Mark Twain

"The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."

Novel defense

The Smithsonian Book of Books by Michael Olmert

From The Smithsonian Book of Books comes this little detail of which I was unaware.

"The ability to read and write Latin among the clergy was a holdover from the time of Alcuin (of York). Reading the 51st Psalm in Latin was proof that one was in holy orders and so was exempt from criminal prosecution in civil courts. Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's friend, once used his classical training in this way to escape punishment for manslaughter after a duel. In America this legal device survived into the 18th century."

Colophons and marginalia

I am enjoying dipping into The Smithsonian Book of Books at the moment.

The Smithsonian Book of Books by Michael Olmert

In the chapters covering the arts and development of the medieval scribes and illuminated manuscripts are a littering of the marginalia and colophons inked in by those toiling scribes of centuries past (and which seem to bring us closer to them than any of the actual text they are copying):

To copy books is better than to ditch the vines:
the second serves the belly, but the first the mind.

Or from this Irish scribe about his favorite pet:

Pangur is proof the arts of cats
And men are in alliance;
His mind is set on catching rats,
And mine on snaring science.

I make my book, the world forgot,
A kind of endless class-time;
My hobby Pangur envies not--
He likes more childish pastime.

Caught in his diplomatic net,
A mouse jumps down his gullet;
And sometimes I can half-way get
A problem when I mull it.

An Irish scribe in the 1100s couldn't resist adding this editorial colophon to the book he had just finished copying:

I who have copied down this story, or more accurately fantasy, do not credit the details of the story, or fantasy. Some things in it are devilish lies, and some poetical figments; some seem possible and others not; some are for the enjoyment of idiots.

Another exasperated scribe noted in the margins of a particularly challenging piece of Greek

There's an end to that . . and my seven curses go with it.

And then there is the simple and touching colophon to a just completed copy:

Goodbye, little book.

Nasturtiums

I know there's a word for it, can anyone think of it? The phenomenon is when you suddenly come across two or more instances of something unusual and impute to it something more than coincidence. I first became across this phenomenon when I was ten or twelve and noticed in a single day three separate dogs in different parts of the city that had those big plastic cones they put around a dog's head to stop them from chewing on stitches or a wound. I hadn't seen one of those for years and then spotted three in a day.

Likewise, last night I am sampling some Robert Frost poems and came across Locked Out.

Locked Out
As told to a child
by Robert Frost


When we locked up the house at night,
We always locked the flowers outside
And cut them off from window light.
The time I dreamed the door was tried
And brushed with buttons upon sleeves,
The flowers were out there with the thieves.
Yet nobody molested them!
We did find one nasturtium
Upon the steps with bitten stem.
I may have been to blame for that:
I always thought it must have been
Some flower I played with as I sat
At dusk to watch the moon down early.

What caught my eye was the line "We did find one nasturtium" and thinking to myself, you don't see that word often and I don't think I have ever seen it in a poem. Nasturtium is Latin for nose twister.

Then this morning, I am rereading Rosemary Wells' Wingwalker and come across:

"Your Father has dreams on the side, Reuben," my mother told me. She and I were planting nasturtiums in the center of a tire painted white.

Now what are the odds, and how would you even reckon them, of coming across nasturtiums at random, twice in the space of twenty-four hours?

Socio-geography

Here is an interesting article by Virginia Postrel titled Resilience vs. Anticipation from Reason On-line, August 25, 1997. The whole article is a nice admixture of socio-geography, business strategy, macro-economics and technology history.

The only real relevance here is that I found it interesting and it provides some well-argued substance to a theme that the writer Lawrence Durrell used to speculate on, i.e. the influence of an environment on the character of a people.

Lawrence Durrell is most famous for his Alexandria Quartet, (constituting Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea) which is generally admired by many literary critics and has always seemed popular among older Young Adult readers. For my money, though, in my teenage years, I far more enjoyed his travel writing, especially Prospero's Cell, Reflections on a Marine Venus, Bitter Lemons, and Sicilian Carousel among others. Sadly all are out of print but some are represented in an anthology the Lawrence Durrell Travel Reader. Also not to be overlookoed is the humorous gem Antrobus Complete and the rather unclassifiable Pope Joan, all grist for the YA mill.

A great ten-step reading program

Here is a wonderful reading program from John Bianchi and Frank B. Edwards at Pokeweed Press. No special subscriptions, no classes necessary. Nothing - simply add commitment and books and you are good to go.

Reading through the steps, I kept wanting to pull out a particular step for emphasis. Step 5 for example (Read for the fun of it) is especially important. But then again Step 6 (Ration TV as you ration junk food) I am whole-heartedly behind. And Step 7 (Fill your home with books) has got to be mentioned and endorsed. And on and on. I guess that is why I like their progam so much. That and the fact that it pretty neatly summarizes what we have done in our home.

Tacitus, Germanic Tribes and Political Correctness

Gaius Cornelius Tacitus 56AD-117AD

In high school, I went through a Roman historian phase where I read many of the classic Roman historians; Tacitus, Livy, Plutarch, etc. The issues addressed by those writers of two millenium ago often felt so contemporary and I found it fascinating.

I came across this interesting set of observations on the naiveté of Tacitus via a couple of bloggers, Glenn Reynolds and then Gail Heriot. Once again, it is a tying together of today with the long ago.

The essay is by John M. Ellis and is actually the first chapter of his 1997 book Literature Lost; Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities.

Opening excerpt:

What we now call "political correctness" may seem to be nothing more than a modern fad, and one that will pass, but to see it only this way is to misunderstand it. Its particular shape may be specific to our time, but its basic impulse is one that recurs regularly in the history of Western society. Herein lies a deep irony. Those in the grip of this impulse are critical of the Western tradition and define themselves by their opposition to it, yet the impulse itself is so much a part of the Western tradition that the attitudes it generates can be said to be quintessentially Western. One reason for studying the Western tradition is to learn some important lessons about this recurring phenomenon and so avoid mistakes that have been made many times before. In this chapter I shall look at some prior episodes to show more clearly what kind of thing this impulse is, what produces it, and what its dangers are. Rather than carp at the absurdities of the current scene, we can understand them more fully as part of the history of Western civilization.

Those who study German culture, as I do, usually get their first account of the early Germanic peoples from the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote a short treatise entitled Germania in the first century A.D. By the standards of civilized Rome, the Germans were barbarians, which is what Tacitus calls them; in modern terminology, they were part of the Third World of their day. But in Tacitus' eyes they were quite remarkable people. They seemed to be instinctively democratic; all major affairs were discussed by the entire community, and only minor matters were delegated to chieftains. Even the views of a king were heeded, Tacitus tells us, "more because his advice carries weight than because he has the power to command." Similarly, in war, commanders relied on example rather than on the authority of their rank. These natural egalitarians were apparently not bothered by questions of social standing and power. And if they seemed to have the sin of pride well under control, the sin of greed seemed to give them no problems either: Tacitus notes that "the employment of capital in order to increase it by usury is unknown in Germany."