from John Banville’s review of the 2nd volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters, in the latest New York Review of Books:
“The so-called trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable … are the masterworks of his middle period and surely his most representative achievement in prose. Here at last he found a means of allowing the darkness Krapp had “always struggled to keep under” to spread over the page like so much spilled ink.”
I seem to have been to a feast of digital humanities talks in the last couple of days… At Thursday’s CoDE/CMT seminar, James Wade (Emmanuel, Cambridge) and Peter Stokes (King’s, London) discussed the digitization of medieval manuscripts, with Wade discussing the transmogrifications of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur as it moved from manuscript to print and into twentieth and twenty-first century editions, and Stokes asking what it means to ‘put a manuscript on the web’, given that such an act is literally impossible. Perhaps (he suggested) we need to stop thinking that we are accurately ‘representing’ the manuscript, and instead admit that we’re engaged in acts of modelling, which need to be tailored precisely to our sense of how the digitized materials will be used. For me this raised the question of how much we know about the ways in which people use digital resources–do we really read things online, or do we just raid them? (Or are reading and raiding much the same thing?)
Yesterday lunchtime I just managed to make time for the CRASSH Digital Humanities Network seminar on ‘Using Social Media Data for Research: The Ethical Challenges’. Here Fabian Neuhaus (UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis) and Dr Sharath Srinivasan (Centre of Governance and Human Rights, POLIS) posed some difficult questions about the viability of gathering evidence from tweets or text-messages. The delight of such sources for the researcher is that they provide very precise details that allow you to locate the point of origin of a message; you can map the way in which people are using these media, and you can perhaps begin to tie up particular behaviours and viewpoints with places, times, and social strata (see http://urbantick.blogspot.com/ for more). But this also makes the data–which is difficult to anonymize–very sensitive and open to abuse. How do you get ‘informed consent’ to use this material for research purposes in the first place? And what do you do when the police (or, in some circumstances, the local dictators) come to your office and ask if they can share your information?
I needed to check something in Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’, and, not having my volume of Marvell’s poetry to hand, did what any PhD student would do and quickly searched for the poem via Google. I am used to the sinister phenomenon of Google linking to adverts connected to the content of my emails, and usually ignore them, but this time I was amused by the commentary Google provided on Marvell’s text. While a supplier of ‘artificial grass’ probably wouldn’t be welcomed by Marvell’s speaker, who criticises ‘all this marble crust’, what would he make of the offers of tree surgeons – ‘for healthier, tidier trees’ and ‘local clearance work’?
Cambridge University Press has just sent me an email offering a 10% discount on selected titles to celebrate World Book Day. I click on the link and get a truly mouthwatering array of bargains. Core Topics in Airway Management heads the list, followed by Diagnostic Techniques in Hematological Malignancies; Morbid Obesity: Peri-Operative Management (down to £54.90!); Brain Repair After Stroke; Depression in Primary Care: Evidence and Practice... I trust that this list has not been targetted to my specific needs as a forty-something male, but I’m not taking any chances: the cake and champagne are going back in the cupboard.
There’s a new treat for book-fetishists everywhere, with the publication of the second volume in Yale’s Unpacking my Library series, this one edited by Leah Price and entitled ‘Writers and their Books’. Here Price conducts a series of interviews with many different kinds of reader-writer, asking about their collecting habits, the ecology of their buying and lending and merging and discarding, the geography of their reading (what books are lurking by the bed or piled in the kitchen?), and their theories about the future of the book. But the real meat of the volume lies in its extraordinary photographs, mostly photographs of bookshelves and the spines of books. Battered spines, shiny spines, spines neatly lined up in order or collapsing on a diagonal, spines asserting unities of genre or date or subject-matter, spines at cross-purposes (since publishers have never reached any agreement about which way the words should run). Then there are photos of the living-rooms and writing-rooms in which all these books live, to give you a sense of what our modern St Jeromes have in their studies.
One contributor, Lev Grossman, offers a kind of manifesto for the volume, declaring: ‘When you look around somebody’s personal library, you can actually see, physically instantiated as objects, a map of that person’s interests and preoccupations and memories’. There’s a Desert-Island Discs quality to the book, as contributors are invited to pick out their ten favourite volumes; here even a determined non-fetishist like Steven Pinker (‘I do love the contents of books, of course’) risks having his values upended as the ostentation of dust-jackets reminds us how powerfully ideas are bound in to the energies of past times and places. Much of the pleasure of this project is the painful pleasure of evanescence. The collector is at once present and absent in his or her books; the immortal text can only be propagated by a succession of rapidly dating material forms; the past in which these collections came together awaits the future in which they will split apart. ‘I’m so aware of my age’, says Edmund White at 71, ‘I see books as a problem that I might end up imposing on my heirs’.
All of the contributors are asked about their attitude to the e-book, and in the process some interesting anthropomorphisms surface. Rebecca Goldstein puts it philosophically: ‘Kant tells us that a person can never be used as a means to an end, but must be viewed as an end in itself … Well, that pretty much summarizes my attitude towards books. I would never use a book as a coaster or to prop up something else … Well, maybe a phone book, but not a book that was authored, into which some suffering writer … poured her heart and soul’. Claire Messud sees love of the physical book as a kind of shorthand for being fully alive: ‘Anybody who thinks books are dispensable is someone entirely lacking in appreciation of sensual pleasure. I pity such a person’. And Jonathan Lethem goes still further in his account of the erotics of the unread book: ”For me, there’s a lovely mystery and pregnancy about a book that hasn’t given itself over to you yet–sometimes I’m the most inspired by imagining what the contents of an unread book might be.’ Milton’s claim that books contain a ‘potencie of life’ resonates in these passionate anatomies of bibliophilia.
For historians of reading, there is much food for thought here. Sophie Gee connects the problematic physicality of the book to its cultural significance: ‘Books are hard to transport and therefore signs of permanence’. This offers meat to those who see the weightless, digitized word as the irresponsible parent of a throwaway, twittering textuality, but it perhaps overlooks the way that print too facilitated ephemerality. Elsewhere, James Wood reflects on the fact that, as well as annotating his books, ‘I also regularly write to-do lists in the endpapers, or telephone numbers, or names of people I must e-mail. These latter often prove more interesting than any of my literary comments: years later, I stare at them, trying to work out who these people were’. Is that distraction from interpretation a good or a bad thing, or does it speak to some deeper mystery concerning the relationship between reading and its horizons? Finally, while some of these writers have teddy-bears and toy-cars on their shelves, I was struck by another moment in Rebecca Goldstein’s interview, when she recalled that: ‘There was a time when we had some vases and candlesticks mixed in with the books, but I didn’t like that at all. It seemed to me to qualify as what philosophers call a “category mistake”.’ Although she again puts it in rather intellectual terms, it seems to me that the point she makes is more importantly bodily. Like any kind of collecting, books present a problem of order and organization, and the way that one handles that problem is liable to be felt on the skin, in a shiver of discontent or a warm glow of satisfaction. In this sense, to unpack your library is indeed to unpack yourself.
A few people have asked where they can find the details of the call for papers for the CMT conference on ‘Texts and Textiles’, to be held 11-12 September 2012. The information has got rather buried on our ‘News’ page, so here it is again: textstextilesCMT . The PDF can be downloaded, circulated, and displayed as you wish!
Don’t forget to find us on Facebook, too…
Josie Gill (University of Cambridge)
17 February, 5pm
Wolfson College, Gatsby Room
Amongst the hundreds of files which make up the Francis Crick archive is a file dedicated to Crick’s correspondence with Arthur Jensen, an American educational psychologist whose work focuses on proving a link between race and intelligence. The letters, which date from the early 1970s, provide an insight into Crick’s views on this controversial topic, and his role in galvanising support for a statement on academic freedom in the face of calls for the study of racial differences to be halted. However the file also contains two literary documents; a photocopy of The Poetry of Richard Nixon, a satirical collection of found poetry based on the Watergate tapes, and an essay on feminism by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. What do these documents tell us about Crick’s thinking about race and why are they included in a file of his professional correspondence on the matter? In this paper I will suggest that the poems and essay reflect Crick’s ambivalent relationship to the political culture of the early 1970s which his participation in the debate over race exposes. Crick felt threatened by the questioning of traditional sources of authority such as science, yet embraced the more liberal movements of the time through an interest in beat poetry and drugs. Examining the authorship, production and content of the texts reveals a complex web of connections between Crick and the politically conservative, as well as countercultural, figures of the period, providing an alternative view of the relationship between literature and science in the second half of the twentieth century.
Part of the Countercultural Research Group, Lent 2012.
The Counterculture Research Group is an interdisciplinary series of seminars, lectures and associated events that focuses the multiple artistic, historical and social manifestations of the countercultural impetus.
For further information contact yps1000@cam.ac.uk or rjer2@cam.ac.uk.
17 February, 5pm
Wolfson College, Gatsby Room
Francis Crick, Race, and The Poetry of Richard Nixon
Josie Gill (University of Cambridge)
15 March, 5pm
Wolfson College, Seminar Room
‘A Nation-Wide Intelligence Service’: Mass-Observation, Hermeneutic Paranoia and the Invasion of Cambridge
James Purdon (University of Cambridge)
Wednesday, March 14th speaker change!
Seminars are held in St. Catharine’s College OCR, 2.00pm – 3.30pm, unless otherwise stated. Tea, coffee and biscuits are served. All welcome!
Wednesday, October 19th: Graduate session
Austen Saunders, English Department, University of Cambridge
‘John Dixon’s annotations to The Faerie Queene: the 1590s blogosphere?’
and
Harriet Phillips, English Department, University of Cambridge
‘How the ploughman learned, and then forgot, his Pater Noster: figuring the Tudor everyman’
Wednesday, November 2nd
Round-table session: ‘Letter writing and networking in the early modern world’
Wednesday, November 16th
Professor Thomas Mayer, Augustana College (USA)
‘Trying Gallileo’, 2.15 pm, Lightfoot Room, Faculty of Divinity
Wednesday, November 23rd
Dr Paul White, Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge
‘Does Poetry Teach Morality? Jodocus Badius Ascensius (1462-1535) and Debates about Humanist Education’ – Ramsden Room, St. Catharine’s College
Wednesday, November 30th: Graduate Session
Hannah August, King’s College London, and Simon Smith, Birkbeck College, London
‘Early modern English commercial drama and the creation of delight’
Wednesday, February 1st
Hannah Newton, University of Cambridge
‘Cur’d in a different manner: children’s medicine in early modern England, c.1580-1720’ Rushmore Room, St Catharine’s College
Wednesday, February 15th
Richard Serjeantson, University of Cambridge
‘”Published after the old fashion”: Reconstructing a scribal publishing operation in an age of print’ Rushmore Room, St Catharine’s College
Wednesday, March 14th
Joe Moshenska, University of Cambridge
‘Sir Kenelm Digby’s Interruptions: Piracy and Romance in the 1620s’
Ramsden Room, St Catharine’s College, 2-3.30
Wednesday, May 2nd:
Professor John O’Brien, Royal Holloway, University of London
‘The Disclosure of Truth in Montaigne’
Wednesday May 9th
Will Poole, University of Oxford
(TBC)
Wednesday May 23rd
Meredith Hall, Cambridge
‘Text and Image in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Satire’, Ramsden Room, St Catharine’s College
Wednesday June 6th
Tom Blaen, University of Exeter
(TBC)
For further details, please check the website or contact:
Jennifer Bishop
Cassie Gorman
Jonathan Patterson
Erin Walters
Richard Serjeantson (Trinity College)
Rushmore Room, St Catharine’s College
Wednesday, February 15th
2.00-3.30pm
Part of the Interdisciplinary Early Modern Seminar.