Click the image for a larger version.
Cartoon of the Week : Books
Category Archives: books
Quotes of the Week: Sublime & Ridiculous
The Tuesday scowls, the Wednesday growls, the Thursday curses, the Friday howls, the Saturday snores, the Sunday yawns, the Monday morns, the Monday morns. The whacks, the moans, the cracks, the groans, the welts, the squeaks, the belts, the shrieks, the pricks, the prayers, the kicks, the tears, the skelps, and the yelps.
[Samuel Beckett, Watt]
The moon lives twenty-eight days and this is our month. Each of these days represents something sacred to us: two of the days represent the Great Spirit; two are for Mother Earth; four are for the four winds; one is for the Spotted Eagle; one for the sun; and one for the moon; one is for the Morning Star; and four are for the four ages; seven for our seven great rites; one is for the buffalo; one for the fire; one for the water; one for the rock; and finally, one is for the two-legged people. If you add all these days up you will see that they come to twenty-eight. You should know also that the buffalo has twenty-eight ribs, and that in our war bonnets we usually wear twenty-eight feathers. You see, there is a significance for everything, and these are things that are good for men to know and to remember.
[Black Elk, quoted somewhere I now forget by Joseph Campbell]
Moyers: What happens when a society no longer embraces a powerful mythology?
Campbell: What we’ve got on our hands. If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.
Moyers: And you’d find?
Campbell: The news of the day, including destructive and violent acts by young people who don’t know how to behave in a civilized society.
Moyers: Society has provided them no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind …
Campbell: That’s exactly it. That’s the significance of the puberty rites. In primal societies, there are teeth knocked out, there are scarifications, there are circumcisions, there are all kinds of things done. So you don’t have your little baby body any more, you’re something else entirely.
When I was a kid, we wore short trousers, you know, knee pants. And then there was a great moment when you put on long pants. Boys now don’t get that. I see even five-year-olds walking around with long trousers. When are they going to know that they’re now men and must put aside childish things?
Moyers: Where do the kids growing up in the city — on 125th and Broadway, for example — where do these kids get their myths today?
Campbell: They make them up themselves. This is why we have graffiti all over the city. These kids have their own gangs and their own initiations and their own morality, and they’re doing the best they can … they have not been initiated into our society.
[Joseph Campbell; The Power of Myth]
Out of this scrimmage Thomas Drury emerges as something of an orchestrator, an impresario of knaveries …
[Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, 2nd edition, 2002]
A fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta.
[Shakespeare, I Henry IV, I ii]
Quotes of the Week
This week’s selection of quotes which caught my eye during the last week …
Everyone has a photographic memory … Some just don’t have film.
[Thoughts of Angel]
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
[Kurt Vonnegut]
Which links quite nicely to the following two …
We now return to the spring of 1593 and the events leading up to the killing of Christopher Marlowe … with a new understanding of the continuity of secret politics as a factor in his life. He is remembered as a poet … and as a wild young blasphemer in an age of enforced devotion, but he was also a spy … one of hundreds of such men, part of a maverick army of intelligencers and projectors on which the government of the day depended, sometimes out of a genuine need for information, but often in ways that relate more to political expediency, to courtly in-fighting, to police-state repression.
[Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, 2nd edition, 2002]
As we have found, time and again, informers have often a need to create information. They are ‘projectors’ who provoke or indeed invent dangerous sentiments in order to denounce them. They are ‘politicians’ in that pejorative Elizabethan sense, the sense in which Shakespeare means it when King Lear says, ‘Get thee glass eyes and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see the things thou dost not’.
[Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, 2nd edition, 2002]
Quotes of the Week
Well let’s start this week’s selection where we left off last week, with something from John Aubrey …
Even the cats were different, and Aubrey could recall when ‘the common English Catt was white with some blewish piednesse sc gallipot-blew, the race or breed of them are now almost lost’ … Aubrey says that Archbishop Laud had been ‘a great lover of Catts. He was presented with some Cypruss-catts, our Tabby-catts, which were sold at first for 5li a piece. This was about 1637 or 1638’. Tabbies are still called ‘cyprus cats’ in Norfolk.
[Anthony Powell, John Aubrey and His Friends]
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”.
[Isaac Asimov in Newsweek, 21 January 1980]
I discovered books and music while everyone else got into drugs. Books and music were my drugs. What I read and listened to then shaped and changed my life forever.
[Katy Wheatley on her weblog]
I find being middle aged rather liberating. I wear what I like. I eat what I like. I listen to and watch what I like. I do not feel ashamed of anything that makes me happy and makes my life feel richer, better and more joyous.
[Katy Wheatley on her weblog]
Katy, dearest, how many more times do I have to tell you that you aren’t middle aged? You can’t be middle aged — you’re younger than I am! Anyway I’m not having it, if only because if you’re middle aged then I’m senile and I ain’t ready for that yet.
To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as an easy way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.
[John Perry, University of Stanford, Winner of the 2011 Ig Nobel for Literature]
And finally, confirmation from an unknown source of what we all suspected …
Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible impossible.
Quotes of the Week
Well there’s just one good quote this week …
I have a very proper present for your Lordship. I know your love of antiquities makes you a little superstitious. I have an elderstick, that was cut in the minute that the sun entered Taurus. Such a planetary cutting of it gives virtue to stop bleeding to which you know you are subject. If you desire to know more of the time and manner of cutting it, you must consult Aubrey’s Miscellanies. You may meet with it without doubt amongst your father’s collection of mad books.
[Dr William Stratford writing to Edward Harley (son of the Earl of Oxford), 28 June 1711, quoted in Anthony Powell, John Aubrey and His Friends]
Listography : Celebrity Beer
I’ve not taken part in Kate’s weekly Listography for the last couple of weeks largely because I’ve struggled to be motivated by the themes. Well that’s life. But I thought that I should try to make an effort again this week. And as often that’s proven to be harder than I expected as Kate is asking us to nominate five celebrities we would like to go for a beer with.
Surely that can’t be difficult? Well yes, because first one has to decide what “celebrity” means. The mind goes to TV persons, footballers, WAGS, pop singers and actors. Well if that’s what it means count me out because almost to a woman (are only of them actually men?) they bore me rigid — if I’ve even noticed them to start with. And then there is the question as to whether they have to be alive, or if dead celebrities count?
Therefore I decided that “celebrity” was whatever I wanted it to mean and I could include anyone I liked as long as they had a public persona and were alive. So here are five, who at the final reckoning may or may not be the top five. Who knows?
Alice Roberts. I’ve mentioned Alice any number of times before here because she’s just all-round brilliant: qualified medic, teaches anatomy, anthropologist, archaeologist, author, broadcaster and an excellent artist. I also think she’s hot! One of the people I would love to sit in the pub with and just talk the evening away.
Professor Mick Aston. The original lead archaeologist with the stripy jumpers on Channel 4’s Time Team. He’s another who I would love to just be able to chat with over beer, partly because I imagine a fascinating conversation but also because of his interest in the development of English churches and monasticism.
Dalai Lama. Another old friend of these lists — and not just because I am more attracted to Buddhism (albeit Zen) than any other philosophy. How can one not want to talk with one of the world’s most important spiritual leaders. But not just that, he seems to have a slightly wicked sense of humour!
Tony Benn. Yes, the British Labour Party politician, former Cabinet Minister and campaigner, now well into his eighties. I’d want to have a drink with him not for his politics (I disagree with much, but not all, of what he believes in) but because he is such a respected parliamentarian and constitutional historian with great insight into the workings of both history and state.
And now it is awful to say it but I get a bit stumped for my fifth nomination. There are so many people one could choose: Astronomer Patrick Moore, chefs Brian Turner and Rick Stein, BBC Weather Presenter Laura Tobin (a cheeky little pixie if ever I saw one!), authors Terry Pratchett and AN Wilson, historian Simon Schama, comedian Rory Bremner … But I think for my final choice I’ll pick …
Dick Strawbridge. Yes, him of the giant moustache. He’s another broadcaster, engineer, ecologist, ex-army Colonel and an absolute all-round nutter! I first noticed him presenting the BBC series “Crafty Tricks of War” in which he built — and usually blew up — all manner of nefarious military devices.
Well now, that’s a strange set of bedfellows if ever there was one. But in tell you what, I bet they’d all get on well together over some beer, after all in their own ways they’re all completely out to lunch on a variety of ancient bicycles!
Quotes of the Week
Oooo … have we got a thought-provoking bunch this week!
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
[William James]
Life is short, smile while you still have teeth!
[Thoughts of Angel]
A shepherd in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale wishes “there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.”
[David Dobbs at National Geographic]
[Natural] Selection is hell on dysfunctional traits. If adolescence is essentially a collection of them – angst, idiocy, and haste; impulsiveness, selfishness, and reckless bumbling – then how did those traits survive selection?
[David Dobbs at National Geographic]
If there was a God, why on earth would he want us to ‘believe’ and/or ‘have faith’? Given that he (she or it) is omnipotent, and can therefore by definition do anything that he wants, why doesn’t he just make us have faith/belief hard-wired into our brains? Also, can anybody think of reasons why he would care if we have faith or if we just merrily go on ignoring him? I’m genuinely puzzled by this.
[Keith J at cix:enquire_within/54discussion]
For what are we if we are not words made flesh, or flesh expressing our meaning in words? We are memories, thoughts, feelings, ideas, pain, anguish, love, amusement, boredom, hopes and dreams. We are all these things in a sheath of skin, making our way into the unknown, and if we cannot capture it, think about it, reflect on it and own it, what do we have?
[Katyboo]
I visualize the ego as a little guy in a gray flannel suit and tight necktie. His job is to get you safely through your waking day, to make sure that you pay your electric bill and don’t offend the boss. He keeps up a constant chatter, telling you to do this or that, and insisting that you pay attention to what’s happening in the world around you. He takes occasional coffee breaks, like when you’ve driven down a familiar road, and realize when you arrive home that you have no memory of the trip. The ego has taken time out, figuring you can get home on automatic pilot. He’s grateful when you finally retire for the night. He’s got you in a safe place – your bedroom – where nothing is likely to happen to you. He pops up again in the morning, when you “wake down” from your wider experiences in the sleep state. He’s the character who makes you look at the clock (“time” only exists in its usual sense when the ego is on the job) and nags you into getting out of bed and on your way to work. Jealous of the time you spend in your right brain, he likes to insist he’s been around all the time. He hates to admit that his job isn’t all there is to your experience, so he makes sure you forget your dreams. He’s especially good at pretending he’s never off the job. “I wasn’t asleep, or not paying attention. I was just resting my eyes. I heard everything you said,” he insists indignantly when you catch him at one of his coffee breaks, such as when you are wool-gathering, sleeping, or under hypnosis.
[Helen Wambach, Reliving Past Lives]
I've Been Amazoned!
Listography – Things I did this Summer
I’ve been somewhat lacking in the last few weeks in keeping up with Kate’s Listography. The spirit has been willing but there just haven’t been enough hours in the day. Why? Well see my previous post, and consider that I’ve been working a minimum of 6 hours a day, 7 days a week, for at least 6 weeks on Society/conference business.
But better late than never here’s my response to Kate’s Listography from last week. These are some of the things I did this summer …
Organised and ran an international literary conference. I think I hardly need say more.
Completed and released my photo book – a month earlier than planned. I don’t expect it to make me tons of money. I did it because I wanted to; it was fun; it was for me.
Wrote an academic paper and submitted it for publication. Not because I had to for work or anything, but just for the sheer hell of it!
Drank afternoon tea with an Earl. Yes, a real Earl. No names, no telling. Just a pleasant cup of tea and a chat, tête-a-tete, while he signed some books.
Ate too much fish and chips – several times. Well who wouldn’t?
Glamorous? No. Mostly damned hard work!
Well that was some weekend!
I’m exhausted! I’m still trying to recover from last weekend. And here we are with the next weekend upon us!
We spent four days last weekend running what is turning into a major literary conference: the Biennial Anthony Powell Conference, organised by the Anthony Powell Society of which I am Hon. Secretary. So that means I’m the one who does all the work and carries the can.
This is the sixth conference we have run, and the fifth for which I have been the lead organiser (the exception was 2009 in Washington, DC where I still did a lot of the work). All of them have been different and each has been stunning in its own way.
But for me this one surpassed all the others. 100 delegates. 15 papers of different types plus three keynotes over two days of plenary sessions at the Naval & Military Club in London’s St James’s Square. A reception with charity auction which raised almost £1000 – which was at least twice what I had expected (the money goes to pay for a plaque in London to commemorate Powell). A coach tour of London followed by Sunday lunch. Then on Monday a few of us spent the day in Eton, still looking at Powell connections. All with a fantastic, friendly set of people.
Four long and tiring days. But wonderfully exhilarating days despite the odd gripes (well you can’t please everyone all the time). This is some of what the delegates said:
This is my fifth conference this summer and has been far and away the best
Superb organization and time-keeping
Congratulations on a really splendid conference
Brilliant venue
Themes very well thought out, complementing each other
The setting was perfect
Excellent venue and organisation coupled with lots of friendly and interesting people
Great work all round; congratulations
Reminded me how much I enjoy Powell’s writings
Did we make a profit? Don’t know yet as I haven’t got all the bills in, but we’ll not be far off at least breaking even (which is all we aim to do).
And I didn’t have time to take a single photo! But here I am (in blue shirt), in the sumptuous surroundings of the Naval & Military Club, playing at being auctioneer (photo by Graham & Dorothy Davie).
Now I wonder if I can get enough lie-ins before doing it all again in 2013?