Does anyone recognize this script? And the text to which it belongs?
One of this winter’s exhibitions at the British Museum, ‘Journey through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead’, opens on Thursday. The exhibition website explains that the ‘Book’ was ‘not a single text but a compilation of spells designed to guide the deceased through the dangers of the underworld, ultimately ensuring eternal life.’ This is the first time that many of these unique works from the British Museum’s collection have been shown in a public exhibition. The oldest examples of these illustrated texts on papyrus and linen were written over 3,500 years ago, and they will be displayed alongside other objects connected to death, burial, and beliefs about afterlife in Ancient Egypt. The museum website doesn’t give away much more about these mysterious texts, but promises advanced technological elements in the exhibition to enrich the visitor’s experience and understanding of these fragile documents. There is a series of public lectures and events too, details available here. If readers of this blog can enlighten us further about these fascinating material texts after visiting the exhibition, please feel free to comment below!
This was the provocative title of BBC Radio 3’s Night Waves programme yesterday evening. Philip Dodd chaired a panel in Alnwick made up of novelists David Almond and Louise Welsh, historian Sheila Hingley, and Chris Meade, co-director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, which discussed the rising popularity of e-readers and the consequences of this new technology for readers, writers, and publishers.
Amongst the panel and the audience there was widespread agreement that reading books is a multi-sensory experience involving more than ‘reading text’. Hingley commented that a book is ‘more than a vehicle for text’, and we wouldn’t want to ‘curl up in bed with a piece of plastic’. Many audience members shared personal stories illustrating the importance of the physical as well as the intellectual and emotional pleasure of the book as a distinctive object to be shared and treasured – elements of reading which are absent from the experience of the e-reader.
Louise Welsh insisted on the democracy of the book in contrast with the expensive e-reader. She reminded us that a history of reading involves a history of access to knowledge, and suggested that because it costs hundreds times more than a cheap paperback, the e-reader is a less democratic medium for reading. As Jason’s most recent post here highlighted however, other manifestations of digital media have been responsible on an immeasurable scale for the democratisation of knowledge and writing. The panel praised the possibilities of the internet, such as fan fiction sites, through which readers can increasingly become writers themselves. David Almond pointed out that children and young people are a significant constituency of this democracy of reading and writing. While he said it was patronising to suggest that young people today are so familiar with screen technologies that books do not appeal to them, he noted that children’s literature in particular has been creative and experimental with different forms of and beyond the printed book, and should not be overlooked in this kind of debate.
Most enthusiastic about digital books was Chris Meade, who suggested that Dickens or Blake would have been excited by the opportunities offered by the e-reader. To be suspicious of the e-book on aesthetic terms is to succumb to nostalgia, he said; rather, we should resist defining ‘literature’ as something only found printed on paper, and embrace the possibilities of collaborative writing, print-on-demand, and new flexible boundaries of publication. Members of the audience drew attention to some valuable practical uses of the e-reader – a librarian from Newcastle commented that it could have significant benefits for borrowers who are limited by the size of print in books, and that with an e-reader housebound borrowers could potentially gain access to many more books than previously.
No matter how sleek and clever new screen technologies might be, the printed book is a ‘design classic’, someone put it. The e-reader looks as though it is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, and the panel agreed that we should think of this new relationship between the book and the e-book as not antagonistic and ‘either/or’, but as potentially mutually beneficial…
If you’re interested in hearing the whole debate, the programme is available to ‘listen again’ on BBC iplayer until 22 October 2010.
I heard a very absorbing lecture this afternoon by Dr Mathias Döpfner, the Humanitas Visiting Professor, who was taking time out from his day job as CEO of the German media corporation Axel Springer to offer Cambridge his thoughts on the digital revolution. He nailed his colours to the mast early on by saying that digitization was the fourth of mankind’s great inventions, on a continuum that included language, writing and print. And in the first half of his talk the internet was defined as an inherently anti-authoritarian space of free speech, the ideal culmination of the crusading efforts of generations of campaigners against censorship, and the bane of totalitarian regimes everywhere.
The second half of Döpfner’s lecture sketched out the other side of the argument, looking at the way we expose our private lives on social networking sites, and exploring the potential dangers of beguiling gizmos such as face-and-place recognition and global positioning systems. We may enjoy ‘geotagging’ our photos, or navigating unfamiliar cities without getting lost, but the technology that allows us to do this also allows us to be tagged and navigated in unprecedented ways. Of course, the companies that store our personal information and create new games for us to play claim to want only the best for us—‘Don’t be evil’, as Google puts it, plumbing unsuspected depths of banality—but then oppression frequently wears a smile. Döpfner’s conclusion (somewhat at odds with his initial premise) was that the internet is really nothing in itself. Like language, it is neither good nor evil; it reflects back the kind of society we want to be. Still, he concluded, only the worst kind of cynic would want to damn the internet as a threat to the free world rather than celebrating its enormous potential to release the unfree.
It was powerful stuff, but from the tone of the questions I suspect that some members of the audience were a shade more cynical than the speaker. The question of the relationship between capitalism and the internet was a significant unaddressed issue—do the free market in ideas and the free market in iphones have to go hand in hand? Are we in the West more interested in the spread of freedom or of profit? Or, to put it slightly less controversially (as did the Chair John Thompson in an eloquent final question), what relationship should there be between private companies and governments in regulating the web—given that the former act chiefly in their own interests, rather than in ours?
By now it will be presumably be hard to get uncorrected copies of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Freedom, forty-six million printed pages of which were pulped last weekend after the author discovered that they were riddled with errors. Viewers of Friday’s ‘Newsnight Review’ were treated to a delightful bit of footage (sadly not yet available on Youtube) in which the author stopped in the middle of the extract he was reading to camera, declared that his English copy was full of mistakes, and uttered a heartfelt expletive. In a faraway printing firm, the hand that double-clicked the wrong computer file was doubtless being slapped, hard.
So far as I’m aware, none of the reviews–even those in the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books, which dared to suggest that Franzen’s was not the novel-to-end-all-novels–mentioned the typos and unrevised passages that got the author’s goat (either they were skimming, or they had been sent the American edition). The British press, which is not renowned for its ability to resist a good pun, mostly neglected to point out that Franzen’s previous bestseller had been entitled ‘The Corrections’. But the papers did dredge up some fine examples of previous pulpings, including a Pasta Bible that told readers to add ‘salt and freshly ground black people’ to their tagliatelle, and the ‘Wicked Bible’ of 1631 which instructed, between ‘Thou shalt not kill’ and ‘Thou shalt not steale’, ‘Thou shalt commit adultery’. (The last was apparently an act of industrial sabotage, rather than a mistake).
In Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590), the snaky monster Error spews out ‘vomit full of bookes and papers’ when she is vanquished by a passing knight in shining armour. Outside the world of poetry, she’s clearly still on the rampage.
The American Library Association’s Banned Books week began on 25th September. This annual celebration of the ‘freedom to read’ raises awareness of attempts to remove particular books from schools, libraries, and other institutions, as well as official state censorship. The ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom compiles a database of ‘challenged books’ each year based on newspaper reports and information from the public – should you come across an attempted book suppression, you can report it online via the rather sinister Challenge Reporting Form…
Over here in Europe, this month also sees the centenary celebrations for one of Hungary’s most important twentieth-century poets, György Faludy (1910-2006). Faludy first became known for his translations and rewritings of Franςois Villon’s ballads in the 1930s, but the story of the publication of these and all his subsequent writing is bound up with a traumatic period in the history of central Europe. Faludy’s criticism of the totalitarian regimes in his native country resulted in multiple periods of exile and imprisonment during the 1940s and 1950s. In Hungary his books were burned by the ruling fascist Arrow Cross party in the 1940s, and pulped during the communist regime that followed. For many decades his work circulated in samizdat printings.
Faludy spent several years in the forced labour camp at Recsk, where he sustained the spirits of the other prisoners by giving lectures and readings, and composed poetry without any writing tools. After the revolution of October 1956, he settled in London, subsequently moving to Canada where he lectured at universities there and in the USA and Europe. He returned to Hungary in 1988, when at last his work began to be published openly. Even in 1985, the Preface to an English edition of the Selected Poems 1933-1980 stated ‘Another Hungarian periodical committed a kind of suicide last year when it published an essay pointing out how ludicrous it was that, although Faludy was beyond doubt Hungary’s greatest poet, none of his works could be printed or purchased in his native country’.
The works in Selected Poems 1933-1980, ed. and trans. Robin Skelton et al (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), make frequent allusions to books, conveying Faludy’s profound sense of the printed word as something simultaneously dangerous and vulnerable. With ‘In the Reading Room of the British Museum’ (London, 1967) Faludy celebrates the intellectual freedom of his regular Reading Room companions in a place ‘where factory whistles never sound, and money/ never talks – where silence hovers over worth’. These people, liberated by reading, will ‘on their deathbeds’ know ‘in silence what a billion men/will never know: that, living, they were alive’. In ‘Tibet’ (London, 1957) Faludy contrasts a peaceful domestic scene of reading and writing with the political events happening in the Far East: ‘Standing at monastery windows/ they are throwing out books’. These powerful images of destruction remind Faludy of his own country and its sufferings: ‘Wretched we who left Hungary,/ wretched those left behind’. The volume concludes with ‘Learn by heart this poem of mine’ (Toronto, 1980), in which he laments
[…]
books only last a little time
and this one will be borrowed, scarred,
burned by the Hungarian border guards,
lost by the library, broken-backed,
its paper dried up, crisped and cracked,
worm-eaten, crumbling into dust,
or slowly brown and self-combust
when climbing Fahrenheit has got
to 451, for that’s how hot
your town will be when it burns down.
Learn by heart this poem of mine.
The poem anticipates an apocalyptic destruction of humanity by itself, and the surprising final line – ‘You must forget this poem of mine’ – reminds us of the controversial issues of materiality that always surround the works of writers with views considered unsavoury by those in power. Sometimes even the human memory, Faludy suggests in this poem, is too dangerous a place for words to be preserved.
Miltonists the world over will be groaning at the news that a new poem has just been attributed to their man. The 8-line ‘Extempore upon a Faggot’, discovered by Oxford academic Jennifer Batt, is a fine example of the sort of throwaway crudeness that overwhelms the printed and handwritten verse miscellanies of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries. ‘Have you not in a Chimney seen / A Faggot which is moist and green / How coyly it receives the Heat / And at both ends do’s weep and sweat? / So fares it with a tender Maid / When first upon her Back she’s laid / But like dry Wood th’ experienced Dame / Cracks and rejoices in the Flame.’
Batt herself suspects that the lines may be by John Suckling; perhaps he added the name of Milton to discredit the fiery radical, for whom faggots would have been associated more with burning martyrs than lustful dames. Myself, I’m holding out for Robert Herrick, whose poem ‘Upon the Nipples of Julia’s Breast’ opens with a similar turn of phrase–‘Have ye beheld (with much delight) / A red rose peeping through a white?’–and shares the aim of using things in the world to provoke lascivious thoughts in the (probably male) reader.
Given what we know about the vagaries of lyric authorship in the early modern period, we may need a moratorium on the announcement of new discoveries of this kind. One thinks back to the debates which raged when Gary Taylor discovered an ungainly poem beginning ‘Shall I die?’ with an attribution to Shakespeare in a Bodleian manuscript. But poetic miscellanies and anthologies also give us a valuable glimpse into a period’s literary undergrowth and force us to ask exactly how we can know who wrote what–which is often an extremely challenging and worthwhile question.
Light relief from all the rumours of wars in recent posts comes in the news that Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page has angered fans by publishing his autobiography-in-pictures as a leather-bound, silk-wrapped ‘work of art’ retailing at £445. Printed on ‘fine art paper’ in a limited edition of 2,500 copies, the book will join a long tradition of luxury publications stretching back to the origins of the codex–a tradition largely invisible to the average modern reader, for whom the idea of the book is tied to ideas of egalitarianism, democracy, and the free (or cheap) exchange of information. Page linked his choice of medium to his own desire to have a library and his appreciation of fine bookbinding.
Meanwhile this week’s Times Literary Supplement has a blood-red triangle in a corner of the front cover, advertising an article on ‘books bound in human skin’. ‘Anthropodermic bibliopegy’, the article reports, took off in the eighteenth century, ‘when binding the Lives of executed criminals in their own skin became a bit of a fad.’ An example, a copy of a blank paper book supposedly bound in ‘Tanned Skin from the Negro whose Execution caused the War of Independence’, is currently on display in a Wellcome Collection exhibition entitled ‘Skin‘. The TLS piece, by Jill Lepore of Harvard, does a wonderful job of teasing out the historical ambiguities that accumulate around this volume. Let’s hope it doesn’t give Jimmy Page any gruesome ideas.
Yet more material texts in the headlines for political reasons: as the ninth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York approaches, a preacher in Florida has announced his intention to burn copies of the Qur’an outside his church on Saturday. Needless to say, his views have provoked horror and outrage. Again, without wishing to over-simplify the complex issues surrounding this threat and the responses it has had from across the globe, this incident is a dramatic reminder of the political importance of all sacred texts as material objects which symbolise tolerance and respect.
Sales of Tony Blair’s autobiography A Journey may be slowed by a new campaign instigated by a 24-year-old nursing student named Euan Booth. Booth set up a Facebook group entitled ‘Subversively move Tony Blair’s memoirs to the crime section in the bookshops’. More than 5,000 people are now engaged in the effort to reclassify the book (some have opted for ‘Sci-fi, Fantasy and Horror’ rather than ‘Crime’). Without wishing to devalue the political issues at the heart of this protest, it’s interesting as an example of the interaction of digital and print media, and as a reminder of how far the interpretation of a book might be affected by the company it keeps.