Tag Archives: bookaday

#bookadayUK (30): Would save if my house burned down

Leave a reply

The books I’d most want to save are actually in my office at Merton.  The only thing I own that is remotely close to being a unique copy is my copy of Lynette Roberts’s Collected Poems, ed. John Pikoulis (Bridgend: Seren, 1998), a book that the publisher withdrew and pulped before publication, but not before six or so copies had been accidentally released to the Oxford Blackwells.

Roberts Lynette CollPoems

But even that edition circulated in photocopied form, and since Patrick McGuinness’s edition came out (Manchester: Carcanet, 2005), its loss has been less keenly felt.

The other category of book I’d want to save is those with annotations.  A heavily annotated text can represent years of work, and though half the value lies in having the insight that led to the annotation, and the act of annotation is really just a means of physically sealing that insight, I’d still be sorry to lose certain books.  The trouble would be, which ones should I select?

Finally, there are books with personal connections.  Here, I’d probably be inclined to save my grandmother’s Bible, presented to her at the Christadelphian Sunday School in Ashton-under-Lyne for attendance and scripture work, 1915-16. I’m not sure of her date of birth, but I think she must have been about 8 years old; she died long before I was born.  The millenarianism didn’t get passed down through the family, but the book did.

Bible_MarianLeach

Advertisement

#bookadayUK (29): Most re-read

Leave a reply

Mrs Dalloway or Scrambled Eggs Super!?  I was on the verge of choosing the former, when I saw someone else tweet Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea, and realised that across six months or so last year and earlier this year, I read Dr Seuss’s egg-collecting romance epic pretty much every night to our three/four-year-old.  And although my re-readings of Mrs Dalloway may stretch into the dozens, I’ve no reason to think that they run over a hundred.

DrSeuss

But there’s a respect in which I have genuinely re-read Mrs Dalloway more often than Scrambled Eggs Super. When I’m reading the latter, I’m scarcely little more than a vocalisation machine for Dr Seuss’s words. I tried, for the sake of my own sanity, to find minor variations in rhythm and intonation each time I read it: sometimes running one line into another, sometimes emphasising line-endings and rhymes; sometimes accelerating and decelerating.  But for all that I tried, it’s not particularly flexible verse for a reader; it’s got its own insistent rhythms and it doesn’t want to allow you much leeway.  And as for interpretation at a semantic level, if there is scope for that, I’ve not risen to the challenge.

Whereas with Mrs Dalloway, each re-reading has brought new emphases, has found new images emerging, or new interconnections, or new questions as to why Woolf does what she does.  Although I have re-read it cover-to-cover many times, I’ve also re-read selected scenes and episodes far more often, sometimes with a view to an impending class or tutorial, sometimes with a view to writing a lecture or seminar paper. I first read it in an unannotated Grafton paperback in 1987, as one of several novels by Woolf for one of my first-year tutorials;  that was the copy I was still using when I decided that Woolf would form part of my doctorate, probably sometime in 1991 or 1992.  When I started teaching Woolf for a module at Bangor (1996 or 1997) I insisted that everyone use the Oxford World’s Classics editions, but soon after had to obtain the Penguin Classics ones for writing a chapter in the Cambridge Companion.  Then in 2000 David Bradshaw did an excellent new edition for Oxford World’s Classics and I had to learn to find my way around yet another pagination. As I’ve become more familiar with it, re-reading a small part reactivates memories of the whole; also, as I’ve become familiar with the various copies I’ve owned, I’ve learned to find passages quickly, in spite of the lack of chapter divisions.

Mrs Dalloway teaches its reader about the power of repetition and echo from the very start: everyone notices Big Ben and the leaden circles dissolving in air, and many readers must be grateful to have Big Ben’s chimes as a substitute for chapter divisions, as a fixed reference point in the text in the absence of chapter divisions, even while the text reminds us that there’s a kind of violence in such divisions and subdivisions, through the clocks of Harley Street slicing and shredding the day.  Once you’ve followed that cue, there are plenty of others: those shaped around the parallelism between Septimus and Clarissa, especially, but also others that are more elusively riddling such as Peter Walsh’s image of himself as a buccaneer being echoed in Elizabeth Dalloway’s idea of the omnibus being a pirate ship.  Mrs Dalloway has rhythms: not — or not only — prose rhythms, but structural rhythms.  Unlike Dr Seuss’s verse rhythms, they’re subtle and they allow the reader great flexibility about where to place the emphasis.  As Woolf said in her often-quoted essay ‘Modern Fiction’, ‘the accent falls differently from of old.’

#bookadayUK (27): Want to be one of the characters

Leave a reply

Wanting to be a character, no; but wanting to live in their worlds, yes. I don’t know if I’m an anomalous reader from this point of view, but even when reading the novels and plays that have most absorbed me, even as  young reader, I don’t think I wanted to be anyone else.  Of course, when you’re completely drawn into a fictional world, you might identify with a character,   but that’s not the same as wanting to be them.

Sometimes the wanting to live in their worlds is a matter of wanting to hang out with the characters, wanting have conversations with their particular qualities of eloquence, or wit, or menace, or obliquity.  Some of the scenes of Stephen Daedalus and his student friends in Ulysses affected me that way, and coloured my second term at university, even while I was aware that his view was being placed relative to those of other characters, above all Bloom.  (Bloom got into me in a different way, in the curious tentative tumpty-tum rhythm of his thoughts.)  Sometimes it’s something less about character than about place or situation: Thomas Hardy is particularly evocative in this way, in The Woodlanders and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and in places in The Mayor of Casterbridge.  I’m not sure my response was exactly one of wanting to live in Hardy’s Wessex, but the place I lived was geographically close enough and physically similar that I couldn’t help but see it as Wessex; and in any case, Hardy’s Wessex is always constructed as a place full of survivals, things that have escaped the tide of modernity, so the glimpsed decaying shepherd’s hut or rusting piece of unidentifiable farm machinery was Hardyesque in being the evocative exception.  And then there’s a whole other category of bodily evocation. D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow got to me, when I was 17 or 18, with its intense evocation of bodily awareness and bodily rhythms: this wasn’t wanting about wanting to live in Lawrence’s East Midlands landscape, and it wasn’t about wanting to be Will, or Anna, or Ursula; but it was about feeling that my experience of the world had been transfigured.

 

#bookadayUK (26): Should have sold more copies

Leave a reply

There were two giants in popular science writing in the late 1920s, certainly in the sub-sector of popular writing about physics and astronomy: A. S. Eddington and James Jeans, both physicists working at Cambridge University.  Works by both sold astonishingly well, but if the qualities of the writing are considered, Eddington should have outsold Jeans, and he didn’t.

Eddington_and_Jeans

My interest in how science became available to literary authors led me early on to popular science writing.  One might argue that popularity is a quality of the style of writing (its mode of address, the way it introduces and deploys technical terms, and the way it frames strictly scientific questions with humanistic concerns), and that popularity in terms of sales figures is a separate issue, but, for better or for worse, my initial impulse was to pursue sales figures.  Eddington, Cambridge professor and author of The Nature of the Physical World (1928), was a faintly obsessive record keeper, especially when it came to numbers, and the notebooks held by Trinity College, Cambridge, record the lengths of his cycle rides, the weights of his prize medals, and — most usefully to me — the annual sales figures for each of his books.  For other 1920s and 1930s authors like James Jeans, it is possible to find out about print runs from the archives of Cambridge University Press. Here’s one of the less exciting pages of my D.Phil., concerning Eddington’s Space, Time, and Gravitation (1920):

DPhil_AppxB

The upturn in sales in 1942 is something I’ve seen in Herbert Read’s figures too, and I think it’s more widely recognised; people were staying at home more because of the war-time blackout regulations. The upturn in sales in 1929 was probably caused by the success of The Nature of the Physical World, published in November 1928; although Space, Time, and Gravitation, is a more technical work, it’s likely that the later work stimulated interest and demand.

Jeans’s career as a popular science writer had begun with Eos, or the Wider Aspects of Cosmogony (1928), in Kegan Paul’s To-Day and To-Morrow series, and had continued with The Universe Around Us (1929). But his biggest success was The Mysterious Universe (1930), an expanded version of the Rede Lecture which he delivered in November 1930.  Published the day after the Rede Lecture, by the end of December it had sold 70,000 copies in the UK.  The Nature of the Physical World had managed about 2500 in its first two months.  Jeans’s book, shorter than Eddington’s, is a lucid exposition of developments in modern physics, but Jeans didn’t have Eddington’s gift for taking difficult physical concepts, at times counter-intuitive ones, and rendering them tangible.  Nor does Jeans deliver coups-de-theatre such as Eddington’s opening scene in which he stands before two tables, the one his everyday table, the other a table as described by science.  If I were selecting one to be reprinted as a classic of its time, it would be Eddington’s; but whether because of price or brevity or some freak whim of the marketplace, it was Jeans’s work that found more prominence.

 

#bookadayUK (25): Never finished it

Leave a reply

Given the length of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and the minuteness of the portion that I’ve read, it would be fair to ask whether I’ve ever really started it.  In 1992 Chatto and Windus brought out a revised version of the original Scott Moncrieff and Kilmartin translation, and in 1994, somewhere in the closing stages of my D.Phil., I bought the first volume.  How soon I began reading it I can’t remember, but I do distinctly recall thinking that the shape of the sentences and the metaphorical suggestiveness of the language was utterly gripping, and that the pace natural to reading it was not a fast one, but a leisurely, contemplative one; the book was definitely the one for me, but definitely not at that particular moment.

Proust_1992

Most significantly, this translation removed Scott Moncrieff’s very literary and Shakespearean title, Remembrance of Things Past, in favour of a more literal rendering, one that transforms the rememberer a more active searcher.  I believe that this translation has now been further superseded, but it’s still the one I want to go back to.

#bookadayUK (24): Hooked me into reading

Leave a reply

As Biblicists know, eating an apple can get you into all kinds of trouble.  I’m not writing about the work that first hooked me into reading, because that was Ted Hughes’s The Iron Man, and I’ve already written about it.  The work that took my reading to a new level was T. S. Eliot’s group of short poems ‘Preludes’.  I’d been a voracious reader at primary school, but lost interest between 11 and 16 because no-one could recommend anything suitable for me. Then a couple of works grabbed my interest during my O-level years.

The first was Edwin Muir’s ‘The Horses’, which we covered  as a poem in our anthology, Rhyme and Reason.  I wrote an essay on it, had a spine-tingling moment when I realised that it was a kind of parallel creation myth, and the teacher was lavish in her praise.  (She didn’t even grade it; just wrote ‘Superb’.  You could overdo that kind of praise, but it was an important endorsement and confirmation.)

The other encounter happened by accident in the last lesson one Friday afternoon; spring or early summer, I’d guess.  The teacher, Mrs Harris, was off sick, and the lesson was being covered by a youthful, likeable Geography teacher, Mr Koenig.  I was hungry (my packed lunches were never big enough), and realised I still had an apple in my bag, so figured that I might as well eat it.  The chairs were arranged in double horseshoe configuration, so even though I was on the outer row, there wasn’t a great deal of cover.  I was spotted, and as a punishment, Mr Koenig took an old anthology from the cupboard, found a poem by a poet I’d never heard of and told me to write an essay on it: write about the urban imagery in ‘Preludes’ by T. S. Eliot. He must have done English Lit at A-level, to be able to identify a suitable topic with such speed.  At first I was resentful, as eating when you’re hungry didn’t seem such a terrible thing to do, and I’d never before been set a punitive essay or subjected to any ‘demerit’ or detention.  But at home, when I began to read the poems, and still more when I began to write about them, I was really blown away: the tone and manner were completely different from anything else we’d done.

My guess is this must have been the spring of my O-level year.  I can’t remember whether there were any other Eliot poems in the anthology, but somehow I must have found out more about him.  At the point when I left secondary school I was signed up to do science A-levels at sixth-form college (Maths, Biology, Chemistry, Physics), with a vague plan of going on to do a medicine degree; but over the summer I started to feel that I needed some expressive, artistic dimension to my studies, so after the O-level results came I phoned the sixth-form and swapped one of the science subjects for English Literature. At some point in September of that year, I bought Eliot’s Collected Poems; I wrote the date September 1984 in it, but nothing more precise. I remember distinctly buying it in Wallingford, a small market town ten miles from home where we didn’t shop very often; or rather, I remember beginning to read it in the car on the way home.  Within a year I’d dropped another science subject, and set myself on studying English at University, now with the unusual subject combination of Chemistry, Maths, and English.

EliotTS_Collected

My copy, bought September 1984

#bookadayUK (23): Made to read at school

Leave a reply

I can recall a few works that I resented having to read at school, or that at the very least I said goodbye to with complete indifference, but on the whole I was lucky with the things I was made to read at O-level, and with those I half-chose to read by taking A-level English. So I can ask with good reason what the Associated Examining Board thought it was doing when it chose Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water as a set text — presumably working on some undigested Romantic assumption that Nature is morally uplifting — but generally speaking I’ve no cause for complaints.

The text I was made to read at sixth-form college that had no connection to our syllabus was the ‘Time Passes’ section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Our class usually studied two texts in parallel with two different teachers, Miranda O’Connell and Joan Clark, but at some point in the spring of the second year, Mrs Clark suffered a slipped disc and had a week or so away. In the first instance the college drafted in a teacher from the Henley Technical College, who I think was called Sally Benjafield, and so we found ourselves doing a practical criticism exercise on ‘Time Passes’.  Opinions were divided: I found it strange but haunting, and couldn’t put my finger on why it sounded like poetry; Dan P., who regularly sat next to me, and who was refreshingly free of illusions, declared it to be ‘pretentious’.

Woolf_TimePasses

Whether this was the first time I’d ever heard of Woolf I can’t be sure.  Colin Gregg’s adaptation of To the Lighthouse had first broadcast on the BBC in March 1983, and was given front-cover treatment in the Radio Times, but I didn’t watch it then; we saw it on videotape some time at sixth form: possibly as a follow-up to the close-reading class on ‘Times Passes’, but possibly as a quite separate extra. And although this was the first time I’d read Woolf, and although I remembering being intrigued by it, I didn’t immediately rush out and get hold of To the Lighthouse.  In part because I was busy preparing for A-levels, and busy preparing for that summer’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in part too because presenting ‘Time Passes’ without any narrative context might make for a good practical criticism exercise, but it doesn’t make for the best introduction to Woolf.

 

#bookadayUK (22): Out of Print

Leave a reply

Pig Cupid, a small pamphlet of poems in response to Mina Loy’s ‘Songs to Johannes’, was where I first became aware of this neglected modernist poet.  That was in 2000; later, when Lawrence Rainey’s Modernism anthology came out (2005), I read her for the first time, and was amazed by ‘Parturition’ in particular, for the way it connected intense physical experience with philosophical abstractions. Rainey’s selection led me to what remains the most readily obtainable selection her poetry, and undoubtedly the best place to start, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger Conover (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996; later published by Carcanet).  But tantalisingly, what Conover wasn’t able to include in that selection, given that he wished to include annotations and an introduction, was Loy’s autobiographical poem ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose’.  He had included it in an earlier collection of her work, The Last Lunar Baedeker (Jargon Society, 1982), a beautifully made and hefty book that now re-sells for equally hefty prices.

Loy_LastLunar

You can get a good feel for Loy’s poetry without reading ‘Anglo-Mongrels’, but nevertheless, it attempts something quite different: an autobiography.  And it’s an autobiography that explores where personhood comes from, so rather than beginning with Loy’s childhood, it begins with her parents: her Hungarian-born Jewish father, Sigmund Felix Lowy, and her English mother, Julia Bryan. And her presentation of them isn’t straightforward: Sigmund becomes ‘Exodus’, and Julia is initially named ‘English Rose’, later to become ‘Ada’. In consequence, we see them as types rather than individuals, she ‘simperiing in her / ideological pink’, and he something of  Jewish stereotype, ‘loaded with Mosaic / passions that amass / like money.’  Mina Loy herself is born twenty pages into the poem (it’s about sixty pages long in total) and is referred to as ‘Ova’; her later lover Arthur Cravan is presented at the moment of his birth as ‘the male fruit / of a Celtic couple’, and is named ‘Colossus’.  The narrative doesn’t carry the main characters far beyond their early childhoods and formative impressions.  While ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose’ is by no means perfect as autobiographical poetry, it’s a singular and striking experiment that deserves to be more widely read.

 

 

#bookadayUK (21): Summer read

Leave a reply

‘How do you manage to fill those long summer holidays?’ The question was asked by a graduate at Bangor at his graduation-day party, and seemed charged with genuine concern.  If I couldn’t fill those empty months without seminars or lectures, he seemed to imply, I’d be at danger of going off the rails.  The student — let’s call him Johnny DeNiro, for he truly had changed his surname to that of an Italian-American film star — was a likeable and bright guy who had overcome many obstacles to get his degree; but I was astonished that he’d spent three years at university and still thought that lecturers spent the summer vacation with nothing to do. It’s the time when books and articles get written, when editions get edited and annotated, and when conference papers are delivered and discussed. Last summer I examined two PhD theses, one in Edinburgh and one in St Andrews, and on the train home from the first viva voce examination I began reading the thesis for the second one.  I understand the idea of a summer read, as something slightly less demanding than usual, or as a break from the usual routine, but I understand it in a distant and theoretical way; savoir, not connaitre. In practice I’m too busy reading in the summer to find time for summer reading; and when I’m not reading, I’m writing.

My most sand-filled books are Noel Malcolm’s Kosovo: A Short History, which I read on various beaches in North Wales in the summer of 1998, trying to understand what on earth was happening in the Balkans, and a Penguin translation of the Odyssey, which I read in the Mani in the summer of 2001, as I was teaching a module on Ulysses the next academic year and thought I could talk more authoritatively about Joyce’s ‘mythical method’ if I’d read Homer.  (In fact it made little difference, but I loved reading it). If the first was intensely serious, it was at least a break from work; the second was a pleasure, but there was a justification for it. I don’t suppose either fulfils other people’s criteria for summer reading; they don’t even fulfil mine. If I’m taking time off and spending it with a book, it’s more likely to be over the Christmas break; but, for the sake of naming something, if I have time this summer for reading that doesn’t fulfil an immediate research need, I’m be catching up with some biographies — Richard Burton’s A Strong Song Tows Us, or Dai Smith’s A Warrior’s Tale — or perhaps history of science, Jon Agar’s Science in the Twentieth Century.  That said, lining them up for the photoshoot, I’m alarmed by their monumentality; perhaps I need to continue the search for something light and distracting.

summerreading

#bookadayUK (20): Favourite Cover

Leave a reply

In September 1990 I was living in Oxford, just about to begin my postgraduate study, and I noticed something familiar and unexpected in the window of what was then Blackwell’s Paperback Bookshop on Broad Street:

Penrose (D Leigh)

Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind had come out in a Vintage paperback, and I instantly recognised the style of the cover artist.  A little later, I saw another very familiar jacket, and asked the staff if I could have one of the large promotional posters they’d had in the window:

Winterson Sexing (Leigh)

I’d been listening to John Foxx’s music since around the time of his album The Garden; I’d come to him via the Midge-Ure-era incarnation of Ultravox, and had discovered the earlier Foxx-era Ultravox and then Foxx’s solo work.  Born Dennis Leigh in Chorley, Lancashire, he had studied at art college in Lancashire and later at the Royal College of Art, before starting a band; from the outset he had been involved in the design of Ultravox’s sleeves. Early sleeves (‘RockWrok’ and  ‘Young Savage’ around 1977) had employed  rough-and-ready collage style that was ubiquitous in punk, but with the first single from their Systems of Romance album, a more refined style had emerged: less of the kidnap-gang and ransom-note style, more of a detached reworking of high European culture.

Ultravox_SlowMotion

Foxx dropped that style for the stark minimalism of his first solo album, Metamatic, and for the associated singles, but it re-emerged in the sleeve for the single ‘Europe After the Rain’ (1981), and, having been allowed to drop for a few more singles, emerged again for several more singles: the second version of ‘Endlessly’, ‘Your Dress’, and ‘Stars on Fire’.

Endlessly_sleeve

Dennis Leigh, front cover of Endlessly (second version)

Foxx_YourDress_back

Dennis Leigh, back cover of ‘Your Dress’

Foxx_StarsOnFire

Although there are all sorts of different methods being used in these sleeves, they’re united by  their sources (Italian paintings, especially Botticelli) and framing elements (the numbers at the edge of ‘Slow Motion’, the colour strips at the edge of of ‘Stars on Fire’) which reference colour-printing quality control or some sort of indexing system.

After ‘Stars on Fire’ and the album from which it was drawn, In Mysterious Ways, Foxx withdrew from the music industry.  He lectured on design in the art departments of various universities, and worked as a book-cover designer, under his real name, hence the Penrose and Winterson covers.  (A few years years later I discovered that he’d been living a few miles up the road from my parents, in south Oxfordshire; I bumped into a friend from school who had been having French conversation lessons with his wife). My own musical tastes moved on too.  The remembered versions of the songs stayed with me, but the relatively commercial production values of the last two albums grated. The early Ultravox material stood the test of time much better.

Much of my D.Phil. involved thinking about the popular science writing of the 1920s, and although Penrose’s book is very different from (say) Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World (1928), the popular science boom that followed Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time was an important element of dialogue between the past and the present.  Seeing Leigh’s designs on the covers of both literature and science was a reminder that at some points, literary and popular scientific culture overlapped.  At some point in reworking my thesis into a book, Einstein’s Wake, I imagined the sleeve of ‘Slow Motion’ as the ideal image. A crucial argument both in thesis and book concerns the finite velocity of light, and the way it becomes an image for the belatedness of knowledge in modernity.  Many expositors adopted Camille Flammarion’s ideal that, seen from a distant point in space, the Battle of Waterloo appeared to be happening in the present moment.  The way the image of the woman’s face is spread across space speaks to that idea.  The sequences of numbers in the margins also intrigued me, and touched on the idea that our knowledge is relative to our frame of reference; I particularly liked the way that the sequence at the left has a gap in it, as if the frame isn’t quite as reliable as it should be.  I was contracted to publish with Oxford University Press, and at that date its jackets were typographically conservative (Roman fonts) and tended to include a small framed image centrally in the page; I liked the way that ‘Slow Motion’ would fit that tradition but also break it; modernist fracturing of a settled tradition. It seemed worth asking if Leigh would allow me to re-use the image. I didn’t know how to go about contacting him, but found an Ultravox fan-club website and asked the fan-club organiser if he could pass on a question; the answer came back indirectly that it would be okay, but that the image should be credited to John Foxx.

I had the 12″ single of ‘Slow Motion’, and though that would improve the image quality, but scanning an image that was slightly too large for any available flat-bed scanner proved to be a nightmare.  (This was sometime in 2001).  I had to scan it in two parts and then digitally piece them together, and more or less manually sharpen the edges of lines, pixel by pixel.  Doing it this way gave me the opportunity to eliminate some of the scuff marks on my own copy, but at some point the labour expended went beyond reasonable and beyond enjoyable, and became more of a labour of love. Somewhere in the line of transmission the pointed corner at the top right was flattened, which is frustrating, and of course OUP were never going to reprint the image in colour; but on the whole I’m happy with how it worked out.

Slow Motion and Einstein's Wake