Knowledge for knowledge’s sake?

Tags

History, Kay Fairfax, Lynne Truss, Reference

In this post: Thoughts on Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss [jump to A], and on Mrs. Beeton’s Household Book edited by Kay Fairfax [jump to B]—eventual reading in my quest to sustain Dorkus Randomicus status. Because, ya know: There comes a time in a young woman’s life when she’ll hunger for a book about how to employ a “zero tolerance approach to punctuation,” and, exhibiting the same thirst, follow that up a few days later with “an entertaining glimpse of upstairs and downstairs life in the Victorian home.” Yes. There better be those kinds of times—validate my normalcy, please?

---

[A] • My job—ya know, the thing I do to pay for this bibliophilic madness—insists on near-maniacal fastidiousness about grammar, and I say that in the fondest voice possible. Sure, this is an ideal that goes out the window when I figuratively clock out, as evidenced by this blog, hahaha.

So it wasn’t that idly that I picked up Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss—which, by the way, just annoys me with its your-prerogative attitude on the Oxford comma, and its apparent fondness for the ampersand. [I am in pain trying to stop myself from writing the title as: Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. Hell, this book has even shrugged about my insistence of italicizing titles. Come on, Miss Truss, please?]

Two main challenges to my digestion, even my comprehension: Information overload, and the fact that our house style doesn’t conform with the rules of British grammar. Great. So, no, this wasn’t zipped through. This was read with the intention to learn, even scolded. This was read with a pen aloft and a notebook ever-handy. This was read with me wielding whatever it was I picked up the next day, to the bewilderment of my co-workers at the face of my random thoughts about commas and semi-colons and em dashes.

[B] • And then, well, Mrs. Beeton’s Household Book, adapted and edited by Kay Fairfax, was read because I felt like it. Because while I was hanging out at the bookstore waiting for the X-Men: First Class screening, I saw this beckoning me, and I had to buy it. And, well, because I am curious about the Victorian era, and very very very fascinated with romance novels set then.

Holy baby pandas, I loved this antiquated, awfully practical, and occasionally self-righteous book—mostly from Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton, first published in 1861 [and, partly, Fairfax’s frequently in attendance, yet often superficial commentary]. I mean, come on, a book that intones, “She who makes her husband and her children happy, who reclaim the one from vice and trains up the other to virtue, is a much greater character than ladies described in novels.” [Beeton, there!]—isn’t that just a freakin’ hoot?

Hee, it’s all so fascinating, and I learned a lot of useless information. Sure, I’ve learned more in amassing countless of historical romance novels, but it’s great to know the particulars—that twin footmen were considered a status symbol, not unlike bookends; that the Victorians liked a lot of junk in their houses; that the drapes were almost always drawn shut, because they believed that sunlight was bad for both furniture and people; that there were no bedside tables then; and that I’d also been advised to never enter a sickroom with an empty stomach, as the body is more susceptible to contagion when hungry.

Armed thus, I am so freaking ready for the world.

PSA: Both books—Truss, PhP465, and Beeton/Fairfax, PhP250—were recently bought at National Bookstore Katipunan. Both times, I wasn’t even supposed to be hanging out at NBS Katipunan.

Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading, and our “essential function”

Tags

Alberto Manguel, Books About Books, Excerpts, History, Reference

There is nowhere to begin with A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel when you’ve got a mind as speckle-y and inane as mine. Faced with this kind of book-dorkery-in-a-book, the tendency is to quote long passages from each of the chapters, and [over-] share personal experience that basically says, “I agree, I agree!”

[I have tried to offset the projected self-indulgence of this post—and, come on, these are a smidge of my notes and marginalia for Manguel’s book—by putting up two earlier posts about it, mostly quotes: [01] About that enlightened group of people who specialize in book thievery; and [02] about The Büchernarr, or the Book Fool.]

And I think I’m going to do that, or, well, do that for one chapter or two—and even then there’s a lot of chopping off to do. This is going to be a ridiculous post as it is. But I am in a ridiculous-enough mood.

---

» Even before the mankind’s history of reading, Manguel, in an introductory chapter, offers his own personal history of reading. Which actually makes me want to start my own. Good lord.

» Manguel describes readings as “our essential function.” YES. Also: “Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.” Manguel talks about experiencing, as a child, the world offered by books as infinitely better than the world out there. And when encountering in the world something already experienced in books, most things feel short. Except, he says—simply, quietly—except when he touched a lover’s body for the first time. Oh, my.

» How Manguel reads, two kinds: “First, by following, breathlessly, the events and the characters without stopping to notice the details, the quickening pace sometimes hurtling the story beyond the last page . . . Secondly, by careful exploration, scrutinizing the text to understand its raveled meaning, finding pleasure merely in the sound of the words or in the clues which the words did not wish to reveal, or in what I suspected was hidden deep in the story itself, something too terrible or too marvelous to be looked at.”

» Adulterous reading! <3 Reading to Borges – by the way, as a boy he read to the blind Borges!—he “quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before.” He quotes the Argentinian writer Ezequiel Martínez Estrada: “There are those who, while reading a book, recall, compare, conjure up emotions from other, previous reading. This is one of the most delicate forms adultery.”

* * *

» The chapter “The Silent Readers,” among my favorites. Basically, we didn’t always read silently—that is, we read not so much for ourselves but to share what we are reading to the people around us. And in this silence, reading became a solitary act.

Even though he thought there were too many books to be read, and thought readers should share their findings by reporting to one another the gist of their studies, [Ralph Waldo] Emerson believed that reading a book was a private and solitary business. “All these books . . . are the majestic ecpressions of the universal conscience, and are more to our daily purpose than this year’s almanac or this day’s newspaper. But they are for the closet, and are to be read on the bended knew. Their communicatons are not to be given or taken with the lips and the end of the tongue, but out of the glow of the cheek, and with the throbbing of the heart.” In silence.

The more silent reading became the norm, the reading experience turned more personal and introspective, even intimate. Reading was, at last, more for oneself.

» “. . . the reader has become deaf and blind to the world, to the passing crowds, to the chalky flesh-coloured facades of the buildings. Nobody seems to notice a concentrating reader: withdrawn, intent, the reader becomes commonplace.” Curiously: Just as I was writing this last sentence, two women approached the one who’d been reading on the table beside me. Reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, occasionally groaning, and muttering, “My god, Umbridge!” The two girls tell her: “Have you been here all along? We didn’t see you.”

» I am optimistic enough to think that readers seek readers. We are comforted by seeing strangers rapt with a book. I know I scan the room for people whose heads are bent low over an open book, and I always feel indescribably giddy when I spot one. One of us.

[There’s this boy who frequents the same café I do. One week he’d be reading Gary Shteyngart, another he’d been juggling Proust and King Lear. And this boy, this boy looks like an awkward young Paul Auster, not in grayscale.]

---

I’ve barely scratched the surface. And this is an incredibly useless post, haha. I mean, I haven’t even talked about what A History of Reading is about. It’s about a the history of reading. How we learned to read, how we read from civilization’s birth to our darketh thimes noweth, and how incredibly awesome the act of reading is. That’s about it.

I think I squealed when I saw this at a local bookstore. Come on, Rest of Alberto Manguel’s Oeuvre, get to me now.

The Büchernarr

Tags

Alberto Manguel, Books About Books, Excerpts, History

In the chapter “The Book Fool,” of A History of Reading, author Alberto Manguel cites a small volume of allegorical verse by one Sebastian Brant, published in February 1494 called The Ship of Fools — with illustrations by a young Albrecht Dürer. Yes, the book fool is the main attraction. “Brant,” Manguel shares, “had meticulously surveyed the follies or sins of his society” and one of these is “the folly of the scholar:”

The reader opening Brant’s book would be confronted by his own image: a man in his study, surrounded by books. There are books everywhere: on the shelves behind him, on both sides of his lectern-desk, inside the compartments of the desk itself. The man is wearing a nightcap (to hide his ass’s ears) while a fool’s hood with bells hands behind him, and he holds in his right hand a duster with which he swats at the flies come to settle on his books. He is the Büchernarr, the “book fool,” the man whose folly consists in burying himself in books. On his nose sits a pair of glasses.

I am quick to say, “Hey, what’s wrong with that?”

The popularity of Brant’s book gave way to many new editions and incarnations. In 1509, “humanist scholar Geiler von Kaysersberg began preaching a series of sermons based on Brant’s cast of fools.” Particularly colorful was his depiction and elaboration of the best fool there is. Ladies and gentlemen, the seven kinds of Book Fool:

1. The Fool who collects books for the sake of glory, as if they were costly furniture . . . Geiler insists, “He who wants books to bring him fame must learn something from them; he must store them not in his library but in his head. But this first Fool ahs put his books in chains and made them his prisoners; could they free themselves and speak, they would haul him in front of the magistrate, demanding that he, not they, be locked up.”
2. The Fool who wants to grow wise through the consumption of too many books. Geiler compares him to a stomach upset by too much food, and to a military general hampered in his siege by having too many soldiers.
3. The Fool who collects books without truly reading them, merely flicking through them to satisfy his idle curiosity. Geiler compares him to a madman running through the town, trying to observe in detail, as he tears along, the signs and emblems on the house-fronts. This, he says, is impossible, and a sorry waste of time.
4. The Fool who loves sumptuously illuminated books.
5. The Fool who binds his books in rich cloth.
6. The Fool who writes and produces badly written books without having read the classics, and without any knowledge of spelling, grammar, or rhetoric. He is the reader turned writer, tempted to add his scribbled thoughts to stand beside the works of the great.
7. Finally—in a paradoxical switch future anti-intellectuals would ignore—the seventh and last Book Fool is he who despises books entirely and scorns the wisdom that can be obtained from them.

No further comments from my side of the Pacific, kids.

“. . .a species of covetousness unlike any other”

Tags

Alberto Manguel, Books About Books, History

. . . no curses seem to deter those readers who, like crazed lovers, are determined to make a certain book theirs. The urge to possess a book, to be its sole owner, is a species of covetousness unlike any other. “A book reads the better,” confessed Charles Lamb . . . “which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog’s ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.

The act of reading establishes an intimate, physical relationship in which all the senses have a part: the eyes drawing words from the page, the ears echoing the sounds being read, the nose inhaling the familiar scent of paper, glue, ink, cardboard or leather, the touch caressing the rough or soft page, the smooth or hard binding, even the taste, at times, when the reader’s fingers are lifted to the tongue . . . All this, many readers are unwilling to share — and if the book they wish to read is in someone else’s possession, the laws of property are as hard to uphold as those of faithfulness in love. Also, physical ownership becomes at times synonymous with a sense of intellectual apprehension. We come to feel that the books we own are the books we know, as if possession were, in libraries as in courts, nine-tenths of the law; that to glance at the spines of the books we call ours, obediently standing guard along the walls of our room, willing to speak to us and us alone at the mere flick of a page, allows us to say, “All this is mine,” as if their presence alone fills us with their wisdom, without our actually having to labour through their contents.

From the chapter “Stealing Books,” in A History of Reading by Albert Manguel. Which is all sorts of dorkalicious and yummy. I have not read this to the end — I mean, I am trying not to hurtle through it. And I keep drawing little hearts and exclamation points in the margins, hee.

[Photo credit: Legs by Henri Cartier-Bresson.]

On The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

Tags

Excerpts, History, Reference, Sarah Vowell

I don’t think I’ve ever had any interest in the Puritans. But Nick Hornby kept going on and on about Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates that when I saw it half-buried in a BookSale, priced PhP45 [about a dollar], I had to buy it. Curiosity, you see. Although it wasn’t until I got home and actually opened the book that I realized it wasn’t a novel. Sorry, Nick, wasn’t paying attention. So.

>> Aherm. The Wordy Shipmates. A rather lively romp with the Puritans [those who set foot in America about ten years after the Mayflower peeps did.] Vowell focuses on “those Puritans who fall between the cracks of 1620 Plymouth and 1691 Salem,” arguably the two groups of Puritans more known to the average dude. [For fun, see Wednesday Addams’ Thanksgiving speech, and then how witches and wizards cast a tickling charm to the flames in History of Magic, an unfortunately fictional book from the Harry Potter Series.] Okay then. Why am I reading about the Puritans again?

>> Vowell as author: Imagine sitting by your lonesome in a bar, and this tiny woman plonks down in front of you and gives you a rather fun lecture on people who have very little, it seems, to do with you. It’s informal, it’s funny, it’s honest — but with all lectures, there are digressions that may or may not concern you, and even on-topic shiz that you can only fidget through, not to mention the wise-cracking can occasionally get on your nerves. But it’s insightful, informative, and at times, even tender. And unabashedly sentimental. I especially love the quite-opinionated commentary.

I’m always disappointed when I see the word “Puritan” tossed around as shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring, stupid, judgmental killjoys. Because to me, they are very specific, fascinating, even brilliant, judgmental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to hell.

>> The “Puritans’ vision of themselves as God’s chosen people, as a beacon of righteousness that all others are to admire” — a principle, Vowell posits, that haunts modern-day America. In the same paragraph, she glances upon the central ideal of these settlers of establishing that land of promise, that utopia, “a city upon a hill,” [a phrase and ideal that will be discussed at great length in the latter part of the book]; and also, how the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s official seal “pictures an Indian in a loincloth holding a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other. Words are coming out of his mouth. The Indian says, ‘Come over and help us.’ That is really what it says.”

>> But whatever flaws and nobilities these early settlers possessed and embodied — whether by disposition, or as a product of their time and the social construct — Vowell leads us through it all rather animatedly — filtering diaries, journals, official records, and pamphlets to present a clearer image — and she does not hesitate to say where her sympathies lie: She may not like some of these people, but she loves them. They’re important, and they shouldn’t be falling into the cracks between two milestones — a sad truth, unfortunately, to most historical events and peoples.

>> I do have a feeling, though, that this shall all be thrown into that gaping bucket of Awesomeness that my darling friends have dubbed, Sasha’s Wellspring of Useless Information. Like that part in Vowell’s narrative where she recounts the sex lives of these Puritans. My goodness, now that was too much information. And rather enlightening too. These people are gahdamned raunchy, for cripes’ sake. And they kept writing about it! Jeesh.

* * *

Bits of extraneous reflection that isn’t really about the book itself, but, well, more of what randomly popped into my head while I was reading Vowell — under the cut: