September 29, 2005

Here is

Mrs. Spectator's Coffeehouse,"a clearinghouse of online resources for researchers interested in the long 18thc." Very modest so far (though I found some nice fonts at The Scriptorium). All suggestions gratefully accepted.

Well, probably not all suggestions.

September 27, 2005

Out of the mouths ...

One of my students from the eighteenth century lit. class: "it seems as though almost all writing from this time consisted of either Religion or Small Pox… or a combination of the two." She obviously didn't read Wilmot last week.

September 26, 2005

Not as much posting

as I would like (of course, I haven't asked you), as I am positively wrestling with the weblog I have put together for the NEASECS conference. Movable Type sometimes just refuses to update my changes; I am beside myself.

Look, there I am over there, wailing and knashing my teeth.

I hope to have it looking presentable at least a day or two before I go, and maybe even get some feedback. Watch this space.

September 25, 2005

Feeling a sense of

urgency re. the weather. Yesterday it was beautiful: one of those clear fall days with the blue blue sky. The leaves are turning, the river was deep blue. We managed a short walk along Harbour Passage (a new walkway built on the waterfront here in Saint John), and we had the pleasure of watching a loon dive for fish. Those suckers can hold their breath! Today there are all sorts of things we need to do, but friends phoned with an invitation to go to the Irving Nature Park. Apart from my strong feeling that it is not fair to Alex to force him to watch me do laundry and re-read Emma all day (a tonic, let me tell you), damn it, I want to go, too. So, off we head in a couple of hours.

It has been a rough September — I'm still fighting an ear infection after a week of nausea-inducing antibiotics — but since burn-out and a dearth of nature walks is probably a contributing factor, whether or not to take the time is a bit of a catch 22. And then there is the sure knowledge that days like this are numbered.

September 23, 2005

Was pretty tired

last night when I posted about Charles Foran's reading. Wanted to add that he said something interesting in response to a comment from a member of the audience about the cadences of his reading voice (she wondered if he would read a novel with a contemporary setting differently than he did this one, set as it is in 18thc Ireland): Foran said (and this is a half-arsed paraphrase) that he thinks every writer hears a voice in their heads — their own voice — and it is this voice with which they write. He then gave the example of Margaret Atwood as someone whose speaking voice is her narrative voice. I have heard her read, and would have said that she withdraws her voice from the text, and flattens it, in order to focus attention on the words. I hadn't thought of such a direct connection between speaking and writing voices. Foran seems more forthright about the various autobiographical aspects of his work than many writers, and so may be more likely to see — or make — such connections.

I hope this doesn't seem facile. I don't think that I experience my own writing as a transcription of my speaking voice. Of an internal voice, certainly, sometimes. Sometimes it feels like transcription, and other times it feels focused on moving words around in a more self-conscious way. But is that internal voice my speaking voice? (I don't always think too much of my everyday voice, so the thought worries me.)

September 22, 2005

Just got home

from having dinner with Charles Foran and some colleagues, after his reading this evening. Wonderful conversation, wonderful company. And after such a good reading. I thought Carolan's Farewell would be particularly suited to hearing read aloud, and it was. Foran is a lively and nuanced reader. And most generous with his remarks, and with questioners.

And, there was a harpist.¹

I'm asking my intro. to prose students to choose a book from the reading series, attend the reading, and write a report. Saw one or two there this evening; I will be interested to hear their reactions. Some student papers last year indicated that the terrain of the literary reading is, to some, a closed space. Foran's reading was probably more welcoming than many and a good way to be introduced to the whole phenomenon; I wish I had seen more of my students there. Maybe they're waiting for Alberto Manguel.

(My review of Carolan's Farewell here.)

¹ Foran's novel is about Terrence Carolan, a blind harpist who lived in Ireland in the 18thc. Nice touch, having a harpist. And she played some of Carolan's compositions.

September 21, 2005

So yesterday

the Jinker Boy went back to swimming lessons after a hiatus over the summer. The Aquatic Centre has reorganized its swimming hierarchy: JB had formerly progressed from being an Apricot, to a Banana, to a Coconut (Coconuts are able to put their heads under water), but now we are told that he is a Commodore. He, however, is unwittingly subverting the military-industrial complex, as he thinks he is a Salamander.

So there he is, at the side of the pool with the other Commodores, being grilled by the instructor on pool safety. Can you run near a pool? Chorus of little voices: No! Each Commodore was allowed to jump into the pool after a correct answer.

Instructor: Can you eat at the pool?
Chorus: No!
Instructor: Why not?
JB: Because there's no food here.

He was allowed to jump in.

September 18, 2005

Dildos

I am having my students read "Signior Dildo" by the Earl of Rochester, but I am nonetheless feeling too squeamish to post a link to this post on 18thc dildos at Fascinating History. So will post it here. Interesting stuff on 18thc assumptions about woman-on-woman sex: that it was "practise." Perhaps, but I imagine some women never got it right.

Update (23/9/05): Movable Type was junking all the comments to this post. Even mine!

Cataloguing personal libraries

Another think on the "to-do" list: Ellen Moody, who I seem to be quoting a lot lately, writes that she has begun to catalogue her personal library online, with Library Thing. Sharon, The Little Professor and Language Hat are also new users. It sounds very useful, though as others have pointed out, it would benefit from drawing on an even wider field than Amazon.com and the Library of Congress, and to be of real use, it needs to recognize different editions. Though apparently one can add or amend items manually.

Anyway, it will be some time before I start playing with this.

Tim Spalding, the creator of Library Thing, also offers MothBoard, an interesting idea: transitory discussion boards for ephemeral topics or projects.

September 17, 2005

Review of Carolan’s Farewell by Charles Foran

(Originally published in The New Brunswick Reader, Sept. 17, 2005)

I will shortly make a few measured and analytical remarks about this novel, but first, forgive some burbling: this is a beautiful, beautiful book. A book to live in for awhile. We hear much of it, as the first of the two main parts of the narrative lies with Terence Carolan, a blind composer and harper who lived between 1670 and 1738. We hear what he hears, and cannot see what he cannot. The language used to describe the input from his remaining senses is by turns exultant and earthy. Very earthy: Carolan's aging and failing body, and its baser functions, take up much of his attention as he pushes himself to finish a punishing religious pilgrimage and then the final leg of what turns out to be his last of many journeys through Ireland.

Carolan is a complex and faulty character. Neglectful of the wife and children he loves, travelling the country to sing for his supper, drinking too much and not practising his music enough, and ludicrous in his unwieldy, disobedient body, he is also intuitive, kind, a fascinating case study of the artistic process, and very, very droll. It is only Foran's skill that reconciles us to his absence through much of the book.

The second half focuses on Owen Connor, Carolan's fictitious manservant and guide, at a time when he is largely separated from his master, who lies ill. The two part structure echoes events in the plot; the first section recounts the last part of Carolan's journey, and in the second, after a long period of frustrated inactivity, Connor repeats some of that journey alone. Our attention is deflected from Carolan, who comes to various realizations of his own, to Owen, who must now answer a different set of questions. In some senses his character is the more tragic of the two, in that Carolan seems to achieve a sort of peace, while Owen never seems to be comfortable except with the master he is loosing.

If I have any criticism of Charles Foran's lovely text — one critic calls it note-perfect and that seems right — it is of the way in which his characters betray evidence of sensibilities more modern than would have been likely. Carolan "comes to terms with grief" — or at least, he would have if he existed in a contemporary setting. Owen exhibits a sense of egalitarianism that would have been unusual in 1737. But Foran, who has a steady sense of historical detail, would surely not misstep here. And in fact, instead of giving us the contemporary characters in fancy dress of lesser historical novels, he does something more subtle: he translates, transcribes, eighteenth-century sensibilities so that they exist seamlessly, apparently without effort, in an unabashedly contemporary novel. The deftness with which he accomplishes this blending is remarkable. And even if it were not, the novel rushes over any quibbles with the sheer strength of its language. The dialogue between Carolan and Owen, all the dialogue, in fact, is so clearly realized, so telling and at times so funny, it would be worth a recommendation alone. I look forward to hearing Foran read; much of this novel should be spoken aloud.

And much of it should be pondered over. Carolan is a fully realized character, but he is also emblematic of an Ireland now long passed away. Connor is equally well-drawn, and equally representative: of the struggle of the lower and working classes for a sense of self-worth in the face of the inexorable barriers of class, and in particular of the displaced Irish during the upheavals of the 17th and 18th centuries. Foran's Ireland is a depopulated, shivering place that has fallen away, even while it is still beautiful. Ultimately this novel is about loss — personal, communal, national — and how individuals as well as whole peoples confront those losses. But putting it so bluntly does a disservice to the fineness of Foran's ear for language, the sure hand with which he has crafted his tale. I sit here writing this while listening to one of Carolan's airs on the internet. It is a light, balanced piece, with delicacy and humour, despite solemn undertones and an overlaying sadness. Much like this novel, in fact.

A number of Terrence Carolan's tunes are available online here and elsewhere. Charles Foran will be reading at UNBSJ on Sept. 22, and in Fredericton on Sept. 23.

Historical films

Ellen Moody, on C18-L, points toward a resource that I didn't know about: Modern History in the Movies, part of the Internet History Sourcebooks Project. Lots of Restoration and 18th material, usefully divided into various thematic groups, though it doesn't include everything: the focus is on films that would be useful for teaching history, it seems. Which would apparently not include Albert Finney as Tom Jones. Maybe I'll put together a mega-list in my (HA!) spare time. There are flurries of discussion on C18-L every now and then, and extremely useful lists like this one: they could be consolidated.

Maybe after the holidays.

September 16, 2005

Blogging on blogging on ... blogging

Every year, on each course blog I have been posting various links for the newest crop of baby bloggers. This year I finally smartened up and decided to make one purpose-built blog, called, originally, blogging, where I will collect the how-to's and "what is this blogging of which you speak?" links that I find. I have the strong feeling that this is probably giving them more than most of them want to know, but at least it will streamline things for me.

September 15, 2005

Thoughts scribbled on a napkin, as our server was down for 24 hours

It is so long since I first took to blogging, that if it had been a trifling incident in my life, I might have forgotten its date: but cardinal events are not to be forgotten ... And my introduction to blogging arose in the following way. From an early age I had been accustomed to wash my head in cold water at least once a day: being suddenly seized with toothache, I attributed it to some relaxation caused by an accidental intermission of that practice; jumped out of bed; plunged my head into a basin of cold water; and with hair thus wetted went to sleep.

The next morning, as I need hardly say, I awoke with excruciating rheumatic pains of the head and face, from which I had hardly any respite for about twenty days. On the twenty-first day, I think it was, and on a Sunday, that I went out into the streets; rather to run away, if possible, from my torments, than with any distinct purpose. By accident I met a college acquaintance who recommended blogging. Blogging! dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and pain! I had heard of it as I had of manna or of Ambrosia, but no further: how unmeaning a sound was it at that time! what solemn chords does it now strike upon my heart! what heart-quaking vibrations of sad and happy remembrances! Reverting for a moment to these, I feel a mystic importance attached to the minutest circumstances connected with the place and the time, and the man (if man he was) that first laid open to me the Paradise of blog-readers. It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless: and a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday .... I saw an internet cafe. The proprietor — unconscious minister of celestial pleasures! — as if in sympathy with the rainy Sunday, looked dull and stupid, just as any mortal might be expected to look on a Sunday; and, when I asked for half an hour online, he gave it to me as any other man might do: and furthermore, out of my shilling, returned me what seemed to be real copper halfpence, taken out of a real wooden drawer. Nevertheless, in spite of such indications of humanity, he has ever since existed in my mind as the beatific vision of an immortal proprietor of an internet cafe, sent down to earth on a special mission to myself. And it confirms me in this way of considering him, that, when I next came ... I sought him ... and found him not: and thus to me, who knew not his name (if indeed he had one) he seemed rather to have vanished ... than to have removed in any bodily fashion. The reader may choose to think of him as, possibly, no more than a sublunary proprietor of an internet cafe: it may be so: but my faith is better: I believe him to have evanesced, or evaporated. So unwillingly would I connect any mortal remembrances with that hour, and place, and creature, that first brought me acquainted with the celestial blogosphere. Arrived at my lodgings, it may be supposed that I lost not a moment in going online. I was necessarily ignorant of the whole art and mystery of blogging: and, what I took, I took under every disadvantage. But I took it: — and in an hour, oh! Heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished, was now a trifle in my eyes: — this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me — in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea ... for all human woes: here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered: happiness might now be bought ... and carried in a courier bag: portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a cell phone: and peace of mind could be sent down in gigabytes by an ISP. But, if I talk in this way, the reader will think I am laughing: and I can assure him, that nobody will laugh long who deals much with blogging: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion; and in his happiest state, the blogger cannot present himself in the character of Il Allegro: even then, he speaks and thinks as becomes Il Penseroso. Nevertheless, I have a very reprehensible way of jesting at times in the midst of my own misery: and, unless when I am checked by some more powerful feelings, I am afraid I shall be guilty of this indecent practice even in these annals of suffering or enjoyment. The reader must allow a little to my infirm nature in this respect: and with a few indulgences of that sort, I shall endeavour to be as grave, if not drowsy, as fits a theme like blogging, so anti-mercurial as it really is, and so drowsy as it is falsely reputed.

Oh! Did I say "scribbled on a napkin"? I meant, cribbed from Mr. De Quincey.

September 13, 2005

Second week of classes

and I have the cold from hell, courtesy of the Jinker Boy. Began my 18thc lit. class this afternoon. The students probably thought that someone had kidnapped the prof and replaced her with a scarecrow, cleverly disguised with glasses. "The 18thc was one of the most vibrant periods of ... what was I saying?" We'll see how the numbers are next week. But even if I drove them all away, the class was still marginally better than the intro. to prose class this morning, when I forgot one of my computer plugs and so could not show the carefully prepared Keynote presentation on printing technologies I stayed up until 2am preparing. Lots of illustrations, including some lovely illuminations from the Book of Kells.¹ But never mind: I described them. Probably quite vividly.

¹ And, who knew? We have a facsimile edition at our Fredericton campus.

September 12, 2005

Saving New Orleans history

This from the National Coalition for History (U.S.A.) (heads up from Anita Guerrini on C18-L):

HISTORY/ARCHIVES COMMUNITY RALLY TO ASSIST IN KATRINA AFTERMATH
As emergency officials continue to find and rescue survivors, recover bodies, and clean up the wreckage from Hurricane Katrina ... efforts are also underway by various history and archival organizations to pitch in and begin to survey the damage done to sites of historical significance and to preserve as much as possible. This rescue and salvage effort takes on special importance in a part of the country that is especially rich with historic sites, artifacts, and archives.
....
Virtually everything in the Latin Quarter and the Garden District suffered some damage. Preliminary reports indicate that the New Orleans Public Library was hit hard and its archive of city records, which are housed in the basement of the building, probably experienced flooding. At the New Orleans Notarial Archives, which hold some 40 million pages of signed acts compiled by notaries of new Orleans over three centuries, initial efforts to save historical documents were unsuccessful. A Swedish document salvage firm, hired by the archives to freeze-dry records to remove the moisture from them, was turned away by uniformed personnel as they attempted to enter the city. There are a considerable number of freezer trucks available as soon as they are allowed to access areas currently closed. In the case of both the public library and the notarial archives, time is of the essence as humidity, mold, and water damage may decimate these collections in a matter of days.

Read more. Various links toward the end.

September 11, 2005

Forgot to tell you

Was just putzing around in MovableType (my blogging program) and discovered several unfinished posts. Here are two of them combined: some interesting early-modern/19thc resources:

Christopher Hill's The English Revolution, 1640 is available online (link from Plep).

Sharon posted a number of links to electronic journals of early-modern studies. Of particular interest to me is Early Modern Culture, in issue 4 of which can be found "The Case of Moll Frith" by Natasha Korda, and Early Modern Literary Studies, which published a special issue on Margaret Cavendish.

Other excellent resources: Romanticism on the Net
Domestic Goddessess a.k.a. scribbling mobs of women: "A moderated E-journal, devoted to women writers, beginning in the 19th century, who wrote domestic fiction."
Genders: "Presenting Innovative Work in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Theories."

Charles Foran's Carolan's Farewell

This is a wonderful, wonderful book. I am writing a review for the New Brunswick Reader, which I will post here after it first comes out there. Foran is coming to Saint John on Sept. 22 to open UNBSJ's Lorenzo Reading Series for 2005-2006. It should be an exciting reading; the language in the novel is so alive.

But — to my review.

September 10, 2005

I just ordered

one of these. Now the pizza deliveries and ambulances will always be able to find us.

September 9, 2005

The Bastille

Jim Chevallier has put together a website on the Bastille. Particularly interesting is the way in which he counters many common assumptions. For example,

The people who stormed the Bastille wanted to free the prisoners. They wanted to get their hands on weapons and gun powder which had been stored there. In fact, they FORGOT to free the prisoners before taking the keys of the cells out to parade them through the streets. Oops.

And some of the descriptions of food served are mouth-watering. One prisoner was given

an excellent soup, a succulent slice of beef, a boiled leg of capon, dripping with fat and falling off the bone; a small plate of fried artichokes in a marinade, one of spinach, a very nice cresonne pear, fresh grapes, a bottle of old Burgundy wine, and the best Moka coffee.

Though to be fair, other prisoners report that the wine was merely indifferent.

The chicken pot pie and diet cola I just bought from our campus food services are looking pretty unappealing.

September 8, 2005

Busy

preparing for two first classes tomorrow, one an introductory prose class, and the other a third year class in women's writing before 1775, a course which will rely heavily on online readings. One keener has already set up her blog.

I can't say that it was a restful summer, except in the sense that a change is as good as a rest, in which case, it was all too restful. In fact, rather than coming back to class invigorated, this term I feel more like I will be escaping into teaching.

So let's see how that goes, shall we?

September 7, 2005

Atomic age travel

Motel Postcards from the Era of the Open Road. I have alway hankered after travel in the thirties and forties, myself. Think Hitchcock's brilliant The Lady Vanishes, and Humphrey Bogart and Mary Aster in Across the Pacific. But this looks fun, too. Via Plep.

Most of these motels hail from the Middle Era of Motorized Mobility, the 50s and 60s. There were motels in the 20s and 30s, but they were likely to be a collection of shanties and cabins with a humble sign out front. In the 50s and 60s the sign took on great prominence; it was a way of establishing identity and rank even when no other feature of the motel was unique. The sign didn’t just sell the place; it was the place.

Most of the signs want to be the Holiday Inn sign, as if to tie themselves to the standards and promise of the franchise behemoth, and protect themselves from its power. Most of the motels lost the battle, and nowadays we distrust the motel that stands alone. Most of these places are gone or renamed. But we still have the cards.

Joe and I were thinking of this, this past trip. On the way back from NY we stayed in an odd little place in Maine with a kitschy Dutch theme (think, lots of plaster/china/wooden/embroidered windmills), more like the humble motels of earlier periods, with small and very basic cabins. But there was a cozy lobby where guests gathered for breakfast, a breakfast not much different than the "continental breakfast" offered in the franchise motels, true. But the setting, its quirkiness, its homeyness, led us to have several conversations with other travellers, the kinds of conversations we have never had in the fluorescent breakfast spaces (or anywhere else) of the large chain motels, where anonymity is part of the hygienic experience, like plastic-wrapped paper cups or one of those "rest assured, no-one has peed here" paper strips stretched across the toilet seat.

The Jinker Boy was wildly excited by the tiny cabin with its midget-sized shower stall and its two dipping beds taking all but a few square feet of floor space, and his mood infected us, exhausted as we were. We realized that we could remember these sorts of places years later, even after only one night, while franchise motels are just a blur. Sometimes of course you are so tired you want the assurance of the known quantity (this explains the time I ate at McDonalds in Paris). But we vowed not to succumb to the beige as often as we have in the past few years.

Bring on the windmills.

September 6, 2005

Ye Olde Linke Dumpe

First edition of the first Italian writing manual, Sigismondo Fanti's Theorica et practica de modo scribendi fabricandique omnes litterarum species (Venice: Giovanni Rosso, December 1, 1514.) Click for larger image.

Dress an Elizabethan lady with your mouse. Really. Or, at the very least, check out the sorts of things she would have worn. Links via Fascinating History.

Early Modern Carnivalesque is up (Home). Lots of good, good stuff. For instance, info. about 16thc engraving from Giornale Nuovo; see also A Heavenly Craft: The Woodcut in Early Printed Books. Wonderful maps of London at Age of Enlightenment (and why did I not know about this blog? An example of its excellent resources: check out Eat Feed - Georgian England, a podcast with an interview with food historian Gilly Lehmann).

Art of the First Fleet (via Plep):

On 13 May 1787 eleven ships, now commonly referred to as The First Fleet, set sail from Portsmouth to establish a colony in New South Wales, Australia. They reached their destination on 18 January 1788, 18 years after Captain James Cook had first landed on the east coast of Australia at Botany Bay. One of the unplanned but long-lasting outcomes of this event was the large number of outstanding drawings of aboriginal people, the environment and wildlife found on arrival as well as of the early foundation of the colony.

American Notes: Travels in America, 1750-1920: "253 published narratives by Americans and foreign visitors recounting their travels in the colonies and the United States and their observations and opinions about American peoples, places, and society." And Sylvain Marechal (b. 1750), the "Man Without God," at the International Institute of Social History (both via Plep).

Jill Walker writes here (and earlier, here), on plans to digitalize Alexandre Dumas's newspapers. She writes,

Alexandre Dumas directed and/or wrote for eleven newspapers - he was truly into the new technology of the modern press, which was introduced in France in the 1830s. His first newspaper was written solely by Dumas, and was called Le Mois: The tagline must be the tagline of some blog out there: jour par jour, heure par heure (”hour by hour, day by day”). Dumas’ intention was to write a daily chronicle of events. Dumas saw himself as “the universal stenographer” and a “literary worker.”

"Straws in the Wind: Ballads and Broadsides, 1500-1800," a wonderful-sounding conference that I doubt I can attend, on
February 24 and 25, 2006, at the University of California Santa Barbara Early Modern Center (thanks, Sharon. And never forget Sharon's Early Modern Resources, your one stop shop for all things early modern).

Only twelve days left until Sept. 19, which as we all know, is International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

And finally, on this day three hundred and forty-three years ago, Samuel Pepys ate too much.

September 5, 2005

Fiddling while Rome burns

Really want to be chic, Ms. Rice? Ditch the boyfriend.

And, it's Labour Day

Poster by Milton Glaser

Writing Katrina

Anne Rice has a succinct article, "Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans," in the NY Times (link from PCL LinkDump):

But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs.

Novelist/New Orleans resident Poppy Z. Brite blogs on LiveJournal (heads up from Metafilter).

This from BoingBoing: Help the Internet Archive archive blog coverage of Katrina. Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, writes:

The Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library, needs help in finding URL's of sites and blogs that contain documents of this major disaster.

Please email links to sites and pages that should be saved for future research to katrina@archive.org.

We have worked to archive events such as 9/11 and the tsunami with the generous help of volunteers finding and sending in links. We then save these digital works for the long term and create research tools (for example: http://www.loc.gov/minerva/collect/sept11/index.html and http://web.archive.org). As a library, we provide free access to those wanting to learn from these events — we can only hope that we learn some lessons from disasters such as these.

Again, please send email to katrina@archive.org with lists of URL's you suggest should be archived relevant to the Katrina Disaster.

We are also looking for a couple of volunteers that can help orchestrate the crawl. If you are interested, please send a note to katrina@archive.org with "volunteer" in the subject line.

International reactions: from the BBC: "New Orleans crisis shames US" by Matt Wells; from The Observer: "Bush Strafes New Orleans. Where is our Huey Long" by Greg Palast; from the LA Times: "Katrina Elicits Sympathy, Jeers Worldwide" by Héctor Tobar; Watching America (via Metafilter). See also " Hurricane Katrina: What next" (comments from readers to the BBC), and from The Globe and Mail: "Chaos, disorganization epitomize rescue plans" by Christie Blatchford (reg. req.), "Political fury grows at slow federal effort" by Shawn McCarthy, and "Storm's victims still seek blame as Katrina's toll grows higher" by Timothy Appleby.

September 4, 2005

Beautiful books

Click for larger image.

Some time ago I posted a link about the decorated edges of books; here is another, via moleskinerie, to the collection at Princeton U Library.

Here, from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library, via RaShOmoN, is a collection of scanned old illustrated botany books: 30,203 pages and 3,360 botanical illustrations currently online.

Saducismus Triumphatus: or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions in Two Parts. The First treating of their Possibility; The Second of their Real Existence at Giornale Nuovo.

Images from Medieval & Renaissance Manuscript (via Metafilter).

Wonder Bound: Rare Books on Early Museums (via Plep).

Renaissance Festival Books (also via Plep).

Altered Books (via Shopiere):

The Idea: Cut the bindings off of books found at a used book store. Find poems in the pages by the process of obliteration. Put pages in the mail and send them all around the world. Lather, rinse, repeat. This site is a chronicle of a very specific set of collaborations between [a group of] artists ... working on [specific] titles ....

Reminds me of Tom Phillips' work.

"It's 70 years since the first Penguin book was published. To mark the anniversary the Victoria and Albert Museum has a display of some 500 iconic book covers from the Penguin archives." Read more at Cronaca.

September 3, 2005

Word wizardry

A link-rich post at Blue Tea: the Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus, the Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form, and more. An example from the latter: Adonic verse by S. A. McBurnie:

First a dactyl, then spondee or trochee;
Make it solemn, not bouncy or poky.
If you're struck with the urge
For composing a dirge
An Adonic verse suits: it's not hokey.

Brazilian Visual Poetry and other wordy links at growabrain.

2005 FAUX FAULKNER WINNER: "The Administration and the Fury: If William Faulkner were writing on the Bush White House" by Sam Apple (via cyrenity [28/7/05]). But read it; it explains a lot.

SFish

Klingon fairy tales, such as "The Hare Foolishly Lowers His Guard and Is Devastated by the Tortoise, Whose Prowess in Battle Attracts Many Desirable Mates" (from McSweeney's, via Blue Tea).

Exclamation Mark has been retooled into Exclamation Mark's B-Movie Reviews. Great stuff!

John Wilkins' The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638) at Giornale Nuovo.

Phillip K. Dick: 650 scanned paperback covers from around the world (via Shopiere).

Alice in Coutureland (via BoingBoing).

Isabel Samaras' Paintings (via Dr. Johnson's Cat). Check out the K&S, Batman and Robin, Herman Munster, Planet of the Apes, and more.

New Orleans

Carrol Cox posted the following piece by Jordan Flaherty to C18-L, and as Flaherty has written "Please Forward" at the top, I will reproduce it here, in its entirety. This is one of the most telling pieces on the catastrophe that I have seen or read yet. Scroll to the end for links.

Please Forward

Notes From Inside New Orleans by Jordan Flaherty Friday, September 2, 2005

I just left New Orleans a couple hours ago. I traveled from the apartment I was staying in by boat to a helicopter to a refugee camp. If anyone wants to examine the attitude of federal and state officials towards the victims of hurricane Katrina, I advise you to visit one of the refugee camps.

In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the barricades, and people would rush for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was going. Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them - Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (for example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge. You had no choice but to go to the shelter in Arkansas. If you had people willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up, they could not come within 17 miles of the camp.

I travelled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation Army workers, National Guard, and state police, and although they were friendly, no one could give me any details on when buses would arrive, how many, where they would go to, or any other information. I spoke to the several teams of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able to get any information from any federal or state officials on any of these questions, and all of them, from Australian tv to local Fox affiliates complained of an unorganized, non-communicative, mess. One cameraman told me "as someone who's been here in this camp for two days, the only information I can give you is this: get out by nightfall. You don't want to be here at night."

There was also no visible attempt by any of those running the camp to set up any sort of transparent and consistent system, for instance a line to get on buses, a way to register contact information or find family members, special needs services for children and infirm, phone services, treatment for possible disease exposure, nor even a single trash can.

To understand this tragedy, its important to look at New Orleans itself. For those who have not lived in New Orleans, you have missed a incredible, glorious, vital, city. A place with a culture and energy unlike anywhere else in the world. A 70% African-American city where resistance to white supremacy has supported a generous, subversive and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues and hiphop, to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, Parades, Beads, Jazz Funerals, and red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and dance and sexuality and liberation unlike anywhere else in the world.

It is a city of kindness and hospitality, where walking down the block can take two hours because you stop and talk to someone on every porch, and where a community pulls together when someone is in need. It is a city of extended families and social networks filling the gaps left by city, state and federal governments that have abdicated their responsibility for the public welfare. It is a city where someone you walk past on the street not only asks how you are, they wait for an answer.

It is also a city of exploitation and segregation and fear. The city of New Orleans has a population of just over 500,000 and was expecting 300 murders this year, most of them centered on just a few, overwhelmingly black, neighborhoods. Police have been quoted as saying that they don't need to search out the perpetrators, because usually a few days after a shooting, the attacker is shot in revenge.

There is an atmosphere of intense hostility and distrust between much of Black New Orleans and the N.O. Police Department. In recent months, officers have been accused of everything from drug running to corruption to theft. In separate incidents, two New Orleans police officers were recently charged with rape (while in uniform), and there have been several high profile police killings of unarmed youth, including the murder of Jenard Thomas, which has inspired ongoing weekly protests for several months.

The city has a 40% illiteracy rate, and over 50% of black ninth graders will not graduate in four years. Louisiana spends on average $4,724 per child's education and ranks 48th in the country for lowest teacher salaries. The equivalent of more than two classrooms of young people drop out of Louisiana schools every day and about 50,000 students are absent from school on any given day. Far too many young black men from New Orleans end up enslaved in Angola Prison, a former slave plantation where inmates still do manual farm labor, and over 90% of inmates eventually die in the prison. It is a city where industry has left, and most remaining jobs are are low-paying, transient, insecure jobs in the service economy.

Race has always been the undercurrent of Louisiana politics. This disaster is one that was constructed out of racism, neglect and incompetence. Hurricane Katrina was the inevitable spark igniting the gasoline of cruelty and corruption. From the neighborhoods left most at risk, to the treatment of the refugees to the the media portrayal of the victims, this disaster is shaped by race.

Louisiana politics is famously corrupt, but with the tragedies of this week our political leaders have defined a new level of incompetence. As hurricane Katrina approached, our Governor urged us to "Pray the hurricane down" to a level two. Trapped in a building two days after the hurricane, we tuned our battery-operated radio into local radio and tv stations, hoping for vital news, and were told that our governor had called for a day of prayer. As rumors and panic began to rule, they was no source of solid dependable information. Tuesday night, politicians and reporters said the water level would rise another 12 feet - instead it stabilized. Rumors spread like wildfire, and the politicians and media only made it worse.

While the rich escaped New Orleans, those with nowhere to go and no way to get there were left behind. Adding salt to the wound, the local and national media have spent the last week demonizing those left behind. As someone that loves New Orleans and the people in it, this is the part of this tragedy that hurts me the most, and it hurts me deeply.

No sane person should classify someone who takes food from indefinitely closed stores in a desperate, starving city as a "looter," but thats just what the media did over and over again. Sherrifs and politicians talked of having troops protect stores instead of perform rescue operations.

Images of New Orleans' hurricane-ravaged population were transformed into black, out-of-control, criminals. As if taking a stereo from a store that will clearly be insured against loss is a greater crime than the governmental neglect and incompetence that did billions of dollars of damage and destroyed a city. This media focus is a tactic, just as the eighties focus on "welfare queens" and "super-predators" obscured the simultaneous and much larger crimes of the Savings and Loan scams and mass layoffs, the hyper-exploited people of New Orleans are being used as a scapegoat to cover up much larger crimes.

City, state and national politicians are the real criminals here. Since at least the mid-1800s, its been widely known the danger faced by flooding to New Orleans. The flood of 1927, which, like this week's events, was more about politics and racism than any kind of natural disaster, illustrated exactly the danger faced. Yet government officials have consistently refused to spend the money to protect this poor, overwhelmingly black, city.

While FEMA and others warned of the urgent impending danger to New Orleans and put forward proposals for funding to reinforce and protect the city, the Bush administration, in every year since 2001, has cut or refused to fund New Orleans flood control, and ignored scientists warnings of increased hurricanes as a result of global warming. And, as the dangers rose with the floodlines, the lack of coordinated response dramatized vividly the callous disregard of our elected leaders.

The aftermath from the 1927 flood helped shape the elections of both a US President and a Governor, and ushered in the southern populist politics of Huey Long.

In the coming months, billions of dollars will likely flood into New Orleans. This money can either be spent to usher in a "New Deal" for the city, with public investment, creation of stable union jobs, new schools, cultural programs and housing restoration, or the city can be "rebuilt and revitalized" to a shell of its former self, with newer hotels, more casinos, and with chain stores and theme parks replacing the former neighborhoods, cultural centers and corner jazz clubs.

Long before Katrina, New Orleans was hit by a hurricane of poverty, racism, disinvestment, de-industrialization and corruption. Simply the damage from this pre-Katrina hurricane will take billions to repair.

Now that the money is flowing in, and the world's eyes are focused on Katrina, its vital that progressive-minded people take this opportunity to fight for a rebuilding with justice. New Orleans is a special place, and we need to fight for its rebirth.

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Jordan Flaherty is an editor of Left Turn Magazine.

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Below are some small, grassroots and New Orleans-based resources, organizations and institutions that will need your support in the coming months.

Social Justice:
Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana
If They Can Learn
NOLA Palestinian Solidarity
The Peoples Institute
Critical Resistance New Orleans

Cultural Resources:
The Backstreet Cultural Museum
ASHE Cultural Arts Center
The Neighborhood Gallery
New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival
the iron rail: literacy. politics. culture.
girl gang productions

Current Info and Resources

September 2, 2005

MT3.2

Our wonderful web team upgraded to MT3.2 while I was away; a nice surprise. For anyone thinking of moving on up, so far it seems well worth the change. The main menu can be customized in some new ways, and you have the option of looking at, say, the comments, across all your blogs: a real bonus if you are running more than one. There is also a junk folder, where questionable comments go, a sort of electronic limbo. And new style templates. And you can search across all your entries, so I just went back and changed all my early references to the Jinker Boy's real name (what, you thought that was on his birth certificate?). There seems to be a lot more, too, but I haven't had time to delve. All very cool.

Now if only I could resize the damn entry window. I thought I saw a plug-in, once, that allowed you to do so, but I haven't been able to track it down since.

We're back

So little time; so much to do. Those of you about to start a new term of teaching could do a lot worse than to visit GZombie's inaugural Teaching Carnival #1. What a great idea! Cats and historians have their own carnivals; why not us?