I don't use this myself

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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?