Category: Worlds

De-expurgation

December 19th, 2024
Norham Castle, Sunrise (1845), oil on canvas by J.M.W. Turner, in the Tate Britain, London (Wikimedia Commons).
I was wondering about imagery that could symbolize the word RESURGAM. What are things that rise, that give and renew life, that help people know themselves and the objects of there desires? The sun, of course! The sun also rises every 24 hours and performs uncountable miracles without blinking, while we do other things. Having settled on the sun as my thematic image for Resurgam NFP, almost immediately I thought of the artist J.M.W. Turner. He was an unclassifiable genius who painted Impressionist art before there was Impressionist art — “My job is to paint what I see, not what I know.” Turner’s aesthetics and practices resonate with George Moore’s, and George fully appreciated Turner’s brilliance. So here is a sunrise by Turner, one that George himself enjoyed looking at, one that says with colors as George said with words, “RESURGAM — I shall rise again.”
Tis the Season

As we approach the dawn of 2025, today I’ll begin by thanking my heroes — volunteers and donors — who stepped up in 2024 to help the cause. I want to see more of them as GMi flourishes next year. Whether or not I do, I warmly appreciate their demonstrated good will and support.
1. Samuel Becker
2. Charles Deane
3. Kheir Fakhreldin
4. Kathi Griffith
5. Mark Samuels Lasner
6. Ken Long
7. Richard Miles
8. Michael O’Shea
9. Michele Reardon
10. Claudette Walsh
11. James Walter
As of this writing, GMi has published 1,286 meaty web pages and 11 full-length ebooks of George Moore’s first editions. Heroes, we’re amazing!

Resurgam NFP

In November, I announced the formation of Resurgam NFP. I have now completed registration of the new not-for-profit corporation in the State of Illinois.

Resurgam has a board of directors, articles of incorporation, a federal employer identification number, and a web domain; website to follow.

Bylaws

My very next step is to draft the bylaws. These are principles and practices that will govern Resurgam in the conduct of business and fulfillment of its mission.

Part of writing bylaws is deciding the kinds of people who may join Resurgam as officers and members of the corporation. Resurgam is going to employ a few talented individuals with credentials in:
- tax accounting
- legal council
- communications
- grantseeking
- technology assessment
None will start with a salary; each will begin as a volunteer although in time I expect officers and members of the corporation to be compensated in line with our not-for-profit charter.

We’re Hiring

Do you have time and talent to spare for a cause? If you have a passion for art and literature of yesteryear, and if your skills happen to align with the functions listed above, please contact me to discuss joining Resurgam.

I should add that Resurgam has formed to help kickstart the literary legacy of George Moore, but not only for that. The mission is more inclusive: to provide funding for legacies in addition to George’s.

For example, I would love to do something for the legacy of Joris-Karl Huysmans of France, Robert Louise Stevenson of Scotland, and Ralph Waldo Emerson of the United States. All three are literary titans whose fame is not matched by their accessibility and utility. They and many more like them are ready for a kickstart in the digital age.

You may have different favorites whom you’re working on or wondering about. Resurgam NFP will soon be able to welcome your proposal.

Tax Exemption

After Resurgam directors sign off on our bylaws, my next step will be to prepare an application to the United States Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status. Compared with formation at the state level, IRS certification at the national level is more complex and deliberate.

Not a problem though. I have studied the instructions, they are not rocket science. I plan to finish my IRS application by the end of March 2025. After approval, institutional grantseeking will begin.

Targeting

Even before bylaws are written and tax exemption is secure, I will join Forefront, the organzation here in Chicago that helps grantmakers and grantseekers find each other.

Having dabbled in grantseeking in the past, I know how bewildering and time-consuming it can get; like navigating a maze! Forefront will provide Resurgam with community, context and counsel for finding our way to the money. By the time Resurgam is tax-exempt, we should have a qualified list of grantmakers to approach and an understanding of how to approach them.

Off Comes a Fig Leaf

George Moore serialized his freshest essays about Ireland in a French newspaper, Le Figaro, July-September 1886. He wrote his essays in English; his handwritten text was translated into French by somebody named M.F. Rabbe and published under a collective title: Lettres sur I’lrlande.

(By the way, if you know anything about M.F. Rabbe, you are way ahead of me. Like Bernard Lopez, Rabbe is an important figure in George’s biography who is AWOL from the historical record.)

Soon after Lettres sur I’lrlande, George augmented his series for book publication. Still written in English, and still translated by M.F. Rabbe, the expanded essays were published as Terre d’Irlande in Paris, March 1887.

Not long after Terre d’Irlande, George’s original English manuscript was published in London as Parnell and his Island, May 1887.

Or was it? The correct answer is, not quite.

By their own account, his London publisher Messrs. Sonnenschein “mutilated” the text of Terre d’Irlande before publishing the first and only English edition. Their reasons were commercial rather than literary.

By self-censoring the text, the publisher hoped to avoid yet another book ban by English booksellers and librarians. All of George’s books had been banned up to that time. (And guess what: the expurgated Parnell and his Ireland would be banned as well!)

Ban or no ban, on its way from Terre d’Irlande to Parnell and his Island, George Moore’s manuscript was expurgated before it was printed, without his help and over his objections.

No unexpurgated text of Parnell and his Island has ever been published. But GMi is about to change that.

Our first step will be to make a GMi ebook of Terre d’Irlande. An ebook will kickstart the French text in the digital age so it can be treated to the same textual analysis as the rest of the canon, by humans and machines.

The second step, a bit more nuanced, will be to translate Terre d’Irlande into something that looks, sounds and feels like George Moore’s English. That process will require preserving the author’s unexpurgated English, and restoring the expurgated text from the earlier French translation.

Because no manuscript is extant, it will be necessary to synthesize two different printed texts, in two languages, that have survived.

The printed texts are:
1. The augmented second publication in French
2. The expurgated third publication in English
I’m unsure whether it is also necessary to analyze the earliest serialized text in French, which may be regarded as the true first. That is to be determined.

Parnell and his Island (1887) and Confessions of a Young Man (1888) are rarely read together, but they’re really two peas in a pod.

They’re both autobiographical, both meditations on the author’s origins and values, both written at about the same age, both published at nearly the same time by the same publisher, and both for the same purpose: to turn the attention of a realistic novelist inward, upon himself, and to make of himself an entirely new aesthetic proposition.

Both of these books belong side by side on your digital shelf.

Progress on Letters

The Letters pillar of GMi now encompasses 1863-1887. All extant letters written during the emergence of George Moore as a memoirist are freely available. They’re somewhat revealing, helpful to a degree, and will become even more helpful when the letters of 1888 are added. Those are already on the workbench.

Speaking of “his Island“

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (2018) is by Patrick Radden Keefe. I haven’t read the book, but I recently watched a nine-hour series based on it that is streaming on Hulu. It is brilliant, but so very, very uncomfortable!

My own first visit to Ireland occurred in 1976, only four years after the pivotal murder of the book’s title. Struggling to sense and relate to Irish culture, which was all new to me, I remember saying to myself without knowing why: “I have come among crazies; this alien nation proverbially “is and it isn’t.”

Say Nothing reprises that feeling, only with the book and film, it is possible for me to see more behind the curtain and begin to understand behavior that, at face value, didn’t compute.

One example of “it is and it isn’t” comes at the end of every episode of the series, when a disclaimer concerning Gerry Adams fills the screen.

Indeed, Adams was and he wasn’t, is and he isn’t. Or as George Moore may say when we’ve re-animated him, not everything has changed on his Island.

More books for George

Soon after my November newsletter, I finished reading Certain Artists, by Joris-Karl Huysmans, in the vivid translation by Brendan King (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2021).

Certain Artists is the second of two volumes of Huysmans’ art criticism from the same translator. Like the first, Modern Art, it throws exquisite light on the obscure rise of French Impressionism and decline of Neoclassicism.

In Certain Artists, Huysmans wandered into some of the weirdest and most unsettling byways of modernism that I’m aware of; actually, that I wasn’t aware of until now.

George Moore also observed and explored that terra incognita, but with less vigor, rigor and candor. After all, he was British! How wonderful now to imagine a conversation between JK and GM; and even more than imagine, to create a simulation of their conversation with generative AI.

GMi is inching towards that simulation, and the conversation is going to include all of us!

Certain Artists is a masterpiece by any standard: a must-read for everybody who cares about visual arts in the late nineteenth century and the culture that formed a background for George Moore’s life and work.

When I said as much to Brendan, he replied that his translation of yet another volume of Huysmans’ art criticism is in the works. Bravo!

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Resurgam

November 28th, 2024
The Drawing Lesson (1879), by Henri Fantin-Latour (Wikimedia Co mmons) appears on the cover of Modern Art by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Huysmans reviewed this picture in the Salon of 1879: “M. Fantin-Latour is not a ‘couturier’ or a painter of accessories, he’s a great painter who grasps and renders life. His painting is neither pedantic, nor strained: it is strong and simple. M. Fantin-Latour is one of the best artists we have in France.” In 1879, George Moore finished an artistic expatriation in Paris and returned to London as a budding man of letters. He had much in common and a few differences with the avant-gardist Huysmans.
More Books for George

My excitement about modernist art history surged in September with Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment; in October I touted Anka Muhlstein’s The Pen and the Brush (2017), about the dovetail of nineteenth century French art and literature.

In November I’m back on a soapbox to extol two other splendid books: Anka Muhlstein’s Camille Pissarro. The Audacity of Impressionism, translated by Adriana Hunter (2024) and Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Modern Art, translated by Brendan King (2019). King’s is the first English translation of that French masterpiece from 1883.

George Moore is not mentioned in either book. Nonetheless, Camille the painter and Joris-Karl the art critic epitomized much of George’s passion for painting and literature, and he knew both of them.

Both books can supply rich context for visitors to the Impressionist Moment in Washington D.C. before it closes in January; likewise for visitors to a special exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago opening in June 2025.

You won’t want to miss Gustave Caillebotte in Chicago, so go ahead and start the background reading. Prepare to walk thoughtfully through the galleries, pausing between pictures to catch your breath. I’ll meet you in the Member’s Lounge where we can mutually effervesce.

New Motto

George Moore’s love of antique printing and bookbinding is no secret to collectors. Starting in his fortieth year and increasingly as he got older, he lavished TLC on the design and construction of handmade books.

For that reason, it seemed fitting for me to borrow a motto from the 17^th century Dutch publisher Elzevir. Their woodcut insignia was contemporary with Dutch masters that George cherished. I have nailed it to the front door of GMi, replacing a vignette of purportedly similar vintage.

Known as le Solitaire (the Hermit), the woodcut is a Dutch elm tree entwined by a fruited vine; beside the tree a man stands alone, reaching for fruit with his right hand. Opposite him, an ironic motto in Latin: non solus (not alone).

What does that mean? Unable to work it out, I asked ChatGPT and in two seconds received an eloquent answer that is too long to repeat here. But it left intact my belief about all fine art: that it means what you want.

What I want for GMi goes something like this. The tree is life. The fruited vine is the arts. The man alone is a writer or reader, probably both.

In grasping the fruit of life (art), the solitary man is no longer alone; he joins something greater than himself; and greatness is now within him.

Accordingly, makers and patrons of GMi truly are non solus.

Future Shock

A novel way of grasping the fruit was recently reported by Andrew Higgins in “An ‘Interview’ With a Dead Luminary Exposes the Pitfalls of A.I.” (New York Times, 3 November 2024).

If you read that intriguing article you may be tempted to join a chorus of protesters that Andrew quoted. However, that would be a mistake.

Yes, of course, a “technology-enabled resurrection” of Wisława Szymborska on Polish radio seems a lot like technology-enabled re-animation of George Moore that’s been promised hereabouts.

And to be sure, there are similarities. Both projects are experiments to engage readers with consequential authors who are no longer with us in the flesh. To engage readers with the authors themselves, not just their writing.

Was the Polish experiment successful? By the numbers, yes it was. It roused popular desires to experience a dead poet as a living individual, even though poetry is perhaps the least popular of the literary arts.

To me, the “protestable” problem in Krakow (if there was one) was not the resurrection of Wisława, but the use of a computer model to interview her.

Such technical symmetry turned her interview into a closed system, and made humans superfluous to the dialogue: mere auditors, like students in a lecture hall.

A closed system is one that GMi won’t make. The re-animated George may occasionally converse with other models, but far more importantly he will converse freely with real humans like you and me.

We will not be his auditors, but his interviewers; and George will talk not for us, but with us, about whatever we have on our minds at the moment.

Resurgam

Speaking of resurrection and re-animation, “resurgam” is a Latin word that means “I shall rise again”; it’s the title of the last chapter in George Moore’s Memoirs of My Dead Life (1906).

In 2024, it is also the name of a new not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) corporation in Illinois.

I am forming Resurgam NFP for the express purpose of winning institutional grants to fund research and development of George Moore’s literary legacy.

This bold move follows the timid inception of my first Gofundme Campaign. Remember that?

If it got past you the first couple of times I mentioned it, have a listen to my pitch, Why George? It is performed by James, my Irish AI alter ego, who was cast and vetted by Michael O’Shea.

Why George? Why Bob? Why donate?

My Gofundme Campaign wants to finance travel to the UK for vital research at the British Library. Several noble and generous people stepped up with a donation. I am very grateful to them, but more are needed.

Resurgam NFP is key to unlocking that more. I expect it to start cranking out grant applications by mid-2025. And to win.

So stand clear, my friends, GMi is going to the next level!

French Correction

George Moore was sort-of bilingual. Though lacking formal education in any language, he managed to read and write passably in English and French.

His letters were mostly written in English, but quite a few are in French to French correspondents. Those French letters are problematic for me.

Now that I’m filling the Letters pillar of GMi, slowly but surely, with fresh transcriptions, I have to face that problem head on.

I started transcribing in the year 1863. Week later I have reached 1887. The process is horribly slow for two reasons.

First, I am slow because I exclude footnotes from George’s text. Instead of those distracting superscript numbers that interrupt, often unnecessarily, I place minimal explanatory notes in a headstone for each letter. That little bit of editorial assistance takes time.

Second, I am slow because I render each letter as “sensible text,” stripping out the dross left by George’s careless penmanship. My fresh transcriptions are corrected for paragraph breaks, capitalization, spelling and punctuation; now more readable and learnable than ever.

This process is not a problem for me with letters in English, but I am not competent to perform cleanup with letters in French. I am easily flustered by accents grave and aigu.

Now however, thanks to my Dublin colleague Michael O’Shea, a true heroine has arrived at GMi to get me over this hurdle.

Her name is Claudette Walsh. She is a native of Lyon who moved to Ireland to teach French, and stayed. Eventually James Joyce cast his spell over her, as he has over Michael, and she joined the Joyce community in Ireland as an acolyte.

I don’t know what Joyce is doing for Claudette, but I know very well what she is doing for Moore. She is making his French letters presentable to the world. I am very grateful indeed for her gracious support.

By removing pedantic footnotes and correcting slovenly penmanship, GMi is ensuring that the letters of George Moore are eminently readable, accessible, and useful to human readers and machine learners.

With thousands of letters flowing into this kickstart, everybody will be well served.

OMG

While searching microfilm reels to answer Claudette’s questions about particular words that make no sense in any language, I came across an image that likewise makes little sense, unless you were there.

It’s a photograph of me aet. 26, during my first visit to Moore Hall. I am sitting inside a window of the ruin, posing for my camera perched a few feet away.

You couldn’t have been there because I was alone. I took a train from Dublin to Claremorris; from there I hitchhiked to Muckloon. I was stunned that the local workmen who gave me a lift knew so much about the racehorses of the Moores a hundred years previous, but nothing at all about the writer.

After climbing into the house and taking this picture, I spent the night in my tent on the grass below the gated and locked front door. It was as black and silent as outer space! Unable to sleep, I got so agitated that I drank the wine and smoked the cigar that I planned to leave at George’s grave.

Just as well that I did, because the next morning was wet and overcast, and I couldn’t find Mr. Macdonald who, I was told, rented boats for rowing to the remote island grave in Lough Carra.

I walked and hitchhiked away from Moore Hall, promising George that I would be back. I have kept my promise.

Confession, Memoir, Autobiography

When I recently posted Vale in the GMi Shop, I finished making available all of George Moore’s published writing about himself, all in one place, all free.

These are the only editions whose readers can communicate with the editor and each other about what George wrote; and the only editions whose text is open for computerized textual analysis.

The cover of Vale has a portrait sketch by John Butler Yeats of his son William, drawn around the time that George Moore was (temporarily) enchanted by the great poet.

I chose this artwork partly because W.B. Yeats catalyzed George’s return to his native land for the Irish Literary Revival, but mostly because I previously chose similar drawings by JBY for Ave and Salve. They make a nice set.

That said, there’s a caveat. Edward Martyn earned his spot on the cover of Ave because George centered that book on their relationship. You cannot appreciate and enjoy Ave without taking Edward into your heart the way George did.

George Russell (Æ) earned his spot on the cover of Salve for the same reason. Each of the first two volumes of Hail and Farewell turns on a friendship of surpassing, intrinsic value to the author.

The person who actually earned a spot on the cover of Vale is not Yeats, but George’s brother Maurice Moore, “the Colonel.” Vale turns on their fraught fraternal relationship. The book is a candid testament to it.

By the time George published Vale in 1914, he was over the magic of Yeats. Nonetheless appreciative of Yeats’s poetry, but somewhat dismissive of the man and his performative charisma.

Though William Butler Yeats is not a pivotal foil in Vale, the way Maurice Moore is, he is nevertheless George’s persistent foil across all three volumes of Hail and Farewell.

Since John Butler Yeats did not draw a portrait of Maurice Moore, I felt sure that William Butler Years was the next best choice for the cover of Vale. I got to make a “set” though perhaps not perfectly.

And by the way, as an aside to Michael and Claudette, Chapter 7 of Vale opens with a discussion about Yeats and the modernist quest for literary opacity.

Speaking of Stéphane Mallarmé (and incidentally of Yeats), George wrote: “His phrases will never grow old, for they tell us nothing; the secret meaning is so deeply embedded that generations will try to puzzle through them….”

The proverbial search for immortality! Excuse me for yawning.

Me and Social Networking

Months ago while pondering the low visibility of GMi on the web, I posted that I would overcome my resistance, hold my nose, and join social networks in order to “get GMi out there.”

I thought I would, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. The Musk-Zuckerberg axis of evil has a stench that seeps into my pores even when my nostrils are blocked.

However, just the other day, I created an account on Bluesky Social, the reincarnation of Twitter that has no stench (so far); it comes off smelling like a rose.

I am trying it, hoping to connect with others whose interests I share. And maybe learn something nice about a world that is otherwise falling apart.

If you are, or choose to become, a subscriber on Bluesky Social, please connect with @beckermultimedia.bsky.social. That’s me! As of today I follow nobody and nobody follows me. Help me change that.

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Why George?

October 15th, 2024
Two portraits by John Butler Yeats in the National Gallery of Ireland. On the left is Edward Martyn in 1899. A patron of the arts and author, Martyn is George Moore’s foil in Hail and Farewell! Ave (1911). On the right is George Russell in 1898. An artist and author who used the pseudonym Æ, Russell is Moore’s foil in Hail and Farewell! Salve (1912). These two volumes of the great trilogy are now live on GMi.
A Book for George

Last month I enthused about Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The exhibition epitomizes art during George Moore’s formative years without mentioning him. (He studied painting in Paris in 1874, but was 22 years old and hadn’t cracked his shell.)

Today I’m enthusing about Anka Muhlstein’s The Pen and the Brush (2017). Like the exhibition, her book helps me see George’s emergent aestheticism in shimmering context!

She doesn’t seem to mention George Moore (I’m not sure because the book is not indexed). Moreover she opens with an erroneous claim that “In England, [Virginia] Woolf would be the first to write about the influence painting had on literature.”

Nonetheless The Pen and the Brush is a marvelous account of reciprocity between nineteenth century painters and novelists, starting with the beloved Balzac and including other French writers who incubated George Moore and got him to hatch.

Consider reading the exhibition catalog and The Pen and the Brush together!

Who Can’t Read Books?

Also on the subject of reading, the New York Times recently published a review of Herscht 07769, a novel by László Krasznahorkai translated from the Hungarian into unreadable English.

The Hungarian original may also be unreadable; I don’t know about that. My mother was Hungarian but didn’t teach me her native language. Csak angolul beszélek.

I haven’t read Herscht 07769, yet I know it’s unreadable because its 400 insane pages consist of a single sentence. László may be emulating Jimmy, the Irish genius who wrote famously unreadable novels a hundred years ago and who purportedly said, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”

Setting aside the pedagogical question, who cares what he meant? we may wonder if ensuring one’s immortality is a priority, or even the business, of a novelist? If you’re a professor, perhaps you think it is. Your job is explaining enigmas and puzzles to kids and colleagues.

Others like myself think not. The priority and business of a novelist, from my point of view, is to delight and edify, in that order. Meaning the right to edify is earned with a passage through delight.

Readers may be delighted and edified by many different literary things (for me it’s the prose of George Moore). Nonetheless, I’m pretty sure that a 400-page sentence ain’t one of them.

Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic indirectly reinforced my view in her essay about “Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.”

We know that college English studies have been a slow moving train wreck for half a century. Now adding to its chronic woes, according to Rose, is the discovery that undergraduates cannot, and don’t want to, read immortal texts that were written for their teachers; texts that have to be explained to be understood; texts that have to be studied to be enjoyed; texts that meander for countless pages without a period or paragraph break.

Experts suggest that this new problem may be caused by technology, or by mentally limited readers, or anything other than the texts themselves. Thus they recognize the symptoms of educational decadence, but I suspect that they miss the cause.

And what else can we expect when Garth Risk Hallberg, the author of that Times book review, ranks László as a “master” and László’s novels as bona fide “masterpieces.”

Thanks perhaps to James Joyce and his acolytes, the unreadable often feels like the acme of serious literary publishing; befuddlement is the bar to which serious novelists aspire in order to ensure their immortality.

George Moore did not aspire to immortality. He did not try to confuse readers and he didn’t care about professors one way or another. His artistic goals were to delight and edify, in that order.

Why George?

I recently started my first Gofundme Campaign. The purpose is worthwhile, the goal is modest and attainable. So say I!

Donors will share credit for bringing an important part of a fine writer’s canon out of the analog crypt, into our world of art and literature, and back to life (digitally).

After launching the Campaign I decided to use my voice and face to do some of the asking. I drafted the video script that I’m sharing below.

The script may change before the camera rolls, but if you approve the draft — your donation is always welcome.

The Script

I met George Moore nearly forty years after he died.

Not George in the flesh, of course.

I met his legacy as a venerable and eclipsed man of letters.

I started reading his novels and stories, then memoirs, then plays and poems, then essays, and even read his bibliography line by line.

Finally I read some of the unpublished letters he wrote to friends and family and many others.

And I was smitten.

My reading for pleasure morphed into research.

Research morphed into editing.

Editing morphed into publishing.

(I’ve overlooked collecting — about 500 volumes so far!)

On and off for about 50 years, George has been a friend.

Actually more than a friend.

He grounded and centered me as I matured and changed.

Even when I changed almost beyond recognition, he held a mirror that showed who I am.

Ironically I guess, this transformative and contrarian author has been my compass and safe harbor.

He inspired a pastime, a vocation, a hobby, and ultimately a lifelong passion.

And he did all that without ever telling me why.

The question is still open: Why George?

Why have I devoted such time and resources to him?

Why should others care enough to donate?

Nobody has an economic or moral incentive, so why bother?

This question hasn’t occurred to me before now.

That may be because, by nature, I do what I want.

And rarely pause to explain why, even to myself.

But now it’s different.

When accepting donations on behalf of George, I have a duty to explain why him, and also why me?

Not because George is the greatest writer of his generation, or his tradition, or his country, or even the greatest writer I’ve read.

George isn’t “the greatest.”

Superlatives have nothing to do with him (or with me).

Rather than “the greatest,” to me he’s just sympatico.

Sympatico means I get him as easily as I breathe, and I believe he gets me in my pose as a skeptical reader.

He knows that I have zero tolerance for insincerity, or vulgarity, or triviality and foolishness, and he likes that about me.

It’s something we have in common.

As a writer, despite his flaws, he made his own life and mine more beautiful.

Not better, because better isn’t the point for somebody like George Moore.

His forte is beauty for its own sake; the proverbial gem-like flame.

This is why I’m trying to bring him back to life with technology.

And why I seek donations to get it done.

Sooner or later I want to talk with George, one-on-one.

I want meandering conversations after dinner, by his fire.

With our cats on our laps.

I also want George to have one-on-one conversations with others.

Without me as their scholarly chaperone.

Without me explaining or interpreting what he says.

Without me even present in the picture.

My helping George speak for himself may do for others what he’s done for me.

George may become as active a part of our world as I’ve been in his.

If you’re not already a fan of George Moore, this may sound off the wall.

I may come across like an old geezer who hasn’t grown up.

And that’s okay, because that’s true of me and of George too.

Both of us never outgrew our loves of art, and beauty and truth.

We’re both strivers who excelled and succeeded, and often didn’t.

We are sympatico.

We hold mirrors up to the other.

We remind the other of who we are and long to be.

And that is the “why” of George Moore.

That’s why I’m getting him ready to meet you.

If you support the Campaign, you’ll eventually meet George as he was in life, as you are in this moment.

He may not impress you as much as he impresses me.

But I think you’ll like and learn a lot from him.

About art and literature, about Irish, English and French culture, about human nature everywhere.

And more evanescent things too.

Like how to know and be true to yourself as you make your way, ever changing.

George wasn’t the best at that, but he was always true to himself, his friends and his word.

If you’re not already one of his friends, I’m offering you the chance to become one now.

By making a donation.

A Salve for the Soul

The second volume of George Moore’s autobiography Hail and Farewell! is named Salve. Along with the first volume Ave, it is now a free ebook in the GMi Shop.

All the chapters of both volumes are also posted in the Worlds pillar of this website, where they can be read, searched and commented. Ave has 104,958 words; Salve has 107,454.

I was intrigued by the way George wove his memoirs around the identities of two boon companions: Edward Martyn in Ave and George Russell in Salve.

Each man was an archetype of the Irish Literary Revival that George witnessed and joined for a time. They are foils to an author whose archetype is different, uncertain and still emerging.

Next up for GMi is the third volume of Hail and Farewell! Vale. With that, I will have placed all of George’s autobiographical writing online, in one place, in a way that is useful to human readers and tomorrow’s machine learners.

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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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Launch of the Letters

August 21st, 2024
The cover of an ebook — 40 years in the oven and still not ready to come out — with a portrait of George Moore aet. 36 by William Strang (see Iconography). This etching was the frontispiece in an edition of Confessions of a Young Man where George admitted “Two dominant notes in my character — an original hatred of my native country, and a brutal loathing of the religion I was brought up in” (Chapter 7). Why do I find that endearing? It’s a puzzlement.
I Crowdsource

I believe in crowdsourcing; in particular the crowdsourcing of quality.

We know that quality can mean almost anything. Here it refers to the high fidelity of transcribed text to sources.

My sources are pages printed more than a century ago, that have aged ever since on the shelves of librarians and collectors. Sources are also handwritten sheets that were never printed, but likewise ossified in archives and attics.

The purported fidelity of my transcriptions is a promise of accuracy. A promise that the language I found on yesterday’s paper is accurately reflected in today’s digital media.

But transcription ain’t replication. The higher calling is to represent both evident and latent intentions in sources, not just copy them like a Xerox machine.

In more than 1,000 web pages on George Moore Interactive, I’ve gone a long way to assuring quality by adhering to Deming’s cardinal rules of process control. Every text of George Moore that you read on GMi is the outcome of systematic steps that should have prevented defects from creeping in.

Should, but not must. There’s no doubt in my mind that errors are present in what I have published.

That’s where crowdsourcing comes in. I admittedly publish imperfect texts that are as high in quality as I can make them, given my rapid pace of development. I am relying on the crowd — people who use the texts — to tell me when they suspect errors.

That’s why every GMi webpage (including this post) has its own comment box. When somebody reads something that doesn’t seem right, they needn’t wonder. They can leave a question or suggestion for me to investigate.

My vision, my design and development of George Moore Interactive are founded on a belief in crowdsourcing. The ultimate success of the mission hinges on it.

% Complete

George Moore’s literary legacy is being reconstructed for the digital age in seven august pillars. They are the main menu items listed on the GMi home page. Here’s a quick recap of where things now stand:
1. Aesthetics: 80% complete
2. Iconography: 100% complete
3. Worlds: 10% complete
4. Letters: 0% complete (see below)
5. Bibliography: 100% complete
6. Chronology: 0% complete
7. Collections: 0% complete
By complete I don’t mean finished, dead and buried. Complete means “the best I can do until the crowd steps up to make GMi better.”

GMi Ebooks

My anticipated migration out of the Kindle Store has begun. Loyal fan of Amazon though I am, I have little respect for their ebook business.

Currently in the GMi Shop there are seven ebooks. Five are Apple Books and two are Kindle editions. I’ll soon create Apple Books to replace the Kindles so that all GMi ebooks can be downloaded from the store I prefer.

At the start of this migration, I decided to price GMi’s Apple ebooks as free. Why? It seems that charging even a small fee to download an ebook may create friction for potential readers while being inconsequential to me. It feels better to give the ebooks away.

Apple Books are not for everybody. To ensure digital rights management, they can be downloaded only to Apple devices (as far as I know). Remember though, the text of every GMi ebook is also available for free on the GMi website, in a different format.

The next ebook in the pipeline is A Communication to My Friends. Coming soon.

GMi Audiobooks

I had a dream that one day George Moore’s fine stories and essays would be released as engaging audiobooks. It may no longer be a dream. It seems to be happening.

During migration to Apple Books I stumbled upon technologies for generating audiobooks out of ebooks. Who knew this was possible? The audiobooks purportedly have naturalistic digital voices — not perfect, not famous, not Her — but not bad either. Moreover these generative audiobooks are fast and easy to make when a producer comes on board.

While I wait for Saoirse Ronan and Colin Farrell to get with the GMi program, I will proceed with this crazy AI alternative. GMi audiobooks performed by non-human, humanlike voices will not be free to download, but they will be reasonably priced and perhaps help me land George’s literary legacy more firmly in the digital age.

Letters Launch

Thanks to new and affordable scanning technology (described below), my work on the Letters pillar of GMi has begun. This pillar is designed to hold careful transcriptions of George’s 6,000+ extant letters: handwritten, typed, and printed between 1863 and 1933.

I located most of those letters around 40 years ago. The Letters of George Moore 1863-1901 was my unpublished doctoral dissertation at the University of Reading, England. I transcribed many more letters as an independent scholar at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, a postdoc at the University of Pittsburgh, and a naive professor at Emory University before deciding that I’d had quite enough of the ivory tower.

I suddenly stopped work, stored everything in the unlikely event that I would ever want to see it again, and went looking for a real life. (I found one.)

Before that extinction event of scholarly aspiration, all of my independent and academic work had been accomplished without a personal computer, without a printer or scanner, and without the Internet. I owned a portable Smith Corona typewriter, a desk and chair, a file cabinet; and honestly not much else. Bob Becker in those days bore a striking resemblance to Bob Cratchit.

So you may imagine my excitement and trepidation when I unboxed and organized my old files a few months ago, suspecting that the time for reviving the Letters was approaching. I spent many hours resurrecting my dormant analog office — minus the typewriter — so that I could once again see what I have, what I had created, what I needed to make sense of and work on.

I didn’t get far beyond that. I was stymied by a question: how can I digitize so many letters without doing what I generally hate to do: seek funding. George Moore Interactive is self-funded, but there is a limit to my generosity, even to myself. Making stuff and giving it away is deeply satisfying to me, but not rewarding. I didn’t wish to spend thousands more dollars to carry the letters of George Moore across the chasm into the digital age.

Instead I spent hundreds. Overhead scanners that I serendipitously discovered a few weeks ago triggered the first of two eurekas. I read about how they worked, marveled, settled on a make and model that seemed to fit the needs of GMi, and quietly murmured “Eureka?” After much anxious self-doubt of the too-good-to-be-true variety, I plunked down the cash.

Not an obscene amount of cash, because I would live on even if the scanner failed to live up to expectations. But I suffer from anti-early-adapter syndrome, which causes me to avoid purchasing bad shit because I don’t want to feel like a fool afterwards.

Anyway, I cleared space in my office for the scanner and it arrived the following week. It stayed in the box for a week after that, like a UXB, until my courage (fortified with single malt Scotch) returned.

Then in no time at all, the box was open, the tech was configured, the minimal documentation was read, and a test was conducted. “Eureka!” I exclaimed. The scanner does just what it’s supposed to do — that well, that fast, that easily.

What I had foreseen as a slow, expensive, cumbersome Letters project was transformed into fun and elegant. Many details must still be decided, about how to publish the letters in a way that complements the GMi mission, but those are good problems to have and to solve.

Breakthrough Scanning

The maker of my overhead scanner is a Chinese firm named CEZUR (pronounced caesar). They have a very light footprint in the United States, basically a warehouse on the West Coast, and that initially worried me.

Why aren’t they everywhere? Where are the resellers? How will I obtain service? My emailed questions were answered in English by HQ in China. To my satisfaction, though I still had doubts. Fear of the unknown.

The scanner is overhead rather than flatbed. An elevated arm floods the scanning platform (a black mat) with just the right kind and amount of light, from multiple angles.

An image of the targeted object appears on my computer screen. Using software controls I optimize the image and then press to scan it; pressing either a button on my screen, a button on my desk, or a pedal on the floor. That pedal expedites scanning of multi-part objects.

Anyone familiar with flatbed would be amazed, as I was, by the speed of this machine. Each scan takes about one second.

CEZUR ET24 Pro scanner configured by GMi for the Worlds and Letters pillars.

If the object I’m scanning is an open book (often it is), CEZUR software automatically corrects the position of the book and the roll of the pages. These two factors are death stars to optical character recognition, as I know from painful experience. Like magic, software makes a scanned object appear perfectly straight and flat on my computer screen, no matter how awry it is on the mat.

The magic continues with advanced OCR that transforms a two-page spread into separate consecutive pages. I can configure OCR for different languages.

The French language in many of George’s writings has been a minefield for me, because the conventional OCR I was using didn’t recognize uniquely French letterforms. That minefield is now clear. Electric sheep can graze there.

At last I batch export my optimized scans to Adobe PDF and Microsoft Word; the former is for reference images, the latter is to open in Apple Pages for initial editing (I prefer Pages to Word) before importing pristine text into Google Docs for final editing.

To those who have never suffered the technical woes of flatbed scanning or the time and expense of outsourced book scanning, this overview may seem trivial and boring. Everybody else may stand up and shout “Hail CEZUR.”

By George he’s got it!

I have previously mentioned A.O. Scott of the New York Times. He was formerly a movie critic, now he’s a literary critic of exceptional ability. Like Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books, he never fails to write well, no matter what the topic, and he always writes things that I find interesting if not inspiring. Take for example this quote from a book review:

“She belongs in an as-yet-undefined and perhaps undefinable class of prose artists who blend feeling and analysis, speculation and research, wit and instruction as they track down the elusive patterns and inescapable contradictions of modern experience.” ¹

I wrote to Mr. Scott after reading his startling review, explaining that George Moore was a member of the distinguished class, perhaps even a founding member. He replied by assuring me that George is now on Anthony’s reading list!

I hope George won’t disappoint. Given Anthony’s exquisite taste, I doubt that he will. Because George wrote about himself, before Anthony or I were born, anticipating that we would someday come along:

“Other men write for money, or for fame, or to kill time, but we are completely disinterested. We are moved by the love of the work itself, and therefore can make sacrifices….” Hail and Farewell! Ave, (London 1911, page 73).

Ave is now a free download in the GMi Shop.

Type your email…
1. “An Ode to Gardens That’s Also a Bouquet of Idea,” by A.O. Scott in the New York Times, reviewing The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, by Olivia Laing. ↩︎
Where Angels Fear to Tread

July 24th, 2024
“In Sight of Death” is a short story by George Moore in the Illustrated News of the World (New York, 27 August 1892, pages 202-203). This imaginative rendering of an angel investor in startups is one of four unsigned illustrations of the story. Just kidding, angel investors are flightless. My transcription of the story, along with its later incarnation as “A Flood,” will soon appear in the Worlds pillar of GMi. The only other place you’ll find it, maybe, is in a distant library. (Courtesy of Kathi Griffin)
Roundup of Outliers

The Aesthetics pillar of George Moore Interactive has bulked up nicely.

It now contains 227 essays of art criticism and 215 essays of literary criticism originally published in periodicals and books during the author’s lifetime. That’s a total of 442 essays — but not a grand total.

I have yet to acquire 90 outliers: 22 essays of art criticism and 68 essays of literary criticism squirreled away in periodicals that have not been scanned or stored in a conveniently located library. Convenient to me, that is; I’m situated in Chicago.

To acquire these 90 outliers, I must leave my virtual tower and travel to the British Library in London. Once ensconced in the Reading Room, I shall order up the periodicals, one at a time, so that I can locate, transcribe and edit the essays I need, and use them to complete the Aesthetics pillar.

At that momentous milestone, there will be 532 critical essays — the whole shebang — live on George Moore Interactive. As always, they will be freely accessible to readers (human and machine) all over the world.

I know, know, it’s about time.

Assuming that the 90 outliers are similar in length to essays already acquired, I estimate that each contains an average of 2,000 words. That being the case, the completed Aesthetics of George Moore will contain 487,191 words of art criticism and 732,924 words of literary criticism for a grand total of 1,220,115 words.

That is obviously more than most people will ever get around to reading or even skimming. However it should take just a few minutes for machine learners to suck all 1,220,115 words into a large language model.

Not long after that, a reanimated George Moore will resume speaking for himself in response to questions about the art and literature of his time, and of ours. Pretty cool!

Can’t Go Yet

I’m fully prepared to go after the needed 90, but the British Library is not ready to host my visit. You may have heard that cyber criminals kidnapped the Library late in 2023 and held it for ransom. Their dastardly behavior is described here and here.

I pause to ask myself: who would want to attack a library, any library, for money? What lowlife would choose to attack the British Library, of all libraries, a pinnacle of western civilization?

I don’t have any answers, but I’m generally aware that some of our fellow citizens rarely hesitate to do any awful thing that lines their pockets and strokes their egos. A library today. The planet tomorrow.

The ransom wasn’t paid, thank heavens, but the cyber criminals didn’t undo the damage they caused; instead they wound up damaging the British Library for free.

The Library has been in recovery mode ever since, rebuilding their legacy information technology so that even the remote collections I want to browse can be accessed once more.

There is light at the end of the tunnel, though I don’t know how far off it is. My plan is to visit London in the spring of 2025 when, hopefully, all Library systems will be go.

Where Angels Fear to Tread

My trip to the British Library will not be nostalgic.

In the 1970s I spent five years under the luminous dome of the old Reading Room, that hallowed Victorian temple of the human spirit. Back then I was a graduate student from the University of Reading in Berkshire, trundling down to Bloomsbury and over to Colindale on my motorcycle, rain or shine, from my quaint mews house in Hampstead.

Though the luminous dome is still attached to the Museum in Bloomsbury, the Library long ago moved to a modern campus headquartered in St. Pancras. That’s my new destination, half a century after my innumerable visits to the original.

Based on the average time that orders take to reach readers in today’s British Library, and the limit on how many orders may be submitted in one day, I have planned a stay of two full weeks to acquire the outliers.

Even as an American citizen, my use of the British Library is to be free of charge; but airfare, hotel accommodation, meals, and ground transportation are not. And by the way, London is not the cheapest town to dally in.

Hence my wish for an angel investor to help cover the travel expenses. What is an angel investor? Somebody who proffers a small amount of capital for a short time, say three years, in order to make 10x return on that investment. Doesn’t sound very angelic, does it? More like usurious, but I didn’t invent the moniker.

Unable to promise 10x or even 1x to a so-called angel, I’ll instead create a crowdfunding campaign to cover the travel expenses. What is crowdfunding? That’s when individuals (and maybe institutions) pledge small donations to kickstart an untested venture, and in return donors receive a tangible thing of value.

My crowdfunding campaign will most likely offer donors a collectible: for example, a signed, maybe illustrated hardcover of select, uncollected essays of George Moore. A fine limited edition that could retail for more than $50 and over time appreciate to multiples of that.

Collectors of George Moore and his period may covet a copy of the book for their physical shelves. My goal is to raise enough small donations to cover all or most of my travel expenses and costs of manufacturing the book.

My crowdfunding campaign will make clear that donations help complete the Aesthetics pillar of GMi; and more importantly move the project closer to its noble goal of kickstarting literary legacies in the digital age.

The limited edition will not be a commercial product, but a token of appreciation to folks who volunteer their support.

Ireland Redux

Spending two weeks from morning to night, head-down in the British Library, eating takeout tandoori when I return to my rented garret, must be balanced by a personal reward of some sort; otherwise my sparkle may dim.

The reward I have in mind is a visit to Ireland, my first in about 20 years. My daughter Elayne may join me to celebrate completion of her third novel (you should read or listen to the first two, they’re great).

In Dublin I may meet Michael O’Shea at Joyce’s Martello Tower for a chilly spring skinny-dip. I may drive around both Irelands as I did more than once upon a time, admiring the beauties and puzzling over the personalities.

Confessions of an Irishman

The other day Michael managed to find a copy of Terre d’Irlande (1887), a cornerstone of any rare book collection of George Moore. I was just then finishing my edit of Confessions of a Young Man (1888) for GMi and still undecided about what to slate next for the Worlds pillar.

My memory of the English translation of Terre d’Irlande, entitled Parnell and His Island, was admittedly poor and not very positive. I had a vague feeling that it was a nasty little rag about a beloved emerald island.

But is it? I decided to check.

Fast forward to now: all sixteen chapters of Parnell and His Island are published in the Worlds pillar of GMi. And I do declare, they are fine: thoughtful, beautifully written, not nasty though occasionally arch. They cover more than a dozen thematic aspects of mid-nineteenth century Irish culture from a biased, Anglo-Irish, eyewitness perspective. I love them all.

Moreover I think Parnell and His Island is intriguing when juxtaposed with Confessions of a Young Man. Both are nonlinear collections of essays that appeared one after the other and were probably written at the same time.

Parnell is all worldbuilding, Confessions is half worldbuilding, half criticism. Together the volumes reflect the perspicuity and sensibility of an emergent author testing his elastic limits.

Next up in Worlds: “In Sight of Death” (1892), later called “A Flood” (1911); the earlier text courtesy of the collection of Kathi Griffin.

Agon of the Agora

Having uploaded first edition texts of Parnell and His Island and Confessions of a Young Man to George Moore Interactive, I’m now wondering if I should also publish them as Kindle editions.

I already have four Kindle editions in the GMi Shop, so I’ve had enough experience of that marketplace to form personal opinions. So far they include:
- Kindle Create is lame desktop publishing software
- Kindle Direct Publishing is slow and time-consuming
- The Kindle Store is a big box rather than a boutique
I’m not sure how much time I have wasted making Kindle editions, but it’s beginning to add up. What’s worse, it’s been neither fun nor profitable for me.

Is there a better way? I have decided to explore other options for ebook and audiobook creation, production and sales.

If I learn it’s possible to increase the quality of GMi editions in any of those three categories by changing platforms, I will. That will mean moving my wares from the big box to a boutique, but I think that will be okay. More my style anyway.

Responsive Web Pages

A quick technical note about embedded Google Docs on the GMi website.

There are now nearly 1,000 live GMi web pages, most of them containing embedded Google Docs of what scholars call primary source material. The embedded docs display in a white box on this standard dark background.

I have discovered that embedded Google Docs display perfectly on computers and mobile devices held in landscape orientation. All good.

However due to technology that I don’t control, embedded Google Docs do not display properly on mobile devices held in portrait orientation.

One fix for this is to spend boatloads of money to write custom code. Another is for people visiting the GMi site on a phone to hold the device sideways, in landscape orientation, to view the embedded content.

For obvious reasons I opt for the second solution. However if a skillful code developer with a literary bent wishes to volunteer to write that custom code, the job can be theirs. If they succeed they can license the code to WordPress or Google, who could sure use it!

BREAKING NEWS 2024-07-26. The technical issue described above was solved by code developer Onur Demir through Codeable. GMi pages with embedded Google Docs now display properly on mobile devices held in portrait or landscape orientation.

Letters 1863-1901

My unpublished PhD dissertation The Letters of George Moore, 1863-1901 contains about 1,000 annotated letters with other scholarly stuff.

The time has come for me to have it scanned as a first step toward integration in the GMi project. I may also produce an ebook of its massive content, since I don’t plan to put “stuff” on this website.

My preferred book scanner in Missouri seems to be AWOL. I can’t seem to get his attention. As soon as I qualify a new vendor for scanning, Letters production will proceed.

Three heavy oversize volumes are not the easiest things to mount on a book scanner, so my choice of a new vendor must be cautious.

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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.

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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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