Print Culture Journal

I don't use this myself

2007-04-10T12:52:00.000-06:00

Ezra Klein: Quote Capturing

But this "ClipMarks" thing seems like something useful for saving quotes; I remember this coming up in class yesterday.

To blog or not to blog

2007-03-29T08:05:00.000-06:00

So, another cornerstone text with oral roots... Hamlet. As you may be aware, Shakespeare rarely created his own plots, but used traditional material from a variety of sources including other plays. In this case, the Hamlet story is a traditional Scandinavian tale best preserved by the Danish mythographer Saxo Grammaticus. This was transmitted, via France, to England, and a play known as the "Ur-Hamlet" was adapted by Shakespeare into the play we know today.

I was reading a book, Saxo Grammaticus & The Life of Hamlet by William Hansen. Hansen points out, not at great length, the fundamentally oral nature of the story, how it is episodic, and the flatness and traditional nature of the characters. Obviously, the latter isn't true of Shakespeare. But you can still see something of the former. Some of Hamlet's noted indecisiveness is a reflection of the original story of a prince who pretends madness. This happens and this happens and this happens (most of the major events in the play have roots in Saxo's account) and Hamlet doesn't do anything about the central problem. Hamlet's oral roots are at the very center of one of the play's most noteworthy characteristics.

But then there's another side to this. The first known publication of Shakespeare's Hamlet was in the first quarto, what's called the "Bad Quarto". It's rather shorter than the "good" play (not necessarily a bad thing, since the complete play is over four hours long), some events take place out of order and some speeches are in different forms. The traditional explanation for the Bad Quarto's existence is basically that they were "memorial reconstructions" by actors and maybe others who had seen the play. In other words, though they never were transmitted orally, they are still essentially oral forms of the text.

Argon?

2007-03-20T09:28:00.000-06:00

Harris, p. 17:

About 2250 B.C., a Semitic leader, Argon I, united the whole [Tigris-Euphrates] valley into the old Babylonian Empire and built a powerful state that extended from the Persian Gulf to the Meditteranean.

I'm sure that nobody cares but me, but there are two mistakes in this sentence.

1. The ruler in question was Sargon, not "Argon" -- actually Sharrukin in the original Akkadian (I believe that "Sargon" is a Hellenization).

2. His empire was not the Babylonian Empire -- which would of course be ruled from Babylon -- but the Akkadian Empire, which was fairly short-lived. The Babylonian Empire, the empire of Hammurabi, was a successor state.

"Argon" could be a typo, or a spellcheck or copyediting error, but there's no ready excuse for the latter. It's a fairly minor point, but this is supposed to be a history, and obvious mistakes like this make me wonder what's wrong with the history of subjects which I don't know. There's a related point on Babylonian history in Manguel which I plan to discuss later.

I blame Charlemagne

2007-03-19T15:38:00.000-06:00

So here is my handwriting story.

I was, I guess, five or six. I remember this as being at my grandmother's house, but I don't remember if it was to her or my mother that I showed something that looked like this:

I said, "That's an 'a'". Having seen them in my books, I just drew it. And my mother or my grandmother said that that's an 'a' in a book, but that's not how you write an 'a'. She drew something that looked like this:

And I asked why you write an 'a' like this when it's not like that in a book. Apparently, it's just so.

Like I said, my handwriting hasn't really caught up to my reading.

Kinda cool thing from UA Press

2007-03-19T10:20:00.000-06:00

Herbal history

They're reprinting The English Physician, a book of herbal remedies that was the first medical book printed in the English colonies of North America. It was a pirate edition, naturally.

People were stupider then:

There was a time when tobacco was considered a cure for a cough. Rhubarb was used to treat bruises. And walnuts were a treatment for fever...

For example, dill was imported as a cure for the hiccups, English ivy was imported as a cure for cramps, and fennel was imported as a treatment for cataracts.

Well, at least the last ones didn't hurt. As for the first, I will quote King James I, 100 years prior:

"loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless."

Shorter King James I: Tobacco is yucky.

Disappointment

2007-03-13T10:53:00.000-06:00

I was putting spine labels on old books and came across something that I thought might be relevant to the discussion, a book from 1944 entitled The Shape of Books to Come. Unfortunately, it was all about content. Oh, well.

I am tired of copyright

2007-03-06T14:41:00.000-06:00

Here's the thing... I'm all for authors and other producers making money. That's great. However, modern copyright has steadily denied any competing virtues, such as allowing broad access or letting works go into the public domain. Instead, it's all about extending it in time and in reach so that nobody, nowhere, is allowed to enjoy anything without paying someone else a fee.

I am convinced that this can't work. Prices for content distribution (bandwidth, hardware) continue to go down, and the cops can't be everywhere.

On the borders of literacy and orality

2007-02-20T10:20:00.000-06:00

From the introduction to the book I passed around yesterday, Oral Performance, Popular Tradition, and Hidden Transcript in Q:

Pioneering scholars such as Werner Kelber, recognizing just how inappropriate were the assumptions of print culture still being followed in classical form-critical analysis, sought ways to understand the sayings of Jesus more adequately as oral performance. It is now being recognized in Gospel studies as in the study of ancient literature more generally that whether or not they existed in written form, texts were recited aloud before groups of people.

This is getting into my part of the discussion, the borderland between literate and oral cultures. That can be, as in archaic Greece, a society where writing is just being introduced. It can also be a society where writing is of long standing (the alphabet was invented in Canaan) but where literacy is primarily limited to educated elites, as has been the case for the majority of recorded history.

I will add (off-topic) that knowing what we now know about the nature of oral transmission has certain very profound implications for the history of early Christianity. It is widely recognized that none of Jesus' teachings were written down in his lifetime; the earliest extant writings associated with Christianity (the letters of Paul, plus the Q literature) date from some twenty years later. The earliest form of the Passion narrative is some twenty years later than these. Given, for example, the tendency in oral societies traditions to fit their traditions to their needs, do these saying reflect Jesus' teaching -- or the needs of the Christian community decades later?

Storytelling fails to grab my attention

2007-02-19T11:32:00.000-06:00

Sorry. It should, because modern storytelling is the mirror image of my project; instead of oral poetry to written text, it's the expression of written text in an oral environment.

Everything comes back to my project

2007-02-12T17:51:00.000-06:00

Even the cannibalism book I checked out today. I quote, from p. 4 of Eat Thy Neighbour:

When the blind poet Homer wrote his immortal works, the Iliad and the Odyssey in the seventh century BC, he would have been hard pressed not to have included at least one story about someone who ate someone.

Emphasis mine. Leaving out the whole orality/literacy angle of the origins of the Homeric epics... How could a blind poet have written anything before automatic composition and the creation of braille?

In which this class hampers my reading enjoyment

2007-02-12T12:38:00.000-06:00

So I am reading this book, a reprint originally published in 1980. And it's going well until I can't stop looking at the type, and noticing that they're using worn plates.

Hearing-Dominance yields to Sight-Dominance

2007-02-06T12:41:00.000-06:00

Linking a bit in Ong to discussion in class... I am not one of the people who listens to podcasts. The main reason is that I'm a visual person; I can't just listen to somebody talk. I need a visual. Actually, I prefer text (that word again! -- written alphabetic text) to anything else. I read faster than I hear anyway.

Ong - Wrong

2007-02-05T16:39:00.000-06:00

Ong says that Homo sapiens first appeared 50,000 years ago. He's off by a factor of four; try 200,000. Even "anatomically modern humans", Homo sapiens sapiens, appeared about 130,000 years ago, though perhaps we only spread throughout the Old World at about Ong's point in time.

It's a minor point but it annoyed me, and I think everyone saw me shake my head.

Human - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Simpsons Reference Goes Here

2007-02-02T08:45:00.000-06:00

Just some commentary on Homer, inspired by Ong's discussion... To my mind, the Iliad and Odyssey are obviously works composed in the oral tradition to be written down. Most scholars now date the epics to the sixth century BC, well after the creation of the Greek alphabet.

There are several reasons I believe that the poems were composed to be written down. The most important is their sheer length. The Iliad is over 15,000 lines long and the Odyssey over 12,000. (For comparison, Beowulf, a literary creation and considered a very long poem, is only about 3200 lines.) They are both far too long to have ever have been performed as unified works; it would have taken several nights to read either. We tend (influenced by the use of the term to describe movies) to think that "epic" means "long", but epic poetry was probably never meant to describe anything on this scale.

Second, there is the well-established narrative and psychological unity of the poems. Ong dismisses this rather shortly, but while the poems use oral language and themes it's the genius of the poet that puts these together brilliantly.

Third, there is no sign that these poems were ever actually transmitted orally; there's little variation between versions, which would be expected if they were. (See Ong on the lack of "exactness" in oral tradition.)

So anyway, here's what I think happened... In the 6th century BC, someone (perhaps the Athenian tyrant Peisistratos; Cicero says that the epics were written down on his orders) got the best poet he could find to compose a "great work" in the epic tradition, getting scribes to record it. This work was the Iliad. Some years later, the same poet or someone trained by him was brought in again, and that led to the Odyssey. Copies of the two works were made -- at major expense considering their length -- and eventually were accepted as the paramount works of epic poetry at a time when epic must have been on the decline.

Words, signs, icons

2007-02-01T10:39:00.000-06:00

Reading Ong, 74-76, "Words Are Not Signs", oddly made me think about the replacement of text-driven menus with icons on computers. I hate it. I am a word guy, and I hate having to interpret icons. Apparently, the new version of Office has replaced the text menu with something called "The Ribbon", which I dread. Anyway, icons are not intuitive to me, anyway. Words I get.

Les Français

2007-01-31T09:26:00.000-06:00

I don't hate the French. Really, I don't. But I think that certain French persons are obsessed with types of theory which I -- and I think, most Anglophones -- have a lot of trouble wrapping our heads around. It's possible that some of this stuff makes sense in the original French, but in English it's gibberish. At the same time, deconstructionists (and deconstructionism has deep French roots) seemingly are more concerned with perception and description -- what we see, and what we call what we see -- than with the actual reality.

A nerdy digression

2007-01-26T14:11:00.000-06:00

I was trying to figure out what "Chaldaic" (Eisenstein, 203-05) meant. From what I can tell, it's another name for Aramaic, or for the Aramaic dialect spoken by Christians and Jews. At any rate, none of the columns in the Polyglot reproduced 204-05 appears to be "Chaldaic". The one on the left is apparently Hebrew -- at any rate, it's in Hebrew letters. The two in the middle are clearly Latin, the one on the right Greek.

This has nothing to do with anything, I was just sharing.

Another problem

2007-01-26T08:29:00.000-06:00

Arts school almost shelves yearbook in favor of a CD

I don't see this mentioned anywhere, but how can you sign a CD? I thought that the whole point of a yearbook was getting people to sign it.

Permanent Renaissance

2007-01-24T09:04:00.000-06:00

From what I can tell, Eisenstein is arguing in this chapter that renascences were doomed to be transitory until the coming of printing, because scribal culture could not provide the volume of texts needed to keep them going. But the Romans were able to keep their society, which was supposedly being reborn, going using manuscript technology. This argues that it could have worked. It's possible that the Romans had gone as far as anyone could go with a scribal culture.

Yay, cataloging!

2007-01-23T12:36:00.000-06:00

(Eisenstein, pp. 70-81.)

Any cataloging system is, of course, arbitrary -- even alphabetical order. Still, I'm struck by the late development of the latter. Anyway, given the small extent of most manuscript collections, and the lack of standardization, it is no wonder that indexing of these collections was haphazard at best. The memory of the "librarian" would be good enough for a small collection, and easier to "interface" with.

Newspapers

2007-01-23T09:30:00.000-06:00

Newspapers...and After?

While I feel that reports of the imminent death of the book have been greatly exaggerated, the book's sibling medium, the newspaper, is not at all well. The latest version of this story is in The Nation. (By the way, political magazines can't be too much healthier.)

It seems to me that while computers aren't really a good substitute for books, they are (in conjunction with the web) a much better delivery system for what newspapers do than the traditional system. Newspapers are horribly inefficient. They use a ridiculous amount of paper to print stories and advertisements. Most newspaper readers read only a fraction of these stories. After reading this fraction of stories, the reader throws the newspaper away, or recycles it, or uses it for lining a birdcage, or whatever.

I hardly ever buy a newspaper anymore. I get my news (and other newspaper items like comics) from the web.

First post

2007-01-22T17:20:00.000-06:00

Hi, I started the class today. There are a lot of people in there but I talk too much, so I'm pretty sure I'll stand out. At any event, I'm going to find a few stories to talk about later, but for right now I'm just setting up.