Moore Interactive is a paragon of “participatory publishing.” That means: I do what I can to make good content accessible and useful to people like you, and I rely on people like you to fill the blanks and connect the dots.

That’s why at the bottom of every GMi page you’ll find an invitation to “Leave a comment.” Not a smile sheet. Heaven forbid! I don’t need to be told what I’ve done well, but rather what I should do better! When you notice opportunities to improve a page, please “leave a comment” at the foot of that page and be specific.

If your feedback is not about a page, but an aspect of the project as a whole, you should surrender to your participatory urge on the Contact page. Write your suggestion, or at least identify an opportunity to do better, and I shall do my best.

Pedagogical Dilemma

Here is an interesting quote from “Llamas, Pizzas, Mandolins,” by Paul Taylor reviewing The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, by Fei-Fei Li :

Li’s conviction that universities are the best place to make a difference in AI is rather wonderful. I only wish I had a clearer idea about how we should be educating the young people who come to us, now that so many of the skills we teach are susceptible to automation.
London Review of Books, Vol. 46 No. 6 · 21 March 2024

Now that so many skills being taught are susceptible to automation, what are your ideas about how to educate young people? Mine are implied in the title of this post, which you may recognize from an old song:
```
If you wanna keep something precious
Gotta lock it up and throw away the key
You want to hold on to your possession
Don't even think about me
If you love somebody
If you love someone
If you love somebody
If you love someone, set them free
(Sting)
```
Folks who enjoy George Moore’s literary legacy probably love him. Love is a strange word to use for our feelings, but I think it fits.

And if you accept my premise, that people like ourselves love George, then also accept Sting’s advice and set him free. Empower him and his readers to meet each other on their own terms, for their own reasons, and then let them go. Magic awaits!

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- georgemooreinteractive.blog where I publish newsy posts
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Sometime after this post goes live, I plan to export all my posts to the .org site where they will join the seven pillars.

If you already subscribe to this blog and wish to continue receiving email notifications, please resubscribe to .org on the home page. That way you’ll continue to be notified when new posts go live.
People, Places, Texts

March 23rd, 2024

Édouard Manet, Self-Portrait (1879) in the Alexandra and Steven A. Cohen Collection (private but not secret). This portrait of the artist, painted around the same time as the artist’s portraits of George Moore, is “reciprocal.” It shows Édouard as he appeared to George, when George was being painted by Édouard. Such reciprocal images are a designed feature of the Iconography of George Moore.

I recently hung a lot more pictures in the digital galleries of George Moore Interactive. The Iconography has grown.

If you follow this project, you already know that most of the extant portraits of George Moore have been roped in. A major one still eluding discovery, in some private collection in the United States, is a portrait by John Singer Sargent. Existence, not in doubt; current whereabouts, unknown.

A different major one, a picture that Bruce Arnold rated as William Orpen’s “masterpiece,” the whereabouts of which were previously unknown, has now suddenly come to light. Eureka! and moreover to colorful light, because my colleague Michael O’Shea went to London to view and make a color snap of it.

Having found that elusive masterpiece — a picture that Moore himself commissioned and owned for thirty years — I am frustrated because though I know where it hangs, I can’t tell you. The owner wants to remain anonymous. But I hope that a museum in Ireland will one day buy it, clean it thoroughly, and hang it in a public gallery where everybody can enjoy it.

Pictures of George Moore are all very well, but the Iconography has grown still larger. It now includes portraits — many of them self-portraits — of artists who knew George as a friend and painted, sketched or photographed him. Moreover each portrait of the artist dates from the time of his or her contact with George Moore. My goal was to show the artist that Moore was watching while the artist was painting him. Reciprocal images? Mission accomplished.

An artist picturing George Moore is analogous to a publisher bringing out his texts. Scholars often look beyond publishers as though they were not central to building literary legacies, when in fact there would be no such legacies without the direct, collaborative, often crucial involvement of publishers.

For this reason, I have brought George’s publishers in from the cold. I have curated a gallery of publishers who worked closely with him — from William Tinsley all the way to William Heinemann. You will now find them in the Iconography, sometimes accompanied by book designs they fostered.

I have not included publishers that never met George Moore, since they didn’t actually work alongside him, but some curious impulse urges me to add Rupert Hart-Davis and Colin Smythe, both of whom deserve a place in this pantheon. If there were more publishers like Rupert and Colin today, enduring literary legacies would be found in many more bookstores and libraries.

With artists and publishers now hanging in GMi galleries, I could hardly ignore George’s family members. After all, some were generators of his DNA, others were stakeholders in his legacy.

That said, you can now find a Moore family tree in the Iconography, going backwards and forwards from grands and parents to siblings and their offspring. I included Nancy Cunard in the tree, though Nancy herself was known to disagree. I think George would approve.

While still more people are lining up for inclusion in the Iconography, my attention has been diverted from them to places where George Moore lived and visited. It may be wondered what value and meaning attaches to a place where a great writer was situated at various moments in his life. I am not prepared to explain it, but I feel sure that place matters to the writer, to the writing, and to readers like me who want to grasp the real world lurking behind the author’s worldbuilding.

The Places gallery of the Iconography now shows all the homes and other buildings where Moore literally wrote things: all the return addresses in his letters. Most of the images are vintage; the rest depict buildings whose appearance has changed little since Moore was there. Just ignore the cars parked on the curb.

With the Places gallery, it is now a bit easier to see the world surrounding the author as he himself saw it; and it will become easier still when I add more places. My initial foray was to capture the places where Moore wrote; next is to capture places he is known to have frequented but didn’t write from.

The first of this kind are homes of Lady Cunard after she left Nevill Holt. Her homes were never George’s return address, and her biographers and Moore’s have mostly ignored them, but we may feel certain that he was a frequent visitor, and his time in those houses was extremely important to him.

Textract

“Amazon Textract goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) by extracting relationships and structures between elements from documents.”

That quite remarkable claim is made almost in passing by Amazon Web Services about a business application GMi will use to “kickstart literary legacies in the digital age.”

The claim is remarkable because it captures what may be the essence of textual scholarship and literary criticism as practiced in the academy; but in this case it is practiced by machines in the cloud, to levels of accuracy and integration undreamed of in old schools.

“When extracting information from documents, Amazon Textract returns a confidence score for everything it identifies so that you can make informed decisions about how to use the results. For example, if you … want to ensure high accuracy, you can flag any item with a confidence score below 95 percent to be reviewed by a human.”

Is your jaw beginning to drop? If not, maybe you should read that quote again. It bolsters the first claim by saying that machines performing textual analysis (and literary criticism) perform a task that is traditionally delegated to the slowest and most prejudiced humans in our world: peer reviewers.

Artificially intelligent machines tell us, the human consumers of their labor, how trustworthy their work is (according to numerous objective measures derived from machine learning on a vast scale). The machines tell us, in effect, “these are the things I feel very confident about, you can depend on them; these other things are probably okay but you should investigate to make sure of them.”

“…many text-extraction use cases and applications require humans to review low-confidence predictions to ensure that the results are correct. But building custom human reviewing systems is time consuming and expensive. Amazon Textract is directly integrated with Amazon A2I for you to implement human-review extracted text with low confidence scores from documents. You can choose from a pool of reviewers within your organization, or access the workforce of over 500,000 independent contractors who are already performing ML tasks through Amazon Mechanical Turk.”

I do not expect anybody reading this blog to appreciate the disruption in that statement, but it is epic. It signals that slow and labor intensive work of assuring the quality of a literacy legacy can be speeded up: first by making the process of troubleshooting significantly faster and more efficient, and second by ironing out the digital wrinkles with a host of inexpensive, on-call human helpers.

Some might say, “why would I assign that work to low-cost skilled helpers when I can get it done for free by unskilled students?” The answer may be that the academic-industrial process in the humanities is not going to last forever; some believe that it has already collapsed; and therefore new ways of doing important work at scale are needed.

Evelyn Innes and Sister Teresa

Until recently, if you asked me which of George Moore’s novels are least susceptible to kickstarting in the digital age, I would have answered Evelyn Innes (1898) and Sister Teresa (1901). They are just so… dated?

That was before I encountered Catherine Coldstream, the author of Cloistered: My Years as a Nun (2024). I am not saying that Catherine embodies Evelyn, but rather that she seems to channel much of what George Moore was concerned about when he conceived his symbolist duology.

This resonance of Moore’s legacy with contemporary dilemmas has always struck me as the most overlooked quality of his canon, in an age that prefers to deconstruct recondite authors in (usually vain) hopes of finding something interesting to talk about. Catherine Coldstream has made me feel that even the most recalcitrant of Moore’s novels is poised for a fresh start.

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Let’s Get Corporeal

November 30th, 2023

Photograph of the “Pagan” circa 1880 aet. 28. It was published in monochrome in Joseph Hone’s The Life of George Moore (1936). I colorized my scan with a neural filter in Photoshop in order to give the young man a pulse. Works for me as a prototype, but more advanced technology and a larger dataset will generate much better results.
The whereabouts of the original photograph are unknown. Did Hone get it from a family member or from Moore’s executor? It looks like it came from an album found in Moore’s home after he died. And what happened to the photograph after Hone’s publisher Gollancz copied it?
A picture is worth a thousand words, but it often poses a thousand questions. As I give free and easy access to all extant pictures of George Moore, innumerable people may help each other find some answers.

A human mind does more than reason; it exists in time, and reckons with life and death, and builds a world around itself. It gathers meaning, as if by gravity. That’s according to Joshua Rothman in “Metamorphosis,” a profile of Geoffrey Hinton in the New Yorker, 20 November 2023.

Mr. Rothman was referring to the development of generative artificial intelligence — the kind that can pass the Turing test, a technology that may save us from ourselves or hasten our ineluctable end. I resonate with the quote about Hinton because it also says a lot about Moore.

By Moore I don’t mean a cardboard cutout fabricated by scholars. I mean a man who was present in his moment, made a living from intricate worldbuilding, created estimable meaning, and bravely, sensitively, often humorously reckoned with life and death.

His almost final reckoning took place on 21 January 1933 — almost because, thanks to scientists like Geoffrey Hinton and builders like yours truly, his reanimation is being scheduled. George Moore is coming back to continue having conversations in Ebury Street.

One dimension of reanimation — the most basic and yet complex — is the corporeal. It’s one thing to interact with an intelligent chatbot, where each participant writes one part in a conversation and reads another. It’s quite a different thing to encounter a reanimated George right before your eyes, to watch his facial expressions and body language, to hear the timbre and inflections in his voice, to notice what he’s wearing and the kind of place he lives in.

All of that would be taken for granted in a real conversation; in a virtual one, it cannot be taken for granted, but must be created.

I’ve taken a baby step towards such creation by moving a lot of pictures of George Moore online; as many as I could find pending further research and a little help from my friends.

This part of the People section of George’s Iconography presents the images of 56 makers (artists and photographers) who viewed the living man in his natural element 170 times; plus two makers who imagined what that would have been like. The number of makers is actually a bit larger than 58 because one named Anonymous is 12 different people; I just don’t know who they are. Yet.

Though the ultimate purpose of these pictures is to ballast digital reanimation, I am publishing them in a way that humans can browse.

The pictures are grouped by maker, and the makers are in alphabetical order. Within each group, the pictures are in chronological order; some pictures are precisely dated, others approximately.

George’s age is appended to each date so visitors don’t have to figure that out. The pictures that have no sort of date are in alphabetical order following the dated ones.

Each page includes a link to a maker’s biography. I think it’s important to know whose eyes we’re looking through when we view a subject.

Other information includes picture title, which in most cases I invented; the dimensions in inches and centimeters; and the medium. When the owner of a picture has a webpage about it, I include a link to that page and also a link to the owner’s organization. Likewise if an auctioneer has a webpage touting a picture.

In addition, I have included my description of each picture. You might think this is unnecessary since the picture itself is right there on the page, but I think a description helps visitors notice details that might otherwise be ignored.

I have appended provenance, exhibition and publication history either by linking to an owner’s page or writing what I know (very little, in most cases).

The images are thumbnails suitable for reference. If visitors want high-resolution or rights to reproduce, they can contact owners to request them. If an owner isn’t known, that means rights and image quality aren’t negotiable.

Hard as I tried to get the pictures right, I have zero doubt that I made mistakes of commission and omission. For that reason, as always in George Moore Interactive, visitors who know more or better than I can use Leave a Reply at the bottom of any page, or the Contact page itself, to improve my awareness, accuracy and understanding. I promise to update the pages and acknowledge each individual’s help.

Next up for the People section of Iconography are pictures of family members, friends and associates. In these sections, I may include less metadata with the pictures, but enough to guide the further inquiries of those who are interested.

The overall goal for pictures of people is to show what George Moore looked like throughout his life, and show how others looked who were important to him when he knew them. To visualize and humanize his legacy.

Returning to the subject of ultimate purpose, I’ll mention that my main client for assembling and dating and describing all of these pictures is not people like you, or any other people for that matter.

My main client is a neural network born of the cloud that will take all of the corporeal details of Moore and his world into account and construct a high-fidelity model of the man — how he looks, how he acts, how he talks. That model, endowed with a voice that sounds an awful lot like George did in life, will be the one who hosts your own conversations in Ebury Street. Building a world around itself, gathering meaning, engaging you as if by gravity.

Worldbuilding

In a sidetrack while curating pictures, I transposed the first chapter of the first edition of A Mummer’s Wife, Moore’s second novel, into Google Docs. It comes to 5,719 words including front matter.

This exercise was a proof of concept to estimate the time and effort needed to transpose all of Moore’s worldbuilding into Google Docs.

The bad news is that transposing a book is fairly laborious; the good news is that it’s enjoyable and entirely feasible. By the time we meet again, the whole of A Mummer’s Wife should be online and ready for ingestion into a model.

Thanks to a gracious volunteer in Dublin, next up will be Martin Luther, a title that has never been digitized to my knowledge. Obscure and precious as it has always been, Martin Luther is now in the pipeline.
Publish Imperishably

July 23rd, 2023
The Irish Storyteller, by Philip Wilson Steer. This undated, hitherto unattributed portrait was likely painted in George Moore’s home in Dublin in the early 1900s, around the time that Moore dedicated Reminiscences of the Impressionist Painters (1906) to Steer. The picture was mentioned to D.S. MacColl by Vernon Wethered (see MacColl’s Life Work and Setting of Philip Wilson Steer (1945), p. 66). Wethered recalled that a Steer portrait was published without attribution as the frontispiece in one of George Moore’s books. Only one such portrait was ever published, in The Untilled Field & The Lake, Carra Edition (1923), in sepia tone. I am especially fond of this picture because it has the convivial personality so often and fondly remembered by GM’s friends. Present whereabouts unknown.

Nine months after conceiving George Moore Interactive, I’m getting ready to pull something out of the oven. Not the vivacious embodiment of a beloved modernist author — the virtual resuscitation that I proclaimed in Kickstarting Literary Legacies. Gestation of that marvel continues apace, towards a firm but still distant due date.

The approaching milestone is mundane, if not boring. It’s a prototype of sorts, with the faint heartbeat of a “minimum viable product”: the online publication of qualified content with rudiments of interactivity.

The point of publishing something that’s neither finished nor ready for showtime is to facilitate improvement. By putting a body of hot and freely accessible work on the Internet, I may increase the chances (say from 0% to maybe 3%) of exciting early adopters to view interesting things, take it for a spin, identify systemic defects and limitations, and challenge me to build it better.

Forthcoming “interesting things” are the extensive foundations of three pillars: Iconography, Aesthetics, and Bibliography. Textual, quantitative and pictorial data that form these pillars will appear online as a prototype, in formats that are readable and, to a limited degree, useful. Early adopters (like you?) who engage with the prototype will be able to find, read, and cross-reference data, and insert comments. As such they will become collaborators, stakeholders, and individual investors of intellectual capital.

That is, if anybody shows up! As groundbreaking as this project is, I am ever mindful of Linda Ronstadt’s mashed potatoes. (Google that if you don’t know what I mean.)

Initial objectives for the prototype include:
1. Clear, accurate, human-readable text (the opposite of what is usually found — with difficulty — in digital archives)
2. Machine readable (learnable) text (practically never found in digital archives)
3. Searchable text (which is part of being machine readable, but geared to human users)
4. Updatable, correctable and self-correcting text (enabling crowdsourcing of quality improvement
5. Text that can be commented by readers (members of the crowd to whom quality is sourced)
6. Text that can be hyperlinked to anything on the public web (including aforementioned barely legible source material)
7. Text that can be illustrated with digital images (because so much that sums up to “George Moore” is visual)
8. Text that can be performed (read aloud) by a machine voice (for accessibility and also, eventually, for simulation)
9. Text that can be automatically personalized for individuals (enabling each to build a unique perspective on the legacy)
10. Text that can be exported and printed (enabling migration to external apps and use cases)
11. Text that is free of embedded exegesis (helping impede or at least slow “the imposture of the expert”)
12. Text that can be translated by machine into other languages (however imprecise, still better than no translation)
Early adopters will evaluate the prototype against those initial objectives. A few advanced publishing objectives are beyond the scope of this prototype, including:
1. Dynamic generation of web pages
2. Elegant (more than readable) page format and typography
3. Integrated graphic, video and audio data
4. Responsive page layout (landscape and portrait)
5. High-levels of interactivity (e.g. simulation)
The three pillars Iconography, Aesthetics, and Bibliography must wait for later developments before integrating imagery, but for now will at least link to many of the pictorial objects that Moore created or wrote about. For example, where he wrote about specific paintings, the prototype will provide means to view the paintings even though users will have to open a different app to do so.

The prototype Bibliography will include contents of Edwin Gilcher’s two books in one unified volume (actually, the prototype comprises several digital documents that include all of Edwin’s published data). Errors in his work are corrected but not definitively, pending crowdsourced review.

What’s not in the prototype Bibliography are data that Edwin gathered during the years he continued his research after publication; nor does it include bibliographical entries that postdate Edwin’s death more than 20 years ago. That may be the target of a research team that hasn’t yet formed, and perhaps doesn’t need to form if I crowdsource the task (I think I can, as the Red Engine said).

There are three use cases for this prototype. One consists of unsupervised, self-directed consumers of literature and art: the fandom of George Moore — for upwards of 90 years rumored not to exist, but I suspect it’s out there, somewhere. Another use case consists of academically trained scholars — professors and students, librarians and booksellers — whom the prototype may benefit professionally. Another use case consists of AI developers, many of whom are scrambling to monetize information like that being developed by George Moore Interactive. Some may find the approach taken here to be inspired and pragmatic at some level; a few may want to make the approach work for their own projects while helping to make my project better.

Prototyping and crowdsourcing are different from the time-honored diktat of “publish or perish.” So much of what appears under that cruel regime is stillborn or gets overlooked or forgotten (in arts and sciences alike).

In contrast I mean to publish imperishably. What does that mean? It means that the structure of information hardens but content and techniques of communication do not; imperishably means dynamic and evolving, as in forever young. As an information system, imperishably grows by building on itself and through active connections to data beyond itself.

In a manner of speaking, to publish imperishably is to suppress my editorial ego (alas!) and make room in George Moore Interactive for the talents of others who think differently.

A Voice that Breathed o’er Eden?

I’ve mentioned from time to time that an aim of George Moore Interactive — beyond the prototype, beyond the data — is to reanimate the author digitally. A big part of that is making his voice audible, even though there are no sound recordings that provide a model and no living person who ever heard him speak.

Bringing his voice back to life, so it can speak for itself, will be huge creative fun. It will draw from witness testimony like the following.

He talked along in gusts. Then for a long enchanted stretch it was like the waters of ”The Brook Kerith” flowing by. Very often he paused to correct his own words, editing his speech as though it had been a manuscript; blue-penciling an infelicitous word and underlining its substitute with fine emphasis. It was like reading long passages from one of George Moore’s exquisitely worded later works – and something infinitely more, the spirit of George Moore speaking for itself – which my notes cannot begin to express. Then we settled down to cigarettes and a genuine “conversation in Ebury Street” that was less didactic, less formal, but which bristled with George Mooreisms; taking pot-shots at the conventions both past and present, he chuckling at every coddled white dove he brought down.

From Henry Albert Phillips, “Mr. George Moore Vents His Spleen On the Age We Live In,” New York Times Book Review, 12 June 1927, page 2.
Scrubbing the Data

April 26th, 2023
Une Académie de Peinture. Salon de 1876, by Rodolphe Julian (1839-1907) depicts the interior of Julian’s studio during a life class. George Moore aet. 24 stands in the middle ground right of center, in profile turned to his right, his right hand raised to a canvas. The tall man in the farthest background above Moore is Lewis Welden Hawkins (1849–1910), Moore’s flatmate and fellow student at Académie Julian. This is the earliest known portrait painting of Moore. A few years later he fictionalized Hawkins as Lewis Seymour in A Modern Lover and recalled their formative Parisian adventures in Confessions of a Young Man. This print is courtesy of the Louvre. Present whereabouts of Julian’s oil painting unknown. I intend to find it.

Hi Reader! Hauling George Moore across the digital divide takes a lot of housekeeping. By that I mean cleaning, repairing, correcting, polishing, replacing, filling in, fleshing out, and testing his data.

This may be true of other modernist masters, but maybe not as true. For years they’ve been serviced by an academic-industrial complex of investigators, librarians, curators, collectors, editors and publishers. Their data have been thoroughly scrubbed, but Moore’s have not.

Lately I’ve been scrubbing the Iconography of George Moore, which I myself originated as a lecture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a paper in the Irish Arts Review. It was a simple and straightforward thing to give a lecture to listeners and write a paper for readers; it’s another thing entirely to build a dynamic database for users. That’s what I’m doing now.

To build it well I first had to decide how people of various stripes may use the Iconography, then design so that every foreseeable use case is supported. Supporting usage is nothing like the pedagogic hustle of informing and teaching. Design in this instance is less about imparting knowledge to people than enabling and rewarding their behavior. It depends on identifying the structural affordances in a data set, making them apparent, and facilitating their operation.

For this fairly large database of pictures my scrub involves folding hard and soft facts into resources that increase their purport. That’s different from scholarly exegesis; it’s more about enlarging a picture’s intrinsic meaning to include causes and effects. It mandates going beyond classic footnotes that reveal sources of evidence to embedding links that trigger and elucidate the relationships inherent in, and with, the data — some of which are obvious, many of which are not.

Each picture in my digital Iconography of George Moore — including images of other people, of places and of things — is a manifold visual datum: a thing to view the way artwork on the wall or floor of a gallery is viewed. You can look at each picture and reflect. If that’s all you care to do, you’re then ready to move on.

That said, since these pictures are in cyberspace rather than on a wall or floor, you have more ways to engage. Because they are interactive, you can interrogate, manipulate, interpret, order and align them. Each picture can merely be viewed but also used as a tool for exploration.

By scrubbing visual, textual and quantitative metadata, I have absorbed lots of physical properties and social history into my iconographic records, and given the whole project a pulse. Even if it’s not definitive, each record will facilitate every use case that I have foreseen.

So far then, scrubbing the data involves encoding, for each of the hundreds of pictures, the following metadata:
1. Unique Identifier ….. a GMI catalog number
2. Category ….. genre, kind or class of the picture
3. Name of Creator ….. who made the thing
4. Link to Creator ….. Wikipedia entry or surrogate
5. Name of Picture ….. in my iconography (not the given name)
6. Link to Picture ….. external URL
7. Thumbnail ….. low resolution PNG
8. Date of Picture ….. when the picture was made
9. Aetatis ….. age of George Moore in a picture
10. Locus ….. where he was situated at that time
11. Medium ….. materials used to make the picture
12. Dimensions ….. imperial and metric
13. Description ….. the picture’s alt text
14. Literary References ….. expert commentary
15. Related Pictures ….. similar or comparable
16. Published ….. by whom, in what and when, with page number
17. Owner ….. a person or institution
18. Collection ….. the owner’s metadata
19. Location ….. where the owner keeps the picture
20. Contact Information ….. of the owner
21. Notes ….. ad hoc
You may have noticed that high-resolution TIFs of pictures are not on my list, though they are needed for some use cases. There are legal and financial reasons for excluding them from the Iconography. That said, with metadata that I do provide, you’ll be able to request a high-res image directly from an owner.
Man of Wax

March 19th, 2023

“OUR LAST VICTORIAN“
A Fantastic Portrait in Wax, at the Grafton Galleries.

This amusing little effigy is one of Mr. Edmund Dulac’s exhibits at the National Portrait Society’s Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries. It is carried out in wax, is beautifully clad in an evening suit of the correct period, and stands under a glass case with a wreath suspended over its head, labelled “Our Last Victorian.” Readers will recognise it as being an amusing vision of Mr. George Moore. It stands in the entrance to the Long Gallery, as if to say “Salve” ‘to those who enter.
Reported in The Sketch (London), November 2, 1921
✽ ✽
This doll and other works were owned by Edmund Dulac’s biographer, the late Dr. Colin White of Leeds, when we corresponded in the 1980s. I’m now in touch with the University of Leeds Library about objects they inherited from Dr. White and also about contacting his estate to learn the present whereabouts of other objects.

Hi Reader! My updated and expanded iconography of George Moore lists more than 180 images of the peculiar man in various media: oil, watercolor, pastel, crayon, charcoal, ink, graphite, etching, bronze, doll, photogravure, photograph, lithograph, newsprint.

Have I left something out? Certainly, but you get the idea. There are lots of portraits, made in lots of different ways, by lots of artists. Which begs the question: Why?

George Moore was famous for much of his life, but he wasn’t a celebrity. Fans didn’t hang his picture on the wall or paste it into a scrapbook. (Ahem, full disclosure: four framed pictures of George Moore are hanging on my walls, and hundreds of snaps are cached in my archival scrapbooks. That’s an anomaly.)

Moore was not a show-biz celebrity, nor was he beautiful or handsome or even cute. Setting aside his literary legacy, it’s hard to see what attracted artists to him.

The French impressionist Edouard Manet compared Moore’s face to “a squashed yolk of egg.” The French post-impressionist Jacques Blanche compared him to “a drowned fish.” The Victorian sexologist Havelock Ellis said he looked like an Egyptian cat mummy in the British Museum. The cosmopolitan post-impressionist Walter Sickert figured him as an “intoxicated mummy.” W.B. Yeats saw Moore as “a man carved out of a turnip.”

Ergo: artists did not put this strange-looking individual on a pedestal. And yet they did!

No art historian has explained why artists clung to Moore, and that’s too bad. When one of our great museums gets around to mounting an exhibition of George Moore portraits, a curator will perhaps tell us why there are so many.

If I remember correctly my hurried, naive monograph about George Moore and art (in the Irish Arts Review of 1985) took his images for granted. I merely cataloged them (overlooking much). I didn’t ask why there were a lot. I didn’t speculate about their meaning and value for people today (including myself). This was an oversight that I’ll now start to repair.

Why did artists depict George Moore with uncommon persistence? One answer was given by Max Beerbohm, the esteemed English man of letters and artist who drew Moore again and again, and yet again. Max wrote in The Atlantic Magazine (Boston) of December 1950:

When, where, did I first see my friend George Moore? It is odd that I do not remember my first sight of him. For I am sure there never was in heaven or on earth any one at all like him. It is conceivable that in the waters that are under the earth there may, vaguely luminous, be similar forms, and — stay, it isn’t odd, after all, this lapse of my memory. It is explained by that quality of luminous vagueness which Moore’s presence always had. There always was an illusory look about him the diaphanous, vaporous, wan look of an illusion conjured up for us, perhaps by means of mirrors and by a dishonourable spiritualist. There was something blurred about him: his outlines seemed to merge into the air around him. … Mentally, as well as physically, he was unique. He was always the same, and yet always new. … The outer and inner demeanour of almost every man is variable, changing with the circumstances he is in and the sort of people who are about him. Except Oscar Wilde, I never knew a man whose tone of mind and mode of expression, everywhere, and with every one, were so invariable as Moore’s.

Invariable and yet always new! Taking Max’s word as gospel truth (the right and proper thing to do), I would argue that the reason artists gravitated to George Moore is comparable to why the literary avant garde gravitated to William Butler Yeats. Each man was charismatic, evidently given to exuding a sort of spiritual and ethereal air that fascinated those who met them. Each was present in the human moment while navigating a cosmic arc.

And that basically is why there are lots of images of George Moore, made in lots of different ways, by lots of artists. In person he was unique, authentic, “fantastic,” and entirely the real deal.

Éirinn go Brách

Normally I devote this blog to George Moore, but want to make an exception to tout Fintan O’Toole’s “personal history of modern Ireland,” a weighty book named We Don’t Know Ourselves (2021).

O’Toole writes with refreshing candor, clarity, vigor, and without a trace of sentimentality that often colors recollections of Ireland. He being about my age (a wee bit younger), his book strikes me as a testament — as in eyewitness testimony — of the Ireland that I experienced starting as a student.

Not being Irish, nor having any Irish connections, Celtic proclivities aren’t baked into my DNA as they are for members of the tribe and diaspora. I went there for the first time in 1976, on a ferry from Holyhead in Wales, knowing a little about the Moores of Moore Hall but nothing about their country. Within hours of my arrival to conduct research, I was fairly confused by everything. The environment seemed superficially familiar and profoundly strange, weird, unbelievable.

My sensations of cognitive dissonance summed up to an answer I kept getting in response to questions I asked, even the simplest, most basic questions; an answer that epitomized my uniquely Irish experience:

“It is and it isn’t.”

Any closed-ended question you can think of, that in other places gets a yes or a no or a maybe, in Ireland got all three at the same time: “It is and it isn’t.”

Fintan O’Toole never utters that phrase in his awesome book, but he explains what it means and why it makes sense. He shows how Irish culture is rarely what it seems and is often what it tries to hide. He has written, far and away, the best book about Ireland I have read.

I hope We Don’t Know Ourselves inspires an American memoirist to write likewise about the United States. It’s dreadfully apparent these days that we too don’t know ourselves, for similar or analogous reasons.

By the way, I emailed Fintan O’Toole to ask his opinion of another great Irish memoirist, the author of Hail and Farewell. I’ll let you know if he answers.

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