What are you reading now?

[eighthobstruction]

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... currently reading H J Jackson's marvellous Marginalia - Readers Writing in Books , in which I discover the wonderfully choleric Francis Douce [1757-1834], whose list of Complaints on his resignation from the post of Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum is a joy -

1. The Nature of the constitution of the M[useum] altogether objectionable.
2. The coldness, even danger, in the frequenting the great house in winter.
3. The vastness of the business remaining to be done & continually flowing in.
4. The total impossibility of my individual efforts, limited, restrained & controlled as they are, to do any real, or at least much, good.
5. An apparent, & I believe real, system of espionage throughout the place & certainly a want of due respect towards and confidence in the officers.
6. The total absence of all aid in my department.
7. The apartments I reside in are dangerously cold in winter & like an oven in summer. The whole damp, especially the lower room where my books are in great jeopardy & which I never entered, even in summer time, without being sensibly affected with some kind of pain or unpleasant sensation.
8. The general unwholesomeness of the air from sinks, drains, the ill-contrived & filthy water closet; & most of all the large & excessively cold bed chamber with an opening to the back kitchen & all its damp & cellar like smells.
9. The want of society with the members, their habits wholly different & their manners far from fascinating & sometimes repulsive.
10. The want of power to do any good, & the difficulty to make the motley & often trifling committees sensible that they could do any.
11. The general pride & affected consequence of these committees.
12. Their assumption of power, that I think not vested in them.
13. The fiddle faddle requisition of incessant reports, the greatest part of which can inform them of nothing, or, when they do, of what they are generally incapable of understanding or fairly judging of.

I too will be leaving this Forum for a while, but had to share this as a Christmas treat....

.

....and can't get a decent hot/strong cup of tea anywhere....

[Ian Thumwood]

Smittims

To pick up the discussion, Russell's position is that GoM's "History of the British Kings" does incorporate some grains of truth but the compilation of a single narrative from various sources resulted in a hotch-potch which seriously clouds what is credible. It is interesting that he was ridiculed by his contemporaries who doubted the veracity of his writing and more modern historians who have the benefit of more thorough and disciplined research as well as archaeology. Russell teases out some of G o M's resources (such as Caesar's "Gallic Wars" where he miscounts the number of incursions into Britannia by adding a confused, third visit.) and implies that there are other sources which are now missing. I think the issue of intent is, as you suggest, important and even more so when you can understand who the original audience was for this book. (In GoM's case this meant the Normans as well as a desire to put the "Celtic" Welsh centre stage and so discredit the "Saxon English.) Unfortunately, Geoffrey's exercise was poorly executed and includes a lot of fantasy. I like the book but , as a piece of historical research, I feel it palls in comparison with other ancient historians as diverse as Suetonius and Gregory of Tours who were more thorough and capable as historians. He is not much better than Gerald of Wales as a chronicler of history and has the disadvantage of not being as amusing either! What is amazing is how the stories from one book have , unconsciously, been burned in to the national identity.

The fact that G of M recounted stories about Iron Age kings through an early medieval lens makes the stories regarding Lear, etc a furtile ground for the likes of Shakespeare to project his own politcal bias regarding late 16th Century . The stories are good enough to remain popular 900 years after they were written. Both writers and their audience seemed to view Roman history as being identical to early medieval periods and it was only until 17th / 18th century that you find people taking a more "serious" approach. When you read about Roman armies in much medieval literature, for example, what is being described is a medieval army - a good example of this is in much of the Arthurian tales that were popular at that time.

Back in the 1990s I spent a lot of time reading medieval literature. For a better "grasp" of that period, I think "Sir Gawain & the Green Knight" takes some beating, albeit it was written long after G o M. This book really strikes me as being "authentic" and, as I think I made the point before, diminishes Victoriana like "Ivanhoe" in my opinion.

As far as the Bible is concerned, I would love to read a book where the NT in particular was framed within a Roman context. Adrian Goldsworthy partly dealt with this in an epilogue to his thorough birography of Augustus but I think that the scope should have been widened. Has anyone ever written about the NT from the presepctive of being a verifiable historical record, I wonder ?

BTW - The new Asterix is pretty good!

[smittims]

I think the best way I can answer Ian's question is by referring to the device of Myth, which I think is often misunderstood today. A Channel 4 documentary might mention a Bible story and ask 'did this really happen or its it just a myth?'. I think the ancient reader would not have asked that question, but rather 'what does this story mean to me today?'

A myth is a powerful cultural tool, conveying truth through vivid and memorable images and stories. This is accepted subconsciously by many people who might not analyse what is happening. I think Homer, Shakespeare and Jane Austen are read and loved by millions not because they believe that Lizzie Bennet's marriage to Mr D'Arcy is historical fact but because the story ilustrates a profound human truth.

With the Bible of course this has been muddied by the rise of Fundamentalism since the mid-19th century, which began as a reaction to the scientific discoveries proving the Biblical record could not be fact. Wiser minds knew all along that there is no mention of fact in the Bible, no claim that it is historically accurate or, more importantly ,that it is important to believe that it is. S. Paul says 'this is a true saying and worthy to be repeated' but he does not insist that it is historical fact.

As for King Lear, I think that has always been thought legend. But to confuse this with the concept of fake , forgery , or nonsense is to miss the truth of the story, as it would be to stop reading Hamlet because we can't prove that he really said 'to be or not to be'. Instead we nod our heads and say 'how true this is.'

[richardfinegold]

Lessons,by Ian McEwan. I had started it a few months ago but then shelved it for some others but now I am really enjoying it. Part of the ploti involves the seduction of an adolescent by his Piano teacher. That would have been a longed for event for a student, but it always seems that such children become emotionally scarred for life. The book takes a bit to hit its stride but it’s become compelling

[Dave2002]

Flute by RIchard Adeney

Very entertaining - and somewhat salacious. Very well written, and by someone who often claimed in the text that he wasn't very good at anything - clearly mendacious as well!

[Pulcinella]

JG Ballard.........hmm!?

???

To what does this refer, Draco?
I didn't know that there was a new book with that title.

[DracoM]

JG Ballard.........hmm!?

[smittims]

You raise a larger issue than I can reply to adequately just now on a Monday Morning, Ian. I'll think it over and post again. One thing I might suggest now, however, is that if you think Geoffrey of Monmouth is 'complete nonsense' you may have misunderstood his book.

It seems to me that a signficant barrier to understanding archaic texts such as Shakespeare or the Bible is the difference between our concept of 'fact' in the modern world, testable provable historical fact, a concept we rely on so thoroughly that we often don't think about our reliance on it, and the method of writers who simply didn't use it, for reasons I can't go into now.

[Ian Thumwood]

Well, richard, one could write a book to answer your question,and indeed this has probably been done by more learned minds than mine. Editing Shakespeare is a lifetime's occupation.

Briefly,this is because, although the plays are clearly masterpieces of inexahustible fascination and human significance, there are so many mysteries about exactly what the author intended at so many points. For instance,there is no known surviving autograph of any of the plays, and the various forms in which they have come down to us suggest clearly that changes were made, though we lack information as to the nature and extent of the changes when , why or by whom. King Lear, for example , survives in two versions , one a quarto from 1608, which , though published in the author's lifetime, has no clear provenance, and a Folio from 1623, which, though printed after his death was published by two of his former colleagues. There are discrepancies between the two texts, but neither is clearly 'better' than the other. Other plays display other problems. Macbeth seems to have some scenes missing: characters refer to something that happened earlier which is not in the text. Pericles, long thought to be a pirated text, is now considered to have been a collaboration between Shakespeare and George Wilkins,the author of a contemporary novel on the same story. In most cases we lack clear facts about how the texts reached their surviving states. And ironically , the 1623 Folio, which was meant to establish a standard text, and which is the only surviving versionof about half the plays, presents innumerable textual problems, largely because we don't know what editing Hemmings and Condell did to their sources, nor where they got them.

So the editor needs to research such subjects as the practice of printing and proofreading in Jacobean England, the extent to which authors collaborated, the changes made when a play was revived with or without the author's involvement, and so on. He needs also to know a lot about knowledge, beliefs and ethics of the time, to understand why Shakespeare makes his characters say sometimes puzzling things.

Different editors will have different approaches and different theories about all these things . And they will be influenced by their own beliefs about Shakespeare and his intentions. Here is further uncertainty, since he has very skilfully concealed from us his own private moral, ethical and spiritual beliefs. He left no interviews nor exlapanations, as recent authors have done. If his plays were simple and their surviving text definitive, there would be no need of editions. That this is not so is the start of an endless search.

This is absolutely fascinating but it does throw up some really difficult questions with historical books which have often perplexed me. I really good example of this is Geoffrey of Monmouth's "History of the Kings of Britain" which was written in the first half of the 12th century,. I love this book even though it is complete nonsense and lovers of shakespeare will also appreciate it as they can find where he got his inspirations of the likes of King Lear. One book I have read about this is Miles Russell's "Arthur & the kings of Britain" which is almost unreadable but it does throw up awkward questions about the provenance of books written many hundeds of years ago. The crux of Russell's book is that G of M had access to a long since lost account of Iron Age Britain and that there is an element of truth in G of M's narrative even though it is easy to see which bits are nonsense. I really struggled with Russell's book which effectively attempted to give G of M more credence that he has hitherto been due. 9His contemporaries were also scathing.) However, it did make me think about other historical writers and where the source material came from. I now understand that Homer was probably not one writer but a collection of different Greek writers. There have been attempts to discredit Appicius' famous Roman cookery book as a late antiquity forgery as a 1990s attempt to discredit Asser's " Llife of King Alfred" as a medieval hoax. Shakespeare is only the tip of the ice-berg.

Effectively what Smittims has done is open a can of worms albeit something which is genuinely fascinating. I would be very interested to see the origin of something like the New Testament and curious to learn what the oldest extant version is. This is quite fascinating because the NT has been edited and translated as well as famously excluding a number of more "spoofy " gospels before arriving at the King James version which is probably the defining literary version in the English language. I do wonder how much of what was initially intended by the original writers has made it though to our times , especially as so much is at odds with contemporary Roman histories which, I suppose, may have their own agenda too. The nativity stories , for example, have little basis in fact and can be checked against acounts of the reign of Augustus who was well documented. I think that the Bible (OT and NT) probably make as fascinating an analysis as is the case of Shakespeare writing 1500 years later. I wonder how different they much be in their current form from what was composed in antiquiity and late antiquity. With regard to someone like Sophicles, (to pick a name out of the air) , we can marvel at the morals outlined within a play like Antigone, but what percentage of these words are Sophicles ? How old is the oldest written copy of his plays ? I would suggest Medieval albeit the original versions must date from the Bronze Age.

Is this something that Smittims can shed light on ?

[french frank]

... he left all his books to the Bodleian (nineteen thousand volumes), except for two which were expressly donated to the British Museum. These two were books written by one of his successors at the BM, who had written critically of Douce

Oh, dear. It doesn't sound as if he had a happy working environment!

[vinteuil]

A legendary name: he must have been a disgruntled ex-employee since he bequeathed his wonderful collection of books and manuscripts to the Bodleian! Haste ye back, vints - and have a great Christmas.

... he left all his books to the Bodleian (nineteen thousand volumes), except for two which were expressly donated to the British Museum. These two were books written by one of his successors at the BM, who had written critically of Douce : Douce's revenge is in the detailed sarcastic marginalia throughout these two books.

[french frank]

.
... currently reading H J Jackson's marvellous Marginalia - Readers Writing in Books , in which I discover the wonderfully choleric Francis Douce [1757-1834], whose list of Complaints on his resignation from the post of Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum is a joy

A legendary name: he must have been a disgruntled ex-employee since he bequeathed his wonderful collection of books and manuscripts to the Bodleian! Haste ye back, vints - and have a great Christmas.

[LMcD]

Sorry, I know nothing about Twitter! I live in the eighteenth century.

Now known as 'X', I believe, although presumably one still tweets?

[smittims]

Hope to see you back soon, vinteuil. Happy Christmas.

[vinteuil]

.
... currently reading H J Jackson's marvellous Marginalia - Readers Writing in Books , in which I discover the wonderfully choleric Francis Douce [1757-1834], whose list of Complaints on his resignation from the post of Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum is a joy -

1. The Nature of the constitution of the M[useum] altogether objectionable.
2. The coldness, even danger, in the frequenting the great house in winter.
3. The vastness of the business remaining to be done & continually flowing in.
4. The total impossibility of my individual efforts, limited, restrained & controlled as they are, to do any real, or at least much, good.
5. An apparent, & I believe real, system of espionage throughout the place & certainly a want of due respect towards and confidence in the officers.
6. The total absence of all aid in my department.
7. The apartments I reside in are dangerously cold in winter & like an oven in summer. The whole damp, especially the lower room where my books are in great jeopardy & which I never entered, even in summer time, without being sensibly affected with some kind of pain or unpleasant sensation.
8. The general unwholesomeness of the air from sinks, drains, the ill-contrived & filthy water closet; & most of all the large & excessively cold bed chamber with an opening to the back kitchen & all its damp & cellar like smells.
9. The want of society with the members, their habits wholly different & their manners far from fascinating & sometimes repulsive.
10. The want of power to do any good, & the difficulty to make the motley & often trifling committees sensible that they could do any.
11. The general pride & affected consequence of these committees.
12. Their assumption of power, that I think not vested in them.
13. The fiddle faddle requisition of incessant reports, the greatest part of which can inform them of nothing, or, when they do, of what they are generally incapable of understanding or fairly judging of.

I too will be leaving this Forum for a while, but had to share this as a Christmas treat....

.