A torrent of silence

I usually find that the solution to a tough programming problem arrives when I'm busy with something else: doing the dishes, showering, or at my internal compiler's favorite time - while I'm falling asleep.

Here's a bit about this phenomenon from Esther de Waal's Seeking God: The Way of St Benedict:

The very act of touching, handling, feeling materal things helps to build a small barrier against the torrent of words, written and spoken, which threaten to monopolize us by insisting that they alone constitute reality. Manual work, particularly if it is solitary - gradening, crafts, for example - helps us to know ourselves for it allows the rhythms of the body to operate and gives the time and space for the unconscious to surface naturally. This is the role which Joseph Conrad was speaking about when he wrote in The Heart of Darkness, "I like what is in the work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself and not for others - what no other man can ever know."

Here's a less mystical take on encouraging the unconscious to surface, from a fellow member of an email list:

In the good old days, when I actually worked for a living and was presented with a particularly difficult engineering or programming problem, I would try to encourage that sort of thinking-without-critiquing. Usually by engaging the forebrain in some intellectually passive activity like driving our California freeways while listening to George Schell of the Cleveland Philharmonic conduct Beethoven. I would often arrive at the lab with some new notion hovering below the surface and spend a few hours not looking directly at it — so as not to scare it away until it gelled.

Unfortunately, that sort of thinking-without-critiquing often looks a lot like goofing off.

The Heaven Tree Trilogy and Moby-Dick

Edith Pargeter, a.k.a. Ellis Peters, author of the Brother Cadfael series, on her The Heaven Tree Trilogy "the best thing I have done. The best piece of writing, the story best worth telling, the characters most formidably alive, the theme best worth pursuing to the end: The work that came nearest what I wanted it to be."

Meanwhile, I'm engrossed in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and the great good humor therein. See, for example, this delightful bit of damnation:

Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.

Alan Furst

As recommended on the gunroom mailing list: the novels of Alan Furst based in 1930s and 40s Europe.

Anthony Trollope

Added to Mt Toberead: the novels of Anthony Trollope. There doesn't seem to be a "collected works" available at amazon, so what the heck - maybe I'll run them through TeX.

Recommended on the gunroom mailing list in a thread started by someone who spotted a "Plantagenet Palliser For President" bumper sticker.

Hugh Laurie on PG Wodehouse

An entertaining read from Hugh Laurie with a bit of the old Wodehouse panache at the World of PG Wodehouse.

books.live.com to disappear next week

Naturally, just after I harvested a bunch of book urls pointing to books.live.com. Here's the news from Microsoft - any idea what the marketing gobbledegook means? Here's slashdot and infoworld, and a commentary at salon.

Fortunately, most of the books are available at archive.org.

Bookmarking

As seen at Summa Mamas: What's your favorite thing to use for a bookmark? Or are you a page corner turner?

I'll dogear a page if nothing else is handy; otherwise it's the envelopes of old bills, business reply envelopes, the torn-off corners of paper towels. Pieces of ripped-up loan shark letters make good bookmarks if they're not too thick with reckless promises of cash. Basically, anything flat, flexible and disposable will do.

Back in my Rich Young Bachelor days when I visited bookstores and bought books in them, I'd save a book's receipt for a bookmark. And thus I can recall the very day in 1994 that I bought Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book" and started reading it at a now-defunct restaurant on the corner of Church and Randolph in Champaign.

Letters of John Q Adams

Nine letters to his son on the Bible, collected & published shortly after his death: Letters of John Quincy Adams to His Son, on the Bible and Its Teachings. And here's a collection of works by and about John Adams (JQ Adams' father) at live.com/archive.org.

Hat tip: TSO.

Bubba's Book Club, Issue 9

Neil Peart has a new set of book reviews up at Bubba's Book Club.

Book idea

Someone needs to write a rigorous biography of Donald Knuth while he's still around to contribute.

A Catholic miscellany

Some Google Books I'd pick up if I found them in a used book store:

• The Conversion of Europe, Charles Henry Robinson
• The New Raccolta: Or, Collection of Prayers and Good Works, 1903
• Three Catholic reformers of the fifteenth century, Mary Helen A. Allies, 1878
• St. Vincent Ferrer, his life, spiritual teaching, and practical devotion, André Pradel, 1875
• Virtues and Spiritual Doctrine of St. Vincent de Paul by Michel Ulysse Maynard, Louise de Marillac, 1877
• Albert the great, of the Order of friar-preachers: his life and scholastic labours, Joachim Sighart, 1876
• Sacred and Legendary Art by Anna Jameson, 1895
• The immaculate conception of the Mother of God, an exposition by William Bernard Ullathorne, 1855

The ghost stories of Montague Rhodes James

I'd never heard of M R James, but apparently he's well-known for his ghost stories and his catalogs of old university library holdings and whatnot. At Google Books.

Noted in passing

James O'Donnell is one of the presenters in the BBC's 4-part series on St Augustine, and here's a website devoted to the life and work of Page Smith, biographer of John Adams and others. His biography of Adams ($8.00 many years ago at the Old Book Barn, where I also picked up the complete works of Edmund Burke, the 1880s Boston edition, for a pittance) is among my current reading, as is Laura Ingalls Wilder's cracking good Little House series - an Epiphany gift from our 9-year-old daughter. It's not just for kids!

10 best bookstores in the world

According to the Guardian's Sean Dodson, though he seems focused more on decorations and amenities than books:

• Boekhandel Selexyz Dominicanen in Maastricht
• El Ateneo in Buenos Aires
• Livraria Lello in Porto
• Secret Headquarters comic bookstore in Los Angeles
• Borders in Glasgow
• Scarthin's in the Peak District
• Posada in Brussels
• El lugar de la Mancha in Mexico
• Keibunsya in Kyoto
• Hatchards in London

My favorite was the old used-book store in the basement of the University YMCA in Champaign, Illinois, though it wouldn't appear on anyone's "most beautiful bookstores" list. The proprietor had established a large collection of the old Doubleday Image paperbacks when he was a student in the 50s and 60s and slowly selled them off at the store along with thousands of other goodies.

UPDATE: Welcome, poncers! Feel free to browse around. There's a morning coffee routine/google workout and various & sundry links to whatever I stumble across on the net.

Dalrymple on thin books

From his recent book review:

I make a plea for thin rather than for fat books, at least for the general reader. (I accept the value of fat books as repositories.) There is more intellect in the distillation than in the accumulation of facts; for facts, unlike men, are not created equal. We busy human beings need guidance as to their importance and significance; and there are, after all, very few subjects of such intrinsic importance that we need to know every last detail about them.

Indeed. For example, I've gotten more lasting good out of Samuel Morison's tiny one-volume distillation of the life and voyages of Columbus than I ever would out of his 2.3-pound Columbus biography.

Maybe he dropped by while I was out

I don't remember a Thomas Frognall Dibdin visiting our house lately...

I looked around me with amazement. I had never seen rooms, cupboards, passages, and corridors, so choked, so suffocated with books. Treble rows were here, double rows were there. Hundreds of slim quartos—several upon each other—were longitudinally placed over thin and stunted duodecimos, reaching from one extremity of a shelf to another. Up to the very ceiling the piles of volumes extended; while the floor was strewed with them, in loose and numerous heaps.

How to mark a book

A delightful essay by Mortimer Adler by way of a commenter at Anecdotal Evidence. Incipit:

You know you have to read "between the lines" to get the most out of anything. I want to persuade you to do something equally important in the course of your reading. I want to persuade you to write between the lines. Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading.

I contend, quite bluntly, that marking up a book is not an act of mutilation but of love.

Edward Dahlberg on used book stores

Via Anecdotal Evidence:

"Since publishing became luxurious see what has happened to bookshops. They are infamous greeting-card stores, littered with trash. The only decent and civilized people left in the books business are those who have shambly stores on Fourth Avenue. Do I want La Rochefoucauld, Saint-Simon, La Bruyère or Dio, and I am being literal, I have to go to used-book dealers. Should I desire to procure Strabo or the elder Pliny or Alexander von Humboldt, do you imagine I should have the least luck in buying these on Fifth Avenue? Suppose I desire Whiston’s translations of Jewish Antiquities by Josephus, where do I get it, in a meretricious book house which looks like a Greyhound bus – or in the shabby stalls on Fourth Avenue? I have found a rare Guerrera, a fifteenth-century Spanish monk who did some marvelous chapters of Heliogabalus and Otho, in an immense loft glutted with all sorts of volumes that would entice a fevered brain. You can’t even get literary staples in the new, gimcrack bookshops, Ruskin, Burton, Coleridge’s Letters, Sartor Resartus, the City of God by St. Augustine."

Various etexts

• the works of the recently-beatified Antonio Rosmini, founder of the Institute of Charity which has a foundation here in the diocese of Peoria
• a collection of 12th-century homilies in Old English (one of my periodic monomanias)
• Meditations for every Wednesday and Friday in Lent on a prayer of S. Ephraem, translated from Russian; watch out for the old s->f typography!
• the Blicking Homilies of the Tenth Century (Old English again)
• The Homilies of S. Thomas Aquinas Upon the Epistles and Gospels for the Sundays of the Christian Year, To Which Are Appended the Festival Homilies

Document dump

I have plans for Bernard's sermons on the Missus Est; here's what else I turned up.

• Writings of St. Louis Marie de Montfort
• St Bernard's Advent and Christmas sermons (including the sermons on the "Missus Est"); also see Marco Binetti's St Bernard etexts from the Patrologia Latina (PL 182-185)
• James Cotter Morison's biography of St Bernard
• the same from Don Mabillon, volume 1 and volume 2.
• Dalgairns' life of St Stephen Harding, founder of the Cistercians
• Legends of the Monastic Orders as Represented in the Fine Arts

Brian Lamb groupies, rejoice!

He'll receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom November 5 at the White House:

Brian P. Lamb has elevated America's public debate and helped open up our government to citizens across the Nation. His dedication to a transparent political system and the free flow of ideas has enriched and strengthened our democracy.

The Medieval Bestiary

The Medieval Bestiary: Animals in the Middle Ages - an excellent collection of lore, electronic texts and medieval illustrations.

Dang!

The Mahomet Public Library was giving away books today. I'm resting my back between hauls into the house; counting the children's books there's somewhere around seventy. First up for me: A Canticle for Leibowitz!

Some guides to old books

Memory dump before the power goes out with this advancing thunderstorm. Christopher is monitoring the weather websites.

• Medieval Christian Biblical Exegesis in English Translation
• Editions and Translations of Works of the Venerable Bede

New books for my library

My Google Books library, that is.

• Gregory the Great, Rev. J. Barmby, 1892; Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge
• Gregory the Great: His Place in History and Thought, volume 1, Frederick Holmes Dudden, 1905 Longmans, Green
• The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages, 3rd edition, Henry Osborn Taylor, 1911 The Macmillan Company
• A History of Latin Literature, Leonhard Schmitz, 1877, William Collins, Sons, & Company
• The Dark Ages, William Paton Ker, 1904, C. Scribner's sons
• Fifty Spiritual Homilies of St. Macarius the Egyptian, translated by Arthur James Mason, 1921, Macmillan
• Aelfric: A New Study of His Life and Writings By Caroline Louisa White, 1898 Lamson, Wolffe and Company
• The Complete Works of Venerable Bede: In the Original Latin, John Allen Giles, 1843, Whittaker
  • volume 1 (check out the initial capital letters!)
  • volume 2
  • volume 5
  • volume 6
  • volume 7
  • volume 8
  • volume 10
  • volume 11
• The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church (this is a starting-point to track down the many volumes of this series for a future blog post)
• The London Charterhouse: Its Monks and Its Martyrs, with a Short Account of the English Carthusians After the Dissolution, Dom Lawrence Hendriks, 1889, K. Paul, Trench & Co.

Historical anatomy books online

Here, courtesy of the US National Library of Medicine in Bethesda MD. Fascinating stuff! Here's a plate from William Cheselden's 1733 Osteographia, or The anatomy of the bones:

Reason number 355468453 to homeschool

Award-winning books as required reading. The big national children's book awards are typically awarded to oppressive poorly-written crap that's completely inappropriate for children. Naturally, that's what government educators like to assign to kids. In our family they start with the usual toddler's books, move on through the decent pabulum of the Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, then on to history, well-written fiction and encyclopedias.

Nine-year-old Sarah is a wikipedia maven. She's reading about chess at the moment after spending the morning with bears, cats and kittens.

Savonarola on Psalm 51

You never know what you'll turn up at Google Books. Here's a translation of Girolamo Savonarola's extended meditation on Psalm 51, Miserere mei, Deus, written during his imprisonment and torture. What do the Dominicans make of Savonarola nowadays?

I knew a priest at St Matthew's in Champaign IL back in the 90s who was working on an English translation of Savonarola's works, but I don't know what became of the project.

It's always time for the Pantocrator!

For more information, see Christopher Schönborn's God's Human Face.

Gregory's Moralia in Job

part of the 1850s English edition edition at Google Books:

• Volume 2 (parts 3 and 4: books 11-22)
• Volume 3, Part 1 (part 5 and books 28 and 29)
• Volume 3, Part 2 (books 30-35)

Farewell to the bookmobile

Anna Badkhen writes in the Boston Globe about the declining fortunes of the bookmobile. A guy from the Decatur Public Library drove one to Findlay every other week during the summers of the late 1970s. That's where I found my first Isaac Asimov, the sci-fi novels of the 1970s, and a lot of astronomy and cosmology - I'd carry home an armload to stack on a table in the living room and make my way through them in the following days,

The really dangerous book for boys

Electricity for Boys! I'll have to take a look and see whether we can use any of it. I never did get electricity despite having a 300-in-1 electronics project kit in my early teens. My friend Bryan Hash came over quite a bit to wire things up with it.

New at Project Gutenberg this week:

• Electricity for Boys, 1914
• Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, 1906
• Home Life in Colonial Days, 1898

On bringing back the Great Books

Anthony T. Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale, argues in favor of the Great Books in his book Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.

From the blurb:

Kronman sees a readiness for change—a longing among teachers as well as students to engage questions of ultimate meaning. He urges a revival of the humanities’ lost tradition of studying the meaning of life through the careful but critical reading of great works of literary and philosophical imagination. And he offers here the charter document of that revival.

Here's a short interview with him at Inside Higher Ed, along with comments of varying quality.