Here's a very good writeup on St Benedict Biscop, an Anglo-Saxon Benedictine who founded the abbeys of Wearmouth and Jarrow in 674 A. D.
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Here's an interface, or perhaps a table of contents, for St Gall's collection of ancient and medieval manuscripts. For example, here's the preface to Bede's history: St Gall manuscript on the right and a transcription on the left.
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A remarkable sense of Anglophilia is produced when your current reading consists of Robert Louis Stevenson's Puck of Pook's Hill and James Herriot's books.
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Here's a list of authors and books recommended by Russell Kirk in his The Politics of Prudence (to be expanded as I read more):
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Current reading:
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Here's an article by David Streitfeld from a New York City "news paper" about how the internet is killing bookstores. Mr Streitfeld mentioned ViaLibri in his article.
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For the Mortimer Adler fans out there, here are a few reviews of Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books:
Adler's Great Books of the Western World is the set of books I'd most like to save from a dumpster.
UPDATE: here's a collection of essays about the Great Books series at the Encyclopedia Britannica blog.
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I bought John Ciardi's translation of Dante's Inferno back in my college daze in the mid '80s, picturing the day far in the future when my kids would roam and graze among our groaning bookcases.
I just spotted 10-year-old Sarah reading aloud from Ciardi's Inferno, feeling the language with her lips and tongue as she listens to it. Life is good.
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Tonight after supper, 10-year-old Sarah and I designed an exploration mission to Jupiter that would involve hundreds or thousands of tiny weather balloons fitted out with cameras and instruments to report data back to a few orbiting satellites, which would send the data back to Earth.
Then we fleshed out a story idea involving Girl Scouts on Mars - third-generation Martian girls whose grandparents had been among the first settlers of Mars later this century. The story might involve a trip to Earth, like current-day American scout trips to Europe.
I love being a Daddy :-)
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See his latest article in the New English Review: Of Bibliophilia and Biblioclasm. Via Neoneocon, who is also one of us.
My favorite used bookstore is gone these few years now - it was on the campus of the University of Illinois in the YMCA basement, which always smelled of a little Indian restaurant down there. The white-haired proprietor of the bookstore had been a student at the U of I in the early 1960s and had picked up a large collection of original Doubleday Image paperbacks at the Newman Center back then (back when Image was a reliable Catholic publisher). Many of those good old books ended up on my bookshelves.
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An amusing bit from Neil Peart in his latest installment of Bubba's Book Club:
Robertson Davies would certainly rank in my top handful of Canadian authors, and high on any international list, too. I first read these three novels thirty years ago, and in memory - looking at their faded spines on my bookshelves - their titles rang with an echo of deep enchantment.
That's how I remembered those books, and that's how they feel now, too. Reading them again was as enjoyable, as absorbing, and as impressive, as the first time, but was enhanced by a greater level of understanding from the reader. Elsewhere, Robertson Davies offered a perfect quote for that experience:
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity, and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon, and by moonlight.
(So I guess I have to read an awful lot of books at least one more time - and many more twice. Ah, life.)
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Monticello, November 4, 1823
My Dear Friend, [...]
I thank you much for the two books you were so kind as to send me by Mr. Gallatin. Miss Wright had before favored me with the first edition of her American work; but her Few days in Athens, was entirely new, and has been a treat to me of the highest order. The manner and matter of the dialogue is strictly ancient; and the principles of the sects are beautifully and candidly explained and contrasted; and the scenery and portraiture of the interlocutors are of higher finish than anything in that line left us by the ancients; and like Ossian, if not ancient, it is equal to the best morsels of antiquity. I augur, from this instance, that Herculaneum is likely to furnish better specimens of modern than of ancient genius; and may we not hope more from the same pen?
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I was looking through some old computer files a few weeks ago and found a to-read list of books I'd made way back in January 2002. Back then I was planning to hit the University of Illinois library to check out the books, but a couple of days later our son John was born and he put most other plans on hold. So this time, when I rediscovered the list, I ordered cheap editions at Amazon and waited for our thrice-blessed UPS man to deliver:
I'm two chapters into Derrick's book. So far he's writing as one of those depressing cranky old RadTrad Catholics who sees the End of Civilization around every corner, and he's making the Order of St Benedict out to be a legion of bibliophiles with a genius for saving civilization during Europe's periodic murder-suicide jags. Sure, that's a happy side-effect worth exploring, but we should realize at the same time that that wasn't what St Benedict was aiming at. If you're going to understand the effects of St B and his Rule, you need to get things in order first - maybe Mr Derrick does that in later chapters.
I'm just starting Dawson's book, published in 1932 and revised soon after World War 2. He relies a lot on the venerable and still-valuable Mommsen, and on some Russian guy who imposes Marxist categories on ancient history but otherwise has some decent insights.
A Time to Keep Silence is the first of Mr Fermor's books I've read. Wikipedia says he's known as "Britain's greatest living travel writer". Here, he's at his best writing about people, especially people he hasn't met before and whose ways are strange. He travels to a couple of French Benedictine monasteries and enters into their way of life as much as an Anglican guest can, and after a painful time of adjustment he finds a home in the peace of the cloister. His thoughts upon returning to Paris after a long stay at Normandy's St Wandrille are widely quoted:
If my first days in the abbey had been a period of depression, the unwinding process, after I had left, was ten times worse. The Abbey was at first a graveyard; the outer world seemed afterwards, by contrast, an inferno of noise and vulgarity entirely populated by bounders and sluts and crooks. This state of mind, I saw, was, perhaps, as false as my first reactions to monastic life; but the admission did nothing to decrease its unpleasantness. From the train which took me back to Paris, even the advertisements for Byrrh and Cinzano seen from the window, usually such jubilant emblems of freedom and escape, had acquired the impact of personal insults. The process of adaptation—in reverse—had painfully to begin again.
But wait, that's not all! Lisa and I hit both of the Half-Price Books stores in Indianapolis last weekend, and two days later I packed a huge number of books into 3 large grocery bags at a library book sale: three dollars a bag. I've found that it pays to arrive at a library book sale during the last hour or so - by then all the romance novels and crappy histories have been plundered, leaving the best of the best sitting out in the open: Mortimer Adler, Bill Buckley, Anthony Trollope, Washington Irving, Robert Graves, treasures bought for almost nothing now piled up around the house waiting to be shelved. It's like we're Benedictines saving civilization's bacon once again.
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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.
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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.
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As recommended on the gunroom mailing list: the novels of Alan Furst based in 1930s and 40s Europe.
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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.
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An entertaining read from Hugh Laurie with a bit of the old Wodehouse panache at the World of PG Wodehouse.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Someone needs to write a rigorous biography of Donald Knuth while he's still around to contribute.
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Some Google Books I'd pick up if I found them in a used book store:
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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.
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According to the Guardian's Sean Dodson, though he seems focused more on decorations and amenities than books:
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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I have plans for Bernard's sermons on the Missus Est; here's what else I turned up.
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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.
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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!
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Memory dump before the power goes out with this advancing thunderstorm. Christopher is monitoring the weather websites.
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My Google Books library, that is.
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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.
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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.
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For more information, see Christopher Schönborn's God's
Human Face.
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part of the 1850s English edition edition at Google Books:
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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,
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New at Project Gutenberg this week:
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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.
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A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.—Lord Peter Wimsey
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And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.—St John of Patmos
Right column Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.