My Virtual Reading Room

July 22nd, 2011

"Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes"

10:26 AM

This a delightful essay--I'd seen it before, but not read it closely. This is the beginning:
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If there is anything pleasant in life, it is doing what we aren’t meant to do. If there is anything pleasant in criticism, it is finding out what we aren’t meant to find out. It is the method by which we treat as significant what the author did not mean to be significant, by which we single out as essential what the author regarded as incidental.

Thus, if one brings out a book on turnips, the modern scholar tries to discover from it whether the author was on good terms with his wife; if a poet writes on buttercups, every word he says may be used as evidence against him at an inquest of his views on a future existence. On this fascinating principle, we delight to extort economic evidence from Aristophanes, because Aristophanes knew nothing of economics: we try to extract cryptograms from Shakespeare, because we are inwardly certain that Shakespeare never put them there: we sift and winnow the Gospel of St. Luke, in order to produce a Synoptic problem, because St. Luke, poor man, never knew the Synoptic problem to exist.

There is, however, a special fascination in applying this method to Sherlock Holmes, because it is, in a sense, Holmes’s own method. ‘It has long been an axiom of mine,’ he says, ‘that the little things are infinitely the most important.’ It might be the motto of his life’s work. And it is, is it not, as we clergymen say, by the little things, the apparently unimportant things, that we judge of a man’s character.
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This was written by Monsignor Knox in 1911 (you can read the entire essay here: www.diogenes-club.com/studies.htm ) and Conan Doyle himself was amused by it--you can see his response here: www.diogenes-club.com/knox.htm
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Many thanks to wytchcroft for pointing out an excellent audio version of this essay--it is a pleasure to listen to it! You can listen from the website or download it here: www.archive.org/details/KnoxHolmessay

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Cross-posted to Dr Watson's Consulting Room--

jwatsonmd

Tags: conan doyle, humor/irony, reading, sh, writing

mood: amused

Materia Medica

10:30 AM

Study finds link between personality, body weight
People with impulsive or aggressive behaviors were likely to become overweight, while those who were highly neurotic and less conscientious may tend to experience weight fluctuations, a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found. Research showed that those who scored at the top 10% of impulsivity weighed 22 more pounds on average compared with those with lower scores. HealthDay News (7/20)
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NO, REALLY?!
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And this IS interesting:
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Classical music in ICU helps calm ventilated patients, study shows
A study in Anesthesiology News found that when classical music was piped into the ICU at San Francisco General Hospital, ventilated patients needed lower doses of sedatives. Hospital researchers did a pilot study with five ICU patients and found that after two hours of music sedation needs dropped 33%, with the effect lasting for one hour after the music stopped. BeckersASC.com (7/15)

Tags: medicine, news

mood: contemplative