The Book of William:  How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered The World by Paul Collins

Shortly after the death of William Shakespeare in 1618, two of the Bard’s colleagues, the aging actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, set out to compile a complete edition of their old friend’s plays. Printed in 1623, it’s known today simply as the First Folio, and a single copy is worth millions. Now in The Book of William, English professor and well-known literary detective Paul Collins tells the story of the world’s most obsessively pursued book. It’s a breezy blend of travelogue and history broken into five acts that span the globe and the centuries. And so, beginning in an auction room in contemporary London, where we see one First Folio sell for 2.5 million pounds, we travel back in time to the 1750s, when the edition first began to be worth more than its original price of one pound: it crossed the border from used book to collectible. Then in 1824 one of England’s most celebrated bibliophiles, the Reverend Thomas Dibdin, described the location and condition of 30 specimens of First Folio. As a result it’s the only book whose individual copies can be consistently traced back through the 19th and often well into the 18th or even 17th century. Nowadays there are 230 known copies of the First Folio, and Collins travels around the world in search of them. He goes to the Folger Library in Washington DC, which houses oilman Henry Clay Folger’s collection of the printed works of Shakespeare, including 79 First Folios, kept together in an underground vault. And he travels to Japan, to see the Folio collection of Meisei University, whose collection of 12 numbers more than those owned by the British Library and New York Public Library combined. New copies still turn up. For Collins, one incident in 2004 reads like a fairy tale: A homemaker living near Manchester, surprised to be named the sole surviving heir of a late cousin she’d never heard of before, found among the elderly recluse’s effects a Folio that executors had assumed to be a facsimile edition. But it was the real thing—and a previously unknown copy. Collins pauses often in his journey to indulge in delightful digressions on a range of topics, from the longstanding relationship that the Japanese have with Shakespeare, to the fact that the experts who handle rare books never wear gloves: “The exquisite sensation of human touch is paradoxically vital to book preservation; wear gloves, and you are liable to misjudge the precise action of turning a leaf, and tear a page. Dirty, sweaty fingers keep these old volumes intact.” The Book of William is an enormously entertaining journey into a world where fragile paper and immortal words come together to create one of the world’s ultimate objects of desire.

The Complete McAuslan by George MacDonald Fraser

Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation by Stephanie A. Mann

Fusiliers:  The Saga of a British Redcoat Regiment in the American Revolution by Mark Urban

The Training Ground:  Grant, Lee, Sherman and Davis in the Mexican War by Martin Dugard

Quarrel With The King:  The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War by Adam Nicloson

Barbarians To Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered by Peter S. Wells

Posted in Literary Device ]]> http://feastofnemesis.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/its-time-for-all-good-men-to-head-to-the-bookstore-part-ii/feed/ 3 basilseal 51b3i33kMaL._SL500_AA240_ 51XtrnGEynL._SL500_AA240_ 1000059435_LG 1000071196_LG 1000092018_LG 1000072376_LG http://feastofnemesis.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/its-time-for-all-good-men-to-head-to-the-bookstore-part-i/ http://feastofnemesis.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/its-time-for-all-good-men-to-head-to-the-bookstore-part-i/#comments Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:13:05 +0000 basilseal http://feastofnemesis.wordpress.com/?p=1328 ]]>

Fires of Faith: Catholic England Under Mary Tudor by Eamon Duffy

The Spartacus War by Barry Strauss

How Rome Fell by Adrian Goldsworthy

The American Civil War by Sir John Keegan

The War That Killed Achilles by Caroline Alexander

Start with these, more to come…

“A satirist is a man profoundly revolted by the society in which he lives. His rage takes the form of wit, ridicule, mockery. Aldous Huxley puts satire somewhat far down the scale of literary esthetics, making the good point that “the pure comic genius must be a great inventor” on the order, say, of Aristophanes, who created worlds, as opposed to the “mere satirist,” who necessarily is rooted in this world. Almost by definition, the satirist does not create; he reacts to what exists with caricature and burlesque, two skills Max Beerbohm described: “Burlesque consists in the application of incongruity. Caricature consists merely in exaggeration. To burlesque a statue of Hermes, you need but put a top hat on his head. To caricature it you must exaggerate its every limb and feature.” A satirist may do anything he likes to that Hermes except carve it originally from the stone. Someone must do that for him. In the nicest sense, he is critic.

Our time’s first satirist is Evelyn Waugh. For thirty years his savagery and wit have given pleasure and alarm. His mixed dish is celebrated: the Bright Young People of the Twenties, the popular press, Africa’s political pretensions, death in Hollywood. . .all set down in a prose so chaste that at times one longs for a violation of syntax to suggest that its creator is fallible, or at least part American…”

The Satiric World of Evelyn Waugh

Does FLG really listen to Enya?  Is he, by chance,  a closet John Tesh groupie?  Chasing after Yanni as fast as his Birkenstocks will carry him?   It makes me uneasy somehow…And he was making such great progress too…

Some folks have asked what it is like living next door to the PP’s…Well, actually it’s no different from living several states away…Never see them, they never call, never stop by, turn out the lights when I knock, get an occasional email and I do see Mr. P about every other week for movie night.  And that’s it.

I suppose now that they are fixed in the local social whirl, such as it is, there is no time for old Sir Basil.  You know, if I had feelings, they would probably be hurt.

Well, I do have a few things to be glad about…FLG is actually learning how to dress in the proper manner.  It might be he will soon be throwing out the Crocs and cargo pants and adopting a more Cary/Basil look…It will probably get him fired for not pretending to be egalitarian, but he will look marvelous.  We’ll work on the rest of him in due course, but it is a promising beginning.  And I did notice that Our Maximum Leader has remembered the secret to good art…Where there is fruit, there is art around someplace, and he is studying diligently. And you thought we learned nothing at the RCBfA…

“…Orthodox Catholics deserve to feel satisfaction at today’s development. Yet it’s easy to exaggerate the advantages. On one hand, the Anglicans coming home to full communion will be active in practice, theologically aware, and proportionately resistant to gay and feminist faddishness. On the other hand we have to admit that a sizable minority of (nominally) Catholic clergy envy the Church of England for precisely the reasons its orthodox are bolting. Who knows how many of our own ecclesiastics, even unindicted ones, are gazing wistfully at the lighted windows of Gene Robinson’s honeymoon suite while Rembert Weakland’s autobiography slumbers in their lap?…”

Diogenes

Of course, we will leave aside the fact that the Pope should be burning Anglicans at the stake (ah, the good old days) and not inviting them to join his church with special provisions to make the Catholic Church more Protestant than it already is…The point is that the orthodox Anglo-Catholics will be jumping from a sunken ship to one going down for the last time.  These orthodox folk will be met at the door of their ghastly suburban Bunny Funkhowser designed “churches” by liturgical dancers, alter girls, bull dyke Religious to be able to hold hands and sing “Kum-By-Ah” on” Can’t We All Just Be One With Gaia Day” with the denim shorts, flip-flops and halter top clad, tattoo covered parishioners to listen to the predominately liberal, mostly effeminate and largely gay clergy extol the virtues of pro-abortion politicians and publicly attack their local Bishops for banning the Vagina Monologues at the local Parish pre-school.

If it will make them feel better, by all means, come on along.  But if they think they have discovered a safe haven they had best think again.  The last thing in the world the  majority of Catholic clergy wants is more orthodox Catholics.  Most orthodox have been driven out to Latin Mass Communities and they don’t want to have to do all that work over again.  The Pope’s church and the church as practiced in the American Wasteland are two completely different things.  Welcome Brothers and Sisters, Welcome…

Just so you know, and this isn’t old-crank-old school opinion but the explicit intentions of the show’s creators and writers, as described by them.  Although, since the target audience for this show is, again explicitly stated, 30-something yuppies/bobos, it wasn’t too hard to figure out where they wanted to go with this.

Mad Men intends to show us that the White Males of the 50’s and early 60’s were so bad and so evil that there just had to be a revolution to get rid of them.  They were sexist, racist, heterosexual, drunk, lying, cheating dirty rat finks, and what is most unforgivable is, they smoked and ate beef all the time.  Bastards!  Of course the un-PC  behavior is overdone and over-played for shock value in typical Hollywood fashion as compared to what was really going on back in the day.  I’m surprised they didn’t have all the white male characters just wear Nazi armbands, or white hoods, but of course, they wanted to be subtle.  This is typical Hollywood mushy ideology and “important points” film making.  The important point being that we were so lucky that the Sixties happened and we jettisoned tradition, decorum and good taste along with the evil white guys.  Because we now know that it was all a charade anyway perpetrated by the EWGs to oppress everyone in sight.  That is not to say that there were no “isms” or boorish behavior going on, there always has been and always will be.  But, this is so over the top that it borders on parody.  We must remember that the world was perfect and everywhere peace and happiness reigned supreme until the white guys showed up.  And as soon as we can get rid of the evil white guys, all will be perfect again.

Of course the period detail and costumes are fun to look at, although the underlying message here is “look-what-the-evil-white-guys-make-the-women-wear-for-their-fiendish-not to mention sadistic-pleasure” and don’t you forget it.

Typically not only is the main character an evil white guy, but he is pretending to be someone else, having assumed Draper’s  identity during the Korean War.  Sometimes though, the fake Draper does show flashes of humanity.  This must because he isn’t really an evil rich, white guy, but a poor, white guy pretending. We all know that a real rich, white guy could never fake humanity.

This is all, of course, just dandy to the show’s target audience, who believe all this bilge to start with. You really couldn’t call the show “neutral” in its presentation.  Which is dandy too.

I, of course, turn it on its head, and view it as a training film on how to get back to the good ole’ days where men were men and the rest were hairdressers.

In The Atlantic…Good article.

And stop watching television for God’s sake…

At this month’s meeting we will be studying one of our favourite holidays…For reasons of art, of course…Sort of a Fall Festival, as it were…

Hope to see you there…