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Friday, April 28, 2006 You could listen to John Betjeman read his verse the old-fashioned way or you could revel in his fat funkiness: England's DJs, however, are saluting a less familiar side of the former poet laureate. Recently, rare Betjeman vinyl LPs have been selling on auction site eBay - categorised as "funk/soul/R&B" and recommended for their "dope bass action", "exotic grooviness" and "fat, funky basslines". The time, it seems, has come to boogie with Betjeman. In 1974, at the age of 67, Betjeman launched an extraordinary new recording career. He released the album Banana Blush on the Charisma label - then best known for Genesis and other prog-rock travellers such as Van der Graaf Generator. Banana Blush was followed by three similar albums, with the poet reading his works over a musical backing that includes tea-dance jazz, brass bands, rock guitar and, yes, the occasional fat and funky bassline. Comments Prosit, Ed The Bibliothecary always welcomes readers' comments. Thursday, April 27, 2006 From Paul Collins, another strange book find, this one a "speech pathology novel" that tells the story of a 1939 stuttering study: Halvorson had long heard mutterings about the University of Iowa's "Monster Study," a 1939 project that disrupted speech in orphanage children by misleading them into believing that they were stutterers. Having seemingly induced stuttering in healthy children, UI graduate student Mary Tudor subsequently discovered she couldn't undo the damage. Her resulting thesis, overseen by the respected speech pathologist professor Wendell Johnson, had been hushed up by colleagues concerned with its disturbing parallels to Nazi experimentation. Comments Scholars have discovered a lost Samuel Beckett play: "In what was surely a conscious decision by Mr. Beckett, the white, uniform, non-ruled pages, which symbolize the starkness and emptiness of life, were left unbound, unmarked, and untouched," said Trinity College professor of Irish literature Fintan O'Donoghue. "And, as if to further exemplify the anonymity and facelessness of 20th-century man, they were found, of all places, between other sheets of paper." Comments Dan sent along this link to the perfect reading chair, the bibliochaise. Well, the perfect chair for getting rid of the piles of books that surround me. Comments Prosit, Ed The Bibliothecary always welcomes readers' comments. Sunday, April 23, 2006 Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest! In honor of the birth and death day of Shakespeare (today), here's an interesting website devoted to the study of Hamlet's first meeting with the ghost of his father, Hamlet on the Ramparts. You can watch a clip from the Forbes-Robertson silent film adaptation. I particularly like the ghost effect here, just a simple, super-imposed negative, but the whiteness of the ghost is so stark that it is creepy. The Reading Room is especially well done, too. You can compare texts, manuscript images and illustrations of different parts of the scene.The Adaptations and Promptbooks section is great as well. Check out the Hamlet Travestie by John Poole, 1810. Comments Prosit, Ed The Bibliothecary always welcomes readers' comments. Thursday, April 20, 2006 A piece from the TLS on the evidence for Shakespeare's disappointments at social advancement: Some say (good Will) which I, in sport, do sing Had’st thou not plaid some kingly parts in sport Thou had’st bin a companion for a King, And, beene a King among the meaner sort. Some other raile, but, raile as they thinke fit, Thou hast no railing, but, a raigning Wit: And honesty thou sow’st, which they do reape; So, to increase their Stocke which they do keepe. Comments James Morrow, author of the new The Last Witchfinder (see my Apr 4 post), gives his top ten list of books about witch persecutions. I was all excited to devour Morrow's novel, but I got sidetracked once again into reading a few more crime novels. Hopefully, I'll get to Witchfinder in May. Comments Prosit, Ed The Bibliothecary always welcomes readers' comments. Wednesday, April 19, 2006 I'm watching the Zeffirelli "Hamlet" with my wife and kids (you know, they're never too young to get a little Shakespearean indoctrination) and my three year old, Sophia, says, "Think. Think. Think." My wife asks, "What are you thinking about?" And Sophie says, about the character Hamlet, "When he gets so mad, he can't even believe himself. That's what I'm thinking about." Three years old. She was aptly named. Kids can be sharp, huh? Of course, this is the Mel Gibson-Hamlet. Perfect for kids. A sweaty Gibson makes a lot of pained faces and it looks sooo significant. Like, he's really emotional. My eleven year old was astounded at what a great actor he is. And she hasn't even seen "Mad Max." Comments Here's a photo-essay from the Guardian, "Fallout: the human cost of nuclear catastrophe," a collection of photographs of those affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. If you run your cursor over the each photo, you'll get descriptions of the subjects. But I warn you, this is really heartbreaking. Comments Prosit, Ed The Bibliothecary always welcomes readers' comments. Tuesday, April 18, 2006 I really enjoyed this piece by Carolyn Nizzi Warmbold on how she read all 79 winners for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Number 80 was just announced yesterday. I'm always setting up reading projects for myself, but I so seldom accomplish them. I like how Warmbold just succumbed to just reading the books instead of studying them, a lesson I often need to learn. Comments The Midnight Bell found a late 17th century plate commemorating William of Orange that bears a suspicious resemblance to Beavis and Butthead (hit Zoom for maximum effect). Comments Prosit, Ed The Bibliothecary always welcomes readers' comments. Monday, April 17, 2006 Sorry for the quiet. I just haven't felt very bloggy as of late. Prosit, Ed Thursday, April 13, 2006 A review of a new book on William Blake's sex life. Comments Book designer Germano Facetti died last weekend. Facetti was the genius behind all those great Penguin paperback covers. I wonder how many Penguin Classics I've read (and still own) with his design. The Guardian writes about him and provides a gallery of some of his covers. Comments James Fenton on a new edition of Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Comments Prosit, Ed The Bibliothecary always welcomes readers' comments. Wednesday, April 12, 2006 A good essay in Bookforum on Lillian Hellman's posthumous relationship with Dorothy Parker. I was surprised to learn that Parker left her entire estate, copyrights and all, to Martin Luther King, Jr, a man she had never met but admired tremendously. In the event of King's death, it was to go to the NAACP. When notified of the unexpected bequest, which amounted to around twenty thousand dollars excluding unpaid bills and burial expenses, King was puzzled. He had no idea who Parker was. Hellman was not pleased with the turn of events: "It's one thing to have real feeling for black people, but to have the kind of blind sentimentality about the NAACP, a group so conservative that even many blacks now don't have any respect for it, is something else. She must have been drunk when she did it." But the most surprising revelation is what happened to Dorothy Parker's cremated remains. Great story. Comments And an endlessly fascinating dictionary of slang from 1811. From the Preface: The merit of Captain Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue has been long and universally acknowledged. But its circulation was confined almost exclusively to the lower orders of society: he was not aware, at the time of its compilation, that our young men of fashion would at no very distant period be as distinguished for the vulgarity of their jargon as the inhabitants of Newgate; and he therefore conceived it superfluous to incorporate with his work the few examples of fashionable slang that might occur to his observation. Some of the entries I love: PARENTHESIS. To put a man's nose into a parenthesis: to pull it, the fingers and thumb answering the hooks or crochets. A wooden parenthesis; the pillory. An iron parenthesis; a prison. PARINGS. The chippings of money. CANT. QUEEN DICK. To the tune of the life and death of Queen Dick. That happened in the reign of Queen Dick; i.e., never. RALPH SPOONER. A fool. BLACK PSALM. To sing the black psalm; to cry: a saying used to children. CHRISTENING. Erasing the name of the true maker from a stolen watch, and engraving a fictitious one in its place. ZAD. Crooked like the letter Z. He is a mere zad, or perhaps zed; a description of a very crooked or deformed person. Comments Prosit, Ed The Bibliothecary always welcomes readers' comments. Monday, April 10, 2006 Stephen Greenblatt's review essay on Kit Marlowe biographies, Elizabethan writers, an East German spy/Shakescholar and how espionage makes a good playwright. Comments Another quiz crafted by Sean from The Midnight Bell. This one answers the question, "Which Famous Modern American Poet Are You?" My result: You are Wallace Stevens. You love everything, especially the sound of things. Too bad you are so obscure that at times even you don't understand what the hell you have written. But I had to cheat on some of the questions because I so rarely write verse. Comments The Library Company of Philadelphia is attempting to reconstruct the library of its founder, Ben Franklin, or at least catalog the books that made up his personal collection. I had the pleasure of seeing some of this collection a few years ago and I actually got to hold one of the books in my hand. But the thrill of holding a book that Ben had read has eclipsed my memory of the actual title. Comments Melvyn Bragg talks about his list of Twelve Books (see my posts Mar 24 and 28) and addresses the lack of novels in his list: 'These books have made the world a different place, I think in all cases a better place. Now, can you prove that Jane Austen has made the world a better place? Look what happened in the century after she wrote. Can you prove that Dickens made the world a better place? What did Auden say in 1938? Poetry changes nothing.' Comments Prosit, Ed The Bibliothecary always welcomes readers' comments. Sunday, April 9, 2006 A piece from a couple weeks ago on No 84 Plymouth Grove in Manchester, once the home of Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell: The house is a historical gem which sparkles with the memory of visits by glittering literary and cultural figures of the day. Charles Dickens and his wife arrived unexpectedly at 10am one morning in 1852; far too early, as Elizabeth comments. He was already commissioning her to write for his periodical Household Words, but in her tetchy note do we see their relationship starting to sour? She later tired of his constant editorial demands, one of which was happier endings to her stories. Dickens once exclaimed to a sub- editor: "If I were Mr G, oh heaven how I would beat her!" Advocating domestic abuse? Sometimes Dickens really warms the cockles of your heart. Comments I've posted before on anthropodermic bibliopegy, books bound in human skin. Seems like you can now just find them lying around in the road. Comments Man, those librarians are getting tough. First they're battling the Serpent Brotherhood for the Spear of Destiny. Then they're taking on the nuns in a take-no-prisoners spelling bee. Now they're locking up the patrons: Patron Receives Jail Sentence for Overdue Books Brooke Marie Peckman received a one-year jail term after pleading guilty to failing to return $792 worth of overdue items (books, tapes, and CDs) to the Davis County Library, UT. "This is the first case that has gone this far," library director Pete Giacoma told the AP, saying that normally the threat of incarceration generally is enough to spur the return of overdue materials. At the time of Peckman's arrest, the 23-year-old woman didn't have the library goods—Peckman told authorities she had lost all the items—but was in possession of a controlled substance for which she received an additional sentence of zero to five years. All they need is their own action figure. Comments Prosit, Ed The Bibliothecary always welcomes readers' comments. Friday, April 7, 2006 My kind of weather yesterday. Books were raining down on me all day. In the morning, I stopped at my former haunt, Harvest Books, and picked up a slew of books for just a pittance. Books are so cheap at the Harvest Thrift Outlet that they raised their prices and everything in the place is still just two bucks a book (every sixth book free). My spree contained mostly noir and crime: James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia, Cornell Woolrich's Waltz into Darkness, Evan Hunter's The Blackboard Jungle, Caleb Carr's The Italian Secretary, and a curious book by Robert Poe, The Black Cat. Robert claims to be a descendent of Edgar A. and the novel is about a descendent of Edgar A. solving a crime similar to Poe's short story, "The Black Cat." Not very original, but I hope it is fun. I also found a cool pulp Signet, 007 James Bond: a report by O.F. Snelling, featuring this great text on the backcover: Here it is: the full fantastic lowdown on James Bond Suave, sardonic bachelor with a penchant for Turkish cigarettes and dangerous adventure Expert with fast cars, firearms, and women British secret agent licensed to kill An extraordinary exposé of the life and loves of Agent Double O Seven I hadn't realized how much I had in common with Bond. We both like Turkish cigarettes. But the fun doesn't stop there. The harvest at Harvest also included a 1st Amer ed of Peter Ackroyd's English Music in sparkling condition. As I was about to leave I noticed another pulp pb on the counter, The Curse of the Wise Woman by Lord Dunsany, volume 40 in The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult. What a treasure trove. Comments And the fun didn't stop there. I had lunch with Philly crime writer Duane Swierczynski who loaned me a couple Ken Bruen novels I haven't been able to track down in the many libraries I frequent, Vixen and an advanced reader's copy of Calibre which isn't due to be published until later this year. That's so cool, getting a sneak peak at a new Bruen. Comments And the fun still didn't stop. Duane picked up the lunch tab (a swell guy), so I used my lunch money to buy more books. I haven't told the wife about this buy yet, but she'll probably read this blog post. (Sorry, Kate, I couldn't control myself.) At Big Jar Books in Center City Philly I found The Mystery of the Hansom Cab by Fergus W. Hume, a Dover reprint of a novel printed in 1886. The back cover notes that this was the best-selling mystery novel of the nineteenth century, but was eclipsed by the fame of Sherlock and was soon forgotten. The Big Jar yield also included a Shirley Jackson omnibus (stories, Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle), Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman and a crime anthology, Hard-Boiled, featuring a great line-up: Hammett, Cain, Chandler, MacDonald (Ross and John), Himes, Goodis, Hunter, Thompson and many more. I also got two Paul Collins books from the library, The Trouble with Tom and Sixpence House. I'm delirious right now. I may never go to bed. Comments Plug for the day: My good friend and Omnigatherum co-editor Dan will be playing music on the radio Saturday night (April 8). You can listen live online (no playback options, so you gotta tune in) at 10PM Central Time. That's 11PM for the East Coast and I'm not going to figure out the times for the rest of you people. Do the math. The program is called Cocked in the Chamber and is heard on the University of Texas-Dallas' radio station. Dan and friend, Nick Ippoliti, will play a couple 30 minute sets during the two hour program. And joy for me, the program is a rap show. Dan and Nick play a kind of acoustic rock-bluegrass hybrid, so I'm not sure why they've been booked on a rap show. But there you have it. Listen. It's good for you. Comments May all your book-dreams come true, Ed The Bibliothecary always welcomes readers' comments. Wednesday, April 5, 2006 Fine Books has a list of the Most Expensive Books, Maps & Autographs sold at auction in 2005. I'm figuring the Shakespeare First Folio will top this years list. Items on the list I would buy if I were as rich as Croesus: nos. 8, 65, definitely 68 and 85, 172 and probably a Folio or two. Of course, after some close investigation, I'd probably pick a couple maps as well. One can dream. Comments John Overholt tipped me off to a new 50 pence coin in Jolly Ole England that commemorates Samuel Johnson's Dictionary. Language Hat mentioned it also. Turns out that it isn't the first Johnson coin: Comments A book after my own heart. There just aren't many of us smoking advocates out there, so I'm even happy with irony: The Easy Way to Start Smoking: A Step-by-Step Guide to Smoking Twenty Cigarettes a Day -- And Loads More in the Evening: If you've gotten this far, you're ready to start chanting some of the slogans from the Kick Start PowerPhrase mantra: "I only REALLY need one lung," and " I DO enjoy the taste," and "Who needs another 6 minutes anyway?" Then it is on to "The Smoker's Pledge," all 12 steps of it, among them: "I know only that I will smoke today, that I will smoke tomorrow and do humbly place my destiny into the hands of addiction," and, "I promise not to bring smoking into disrepute by being seen in public smoking and crying at the same time," and, "I will not attempt to teach my dog to smoke." Fire up! Comments Prosit, Ed The Bibliothecary always welcomes readers' comments. Tuesday, April 4, 2006 I just picked up James Morrow's new book, The Last Witchfinder. I heard the author interviewed on Radio Times (you can download here) and there were reviews in the NYTimes and Wash Post. Witchfinder is the fictional story of Jennet Stearne, of a family of witchfinders, on a mission collecting evidence, studying the latest scientific treatises and trying to compose an argumentum grande so lucid, so convincing, so illuminating that it can finally demolish the witchcraft laws that sent more than half a million people to their deaths in Europe. It's no easy task for a poor young woman alone in the world to take on the age's deepest fears, but she's an extraordinary blend of curiosity and passion. Morrow drives her through a gauntlet of adventures, from Indian attack to shipwreck, from desert island to jail, a grand picaresque tour of England and the American colonies. Along the way she meets Isaac Newton and Montesquieu and has an affair with a young Benjamin Franklin in colonial Philadelphia. I just had to have this book and began reading it Sunday night. The most astonishing thing about the novel is its narrator: Newton's Principia Mathematica. Yes, a book narrates this book. Here's how it opens: May I speak candidly, fleshling, one rational creature to another, myself a book and you a reader? Even if the literature of confession leaves you cold, even if you are among those who wish that Rousseau had never bared his soul and Augustine never mislaid his shame, you would do well to lend me a fraction of your life. I am Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, after all — in my native tongue, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, the Principia for short — not some tenth-grade algebra text or guide to improving your golf swing. Attend my adventures and you may, Dame Fortune willing, begin to look upon the world anew. Unlike you humans, a book always remembers its moment of conception. My father, the illustrious Isaac Newton, having abandoned his studies at Trinity College to escape the great plague of 1665, was spending the summer at his mother's farm in Woolsthorpe. An orchard grew beside the house. Staring contemplatively through his bedroom window, Newton watched an apple drop free of its tree, driven by that strange arrangement we have agreed to call gravity. In a leap of intuition, he imagined the apple not simply as falling to the ground but as striving for the very center of the Earth. This fruit, he divined, bore a relationship to its planet analogous to that enjoyed by the moon: gravitation, ergo, was universal — the laws that governed terrestrial acceleration also ruled the heavens. As below, so above. My father never took a woman to his bed, and yet the rush of pleasure he experienced on that sweltering July afternoon easily eclipsed the common run of orgasm. Twenty-two years later — in midsummer of 1687 — I was born. Being a book, a patchwork thing of leather and dreams, ink and inspiration, I have always counted scholars among my friends, poets among my heroes, and glue among my gods. But what am I like in the particular? How is the Principia Mathematica different from all other books? My historical import is beyond debate: I am, quite simply, the single greatest work of science ever written. My practical utility is indisputable. Whatever you may think of Mars probes, moon landings, orbiting satellites, steam turbines, power looms, the Industrial Revolution, or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, none of these things is possible without me. But the curious among you also want to know about my psychic essence. You want to know about my soul. I am so excited to read more of this. Let's hope the kids nap today. Please, nap today. Comments And here's some Newtonian fun I found: Newton's Cannon "This Java applet lets you shoot a ball from a mountain on the earth. Newton described the possible trajectories of a cannonball shot from a tall mountain. Weaker shots fall in parabola, but soon the curvature of the earth becomes more important and stronger shots orbit the earth in ellipses." Comments Prosit, Ed The Bibliothecary always welcomes readers' comments. Monday, April, 3, 2006 Perhaps I should go into politics. Apparently, they have quite a book budget. Oh the books I could buy with $28,000. I wonder if I could get the taxpayers to foot my tobacco bill, as well. Comments The NYTBR has published a cento by David Lehman. A cento is a collage poem using lines from other poems to make a new one. You can read it in a PDF file here. Lehman is the editor of the Oxford Book of American Poetry. You may recall his contest to pick America's favorite poem (see my March 15 post). "Prufrock" is still in the lead, 25% to "Song of Myself" at 20%. I think a last minute flurry of negative ads about Eliot could push Walt into the lead, although I'm not sure he can win the poelectoral college. Comments More on the First Folio being auctioned. Apparently this copy has been joyfully annotated by a former reader: There are squiggles and circles and lines and words to test a Bletchley Park codebreaker. Dr Beal's hunch is that it is the work of a clever student who, obsessed by the plays, wrote arbitrarily in the margins with no particular system. He would mark certain phrases - to be or not to be - and then whole passages. Words like love, wit, honour, glory appear, and the word simile appears over and again. "He starts marking off a page and then seems to get bored and marks the whole page," added a delighted Dr Beal. Included in the margins of the folio is this comment: "Best I desire the readers moughth to kis the writeres arse." Now there's a serious reader. Ben Macintyre wrote a good column on the joys of marginalia a couple of years ago: Marginalia blurred distinctions between writer, reader and critic. Passed from one reader to another, the margins and flypapers of some books became a sort of message board for this unique form of intellectual graffiti, with brief accolades, argumentative asides, addenda and insults. Even the greatest writers could be deflated with a sharp jab from the margins. An anonymous reader who rebelled against Samuel Johnson’s description of the weather as “gloomy, frigid and ungenial ” scrawled in exasperation: “Why can’ t you say Cold like the rest of ye world?” Quite. When I read comments I've scribbled in the margins of books years before, I'm always a little embarrassed. I thought I was a more perceptive reader than the evidence usually suggests. These days I satisfy myself with just a line or an X to mark passages or words I find striking. Although the other day I was reading a novel from 1938 that described the New Jersey shore line as the "American Riviera." I couldn't help but jot down in the margin, "New Jersey??!!" I don't think the European writer had ever visited. Or maybe he had and I just failed to see the intended irony. Comments Prosit, Ed The Bibliothecary always welcomes readers' comments. Saturday, April 1, 2006 Here's an interesting item. A biotech firm is developing technology to genetically engineer dragons and other mythological creatures: This involves synthesising, with actual DNA, the genetic material that the computer models predict will produce the mythical creatures. The synthetic DNA is then inserted into a cell that has had its natural nucleus removed. The result, Dr Fril and his commercial backers hope, will be a real live dragon, unicorn or what have you. Comments The Guardian has a piece on a recipe book compiled by Nostradamus in the 16th Century, including a recipe for an aphrodisiac jam: The recipe is contained in Nostradamus's third book, the Traité des fardemens et confitures. This "Treatise on Make-Up and Jam" appeared in 1555, although the date on the manuscript is 1552. It's essentially a medical cookbook containing, as in many modern examples of cookbooks, the recipes of other people. There is one for curing the plague, for example, which is something you won't find in Nigella. Jamie Oliver would probably have a crack at it, were the government to ask him. The book is based on knowledge acquired by Nostradamus (1503-1566) before he went to Montpellier to study for a medical doctorate in 1529. Prior to this he was a wandering apothecary. The Traité offers useful recipes for marmalade ("candied orange peel ... that will be excellently tasty"), cherry jam (after a year the cherries are "just like they were on the day they were prepared"), quince jelly ("fit to set before a king") and pear preserve ("excellent enough to set before a prince"). Comments The long lost Fourteenth Book of Euclid has been discovered: "This is truly an astonishing document," says Duncan D. Umber of St. Patrick's College of Medieval Studies, who recently examined the manuscript. "Euclid went much farther in his investigations than anyone had previously suspected. People continually underestimate what the ancients were able to do. We will need to reassess Greek mathematics in its entirety." The parchment manuscript was found by 12-year-old William Kelly, who was exploring a rocky cave on an island off the west coast of Ireland. At first, Kelly thought that he had discovered a treasure map. But the Latin words stymied him and the fanciful decorations reminded him of things he had seen in church. Kelly brought the packet to Seamus Donne, a local priest who happened to have an interest in illuminated manuscripts. Donne quickly appreciated the value of Kelly’s find and contacted the foundation. Comments The Independent has a feature on celebrity couples including the little known love affair between Sylvia Plath and rock-n-roll star Chuck Berry: The archetypal rock'n'roller met the legendary poet at Smith College in 1955, when he and his band played at a summer "homecoming ball". Berry was then 29 and tasting success for the first time with Maybellene, named after a line of cosmetics. His band, the Sir John Trio, were No 1 in the charts and their hard R'n'B sound was a "cool" alternative, among progressive colleges, to the soupy country and western fare generally heard at college "hops". Plath was 22, a senior student at Smith and in the process of conquering her demons. After a failed suicide attempt, a period of electroshock and therapy, she had sailed through the final exams and was about to graduate summa cum laude. In a mood to let her hair down, she danced through Berry's entire set and, through the college ball committee, arranged to meet him backstage. They conversed for an hour about the underpinning of rhythm by the human heartbeat and Berry invited the flushed and excitable Plath to join him at a nearby motel. College friends provided a cover story for Plath in the next two weeks as she accompanied the band on a tour of Maine, New England and Maryland, occasionally helping with cooking and washing duties, before returning to Smith. Berry fondly commmemorated their brief but passionate union in Little Silver Dollar, while Plath immortalised her quondam lover in Berry Song ("Love set you ticking like a fat gold watch ...") She was to meet and marry Ted Hughes in Cambridge only a few months later. Comments Prosit, Ed The Bibliothecary always welcomes readers' comments. |
| Chapter The First Introducing Our Heroine, Jennet Stearne, Whose Father Hunts Witches, Whose Aunt Seeks Wisdom, and Whose Soul Desires an Object It Cannot Name |
