Austen's Dangerous Books for Boys!Jennifer Schuessler in the New York Times Book Blog was surprised "while researching a story on Jane Austen monster mashups, that until fairly recently the Bardess of Basingstoke was regarded as pretty much for the boys. There is a pattern throughout the Victorian period and into the modern era that sees the great English statesmen and literati and gentlemen scholars manifesting their devotion to Austen by reading her novels over and over,” Deidre Lynch, a professor at the University of Toronto who has written extensively on Austen devotees, told me in an e-mail message.
Benjamin Disraeli read “Pride and Prejudice” 17 times, and Matthew Arnold and John Henry Newman read “Mansfield Park” every year. The historian Thomas Babbington Macaulay read Austen obsessively and, as a colonial administrator in India, wrote letters home comparing various colleagues to characters in “Emma” and “Pride and Prejudice.” None of them are known to have covered the books in plain brown paper.
In fact, Lynch points out, the term “Janeite” - today used somewhat derisively to refer to Austen’s besotted female fans - came into usage in the 1890s thanks to men who wore it like a badge of honor. Kipling’s 1923 story “The Janeites” was about a platoon of British soldiers who use Austen talk to distract themselves from the horror of the trenches. And here’s E. M. Forster, coming out as a “Jane Austenite” in 1924: I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen. My fatuous expression, and airs of personal immunity - how ill they sit on the face, say, of a Stevensonian! But Jane Austen is so different. She is my favorite author! I read and reread, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers.
On the distaff side of the library, women readers were often much less enthusiastic. Charlotte Brönte, Lynch says, bridled when George Henry Lewes (George Eliot’s paramour) kept pushing the novels on her. “Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on this point.” The heroine of “Troy Chimneys,” Margaret Kennedy’s 1953 historical novel set in the Regency, offered one possible explanation. When the male hero keeps pressing “Mansfield Park” and “Emma” on a lady he knows, she pushes back, arguing that the books, however entertaining, ended up keeping her, well, in the house. Austen’s “greatest admirers,” she says, “will always be men, I believe. For, when they have had enough of the parlor, they may walk out, you know, and we cannot.”
But by the mid-20th century, Austen had become identified as a women’s author. Lynch points to a 1947 usage cited in the O.E.D. that suggests that the question of the Janeite’s gender was starting to make people nervous: Men as masculine as Scott and Kipling have been Janeites and have been enthralled by her sly humor and fidelity to reality. As opposed to the awesome clothes and swoony subplots? Next time I go whaling, I’m taking Jane."
Mormon writers an emerging force in young adult literature
The success of Stephenie Meyers Twilight Books has seen the Salt Lake Tribune arguing that "Mormon writers an emerging force in young adult literature ... Mormon writers, many of them young women, who are surging into the genre of young adult literature, finding a happy marriage between the expectations of their religion and the desires of a burgeoning publishing niche. The most famous among them, of course, is Stephenie Meyer, a practicing Mormon from Arizona whose Twilight series, about a teenage girl who has a no-sex-before-marriage relationship with a dreamy adolescent vampire..."
What drives people to steal rare books
Tim Richardson in the UK Financial Times has a long and sobering article on what drives people to steal rare books. "Every so often a high-profile example of book theft makes the news. The crime in question does not concern hard-up students helping themselves to textbooks in Foyles. Rather it details cases of premeditated, often audacious, theft of beautiful and rare books.
It happened in January, when Farhad Hakimzadeh, an Iranian businessman and book collector, was given a two-year sentence for cutting and stealing pages from antiquarian books in the British and Bodleian libraries over seven years. Hakimzadeh, 60, said he took the pages, from texts that date back to the 16th century and deal with European and Middle Eastern relations, only to augment his own collection. It was proved, however, that he was using stolen single pages to increase the value of books he already owned, which he could then sell. One such page contained a 500-year-old map painted by Hans Holbein, an artist in the court of Henry VIII, worth £32,000."
More here.
Is C.P. Snow's Two Cultures concept still relevant?
The New York Times notes that "Few literary phrases have had as enduring an after¬life as “the two cultures,” coined by C. P. Snow to describe what he saw as a dangerous schism between science and literary life. Yet few people actually seem to read Snow’s book bearing that title.
It was 50 years ago this May that Snow, an English physicist, civil servant and novelist, delivered a lecture at Cambridge called “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” which was later published in book form. Snow’s famous lament was that “the intellectual life of the whole of Western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups,” consisting of scientists on the one hand and literary scholars on the other. Snow largely blamed literary types for this “gulf of mutual incomprehension.” These intellectuals, Snow asserted, were shamefully unembarrassed about not grasping, say, the second law of thermodynamics - even though asking if someone knows it, he writes, “is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?” ...
Today, others believe science now addresses the human condition in ways Snow did not anticipate. For the past two decades, the editor and agent John Brockman has promoted the notion of a “third culture” to describe scientists - notably evolutionary biologists, psychologists and neuroscientists - who are “rendering visible the deeper meanings in our lives” and superseding literary artists in their ability to “shape the thoughts of their generation.” Snow himself suggested in the 1960s that social scientists could form a “third culture.”
The Library of Congress lets you see the Congressional Stevie Wonder Concert
You can view it in full at the Library of Congress website. Wonder performed at the Library in celebration of his being awarded the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. (Thanks to Stevie Wonder and to EMI for giving the LOC rights and permissions!)
Sony e-book reader gets 500,000 books from Google
Yahoo reports that Google Inc. "is making half a million books, unprotected by copyright, available for free on Sony Corp.'s electronic book-reading device. It's the first time Google has made its vast trove of scanned public-domain books available to an e-book device, and vaults the Sony Reader past Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle as the device with the largest available library, at about 600,000 books. The scanned books were all published before 1923, and include works like Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" as well as nonfiction classics like Herodotus' "The Histories." The books are already available as free downloads in the Portable Document Format (PDF), which works well on computer screens but not on e-book readers. Google will provide the books to the Sony Reader in the EPUB (electronic publication) format, which lets the lines flow differently to fit a smaller screen."
A new map of knowledge
The New York Times reports that "A new map of knowledge has been assembled by scientists at the research library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. It is based on electronic data searches in which users moved from one journal to another, thus establishing associations between them. The map includes both the sciences and the humanities in a hub and wheel arrangement, with the humanities at the center and the sciences arrayed around them . . . In the map, published in the current issue of PLoS One, the journals are color-coded as follows: physics, light purple; chemistry, blue; biology, green; medicine, red; social sciences, yellow; humanities, white; mathematics, purple; and engineering, pink. The interconnecting lines reflect the probability that a reader will click from one journal to another on the computer screen. What we have is a map of worldwide scientific activity," Johan Bollen, leader of the research team, said. He plans to make the data publicly available so scholars can assess the impact of their or others' articles and the degree of influence of scientific journals."
The French reject Nicolas Sarkozy’s hatred of a book
Jennifer Schuessler in the New York Times writes, "Those French do know how to get under their leaders’ skin. Apparently, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s well-known hatred for “La Princesse de Clèves” has inspired thousands of readers to reacquaint themselves with Madame de La Fayette’s 17th-century classic. At this week’s Paris book fair, buttons declaring “I Am Reading ‘La Princesse de Cleves’ ” sold out. Meanwhile, universities and theaters have held public readings of their unpopular president’s literary bête noire, a tale of duty overcoming romantic passion (which, if I’m remembering my sophomore tutorial correctly, includes some powerful phallic imagery). And in a recent poll by the magazine Télérama, French writers chose the novel as their third favorite, after works by Proust and Joyce."
Maurice Bowra, the great Oxford gossip
Sir Anthony Kenny in The Times Literary Supplement reviews a new biography of Bowra which "captures the attractive and the repellent features of an extraordinary academic icon".
"Anyone who has read Brideshead Revisited will remember Mr Samgrass of All Souls, the academic on the make who worms his way into the confidence of Lady Marchmain and is trusted to take her alcoholic undergraduate son Sebastian on the Grand Tour. Sebastian gives him the slip on the tour, and drinks to his heart’s content in Istanbul, while his escort enjoys unencumbered visits to Levantine tourist sites. Returned to Brideshead, Samgrass gives a colourful report of the tour, but is eventually exposed as a liar and sent back to Oxford in disgrace.
Evelyn Waugh, courageously, sent a presentation copy of Brideshead to Maurice Bowra, the Warden of Wadham College. The resourceful Bowra rose to the occasion. On receiving the book he wrote back, “Brilliant! Brilliant! Perhaps too brilliant! . . . I hope you spotted me. What a piece of artistry that is - best thing in the whole book”. In the end Brideshead was only one of half a dozen novels and detective stories that portrayed the Warden in fiction. Now, this long-awaited, exhaustively researched, and compulsively readable biography by Leslie Mitchell allows us to assess the Maurice Bowra of fact rather than fiction."
More here.
A maze of magic
"Inspired" by the British Library's "misplacing" of 9,000 books, British novelist Michèle Roberts who worked there, relives the joy of losing herself in the labyrinths of the British Library (then then British Museum) and the perils of being a Librarian. As one who also attended the course at University College London and often saw behind the scenes at the British Museum Library, this article reasonated on a personal level. She concludes:
"I did not survive long as a librarian. After a seven-month stint as the British Council's librarian in Bangkok (I blotted my copybook by sending the king and queen stern reminders that their library books were overdue), I returned to the UK and supported myself through part-time teaching and journalism. From time to time, I meet some of the librarians with whom I trained: they have had to become expert managers and ideologues in a free market, fighting the narrowing availability of public libraries and their reduction of stock, coaxing disaffected youngsters into Idea Stores, battling the contempt for intellectual life initiated in the Thatcher years. Librarians are necessarily heroes and warriors - albeit in disguise."
Watchmen movie
The UK Guardian has a long interview by Steve Rose with Alan Moore: "an extraordinary gentleman, novelist, magician and 'guru of the graphic novel" talks about Watchmen, the dark side of Hollywood and the morality of pornography."
Ten of the best fictional visits to the lavatory
The UK Guardian lists its top ten from Ulysses to Mr Phillips.
"The Merchant's Tale" by Geoffrey Chaucer
Medieval writers were far from prissy. In "The Miller's Tale" we hear that "Nicholas was risen for to pisse". In "The Merchant's Tale", May reads her love letter from lusty Damyan before she disposes of it in the best place. "She rente it al to cloutes atte laste, / And in the pryvee softely it caste".
"Sad Steps" by Philip Larkin
A mid-sleep visit to the lavatory is also the occasion for digressive fancies in this eloquently bleak poem. "Groping back to bed after a piss", the poet is "startled" by the sight of the moon in a "wind-picked sky". It sets him off on high-flown thoughts, until he recalls that he's just a middle-aged geezer with a weak bladder.
MIT OpenCourseWare makes major European Novels available online
"MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative has brought education from the banks of the Charles River to all corners of the globe. One of the latest additions to the MIT OpenCourseWare site deals with the importance and nuances of major European novels, which in this case include Don Quixote, Père Goriot, Madame Bovary, and Anna Karenina. ... On this site, visitors can read the course overview, check out the syllabus, look over the readings (links to online versions are made available here), and take a look at the paper assignments and the discussion questions for each novel."
What the Dickens?
Professor John Sutherland has a long piece in the Financial Times book section on recent Dickens books, including Dan Simmons 'Drood'.
Quote of the Week
"Marcel Proust is to life, what an empty orchestra pit is to music" John Naughton.
Odd Book Title
The infancy and development of linoleum floor cloth. By Frederick Walton. Simpkin. 1925
Debbie Campbell of the NLA reports that while Libraries Australia doesn't show this work, there is a very popular recent alternative called '50 ways to paint ceilings and floors' here.
Pun of the Week
The first bad seafood salad was shrimply awful.
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