#One volume is an ex library copy.

[ssaalexblake]

after literally two years i have finally managed to pick up all of the fma volumes second hand for good prices. Just ordered the last one I didn’t have off a second hand bookshop. I can now actually read the official translations! 

[whilereadingandwalking]

Much of what we know of Sappho's poetry is actually inaccurate. Poets over centuries have filled in, guessed, and translated, but the truth is that Sappho is one of the most iconic poets of antiquity—quoted and referenced by Plutarch, Galen, Aristotle—as well as a queer woman legend, but all we actually have of her poetry is in tattered, halting fragments or quoted excerpts. In If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, Anne Carson takes a stab at translating these excerpts, using open brackets to show the reader where lines are missing, giving us a glimpse into the reality of Sappho's verses.

I admit I feel lied to! The complete poems of Sappho's I've read are ones with much of the verse filled in or with added context. This was a fascinating look into the truth. Sappho's yearning, evocations of Aphrodite, and discussion of soft throats, bundles of violets, and music are gorgeous and hint at the poetic genius we might have known. She wrote nine books of poetry, but this is all we have, and there's a true tragedy in that (my little bookworm heart wonders whether the Library of Alexandria had copies!)

To be honest...I found this volume difficult at times. First of all, my readability pet peeve: footnotes instead of endnotes, PLEASE. The flipping back and forth makes putting the pieces together a lot harder! But rising past my qualms about end notes...they weren't that well done. Included were: comparisons between Sappho and more modern poetry (fun but unnecessary), notes that punted you on to later notes (aren't you supposed to give the explanation at the earliest reference, not latest?), notes that were frustratingly brief and required Wikipedia follow-ups, notes that were so specific they weren't actually useful, and technical notes about where each fragment was found or discovered.

Her translation could be opaque at times, and the end notes didn't give any help (someone explain the uninterrupted line "the blamer may winds and terrors / carry him off" to me). At times a translation may have been accurate, but the meaning wasn't clear, and the notes didn't help. Some verses could have used some literary analysis from someone who knows more about Sappho than the average reader, but only a few had that. For some of Sappho's most iconic verses, I would have loved some insight into the translation choices Carson made. And sometimes I wondered if Carson failed to make a leap in her insights (ex. might the mysterious use of "courtesan" to describe female friends mean something closer to "lover"?)

Overall, I loved Sappho, and this presentation—but wonder if Carson's translation work was let down by the book's execution and the work of the end notes.

[readerbookclub]

Hello everyone :) I’m back with a new book list. This month, we’ve got books all about books. Bookception!

As always, please vote for your favourite using the link at the bottom of the post. 

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, by Anne Fadiman

Anne Fadiman is (by her own admission) the sort of person who learned about sex from her father's copy of Fanny Hill, whose husband buys her 19 pounds of dusty books for her birthday, and who once found herself poring over her roommate's 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only written material in the apartment that she had not read at least twice. This witty collection of essays recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language. For Fadiman, as for many passionate readers, the books she loves have become chapters in her own life story. Writing with remarkable grace, she revives the tradition of the well-crafted personal essay, moving easily from anecdotes about Coleridge and Orwell to tales of her own pathologically literary family. As someone who played at blocks with her father's 22-volume set of Trollope ("My Ancestral Castles") and who only really considered herself married when she and her husband had merged collections ("Marrying Libraries"), she is exquisitely well equipped to expand upon the art of inscriptions, the perverse pleasures of compulsive proof-reading, the allure of long words, and the satisfactions of reading out loud. There is even a foray into pure literary gluttony: Charles Lamb liked buttered muffin crumbs between the leaves, and Fadiman knows of more than one reader who literally consumes page corners. Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, Ex Libris establishes Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists.

The Reading List, by Sara Nisha Adams

Widower Mukesh lives a quiet life in the London Borough of Ealing after losing his beloved wife. He shops every Wednesday, goes to Temple, and worries about his granddaughter, Priya, who hides in her room reading while he spends his evenings watching nature documentaries. Aleisha is a bright but anxious teenager working at the local library for the summer when she discovers a crumpled-up piece of paper in the back of To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s a list of novels that she’s never heard of before. Intrigued, and a little bored with her slow job at the checkout desk, she impulsively decides to read every book on the list, one after the other. As each story gives up its magic, the books transport Aleisha from the painful realities she’s facing at home. When Mukesh arrives at the library, desperate to forge a connection with his bookworm granddaughter, Aleisha passes along the reading list… hoping that it will be a lifeline for him too. Slowly, the shared books create a connection between two lonely souls, as fiction helps them escape their grief and everyday troubles and find joy again.

Lost For Words, by Stephanie Butland

Loveday Cardew prefers books to people. If you look closely, you might glimpse the first lines of the novels she loves most tattooed on her skin. But there are things she'll never show you. Fifteen years ago Loveday lost all she knew and loved in one unspeakable night. Now, she finds refuge in the unique little York bookshop where she works. Everything is about to change for Loveday. Someone knows about her past. Someone is trying to send her a message. And she can't hide any longer.

Words in Deep Blue, by Cath Crowley

Years ago, Rachel had a crush on Henry Jones. The day before she moved away, she tucked a love letter into his favorite book in his family’s bookshop. She waited. But Henry never came. Now Rachel has returned to the city—and to the bookshop—to work alongside the boy she’d rather not see, if at all possible, for the rest of her life. But Rachel needs the distraction, and the escape. Her brother drowned months ago, and she can’t feel anything anymore. She can't see her future. Henry's future isn't looking too promising, either. His girlfriend dumped him. The bookstore is slipping away. And his family is breaking apart. As Henry and Rachel work side by side—surrounded by books, watching love stories unfold, exchanging letters between the pages—they find hope in each other. Because life may be uncontrollable, even unbearable sometimes. But it’s possible that words, and love, and second chances are enough.

The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better? Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

Please vote here.

[mtlibrary]

Provenance mysteries: July 2023

The third provenance mystery of 2023 features two books, both by Stobaeus, and both printed in Lyon by Sebastianus Gryphius in 1555:

Sententiae ex thesauris Graecorum delectæ, quarum autores, circiter CCL. Citat

Sententiarum Ioannis Stobaei tomus secundus

Although the second book is apparently the second volume to the first, both books were issued independently of one another. The ‘second volume’ is a unique item, with this being the only recorded copy – until recently the Universal Short Title Catalogue had it listed as a ‘lost book’.

While there is no mystery concerning one of the hands present in ‘tomus secundus’, since it is clearly a hand-written index in Robert Ashley’s hand, the second hand remains unidentified.

Stobaeus was a 5th century anthologist originally from Macedonia (the city of Stobi to be precise) and is known not for his own writings, but for having compiled a variety of extracts from Greek writers, based on notes he made from his own readings. It is through these extracts that we retain much of original Greek literature and philosophical writings, albeit in a handed-down, extracted format.

The two books issued by Gryphius would have formed part of the broad range of classical works produced by this well-respected French printer during the sixteenth-century. Gryphius specialised in producing ‘pocket’ editions of Latin classics, potentially to rival the editions being produced by Aldus Manutius. Gryphius produced books as small as sextodecimo (16mo), measuring, like these ones, approximately 12cm in height (although sizes for 16mo books could differ).1. Title page

As can be seen above, Gryphius used a truly fantastic printer’s device, depicting a griffin (a play on his surname) perched atop a book (to reflect his trade as a printer) under which is suspended a winged globe (the significance of which escapes me), surrounded by his motto, ‘Virtute duce, comite fortuna’, taken from Cicero.2. Second hand rotated

The unidentified hand, in addition to writing these notes on one of the final blank end-leaves, has annotated the work throughout with manicules (pointing hands), dashes, and underlining. As this hand is present on the leaf facing the marginalia written in Robert Ashley’s hand, it provides us with a good comparison between two early modern readers, and how annotated their books. Ashley’s focus was on indexing the work to highlight the themes of interest to him, whereas the other annotator was interested in noting aphorisms from Stobaeus and Plutarch.

As ever, if you recognise this hand or have further comments please get in touch: library@middletemple.org.uk.

Renae Satterley

Librarian

July 2023

[pagesofkenna]

Book asks! 3, 4, 22?

Book asks!! ty and if anyone wants to send me more...

3: What were your top five books of the year?

Difficult to narrow down - I read some read duds this year, but I also read some great books. In the order in which I read them:

The Rest of Us Just Live Here (Patrick Ness). Saw the cover at the library years ago, knew immediately I needed to read it, and I chanced upon this copy at a book giveaway, and I was not disappointed. It's a generic heroic YA fantasy... but it's about the normal kids living in this town where the generic heroic YA fantasy takes place. The fantasy novel is literally happening in the background and it's so well done.

Legends and Lattes (Travis Baldree). Read this mostly to get inspo for my own D&D-inspired novel, and it's really solid and a fun read! Ex-adventurer decides to settle down and open a coffee shop. Love me a cozy take on a fantasy adventure setting.

The Girl and the Ghost (Hanna Alkaf). My middle-grade pick for this year. Girl inherits a pet evil spirit from her witch grandmother; half the story is from the ghost's POV, and half from the girl's. Really good exploration of relationships and friendships and how we harm the people we love.

Icebreaker (A L Graziadei). One of those queer YA novels I read within 24 hours lmao. It's a gay college hockey story, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover it's also mainly a mental health journey.

Bear Town (Fredrick Backman). The other hockey book I read this year lol, what a book. Something awful happens in this small lake town at the edge of the forest in rural Sweden, and over the course of the novel the author unpacks with careful precision everything that leads up to and falls out from this awful thing. I borrowed this from the library and then bought it to own afterwards bc I loved it so much.

4: Did you discover any new authors that you love this year?

Fredrick Backman was someone people have been telling me to read for years and I finally get why. I picked up Anxious People after reading Bear Town and loved it as much if not more.

In that same vein, Patrick Ness is someone I knew was a good author, but 'The Rest of Us' was not what I expected from him, and I realized he was a much better author than I realized. I also read A Monster Calls later this year, which is what he's most famous for, and that was also not what I expected it to be, so I'll have to check more of his out.

22 What’s the longest book you read?

Single volume pagecount, The Starless Crown by James Rollins. The worldbuilding here was really cool, and I think I liked the writing (I read it back in June), but my main memory is... there are twothree big elements in this fantasy/scifi story that match up with a scifi/fantasy story I was writing for NaNoWriMo one year?? It's truly so surreal to see someone else's take on a convoluted premise you also thought up.

Also honorable mention to Scum Villain's Self-Saving System by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. I tend not to count series in my book counts (I only mark the first book on Goodreads when I read it), instead 'tracking' them as one title. Given that this was four volumes of at least 300 pages each, I think this is the longest (multivolume) title I read this year.

[tstimacstumblinfuntime]

January Book Roundup

The Commodore (”Aubrey & Maturin”, book 17) by Patrick O’Brian, 1995  ★★★☆☆ 

I had more fun with The Commorodre than The Wine-Dark Sea, but not enough to make it all the way to four stars. Jack and Stephen are back in England with all the domestic strife that entails. While I got into the series for the navel adventure, the personal relationships that anchor the novels are what keep me coming back and boy howdy does this one have plenty of that. The book also has plenty of navel action, a good bit of espionage, and a significant digression to acknowledge the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. Another perfectly acceptable book and I’m excited to read the next one. 

Leviathan Falls (”The Expanse”, book 9) by James S. A. Corey (Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck), 2021  ★★★★★

For unclear reasons, it took my local library an entire year to get a copy of this one and another two months for me to get my hands on it. Thankfully, it was entirely worth the wait. The final volume of “The Expanse” has all the exciting space action and well observed human drama that made the series so beloved. Not only that, it manages to wrap up the story of the Rocinante and her crew in an extremely satisfying, narratively symmetrical way. As for the plot... gang, this book has EVERYTHING: Malevolent interdimensional dark gods, an ex-Martian space emperor trying to do an “End of Evangelion”, ancient alien history lessons, and a Good Dog who doesn’t die (technically). I obviously can’t recommend the last book to anyone who might be curious, but the series in aggregate gets a hardy endorsement. 

What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon), 2022  ★★★★☆

I picked this one up knowing exactly two things: My wife enjoyed it and what the cover looked like. Based on this information I was expecting some seriously spooky eco-horror. I was less than a page in when I discovered it was a retelling of “The Fall of the House of Usher” and adjusted my expectation to a story trading in gothic dread. And there is a good deal of both those things, but it was all filtered through a narrator who felt like a comic relief character who wandered in from a different story. What Moves the Dead is a strange piece that I never managed to get completely into, but it has a spectacular voice to it. This one gets a recommendation, but I’d give it a coin flip if the average reader bounces off or becomes completely absorbed.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, 2022 ★★★★☆

Don’t let the time travel, the people from the moon, or the majority of the book taking place in the future trick you: This is literary fiction, not science fiction. Not even what Margaret Atwood insists on calling “speculative fiction”, this is all literary all the way. I’m not much of a literary guy most of the time. If you aren’t going to keep me interested with cool sword fights or dope spaceships, I’m going to need the writing, themes, and structure to be perfect. And the book almost was perfect, bar one slight stumble at the end when a character says the theme of the book directly to the audience. I’m probably being churlish knocking a whole star off for that, but reviews are always subjective. To give you an idea of how perfect the book is otherwise: One of the characters is an author expy on book tour to promote her pandemic novel that was recently adapted to a popular film only for the tour to be interrupted by an actual pandemic and I didn’t immediately close the book with a sigh. This one gets the strongest possible recommendation to anyone with a passing interest in literary fiction (who have probably already read it). If you’re not usually a literary fiction person, I’d recommend this to you, too. Just know that if you find it a bit dull, that’s entirely your fault.

By the Numbers:

Total Books: 4

Genre: Historical Fiction (1), Science Fiction (1), Horror (1), Literary Fiction (1)

Decades: 1990s (1), 2020s (3) 

Author Stats: Women (2, 50%), POC: 0 (0%), Queer Authors: 1 (25%), Living Authors (3, 75%)

I keep saying “kinda light month” after reading four books, but after three months I’m forced to confront the possibility that I’m a “four books a month” guy. Would have been five if the library app hadn’t torn a book from my hands when I had less than 10% to go, but that’s life sometimes. I’m sure I committed some great sin to cause that reversal of fortune.

Also a much bigger percentage of books from this decade than in previous months, which is always nice. And if I can finish The World We Make before the loan expires in 7 days, next month I’ll finally have something other than a 0 for POC authors. 

Have you read any of these? I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences. But please don’t tell me what to read next. I have so may books to read, gang. Please don’t stack that tower any higher, I’m begging you.

[magicalyaku]

My June was literally just sleeping and reading. After Dokomi on the first weekend I was soo exhausted. I had to catch up on all the hours of sleep I missed in April and May ... And just when I thought I'll return to the land of the living the printhouse finally reacted to my complaint about the quality of my books, and hell, it's been years since I've been that angry! 8D Stillll dealing with that shit. So yeah, first half: physically exhausted. Second half: mentally exhausted. Great!

I did not expect to find a common theme among the books this month but surprisingly there is one: "Leave the past behind and start something new". I mean, maybe that's almost every book ever buuut ... Here's what I read:

The good ones: So this is Ever After (F.T. Lukens): Much needed fantasy and lots of fun and warmth and cuteness! I hope F.T. Lukens stays in the fantasy lane. I need more of this! I hope you get this message (Farah Naz Rishi): Finally the real end of the world, not just a metaphorical one. And honestly? People are scary! But I loved how it all came together in the end. All the struggling gets rewarded. The Friend Scheme (Cale Dietrich): I feel, this one took the easy way out on several (possible) confrontations but it was still a nice read. A different setting than usual for sure. Heartbreak Boys (Simon James Green): Perfect summer read. More cute fun. (And for once, the German cover is so much better than the original, which is horrendous, sorry 8D) Kiss & Tell (Adib Khorram): Has some important things to say and is still entertaining! The bad thing is that now I kinda want to listen to their music. Someone give me an animated music video pretty please.

Suprisingly Good: Where we left off (Roan Parrish): Borrowed this from the library for the train ride. Judging by the cover of the first volume I did not expect anything. But I liked it the moment Will explained how he glared at babies just to annoy their mothers. 8D I think this is the first book I read up to now that is solely focussed on the characters’ interactions and growth. As in nothing else happens at all. It’s interesting how it works.

Hmmm: Paper & Blood (Kevin Hearne): I enjoyed the first volume but getting through vol2 was a little bit harder. In vol1 there was a cameo of a character of the author's earlier series and I thought that was cool. But in this one that guy came as an additional cast member and while he was likable it still kind of annoyed me, because it made me feel like I missed out on so much stuff as I have not read his series ... I hope vol3 will finally be about Al's curses. That will be more fun again probably. If you change your mind (Robby Weber): Uhm, the drama of privileged white kids? It was sort of entertaining but the characters did annoy me on multiple occassions. Like when the ex wanted his date. He knew the scriptwriting was important for the protagonist and that there was only a little time left but he still insisted the date had to be now. Why not just wait a week?! ML as well though. Tell him off, boy! Show some spine! D: Also worst names ever. Harry and Haley? I couldn’t help wondering how similar these names would be in Japanese. “8D

On another note, I gifted “The Seven Husband of Evelyn Hugo” to my mother for her birthday and she seems to like it, while my sister found my copy of “Heartbreak Boys” lying around, read the blurb and totally dismissed it. Rude! Also “Aru Shah” is finally being published in German which is great because everyone everywhere should read it, but wtf is with that cover? Is it the lighting or is that girl’s hand white ....?!

[asfaltics]

onginnen

  in which the Eclipse begins and ends       1 severally, where each of them respectively begins, and ends, and where they we give       2       begins   begins and ends, and where it cuts the Longest Night begins and ends. thus       3 begins and ends in different Places, according to the Letter it is joined to .       4   one Stroke 305 Begins, and ends,       5 but the precise manner how it begins and ends, rises and falls       6   where M de- the twilight begins and ends       7 In the small circle       8                                                                             deficient; the action begins and ends often before the conclusion, and the different parts might change       9 It is very imperfect; it begins and ends abruptly, •       10   begins and ends in one day Electriz , sf . electress ta ! k nonsense       11       his understanding of this passage ; on the contrary, begins and ends       12   never perfectly so ; in this all our knowledge both begins and ends ,       13 begins and ends in August for the part within the Walls, and in May for the part without.       14   that it begins and ends       15 that human life begins and ends       16   ideal begins and ends       17           ends begins       18  

sources (minus many from almanacs)

1 ex Astronomical Lectures, read in the Public Schools at Cambridge; by William Whiston (1667-1752*)... Whereunto is added a collection of Astronomical Tables... for the use of young students in the university. And now done into English. (London, 1715) : 173 2 ex Lancelot Carleton, A Letter, to the Revd. Mr. Joseph Slade, Lecturer of the Parish Church of St. Laurence in [R]eading. (Reading, 1727) : 3 strikeout/correction in source 3 ex Joseph Harris, The Description and Use of the Globes, and the Orrery. To which is prefixed, by way of introduction, a brief account of the Solar System. Second edition (London, 1732) : 119 shorthand marginalia at page 78; plates not (or only partially) opened, e.g., Plate 2 between pages 24 and 25 on Harris (1703-64), see wikipedia in a well-written entry by (evidently) geopersona 4 ex Short-hand, adopted to the meanest capacity, wherein the rules are few, plain, and easy; the characters not burthensome to memory; and the hand shorter & more intelligible than any other extant. Together with the principles on which it is founded; also An Alphabetical Praxis, &c. By Henry Taplin. (London, 1760) : 2 5 ex “Night the Seventh. Being the Second Part of the Infidel Reclaimed. Containing the Nature, Proof and Importance of Immortality.” in Dr. Eduard Young’s Klagen Oder Nachtgedanken : Über Leben, Tod und Unsterblichkeit, mit Konstruktionen und Erläuternden Anmerkungen Erleichtert von. G. F. Herrman... (Leipzig, 1800) : 359 6 re “The wind bloweth where it listeth...” in answer to the question, “What is the nature of the new-birth?” ex Jonathan Crowther (1760-1824), A True and Complete Portraiture of Methodism; or, the history of the Wesleyan Methodists. (London, 1811) : 173 7 cross-column OCR misread, entry on “Atmosphere” (ATM), in Pantologia : A New Cabinet Cyclopaedia, Comprehending a complete series of essays, treatises, and systems, alphabetically arranged, with a general dictionary of arts, sciences, and words: the whole presenting a distinct survey of human genius, learning, and industry. By John Mason Good, Olinthus Gregory, and Newton Bosworth; assisted by other gentlemen of eminence, in different dpeartments of literature. Vol. 1 (London, 1819) : 615 8 ex Epistle IV, in Traduction de L'Essai Sur L'homme de Pope : En Vers Français précédé d’un discours et suivie de notes, avec le texte Anglais en regard, par M. De Fontanes. (Paris, 1822) : 214 9 ex “General Observations on Shakespeare’s Plays” (here, Merry Wives of Windsor), in The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., A New Edition in twelve volumes. With an essay on his life and genius, by Arthur Murphy. Vol 10 (of 12; London, 1823) : 197 10 error in preview snippet, ex John Brown, ed. and comp., The Historical Gallery of Criminal Portraitures, Foreign and Domestic : Containing a Selection of the Most Impressive Cases of Guilt and Misfortune to be Found in Modern History. vol. 2 (of 2; Manchester, 1823) : 45 Volume 1 (different — NYPL — holding), with some nice scanning errors, here 11 cross-column OCR misread, at “Efeméro, sm. a thing, which,” in Henry Neuman, Diccionario portátil español-inglés (Paris, 1827) : 117 12 ex Sermon on Confirmation : By William Meade (1789-1862), D. D., Assistant Bishop of the Docess of Virginia. Preached in Winchester, on Sunday, Dec. 12, 1830. Third Edition. Alexandria, D. C., 1833) : 84 on William Meade (1789-1862), see wikipedia see also Sermons addressed to Masters and Servants, and published in the year 1743, by the Rev. Thomas Bacon, Minister of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Maryland. Now Republished with other Tracts and Dialogues on the same subject, and recommended to all masters and mistresses, to be used in their families. By the Rev. William Meade. (Winchester, Va., 1813[?]). Oberlin College Library copy, at archive.org in which a dialogue between Mr. Jackson and a slave of Mr. Wilkins, whom he comes upon during a walk, reading the Bible, pages 141-156 (145) 13 ex “On Abstract Ideas,” in William Hazlitt, Essays on the Principles of Human Action, on the Systems of Hartley and Helvetius; and on Abstract Ideas. (1835) : 165 14 ex Muncipal Corporation Boundaries (England and Wales), “Report upon the Proposed Municipal Boundary and Division of Wards of the Borough of Newcastle-upon-Tyne” in Reports from Commissioners (House of Lords) Vol. 46 (1837) : 335 15 ex Speech of John Sergeant on the Judicial Tenure : Delivered in Convention of Pennsylvania, on the 7th and 8th of November 1837. (Philadelphia, 1838) : 39 16 ex George W(ashington) Burnap (1802-59 *). Lectures to Young Men : On the Cultivation of the Mind, the formation of character, and the conduct of life : delivered in Masonic Hall, Baltimore. (Baltimore, 1860) : 77 17 ex Bertrand du Guesclin, Connétable de France et de Castille, par Émile de Bonnechose, edited with introduction, commentary and map by Stanley M. Leathes. (Cambridge, 1895) : xv on Bertrand du Guesclin (c1320-1380), see wikipedia 18 carved out of these Practical Questions — “begins and ends at what point ?” “begins and ends where ?” in W(illiam). G(eorge). Knight, his Practical Questions on Locomotive Operating (Springfield, Mass., 1913) : 190

—

on the word “begins” —

The usual form in Old English was onginnen, perhaps “to open, open up,” and comparable to OHG in-ginnen “to cut open, open up.” It is odd — unfair? — that “ends” might be a noun, but not “begins.” There is however “The hard begin, that meets thee in the dore” in Spenser’s Faerie Queen (III, iii, 21).

The OED has an obsolete verbal sense “to entrap, ensnare” (here); no surprises in Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (here).  

[popculturebuffet]

Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life Review

Happy Birthday To Me, as I continue my birthday celebration by taking a look at comics that have a personal connection to me.. And for our main feature, i’m taking a look at the first volume of a series that was vitally important to a teenage me, Scott Pilgrim. 

Scott Pilgrim is the brainchild of Brian Lee’O’Malley. O’Malley came up with the concept from a number of things. Being a fan of the band Plumtree, O’Malley was curious about the name of their song “Scott Pilgrim” and wondered who this Scott Pilgrim guy was. So over the years he slowly built the guy up in the back of his mind using bits of his life and what not. As for why he ends up fighting 7 evil exes, that came from a discussion with his then girlfriend, later wife and currently ex-wife Hope Larson, where he threw off the joke that her exes should form some kind of League. After finishing his first solo work Lost at Sea, O’Malley decided Scotty would be his next project and the rest is history. To date while O’Malley has written two works since, Seconds which is delightful and Snotgirl which didn’t grab me but I intend to try again, Scott remains his most popular work, in large part due to it’s SUBLIME video game and movie adaptations, the former of which is finally getting a rerelease next month. 

The series charm is in it’s style: A manga styled comic that combines two desperate kinds of story: Shonen Fight Manga and Slice of Life Indie Comics. The story shifts from Scott going through normal life stuff while trying to make his new relationship work and get his shit together and Scott getting into big bombastic fights with his new sweetie’s exes for the right to keep dating her and to you know, stay alive. The series effortlesly blends a video game like world with real grounded characters and is wonderful for it.  As for where I came in, one Free Comic Book day I found a little comic named Free Scott Pilgrim, which I genuinely loved and was instantly charmed by it’s humor and well done art. So I picked up the second and third volumes of the series proper and the first once I could find it and the rest ,as they say, is history. For my high school life, this was one of hte most important things in it and I wrote fanfiction, which I thankfully never put online and in general enjoyed the hell out of the series. Then I just kind of.. let it sit on my shelf for a while. It wasn’t BAD, I just never got back to it and as the franchise went dormant I just sorta slept on it and the movie and that part of me...

Cut to a few weeks ago, when Comixology did a massive sale for black friday that marked a ton of Graphic Novels down to just 1 buck each, and the color editions of Scott Pilgrim happened to be part of this, though only volume 1 was that cheap. But thanks to my best friend micheal and an early christmas/birthday present I got the rest and got to revisit the series as a whole, with me rethinking my previous thoughts of volume 1 and thus.. wanting to review it and share both why this series is so damn special and what’s good, and what’s not so good about it. I’ll also be covering the game, once i’ts re-released, and the movie once i’m finsihed with the comics so look out for that. And get ready to take a trip to the glorious land of canada... 

As a heads up and as you can tell i’ll be using the color version as while I could get scans of the black and white, I prefer the color version. While the black and white was fine and always will be, I think the impressive coloring job really adds to thing and makes the already great fight scenes pop more, as well as making certain background elements stand out a bit. While it does negate the black and white gags, the tradeoff is more than worth it. That being said either version is fine so if you can get the black and white cheaper that’s fine and i’ve kept my original copies, with volumes 4 -6 having been picked up as they came out. 

So as our story starts we meet our hero: Scott Pilgrim Age 23, a charming but jobless and kind of sketchy possible college graduate whose really been adrift in his life since a breakup about a year ago. And when our story opens he’s taken a turn for a worse and decided to date sweet but naive and inexperinced Knives Chau, a 17 year old girl. And why yes the power dynamics there are messed up and why yes Scott is pretty damn sketchy in this moment in time, and while yes I am aware the age of consent in canada is 16, it dosen’t make this any less greasy and the story knows that.  And how it knows that MOST of his friends aren’t on board. The only ones who seems to is Stephen Stiles, leader of Sex Bomb-Omb, the band scott’s in with one of the best names ever and even then it’s hard to tell if he’s being sarcastic or just a total douche. The other, Young Neil Nordgraf, Stephen’s roomate, is well 19 or 20 and kind of a dipshit so we just ignore him. I used to use him as kind of a projection, to put myself in the adventure when I was younger as Neil kind of lacks personality in the comics but in the comics.. he’s not hte best or most complex character. He is great in the movie though and Edgar Wright did an amazing job fleshing him out.  The rest of his circle are .. not so permissive. His best friend, roomate and king of all gays for all time Wallace Wells very much does not want to come with Scott to school to pick her up because every part of that sentence after hurt to type. Granted Scott gets him to come with him with promises of boys, but frankly knowing wallace he was probably just playing along/wants to protect this poor child. His ex and fellow bandmate Kim is clearly bothered by it and is flat out worried Scott is taking advantage of her. Kim and Wallace are easily my faviorites both for personality and because I have a massive crush on both. With Wallace it just didn’t manifest till the reread. Finally Scott’s kid sister Stacey chews him out over it before genuinely wondering if he’s gone insane or he’s actually happy. For my two cents: he’s not. He WANTS to be, but he dosen’t know how. And as someone whose both neurotypical, which given Scott’s troubles with empathy and relating to people like yours truly I strongly suggest he is, and has struggled with depression I can relate to that. He wants to move on but he just.. can’t, he just wants to get past the haze he’s been in since Envy dumped him.. but he dosen’t know how. So instead of doing someting constructive or finding a job or anything .. he just took the first and easiest way out of his depression he could. I’ve done that with video games and stuff. Scott did that by entering a relationship that’s really easy, requires only so much effort, and is with someone who utterly adores, looks up to him and will never expect better. Being with Knives makes him feel better.. but it dosen’t MAKE him a better person. As i’ve made clear dating someone just for a boost makes him actively worse and had fate not intervened, I shudder to think what Scott might have become. That being said his actoins are still creepy and since Scott has a habit of landing ass backwards into being an asshole here’s a counter to track that. That’s 2 for doing this overall, one for tleling her to be good, and 1 for trying to ply wallace with underage boys. 

Your the Scum of the Earth Scott Counter: 1

Thankfully fate does and Scott’s dreams, ones of him crawling through a desert alone, are interupted by a mysterious pink haired girl on skates. The next day he’s just sort of in a daze, kind of confused, and even more so when he sees her IN REAL LIFE, while at the library with Knives. He’s understandably frazzled but ends up finding out he’s not hallucinating when talking to MIcheal Cormeau. Micheal is a minor character and another artist and friend of o malley’s who represents that one guy in social circles who knows everybody. And indeed he knows the mystery girl, Ramona Flowers and that she’s there. Scott TRIES talking her up but just creeps her out, so Scott goes with plan b and decides to ask around about her. Enter Sandra and Monique, two college aquantinces of Scott, who just sorta show up at major events and aren’t that developed or intresting. They turn him to Julie who forbids him to date her. To which I say. 

Naturually we’ll aslo be needing a counter for this. 

Shut Up Julie Counter: 1

Scott however did find out she’s a delivery girl for Amazon Canada, and thus orders some CD’s on Wallace’s Credit card to hopefully see her. And while his behavior IS obessive.. it’s understandable. I’d be weirdly obessed with finding someone too if they showed up in my dreams every day and were apparently a real person. I’d probably play it cooler but still i’ts kind of understandable. So after a day with knives in which he’s clearly checked out she kisses him, he freaks out and it’s very clear that while Scott’s good at attracting women he’s just.. not good with his emotions and has finally woken up to how messed up this is, but has no idea how to get out now he’s intrested in someone he actually has a future with maybe.  Speaking of Scott’s package and Ramona finally arrive. Scott’s move is to.. ask her out abrubtly but after he mentions her Dreams, Ramona finally puts two and two together and explains things: She’s been using Subspace, a seris of highways connected by the subconcious and apparently more common in america, though it’s later revealed she was taught this but being the first book with a lot of the lore and what not ironed out this is fine. Point is she was just using his dreams as transit and didn’t mean to get him obessed. Scott continues to try his schtick and eventually gets her to agree to hang out with him. Why she does I generally do not know, as SCott basically fell ass backwards over himself conversationally, but whatever. If he didn’t succeed we wouldn’t have a plot. 

That being said things pick up a bit with the date though. The scene is really good and simply just the two.. talking. Having plesant conversations getting to know one another. That good stuff. it’s just really nice to read and it’s hard to explain why. Highlights include Scott’s x-men patch, Ramona not wanting to talk about her last job and Scott admitting he hasn’t been obessed in a long time.. and it comes off sweet rather htan creepy like that sounds. It just means he hasn’t fell this head over heels felt like this. As I said Knives was easy.. but this is hard.. and this.. feels right. So as things Snow Ramona yanks scott through subspace to escape the blizzard. 

So we end up back at Ramona’s place and she offers some tea which leads to one of the best gags of the volume as she lists them off: 

So Ramona goes to get Scott a blanket, Scott ends up following finds her changing, and she decides to warm him up another way.. by embracing him... cue.. the inevitible really. 

It feels organic though: The two are clearly attracted to each other and while Scott came on as strong as freaking colossus, he still rebounded well once they hung out and he could relax a bit and show the scott underneath the lairs of dumbass. The two end up cuddling in bed and Scott seems..genuiley happy saying he needed this... awwwwwww. They part the next morning with him asking her to his band’s performance. 

So Scott finds Wallace  at home who says what Scott needs to hear “You need to break up with your fake highschool girlfriend scott’ Granted the entire first 40 pages could’ve been titled that but now he’s actively cheating. He’s also got a letter. 

It’s a death threat Scott barely grazes through, just like an email earlier. 

But scott’s more concerned with his emotional distress.. i.e. the consequences of his throughly shitty actions finally hitting him in the face. 

Scott heads to practice for his gig and can’t bring himself to break up with knives, but does find out about the opposition: Crash and the Boys, based on an NES game title because of course it is. Crash, their leader, Joel their baseplayer who scott hates because he hates all other baseplayers (”I don’t hate myself kim) and Trasha, an 8 year old progedy they found playing Drum Mania. Don’t ask me what that is, i’m not going to get every refrence. 

So at the show Scott runs into Stacey and her new boyfriend Jimmy  with Stacey being supportive. And then Knives shows up and then RAMONA SHOWS UP. Oh no scott’s cheating might be discovered! 

So Scott books it while we’re introduced to Crash and the Boys. Wallace heckles them, to the band’s annoyance, until they eventually get fed up and we easly get the best gag of the volume. I was wrong this clearly tops the tea thing. 

So Crash and The Boys continue to play their set, including a song that supposdely kills the audience but really knocks them out.. which of course bothers kim because they play next. Meanwhile Ramona and Stacey meet and the two really get along.. and come back to find the audience ko’d and Wallace Making out with Stacey’s boyfriend. Oh no! Which is a dick move, no question. But Stacey’s next move is questionable even for a 19 year old: She says “You won’t steel another guy from me and tells wallace to sit over there”. Okay Stacey even if he is bi, and this series has trouble with the concept of bisexuals we’ll get into that later trust me, he made out with someone else entirely while on a date with you. Wallace is still an asshole, it’s part of his charm.. but it dosen’t change the fact your date kissed someone else seconds after you were gone and has been eyballing him all night, as seen even above. He’s not into you as you thought, just accept it, move on, and kick Jimmy in the balls and then wallace like a proper lady. So Scott prepares to play and this happens

And it’s here, at the very end of the comic the series main premise finally kicks in and the world takes it’s true shape. It’s a world where an indie comedy about a mess of a being putting his life together after finding his dream girl.. also has said mess being forced to get into fist fights with wizards, movie stars, vegans, half-ninjas, twin roboticists and a katana wielding douchenozzle record exec in order to continue to have the right to date his girlfriend. 

It’s where the series charm comes from and really what made it a huge sucess so it’s no suprise this volume perks up immensley for the climax. I’ll get more into it’s pacing problem at the end. For now it’s fight time and as we find out in a hilarious and awesome turn.. Scott is the best fighter in toronto.. which just makes me REALLLY want a Scott Pilgrim version of letterkenny. I mean who wouldn’t want to see wayne fight some guy who can turn his hands into dragons or see Squireely Dan do E.Honda’s hand slap move from streetfighter or see the skids all fuse into one mega emo. It’s just.. the possiblities are as endless as they are wonderous and I want this now. 

But yeah as Patel is both the first boss and Scott’s first real opponent Scott.. handles him really easily. This was by design as O’Malley wanted a shonen progression to the fights.. and honestly it’s a great way to do things. Since the fights are styled after shonen and video games, and both have power based progression in bad guys and threats, it just made sense. Patel.. is just pathetic even with his magic powers, and his habit of sending letters and emails just pounds it in. Though he is right to be a bit pissed Scott didn’t read a letter he hand delivered in a snowstorm. That’s just a tad rude. 

Mid-Fight, Scott, now he knows the whole evil ex boyfriend thing, wonders what Matt and Ramona’s past is and while Matthew refuses to tell.. Ramona spills easily. It was midddle school, all the jocks wanted her for whatever reason, likely because from experince in high school, guys really like indie girls. Matthew was the only non-white non jock, so they teamed up and with her strength and his mystic powers they beat them.. but since his use had dried up, she flipped him off and left.  Matthew dosen’t take this well and summons demon hipster chicks to fight while Scott and co, minus ramona, fight back with a finger gun routine and block his fire balls before propelling Scott into matthew somehow, and landing the KO Evil Exes Left: 6 Matthew bursts into coins though fun fact, O’Malley says the Exes all respawned back at home afterwords and learned their lesson. With Pattel I genuinely don’t think he did... but clearly given his penchant for formality what with the letters and emails, he probably felt it’d break protocol to attack before the rest were done. He probably jsut formed a hipster emo band and found more sucess using his magic for that instead and just forgot about the whole thing. Could be wrong but that’s what i’m going with.  So Scott asks Ramona to go out with him then make out with him, both of which she says yes to. Nice one scotty boy. Ramona then explains the whole evil exes thing: He’ll have to defeat each one as they come after him, and while Scott wonders if they’ll come one at a time Ramona’s not sure. As time will bear out, Scott is MOSTLY correct as most exes take him one on one, with the exception of the twins. But since as I said earlier the twins are basically one person, and as we’ll find out by choice, so it’s an exception. Plus their the last step before the final boss, so by that token it’s a bit fairer to have the penultimate boss get an unfair advantage. Scott is fine with that, he and Ramona share another moment and a kiss.. but Scott makes the mistake of asking if gideon is one and Ramona’s head starts glowing with her dodging the subject, though still going out with SCott and him worried.. it just feels.. off. not a bad ending but the only one of the series three cliffhanger endings that just dosen’t work for me, especailly since it is a bit before the Gideon mystery really picks up steam again. But with that we close this chapter

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Precious Little Life is a decent start to the story.  While Scott is loathsome at first, he’s still a compelling character and does get more likeable as things go, the humor when it is there shines and is one of the series best assets and while the fight is short and only at the end, it is oh so glorious especailly in cover with the impacts taking cues from the movie. It’s a good intro to Scott’s world and ther’es a reason the movie adapts this book the closest as it sets up the cast and premise well, with only Stephen Stiles feeling a bit off and ONLY for the first few chapters.  The volume is only really held back by it’s pacing, as before Scott runs into ramona in his dream the story feels a bit sluggish as we’re just watching some douche date a high school kid. While it is necessary to set up the world, it just dosen’t have the snappy pacing the series would be known for and that makes the rest of the series more charming. it’s nto BAD.. but it’s not FANTASTIC like the series would become. What keeps it from being bad is simple: These aren’t general badness signs but more just O’Malley coming into his owna nd getitng better and better as the book goes, to the point that by the next book the pacing is much better and by book 3 onwards he has it down pat.  Overall not a BAD volume but certaionly the weakest of the bunch.. which given it’s still really good says something about the ride we’re in for. I’ll be back sometime in the future, likely january. Yup i’m taking on YET ANOTHER PROJECT. but since this one, while clearly exausting and time consuimg, is much shorter in overall length, and i’m still proritizing the three I have running over this, I think i’ll be just fine. Until next time, have a happy holiday. 

[rorybergstrom]

𝑫𝑰𝑫 𝑺𝑶𝑴𝑬𝑩𝑶𝑫𝒀 𝑶𝑹𝑫𝑬𝑹 𝑨 𝑩𝑰𝑺𝑬𝑿𝑼𝑨𝑳 𝑹𝑶𝑳𝑳𝑬𝑹𝑺𝑲𝑨𝑻𝑰𝑵𝑮 𝑺𝒀𝑵𝑻𝑯 𝑳𝑶𝑹𝑫  ???

            hello, it’s nora again…. hitting u with another child. a south london-born softboi who deserves tenderness. has a burner phone and doesn’t use social media. does techno dj sets. plays the synth loudly through the night if u live in gorham his room always sounds like a space ship just landed. deals weed around campus on his rollerskates. hates that he can’t get new light up wheels because ana coto made rollerskating cool again. as is tradition, here’s the pinterest board. this intro is recycled?? so if theres mistakes, sue me??? and be sure to like and subscribe for more unboxing content x

application.

『 FIONN WHITEHEAD ❙ DEMI-MALE』 ⟿ looks like RORY BERGSTRÖM is here for HIS JUNIOR year as a MUSIC TECHNOLOGY student. HE is 23 years old & known to be ECCENTRIC, FANATICAL, NITPICKY & DOGMATIC. They’re living in GORHAM, so if you’re there, watch out for them. ⬳ ooc name. age. tz. pronouns. 

aesthetics.

bed hair from a permanent state of slumber, calloused fingertips from strumming bass into the early hours and djing into the blacklit night, self-help books thumbed once and thrown beneath your bed, battered copies of choose your own adventure books, spliffs passed half-arsed across rooftops while light pollution obscures low-hanging stars, marxist literature in stacks against your bedroom walls, a burner phone twice-shattered and a stash of replacement sim cards.

tw ocd, anxiety, drugs

half-swedish, half-british. the swedish is on his mother’s side. he’s bilingual but thinks in english. only really speaks swedish around his mother. only child, and kinda put a lot of pressure on himself to be the perfect kid when he was young, but his parents are honestly, quite decent? and just want him to have a nice life, they don’t care if he isn’t successful or rich or anything, they’re honestly rather solid. (wow imagine having nice parents, a first for all my characters, im literally this meme)

grew up in peckham, a suburb of london. growing up, his mum was a model / actress / waitress who later retrained as a speech therapist and his dad worked in her majesty’s service at buckingham palace. his dad wasn’t allowed to tell his family what his job entailed but rory suspects it’s probably very boring and just involves a lot of…. logistics n security.

was bullied a lot at school. [cole sprouse voice] he didn’t fit in and he didn’t want to fit in. unironically wore a trenchcoat to school every day of his life. spent most of his lunchtimes in the library because it was his safe space. as a result he knows…. loads of useless information because 30% of his school years were spent reading anthologies on space and the vikings etc. would be good on a game show. obsessively recorded every episode of university challenge as a child.

middle-class and lowkey quite wealthy but rarely talks about money, one of those well-off people who still wears really old shitty shoes and only spends money if they absolutely have to

virgin who can’t drive

into star wars, not into the big bang theory. feminist. can’t watch horror movies

favourite film is where the wild things are. also loves the florida project. thinks kids are the sweetest thing and can’t wait to be a dad to some. right now is dad to one cat, whose name changes on a daily basis (identity is constantly shifting, duuuuude), but they were originally named ‘wheezer’

rory has been musical for as long as they can remember. first picked up guitar because he thought it would make this girl esther who he was in love with like him, but he just ended up falling in love with music instead.

formulated several different bands as a kid but ultimately had to give it up cos he was quite controlling and got fixated on making a certain sound so it wasn’t really fun for the others. got into electronic music because it was something he could do basically on his own and keep tweaking until he got it perfect

always drumming their fingers or strumming invisible guitar strings. tends to avoid parties bc he has quite has specific tastes when it comes to music and doesn’t like listening to r&b for eight hours while people throw up into plastic cups.

a techno connoisseur. has been making electronic music since he was about twelve.

after his parents divorce, when he was fourteen, rory & his mother moved to run-down suburban neighbourhood, pittsfield, massachussets.

big into photography. he mostly uses a canon 35mm camera, but occasionally uses disposable ones when he wants that more rustic feel.

moving to the states, their photography became more focused on suburban neighborhoods and are often quite dark and cinematic (think gregory crewsden). here are some shots of pittsfield i really like which rory has on his wall [1] [2] [3]

falls in love 12 times a day. never had a girlfriend or boyfriend. gets sweaty when someone cute looks at him. flirting?? what?? would prefer to idealise them from a distance

gender??? hm. doesn’t really know where he fits yet, sometimes he feels like a guy and sometimes they dont feel like anything at all. isn’t really bothered, cos they think it’s a social construct anyway. uses he/they pronouns interchangeably, but feels like ‘he’ is more fitting. won’t necessarily pull anyone up on it cos he knows having an identity that’s constantly…. in flux.. can be annoying for others … and doesn’t want to be a burden even tho it isn’t at all?? rory internalises guilt

everything is socially constructed. mirrors let you move through time. the whole thing’s a metaphor. he thinks he’s got free will but really he’s trapped in a maze. in a system. all he can do is consume. people think it’s a happy game. it’s not a happy game — it’s a fucking nightmare world, and the worst thing is, it’s real and we live in it

has ocd. tries to let it affect his life as little as possible, but obviously it’s incredibly hard to control a compulsive disorder. was teased for it at school when other kids started to notice. he was obsessed with the number five, would wash his hands five times, count stairs i groups of five, he could only use the corridors in one direction and always had to keep his hands busy. it manifests itself in hyper-fixations (trains when he was a child – specifically steam engines – then later he became obsessed with space and the patterns of constellations, and now he’s obsessed with synthesizers) and repetitive behaviours like counting stairs. doesn’t really affect his social life at all, he can jst get a bit locked-on n hyper-focused sometimes.

has insomnia. barely ever sleeps. finds it hard to switch off from work / writing / gaming / whatever’s preoccupying him in that moment. he’s always awake at 5am and quite often sleeps in through classes but still gets really good grades because he’s very good at his course. rarely attends classes. prefers to work independently. doesn’t really trust his tutors are intelligent enough to be teaching him, and is particularly suspicious of the lockwood tutors. a music snob tbh

secretly a small-scale drug dealer, only does weed n some party pills. rollerskates around campus dealing cos they dnt have a car

likes: techno, the webpage cats on synthesizers in space, allen ginsberg, vintage gramophones,  floating points, lcd soundsystem, marijuana, soft dogs that let you pet them, late-night strolls talking about the universe, independent films, cigarettes, herbal tea, gallows humour, long showers, brown eyes, tchaikovsky, dr. seuss, constellations, photography, late night jazz, vintage game boys and girls who could rip his still-beating heart out of his chest and use it as an ashtray. dislikes:  weddings, funerals, formality, button-up shirts that people actually button-up, bananas, hot coffee, social media, people who watch and play sports, rap music – especially of the misogynistic variety, indie wankers in wire-framed glasses that play ed sheeran songs at open mic nights.

plot ! with ! me ! i’d say all the usual “exes fwb hookups spiel” but rory… is very tender and tame… i feel like a deer in the headlights of love……. so give me

study buddies,

people who are also into techno and are music snobs about it,

people who love all kinds of music,

people who are in bands that maybe rory’s recorded and produced stuff for,

people he actually jams with (he plays bass and synth),

unrequited crushes!!

someone they met at a knitting club in freshman year and have remained friends with despite no longer going to it

people rory knows from open mic nights and gigs

library girlfriends / boyfriends that he stares at longingly while paging through leatherbound volumes

gamers !!! social recluses !!! hermits !!

people he deals weed to on his rollerskates (why r all my characters obsessed with rollerskates)

skaters. rory is really shit at skateboarding. like really shit. help the smol

hm now that rory has !Evolved! ig we can do hook up plots if u want but he’s not tht good at divorcing sex from emotion?? like he  hooked up w teddy once n felt hopelessly inlove so..... if u want soft plots b prepared for crippling sadness.......

stay groovy XD XD

[bluewatsons]

Paul Elie, How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?, New Yorker (June 15, 2020)

She has become an icon of American letters. Now readers are reckoning with another side of her legacy.

A habit of bigotry, most apparent in her juvenilia, persisted throughout her life. 

In 1943, eighteen-year-old Mary Flannery O’Connor went north on a summer trip. Growing up in Georgia—she spent her childhood in Savannah, and went to high school in Milledgeville—she saw herself as a writer and artist in the making. She created illustrated books “too old for children and too young for grown-ups” and dryly titled an assemblage of her poems “The Priceless Works of M. F. O’Connor”; she drew cartoons and submitted them to magazines, noting that her hobby was “collecting rejection slips.”

On her travels, she and two cousins visited Manhattan: Chinatown, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Columbia University. Then they went to Massachusetts, and visited Radcliffe, where one cousin was a student. O’Connor disliked both schools, and said so in letters and postcards to her mother. (Her father had died two years earlier.) Back in Milledgeville, O’Connor studied at the state women’s college (“the institution of higher larning across the road”). In 1945, she made her next trip north, enrolling in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she dropped the Mary (it put her in mind of “an Irish washwoman”) and became Flannery O’Connor.

Less than two decades later, she died, in Milledgeville, of lupus. She was thirty-nine, the author of two novels and a book of stories. A brief obituary in the Times called her “one of the nation’s most promising writers.” Some of her readers dismissed her as a “regional writer”; many didn’t know she was a woman.

We are still learning who Flannery O’Connor was. The materials of her life story have surfaced gradually: essays in 1969, letters in 1979, an annotated Library of America volume in 1988, and a cache of personal items deposited at Emory University in 2012, which yielded the “Prayer Journal,” jottings on faith and fiction from her time at Iowa. Each phase has deepened the portrait of the artist and furthered her reputation. Southerners, women, Catholics, and M.F.A.-program instructors now approach her with devotion. We call her Flannery; we see her as a wise elder, a literary saint, poised for revelation at a typewriter set up on the ground floor of a farmhouse near Milledgeville because treatments for lupus left her unable to climb stairs.

O’Connor is now as canonical as Faulkner and Welty. More than a great writer, she’s a cultural figure: a funny lady in a straw hat, puttering among peacocks, on crutches she likened to “flying buttresses.” The farmhouse is open for tours; her visage is on a stamp. A recent book of previously unpublished correspondence, “Good Things Out of Nazareth” (Convergent), and a documentary, “Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia,” suggest a completed arc, situating her at the literary center where she might have been all along.

The arc is not complete, however. Those letters and postcards she sent home from the North in 1943 were made available to scholars only in 2014, and they show O’Connor as a bigoted young woman. In Massachusetts, she was disturbed by the presence of an African-American student in her cousin’s class; in Manhattan, she sat between her two cousins on the subway lest she have to sit next to people of color. The sight of white students and black students at Columbia sitting side by side and using the same rest rooms repulsed her.

It’s not fair to judge a writer by her juvenilia. But, as she developed into a keenly self-aware writer, the habit of bigotry persisted in her letters—in jokes, asides, and a steady use of the word “nigger.” For half a century, the particulars have been held close by executors, smoothed over by editors, and justified by exegetes, as if to save O’Connor from herself. Unlike, say, the struggle over Philip Larkin, whose coarse, chauvinistic letters are at odds with his lapidary poetry, it’s not about protecting the work from the author; it’s about protecting an author who is now as beloved as her stories.

The work largely deserves the love it gets. O’Connor’s fiction is full of scenarios that now have the feel of mid-century myths: an evangelist preaching the gospel of a Church Without Christ outside a movie house; a grandmother shot by an escaped convict at the roadside; a Bible salesman seducing a female “interleckshul” in a hayloft and taking her wooden leg. The late story “Parker’s Back,” from 1964, in which a tattooed ex-sailor tries to appease his puritanical wife by getting a life-size face of Christ inked onto his back, is a summa of O’Connor’s effects. There’s outlandish naming (Obadiah Elihue Parker), blunt characterization (“The skin on her face was thin and drawn as tight as the skin on an onion and her eyes were gray and sharp like the points of two icepicks”), and pungent speech (“Mr. Parker . . . You’re a walking panner-rammer!”). There’s the way the action hurtles to an end both comic and profound, and the sense, as she put it in an essay, “that something is going on here that counts.” There’s the attractive-repulsive force of religion, as Parker submits to the tattooer’s needle in the hope of making himself a holy image of Christ. And there’s a preoccupation with human skin, and skin coloring, as a locus of conflict.

O’Connor defined herself as a novelist, but many readers now come to her through her essays and letters, and the core truth to emerge from the expansion of her body of work is that the nonfiction is as strong and strange as the fiction. The 1969 book of essays, “Mystery and Manners,” is both an astute manual on the craft of writing and a statement of precepts for the religious artist; the 1979 book of letters, “The Habit of Being,” is bedside reading as wisdom literature, at once companionable and full of barbed, contrarian insights. That they are books was part of O’Connor’s design. She made carbon copies of her letters with publication in mind: fearing that lupus would cut her life short, as it had her father’s, she used the letters and essays to shape the posthumous interpretation of her fiction.

Even much of the material left out of those books is tart and epigrammatic. Here is O’Connor, fresh from Iowa, on what a writing program can do for a writer:

It can put him in the way of experienced writers and literary critics, people who are usually able to tell him after not too long a time whether he should go on writing or enroll immediately in the School of Dentistry.

Here she is on life in Milledgeville, from a 1948 letter to the director of Yaddo, the writers’ colony in upstate New York:

Lately we have been treated to some parades by the Ku Klux Klan. . . . The Grand Dragon and the Grand Cyclops were down from Atlanta and both made big speeches on the Court House square while hundreds of men stamped and hollered inside sheets. It’s too hot to burn a fiery cross, so they bring a portable one made with electric light bulbs.

On her first encounter, in 1956, with the scholar William Sessions:

He arrived promptly at 3:30, talking, talked his way across the grass and up the steps and into a chair and continued talking from that position without pause, break, breath, or gulp until 4:50. At 4:50 he departed to go to Mass (Ascension Thursday) but declared he would like to return after it so I thereupon invited him to supper with us. 5:50 brings him back, still talking, and bearing a sack of ice cream and cake to the meal. He then talked until supper but at that point he met a little head wind in the form of my mother, who is also a talker. Her stories have a non-stop quality, but every now and then she does have to refuel and every time she came down, he went up.

Reviewers of O’Connor’s fiction were vexed by her characters’ lack of interiority. Admirers of the nonfiction have reversed the charge, taking up the idea that the most vivid character in her work is Flannery O’Connor. The new film adroitly introduces the author-as-character. The directors—Mark Bosco, a Jesuit priest who teaches a course on O’Connor at Georgetown, and Elizabeth Coffman, who teaches film at Loyola University Chicago—draw on a full spread of archival material and documentary effects. The actress Mary Steenburgen reads passages from the letters; several stories are animated, with an eye to O’Connor’s adage that “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” There’s a clip from John Huston’s 1979 film of her singular first novel, “Wise Blood,” which she wrote at Yaddo and in Connecticut before the onset of lupus forced her to return home. Erik Langkjaer, a publishing sales rep O’Connor fell in love with, describes their drives in the country. Alice Walker tells of living “across the way” from the farmhouse during her teens, not knowing that a writer lived there: “It was one of my brothers who took milk from her place to the creamery in town. When we drove into Milledgeville, the cows that we saw on the hillside going into town would have been the cows of the O’Connors.”

In May, 1955, O’Connor went to New York to promote her story collection, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” on TV. The rare footage of O’Connor lights up the documentary. She sits, very still, in a velvet-trimmed black dress; her accent is strong, her demeanor assured. “I understand you are living on a farm,” the host prompts. “Yes,” she says. “I only live on one, though. I don’t see much of it. I’m a writer, and I farm from the rocking chair.” He asks her if she is a regional writer, and she replies:

I think that to overcome regionalism, you must have a great deal of self-knowledge. I think that to know yourself is to know your region, and that it’s also to know the world, and in a sense, paradoxically, it’s also to be an exile from that world. So that you have a great deal of detachment.

That is a profound and stringent definition of the writer’s calling. It locates the writer’s art in the refinement of her character: the struggle to overcome an outlook that is an obstacle to a greater good, the letting go of the comforts of home. And it recognizes that detachment can leave the writer alone and apart.

At Iowa and in Connecticut, O’Connor had begun to read European fiction and philosophy, and her work, old-time in its particulars, is shot through with contemporary thought: Gabriel Marcel’s Christian existentialism, Martin Buber’s sense of “the eclipse of God.” She saw herself as “a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness” and saw the South as “Christ-haunted.”

All this can suggest points of similarity with Martin Luther King, Jr., another Georgian who was infused with Continental ideas up north and then returned south to take up a brief, urgent calling. Born four years apart, they grasped the Bible’s pertinence to current events, and saw religion as the tie that bound blacks and whites—as in her second novel, “The Violent Bear It Away,” from 1960, which opens with a black farmer giving a white preacher a Christian burial. O’Connor and King shared a gift for the convention-upending gesture, as in her story “The Enduring Chill,” in which a white man tries to affirm equality with the black workers on his mother’s farm by smoking cigarettes with them in the barn.

O’Connor lectured in a dozen states and often went to Atlanta to visit her doctors; she saw plenty of the changing South. That’s clear from her 1961 story “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” (The title alludes to a thesis advanced by the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who saw the world as gradually “divinized” by human activity in a kind of upward spiral.) A white man, living at home after college, takes his mother to “reducing class” on a newly integrated city bus. The sight of an African-American woman wearing the same style of hat that his mother is wearing stirs him to reflect on all that joins them. The sight of a black boy in the woman’s company prompts his mother to give the boy a gift: a penny with Lincoln’s profile on it. Things get grim after that.

The story was published in “Best American Short Stories” and won an O. Henry Prize in 1963. O’Connor declared that it was all she had to say on “That Issue.” It wasn’t. In May, 1964, she wrote to her friend Maryat Lee, a playwright who was born in Tennessee, lived in New York, and was ardent for civil rights:

About the Negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent. Baldwin can tell us what it feels like to be a Negro in Harlem but he tries to tell us everything else too. M. L. King I dont think is the ages great saint but he’s at least doing what he can do & has to do. Don’t know anything about Ossie Davis except that you like him but you probably like them all. My question is usually would this person be endurable if white. If Baldwin were white nobody would stand him a minute. I prefer Cassius Clay. “If a tiger move into the room with you,” says Cassius, “and you leave, that dont mean you hate the tiger. Just means you know you and him can’t make out. Too much talk about hate.” Cassius is too good for the Moslems.

That passage, published in “The Habit of Being,” echoed a remark in a 1959 letter, also to Maryat Lee, who had suggested that Baldwin—his “Letter from the South” had just run in Partisan Review—could pay O’Connor a visit while on a subsequent reporting trip. O’Connor demurred:

No I can’t see James Baldwin in Georgia. It would cause the greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion. In New York it would be nice to meet him; here it would not. I observe the traditions of the society I feed on—it’s only fair. Might as well expect a mule to fly as me to see James Baldwin in Georgia. I have read one of his stories and it was a good one.

O’Connor-lovers have been downplaying those remarks ever since. But they are not hot-mike moments or loose talk. They were written at the same desk where O’Connor wrote her fiction and are found in the same lode of correspondence that has brought about the rise in her stature. This has put her champions in a bind—upholding her letters as eloquently expressive of her character, but carving out exceptions for the nasty parts.

Last year, Fordham University hosted a symposium on O’Connor and race, supported with a grant from the author’s estate. The organizer, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, edits a series of books on Catholic writers funded by the estate, has compiled a book of devotions drawn from O’Connor’s work, and has written a book of poems that “channel the voice” of the author. In a new volume in the series, “Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor” (Fordham), she takes up Flannery and That Issue. Proposing that O’Connor’s work is “race-haunted,” she applies techniques from whiteness studies and critical race theory, as well as Toni Morrison’s idea of “Africanist ‘othering.’ ” O’Donnell presents a previously unpublished passage on race and engages with scholars who have offered context for the racist remarks. Although she is palpably anguished about O’Connor’s race problem, she winds up reprising those earlier arguments in current literary-critical argot, treating O’Connor as “transgressive in her writing about race” but prone to lapses and excesses that stemmed from social forces beyond her control.

The context arguments go like this. O’Connor was a writer of her place and time, and her limitations were those of “the culture that had produced her.” Forced by illness to return to Georgia, she was made captive to a “Southern code of manners” that maintained whites’ superiority over blacks, but her fiction subjects the code to scrutiny. Although she used racial epithets carelessly in her correspondence, she dealt with race courageously in the fiction, depicting white characters pitilessly and creating upstanding black characters who “retain an inviolable privacy.” And she was admirably leery of cultural appropriation. “I don’t feel capable of entering the mind of a Negro,” she told an interviewer—a reluctance that Alice Walker lauded in a 1975 essay.

All the contextualizing produces a seesaw effect, as it variously cordons off the author from history, deems her a product of racist history, and proposes that she was as oppressed by that history as anybody else was. It backdates O’Connor as a writer of her time when she was a near-contemporary of writers typically seen as writers of our time: Gabriel García Márquez (born 1927), Maya Angelou (1928), Ursula K. Le Guin (1929), Tom Wolfe (1930), and Derek Walcott (1930), among others. It suggests that white racism in Georgia was all-encompassing and brooked no dissent, even though (as O’Donnell points out) Georgia was then changing more dramatically than at any point before or since. Patronizingly, it proposes that O’Connor, a genius who prized detachment, lacked the free will to think for herself.

Another writer of that cohort is Toni Morrison, who was born in Ohio in 1931 and became a Catholic at the age of twelve. Morrison published “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” in 1992. “The fabrication of an Africanist persona” by a white writer, she proposed, “is reflexive: an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly consciousness.” Invoking Morrison, O’Donnell argues that O’Connor’s fiction is fundamentally a working-through of her own racism, and that the offending remarks in the letters “tell us . . . that O’Connor understood evil in the form of racism from the inside, as one who has practiced it.”

The clinching evidence is “Revelation,” drafted in late 1963. This extraordinary story involves Ruby Turpin—a white Southerner in middle age, the owner of a dairy farm—and her encounter in a doctor’s waiting room with a Wellesley-educated young woman, also white, who is so repulsed by Turpin’s condescension toward people there that she cries out, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.” This arouses Turpin to quarrel with God as she surveys a hog pen on her property, and calls forth a magnificent final image of the hereafter in Turpin’s eyes—the people of the rural South heading heavenward. Some say this “vision” redeems the author on That Issue. Brad Gooch, in a 2009 biography, likened it to the dream that Martin Luther King, Jr., spelled out in August, 1963; O’Donnell, drawing on a remark in the letters, depicts it as a “vision O’Connor has been wresting from God every day for much of her life.” Seeing it that way is a stretch. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech envisioned blacks and whites holding hands at the end of time; Turpin’s vision, by contrast, is a segregationist’s vision, in which people process to Heaven by race and class, equal but separate, white landowners such as Turpin preceded (the last shall be first) by “bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.”

After revising “Revelation” in early 1964, O’Connor wrote several letters to Maryat Lee. Many scholars maintain that their letters (often signed with nicknames) are a comic performance, with Lee playing the over-the-top liberal and O’Connor the dug-in gradualist, but O’Connor’s most significant remarks on race in her letters to Lee are plainly sincere. On May 3, 1964—as Richard Russell, Democrat of Georgia, led a filibuster in the Senate to block the Civil Rights Act—O’Connor set out her position in a passage now published for the first time: “You know, I’m an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste anyway. I don’t like negroes. They all give me a pain and the more of them I see, the less and less I like them. Particularly the new kind.” Two weeks after that, she told Lee of her aversion to the “philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind.” Ravaged by lupus, she wrote Lee a note to say that she was checking in to the hospital, signing it “Mrs. Turpin.” She died at home ten weeks later.

Those remarks show a view clearly maintained and growing more intense as time went on. They were objectionable when O’Connor made them. And yet—the argument goes—they’re just remarks, made in chatty letters by an author in extremis. They’re expressive but not representative. Her “public work” (as the scholar Ralph C. Wood calls it) is more complex, and its significance for us lies in its artfully mixed messages, for on race none of us is without sin and in a position to cast a stone.

That argument, however, runs counter to history and to O’Connor’s place in it. It sets up a false equivalence between the “segregationist by taste” and those brutally oppressed by segregation. And it draws a neat line between O’Connor’s fiction and her other writing where race is involved, even though the long effort to move her from the margins to the center has proceeded as if that line weren’t there. Those remarks don’t belong to the past, or to the South, or to literary ephemera. They belong to the author’s body of work; they help show us who she was.

Posterity, in literature, is a strange god—consecrating Dickinson and Melville as American divines, repositioning T. S. Eliot as a man on the run from a Missouri boyhood and a bad marriage. Posterity has favored Flannery O’Connor: the readers of her work today far outnumber those in her lifetime. After her death, the racist passages were stumbling blocks to the next generation’s encounter with her, and it made a kind of sense to sidestep them. Now the reluctance to face them squarely is itself a stumbling block, one that keeps us from approaching her with the seriousness that a great writer deserves.

There’s a way forward, rooted in the work. For twenty years, the director Karin Coonrod has staged dramatic adaptations of O’Connor’s stories. Following a stipulation of the author’s estate, she uses every word: narration, description, dialogue, imagery, and racial epithets. Members of the multiracial cast circulate the full text fluidly from actor to actor, character to character, so that the author’s words, all of them, ring out in her own voice and in other voices, too. ♦

[gotatext]

hello, it’s swamp witch nora again…. i couldn’t stay away.... hitting u with a tiny baby boy who is also terrible (sometimes).  musical softboi who loves karl marx and hates children dying in cobalt mines to make smart phones. as is tradition, here’s the pinterest board, have a peruse. fyi sorry for those of u who have read this intro a thousand times i literally.... can never b bothred to change it n i think thats really sexy of me x

CHARLIE PLUMMER / DEMI-BOY — don’t look now, but is that rory bergström  i see? the 23 year old music student is in their junior year and he is a rochester alum. i hear they can be whimsical, impassioned, self-indulgent and nitpicky, so maybe keep that in mind. i bet he / they will make a name for themselves living in griffin street. ( nora. 24. gmt. she/her. )

aesthetics.

bed hair from a permanent state of slumber, calloused fingertips from strumming bass into the early hours and djing into the blacklit night, self-help books thumbed once and thrown beneath your bed, battered copies of choose your own adventure books, spliffs passed half-arsed across rooftops while light pollution obscures low-hanging stars, marxist literature in stacks against your bedroom walls, a burner phone twice-shattered and a stash of replacement sim cards.

tw ocd, anxiety, drugs

half-swedish, half-british. the swedish is on his mother’s side. he’s bilingual but thinks in english. only really speaks swedish around his mother. only child, and kinda put a lot of pressure on himself to be the perfect kid when he was young, but his parents are honestly, quite decent? and just want him to have a nice life, they don’t care if he isn’t successful or rich or anything, they’re honestly rather solid. (wow imagine having nice parents, a first for all my characters, im literally this meme)

grew up in peckham, a suburb of london. growing up, his mum was a model / actress / waitress who later retrained as a speech therapist and his dad worked in her majesty’s service at buckingham palace. his dad wasn’t allowed to tell his family what his job entailed but rory suspects it’s probably very boring and just involves a lot of…. logistics n security.

was bullied a lot at school. [cole sprouse voice] he didn’t fit in and he didn’t want to fit in. unironically wore a trenchcoat to school every day of his life. spent most of his lunchtimes in the library because it was his safe space. as a result he knows…. loads of useless information because 30% of his school years were spent reading anthologies on space and the vikings etc. would be good on a game show. obsessively recorded every episode of university challenge as a child.

middle-class and lowkey quite wealthy but rarely talks about money, one of those well-off people who still wears really old shitty shoes and only spends money if they absolutely have to

virgin who can’t drive

into star wars, not into the big bang theory. feminist. can’t watch horror movies

favourite film is where the wild things are. also loves the florida project. thinks kids are the sweetest thing and can’t wait to be a dad to some

has been musical for as long as they can remember. first picked up guitar because he thought it would make this girl esther who he was in love with like him, but he just ended up falling in love with music instead.

formulated several different bands as a kid but ultimately had to give it up cos he was quite controlling and got fixated on making a certain sound so it wasn’t really fun for the others. got into electronic music because it was something he could do basically on his own and keep tweaking until he got it perfect

always drumming their fingers or strumming invisible guitar strings. tends to avoid parties bc he has quite has specific tastes when it comes to music and doesn’t like listening to r&b for eight hours while people throw up into plastic cups.

a techno connoisseur. has been making electronic music since he was about twelve.

after his parents divorce, when he was fourteen, rory & his mother moved to run-down suburban neighbourhood, pittsfield, massachussets.

big into photography. he mostly uses a canon 35mm camera, but occasionally uses disposable ones when he wants that more rustic feel.

moving to the states, their photography became more focused on suburban neighborhoods and are often quite dark and cinematic (think gregory crewsden). here are some shots of pittsfield i really like which rory has on his wall [1] [2] [3]

falls in love 12 times a day. never had a girlfriend or boyfriend. gets sweaty when someone cute looks at him. flirting?? what?? would prefer to idealise them from a distance

gender??? hm. rory don’t really know where they fit yet, sometimes he feels like a guy and sometimes they dont feel like anything at all!! slippin out of his physical form into the spirit realm! isn’t really bothered, cos they think it’s a social construct anyway. uses he/they pronouns interchangeably, but currently feels like ‘he’ is more fitting. won’t necessarily pull anyone up on it cos he knows having an identity that’s constantly…. in flux.. can be annoying for others … and doesn’t want to be a burden even tho it isn’t at all?? rory internalises guilt

everything is socially constructed. mirrors let you move through time. the whole thing’s a metaphor. he thinks he’s got free will but really he’s trapped in a maze. in a system. all he can do is consume. people think it’s a happy game. it’s not a happy game — it’s a fucking nightmare world, and the worst thing is, it’s real and we live in it!!!!

has ocd. tries to let it affect his life as little as possible, but obviously it’s incredibly hard to control a compulsive disorder. was teased for it at school when other kids started to notice. he was obsessed with the number five, would wash his hands five times, count stairs i groups of five, he could only use the corridors in one direction and always had to keep his hands busy. it manifests itself in hyper-fixations (trains when he was a child – specifically steam engines – then later he became obsessed with space and the patterns of constellations, and now he’s obsessed with synthesizers) and repetitive behaviours like counting stairs. doesn’t really affect his social life at all, he can jst get a bit locked-on n hyper-focused sometimes.

has insomnia. barely ever sleeps. finds it hard to switch off from work / writing / gaming / whatever’s preoccupying him in that moment. he’s always awake at 5am and quite often sleeps in through classes but still gets really good grades because he’s very good at his course. rarely attends classes. prefers to work independently. doesn’t really trust his tutors are intelligent enough to be teaching him, and is particularly suspicious of the lockwood tutors. a music snob tbh

occasionally deals weed n pills when strapped for cash, but only 2 ppl he knows, and on a very small scale grass-roots level!! (so its ok???) rollerskates around campus dealing cos they dnt have a car. we love to see it

aesthetics: bed hair from a permanent state of slumber, calloused fingertips from strumming bass into the early hours and drumming into blacklit night, self-help books thumbed once and thrown beneath your bed, watching vine compilations until your eyes turn square, battered copies of choose your own adventure books, spliffs passed half-arsed across rooftops while light pollution obscures low-hanging stars

likes: techno, the webpage cats on synthesizers in space, allen ginsberg, vintage gramophones,  floating points, lcd soundsystem, marijuana, soft dogs that let you pet them, late-night strolls talking about the universe, independent films, cigarettes, herbal tea, gallows humour, long showers, brown eyes, tchaikovsky, dr. seuss, constellations, photography, late night jazz, vintage game boys and girls who could rip his still-beating heart out of his chest and use it as an ashtray. dislikes:  weddings, funerals, formality, button-up shirts that people actually button-up, bananas, hot coffee, social media, people who watch and play sports, rap music – especially of the misogynistic variety, indie wankers in wire-framed glasses that play ed sheeran songs at open mic nights.

plot ! with ! me ! i’d say all the usual “exes fwb hookups spiel” but rory… has never hooked up with anyone… i feel like a deer in the headlights of love……. so give me

study buddies,

people who are also into techno and are music snobs about it,

people who love all kinds of music,

people who are in bands that maybe rory’s recorded and produced stuff for,

people he actually jams with (he plays bass and synth),

unrequited crushes!!

actually i think rory had sex w delilah in the last version of this rp so if u want a hook up plot its possible just unlikely. they’d hav 2 be the driving force i reckon cos rory doesn’t really act on impulses like desire or anythin.... jst bottles that shit up !!! but yea we could do a spicy hook up plot maybs, depending on the person

someone they met at a knitting club in freshman year and have remained friends with despite no longer going to it

people rory knows from open mic nights and gigs

library girlfriends / boyfriends that he stares at longingly while paging through leatherbound volumes

gamers !!! social recluses !!! hermits !!

people he deals weed to on his rollerskates (why r all my characters obsessed with rollerskates)

skaters. rory is really shit at skateboarding. like really shit. help the smol

[ucflibrary]

For the month of December, the UCF Libraries Bookshelf celebrates the favorite books of employees of the UCF Libraries. And you know a major thing about librarians? They love talking about their favorite books. The books listed below are some of the favorite non-fiction books we read in 2019.

Click on the link below to see the full list, descriptions, and catalog links for the favorite non-fiction titles read in 2019 by UCF Library employees. These 30 books plus many, many more are also on display on the 2nd (main) floor of the John C. Hitt Library next to the bank of two elevators.

And if you find someone has checked the one you’re interested in out before you had a chance, did you know you can place an interlibrary loan and have another copy sent here for you? Click here for instructions on placing an interlibrary loan.

 A Mind at Play: how Claude Shannon invented the information age by Jimmy Soni In their second collaboration, biographers Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman present the story of Claude Shannon—one of the foremost intellects of the twentieth century and the architect of the Information Age, whose insights stand behind every computer built, email sent, video streamed, and webpage loaded. Claude Shannon was a groundbreaking polymath, a brilliant tinkerer, and a digital pioneer. In this elegantly written, exhaustively researched biography, Soni and Goodman reveal Claude Shannon’s full story for the first time. Suggested by Sandy Avila, Research & Information Services

 Battles for Freedom: the use and abuse of American history by Eric Foner In this collection of polemical pieces, Foner expounds on the relevance of Abraham Lincoln's legacy in the age of Obama and on the need for another era of Reconstruction. In addition to articles in which Foner calls out politicians and the powerful for their abuse and misuse of American history, Foner assesses some of his fellow leading historians of the late 20th century, including Richard Hofstadter, Howard Zinn and Eric Hobsbawm. Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 Because Internet: understanding the new rules of language by Gretchen McCulloch Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of comments and @replies. Linguistically inventive online communities spread new slang and jargon with dizzying speed. What's more, social media is a vast laboratory of unedited, unfiltered words where we can watch language evolve in real time. Even the most absurd-looking slang has genuine patterns behind it. Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch explores the deep forces that shape human language and influence the way we communicate with one another. Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 Consider the Fork: a history of how we cook and eat by Bee Wilson Since prehistory, humans have braved sharp knives, fire, and grindstones to transform raw ingredients into something delicious--or at least edible. But these tools have also transformed how we consume, and how we think about, our food. Bee Wilson takes readers on a wonderful and witty tour of the evolution of cooking around the world, revealing the hidden history of objects we often take for granted. Blending history, science, and personal anecdotes, Wilson reveals how our culinary tools and tricks came to be and how their influence has shaped food culture today. Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 Dopesick: dealers, doctors, and the drug company that addicted America by Beth Macy Through unsparing, compelling, and unforgettably humane portraits of families and first responders determined to ameliorate this epidemic, each facet of the crisis comes into focus. In these politically fragmented times, Beth Macy shows that one thing uniting Americans across geographic, partisan, and class lines is opioid drug abuse. But even in the midst of twin crises in drug abuse and healthcare, Macy finds reason to hope and ample signs of the spirit and tenacity that are helping the countless ordinary people ensnared by addiction build a better future for themselves, their families, and their communities. Suggested by Jeremy Lucas, Research & Information

 Elbert Parr Tuttle: chief jurist of the civil rights revolution by Anne Emanuel This is the first—and the only authorized—biography of Elbert Parr Tuttle (1897–1996), the judge who led the federal court with jurisdiction over most of the Deep South through the most tumultuous years of the civil rights revolution. By the time Tuttle became chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, he had already led an exceptional life. He had cofounded a prestigious law firm, earned a Purple Heart in the battle for Okinawa in World War II, and led Republican Party efforts in the early 1950s to establish a viable presence in the South. But it was the inter­section of Tuttle’s judicial career with the civil rights movement that thrust him onto history’s stage. Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 Ex Libris: confessions of a common reader by Anne Fadiman This witty collection of essays recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language. For Fadiman, as for many passionate readers, the books she loves have become chapters in her own life story. Writing with remarkable grace, she revives the tradition of the well-crafted personal essay, moving easily from anecdotes about Coleridge and Orwell to tales of her own pathologically literary family. As someone who played at blocks with her father's 22-volume set of Trollope ("My Ancestral Castles") and who only really considered herself married when she and her husband had merged collections ("Marrying Libraries"), she is exquisitely well equipped to expand upon the art of inscriptions, the perverse pleasures of compulsive proof-reading, the allure of long words, and the satisfactions of reading out loud. Suggested by Christina Wray, Teaching & Engagement

 From Here to Eternity: traveling the world to find the good death by Caitlin Doughty Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for the dead. In rural Indonesia, she watches a man clean and dress his grandfather's mummified body, which has resided in the family home for two years. In La Paz, she meets Bolivian natitas (cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls), and in Tokyo she encounters the Japanese kotsuage ceremony, in which relatives use chopsticks to pluck their loved-ones' bones from cremation ashes. Doughty vividly describes decomposed bodies and investigates the world's funerary history. She introduces deathcare innovators researching body composting and green burial, and examines how varied traditions, from Mexico's Dias de los Muertos to Zoroastrian sky burial help us see our own death customs in a new light. Doughty contends that the American funeral industry sells a particular -- and, upon close inspection, peculiar -- set of 'respectful' rites: bodies are whisked to a mortuary, pumped full of chemicals, and entombed in concrete. She argues that our expensive, impersonal system fosters a corrosive fear of death that hinders our ability to cope and mourn. By comparing customs, she demonstrates that mourners everywhere respond best when they help care for the deceased and have space to participate in the process. Suggested by Katy Miller, Textbook Affordability

 Human Compatible: artificial intelligence and the problem of control by Stuart Russell Russell begins by exploring the idea of intelligence in humans and in machines. He describes the near-term benefits we can expect, from intelligent personal assistants to vastly accelerated scientific research, and outlines the AI breakthroughs that still have to happen before we reach superhuman AI. He also spells out the ways humans are already finding to misuse AI, from lethal autonomous weapons to viral sabotage. Suggested by Sandy Avila, Research & Information Services

 In Pieces by Sally Field With raw honesty and the fresh, pitch-perfect prose of a natural-born writer, and with all the humility and authenticity her fans have come to expect, Field brings readers behind-the-scenes for not only the highs and lows of her star-studded early career in Hollywood, but deep into the truth of her lifelong relationships--including her complicated love for her own mother. Suggested by Katie Kirwan, Acquisitions & Collections

 Inside of a Dog: what dogs see, smell, and know by Alexandra Horowitz Although not a formal training guide, this book has practical application for dog lovers interested in understanding why their dogs do what they do. With a light touch and the weight of science behind her, Alexandra Horowitz examines the animal we think we know best but may actually understand the least. This book is as close as you can get to knowing about dogs without being a dog yourself. Suggested by Kimberly Montgomery, Cataloging

 Life 3.0: being human in the age of artificial intelligence by Max Tegmark This book empowers you to join what may be the most important conversation of our time. It doesn’t shy away from the full range of viewpoints or from the most controversial issues—from superintelligence to meaning, consciousness and the ultimate physical limits on life in the cosmos. Suggested by Sandy Avila, Research & Information Services

 Longitude: the true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time by Dava Sobel Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day--and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives and the increasing fortunes of nations hung on a resolution. One man, John Harrison, in complete opposition to the scientific community, dared to imagine a mechanical solution--a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had ever been able to do on land. This is the dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of Harrison's forty-year obsession with building his perfect timekeeper, known today as the chronometer. Suggested by Larry Cooperman, Research & Information

 Mindfulness: an eight-week plan for finding peace in a frantic world by Mark Williams and Danny Penman

The book is based on Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). MBCT revolves around a straightforward form of mindfulness meditation which takes just a few minutes a day for the full benefits to be revealed. MBCT has been clinically proven to be at least as effective as drugs for depression and is widely recommended by US physicians and the UK's National Institute for Health and Clinical. Suggested by Tina Buck, Acquisitions & Collections

 Oh, Florida!: How America's Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country by Craig Pittman Florida. That name. That combination of sounds. Three simple syllables packing mixed messages. To some people, it’s a paradise. To others, it’s a punch line. As award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author Craig Pittman shows, it's both of these and, more important, it’s a Petri dish, producing trends that end up influencing the rest of the country. This book embraces those contradictions and shows how they fit together to make this the most interesting state. Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 Packing for Mars: the curious science of life in the void by Mary Roach The best-selling author of Stiff and Bonk explores the irresistibly strange universe of space travel and life without gravity. From the Space Shuttle training toilet to a crash test of NASA’s new space capsule, Mary Roach takes us on the surreally entertaining trip into the science of life in space and space on Earth. Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 Shortest Way Home: one mayor's challenge and a model for America's future by Pete Buttigieg Interweaving two narratives―that of a young man coming of age and a town regaining its economic vitality―Buttigieg recounts growing up in a Rust Belt city, amid decayed factory buildings and the steady soundtrack of rumbling freight trains passing through on their long journey to Chicagoland. Inspired by John F. Kennedy’s legacy, Buttigieg first left northern Indiana for red bricked Harvard and then studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, before joining McKinsey, where he trained as a consultant―becoming, of all things, an expert in grocery pricing. Then, Buttigieg defied the expectations that came with his pedigree, choosing to return home to Indiana and responding to the ultimate challenge of how to revive a once great industrial city and help steer its future in the twenty first century. Suggested by Jeremy Lucas, Research & Information

 Such a Lovely Little War: Saigon, 1961-63 by Marcelino Truong This riveting, beautifully produced graphic memoir tells the story of the early years of the Vietnam war as seen through the eyes of a young boy named Marco, the son of a Vietnamese diplomat and his French wife. The book opens in America, where the boy's father works for the South Vietnam embassy; there the boy is made to feel self-conscious about his otherness thanks to schoolmates who play war games against the so-called "Commies." The family is called back to Saigon in 1961, where the father becomes Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem's personal interpreter; as the growing conflict between North and South intensifies, so does turmoil within Marco's family, as his mother struggles to grapple with bipolar disorder. Suggested by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections

 The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis Michael Lewis’s brilliant narrative takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders. In Agriculture the funding of vital programs like food stamps and school lunches is being slashed. The Commerce Department may not have enough staff to conduct the 2020 Census properly. Over at Energy, where international nuclear risk is managed, it’s not clear there will be enough inspectors to track and locate black market uranium before terrorists do. Willful ignorance plays a role in these looming disasters. If your ambition is to maximize short-term gains without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing those costs. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems. Suggested by Brian Calhoun & Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 The Library Book by Susan Orlean On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’” The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who? Suggested by Rachel Mulvihill, Downtown

 The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit: Victorian iconoclast, children's author, and creator of The Railway Children by Eleanor Fitzsimons Edith Nesbit (1858–1924) is considered the first modern writer for children and the inventor of the children’s adventure story. Award-winning biographer Eleanor Fitzsimons uncovers the little-known details of her life, introducing readers to the Fabian Society cofounder and fabulous socialite who hosted legendary parties and had admirers by the dozen, including George Bernard Shaw. Through Nesbit’s letters and archival research, Fitzsimons reveals “E.” to have been a prolific lecturer and writer on socialism and shows how Nesbit incorporated these ideas into her writing, thereby influencing a generation of children—an aspect of her literary legacy never before examined. Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson This classic work remains as fresh today as when it first appeared. Carson's writing teems with stunning, memorable images--the newly formed Earth cooling beneath an endlessly overcast sky; the centuries of nonstop rain that created the oceans; giant squids battling sperm whales hundreds of fathoms below the surface; and incredibly powerful tides moving 100 billion tons of water daily in the Bay of Fundy. Quite simply, she captures the mystery and allure of the ocean with a compelling blend of imagination and expertise. Suggested by Christina Wray, Teaching & Engagement

 The Sex Lives of Cannibals: adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by J. Maarten Troost This book tells the hilarious story of what happens when Troost discovers that Tarawa is not the island paradise he dreamed of. Falling into one amusing misadventure after another, Troost struggles through relentless, stifling heat, a variety of deadly bacteria, polluted seas, toxic fish—all in a country where the only music to be heard for miles around is “La Macarena.” He and his stalwart girlfriend Sylvia spend the next two years battling incompetent government officials, alarmingly large critters, erratic electricity, and a paucity of food options (including the Great Beer Crisis); and contending with a bizarre cast of local characters, including “Half-Dead Fred” and the self-proclaimed Poet Laureate of Tarawa (a British drunkard who’s never written a poem in his life). Suggested by Katie Kirwan, Acquisitions & Collections

 The Source of Self-Regard: selected essays, speeches, and meditations by Toni Morrison The Source of Self-Regard is brimming with all the elegance of mind and style, the literary prowess and moral compass that are Toni Morrison's inimitable hallmark. It is divided into three parts: the first is introduced by a powerful prayer for the dead of 9/11; the second by a searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., and the last by a heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. In the writings and speeches included here, Morrison takes on contested social issues: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, "black matter(s)," and human rights. She looks at enduring matters of culture: the role of the artist in society, the literary imagination, the Afro-American presence in American literature, and in her Nobel lecture, the power of language itself. And here too is piercing commentary on her own work and that of others, among them, painter and collagist Romare Bearden, author Toni Cade Bambara, and theater director Peter Sellars. Suggested by Jada Reyes, Research & Information Services

 The Collected Schizophrenias: essays by Esme Weijun Wang An intimate, moving book written with the immediacy and directness of one who still struggles with the effects of mental and chronic illness, The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core. Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the “collected schizophrenias” but to those who wish to understand it as well. Opening with the journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Wang discusses the medical community’s own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness, and then follows an arc that examines the manifestations of schizophrenia in her life. In essays that range from using fashion to present as high-functioning to the depths of a rare form of psychosis, and from the failures of the higher education system and the dangers of institutionalization to the complexity of compounding factors such as PTSD and Lyme disease, Wang’s analytical eye, honed as a former lab researcher at Stanford, allows her to balance research with personal narrative. Suggested by Jada Reyes, Research & Information Services

 The War on Normal People: the truth about America's disappearing jobs and why universal basic income is our future by Andrew Yang Yang imagines a different future--one in which having a job is distinct from the capacity to prosper and seek fulfillment. At this vision's core is Universal Basic Income, the concept of providing all citizens with a guaranteed income-and one that is rapidly gaining popularity among forward-thinking politicians and economists. Yang proposes that UBI is an essential step toward a new, more durable kind of economy, one he calls "human capitalism." Suggested by Jeremy Lucas, Research & Information

 Trick Mirror: reflections on self-delusion by Jia Tolentino Jia Tolentino is a peerless voice of her generation, tackling the conflicts, contradictions, and sea changes that define us and our time. Now, in this dazzling collection of nine entirely original essays, written with a rare combination of give and sharpness, wit and fearlessness, she delves into the forces that warp our vision, demonstrating an unparalleled stylistic potency and critical dexterity. Suggested by Jada Reyes, Research & Information Services & Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections

 Two Cheers for Democracy by E. M. Forster Essays that applaud democracy's toleration of individual freedom and self-criticism and deplore its encouragement of mediocrity. Suggested by Christina Wray, Teaching & Engagement

 Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: chasing fear and finding home in the great white north by Blair Braverman By turns funny and sobering, bold and tender, this book brilliantly recounts Braverman’s adventures in Norway and Alaska. Settling into her new surroundings, Braverman was often terrified that she would lose control of her dog team and crash her sled, or be attacked by a polar bear, or get lost on the tundra. Above all, she worried that, unlike the other, gutsier people alongside her, she wasn’t cut out for life on the frontier. But no matter how out of place she felt, one thing was clear: she was hooked on the North. On the brink of adulthood, Braverman was determined to prove that her fears did not define her—and so she resolved to embrace the wilderness and make it her own. Suggested by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections

 When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. This book chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. Suggested by Pat Tiberii, Interlibrary Loan & Document Delivery Services

[readingrobin]

Shelf History

@bookcub tagged me!

❀ This tag is for those books that came to you in an unusual, interesting, funny, or sweet way. Pick 5 (or more if you want) books from your shelf and tell us the story of how you came to own that book. If you’re a public library user and don’t really own any books, you can still participate. Just tell us the most interesting/funny/sweet ways you came to find a particular library book.

Tag your posts #ShelfHistory so I can see them all!

When you’re finished, tag 5 (or more) readers whose Shelf-History you’d like to know about! This one can easily be done on any blogging/vlogging platform so feel free to tag cross-platform if you really want to. ❀

Unfortunately I only have four stories to tell since I mainly get my books in the most conventional ways. People rarely gift books to me, which is odd considering my bibliophile nature, and I just buy them myself usually. But there have been a few cases of serendipity or weird exceptions.

Infinity by Sherrilyn Kenyon - So I was always on the fence about this book. When I first saw it in Barnes and Noble, I read the inside cover and brushed it off when it mentioned zombies, since those really weren’t my thing. I would do this at least three times more, each instance picking it up, reading the inside cover, putting it back because zombies. Now the weird thing is, when I went to the opening weekend of Eclipse (yes I was a teenager once), they were handing this book out for free for people who were seeing the movie. In all the years I had been going to this theater, they had never once done this and have never done it again, to my knowledge.

Of course, when life hands you a book, you definitely have to read it. Guys, this book kind of changed my life I think? It’s not a great work of literature, some of the dialogue is a little, eh, forced in areas, but the themes and characters helped me through a really rough patch in my life. Not to mention the fact that it lead me to read the Dark Hunters series, which was a whole thing for me, seeing all these broken, abused, and tortured souls find redemption and a happy ending. I’ve kind of fallen out with that series, but I won’t lie when I say that it has impacted me in some way.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss- Okay, I have at least four copies of this book: my original paperback, the 10th Anniversary edition, the UK paperback, and, to my luck, a first edition. Now this first edition fell into my lap at my current job at the library and it was sent to be weeded, because it had been on the shelf for at least ten years and had definitely seen better days. The binding was broken, the book was torn and stained in places, it was practically falling apart. Still, I couldn’t let it be weeded, not a first edition of my favorite book. I asked my boss if I could keep it and thankfully she said yes. It’s on my “Special Books” shelf, and at first I considered having it rebound and touched up a bit. Then I decided against it because I felt like I would be robbing it of its identity. This was a book that was constantly checked out. I rarely saw it on the shelf and when I did it didn’t stay there for long.  It had delighted an entire community for a solid decade, been through so many hands I couldn’t imagine. I remember posting about it on Twitter and Patrick actually retweeted it, saying it was “A Velveteen Rabbit book.” How could I possibly alter it after a gem like that?

Nightshade by Andrea Cremer - This one is just awkward, since an ex-boyfriend gave this book to me. He even wrote a nice note inside the cover but that relationship didn’t last since, you know, high school, so now I just have this book with writing on it and I don’t dare open it again because flashbacks. Why do I still have this?

Gargoyles Volume 1: Clan Building by Greg Weisman - I discovered the cartoon Gargoyles when I was in about high school, since I didn’t get Toon Disney as a kid, so thankfully some good soul on YouTube uploaded all the episodes back when copyright strikes weren’t as much of a thing. Seeing that there was a graphic novel continuation of the series, I put it on hold through my library. I waited months for this book, until it was cancelled because the item was lost. Flash forward years later when I find a copy sitting in a case in a used bookshop. I nearly broke down seeing it and bought it on the spot, even though it was a little pricey since it had been out of print for years.

I’ll tag @anassarhenisch @bibliophilicwitch @books-and-cookies @bookphile and @magic-in-every-book and anyone else who wants to join  in

[uchicagoscrc]

Today we bid a fond farewell to Special Collections Project Cataloger, Jennifer Dunlap, as she embarks on a new adventure at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. We wish her well! Jennifer’s parting gift to us (and you!) is a highlight of some of her favorite items here at the UChicago Special Collections Research Center. 

Top to bottom:

1. Duns Scotus’ Ordinatio I. [Venice] : [Johannes Herbort, de Seligenstadt, for Johannes de Colonia, Nicolaus Jenson et Socii], [1481]. This volume contains the first part of Duns Scotus’ Ordinatio or Quaestiones in quattuor libros Sententiarum (commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard). This volume is perhaps the most interesting binding of all the SCRC incunabula featuring blind tooled pigskin over wooden boards with brass “furniture” (metal attachments on the cover, usually to protect the binding), catches, and clasps. (Incun 1481.D9 Rare c.1) 

2.  Boethius. Boetius De philosophico consolatu … [Strassburg] : [Johann Grüniger], [1501]. Aside from the wonderful hand-colored woodcut illustrations, SCRC’s copy is full of provenance information including annotations, manicules, former owner’s inscriptions, and a few manuscript poems. (alc B659.D2 1501 Rare)

3. Barentsz, Willem. Deliniatio cartae trium navigationum per Batavos, ad Septentrionaelm plagam, Norvegiae, Moscoviae, et Nova Semblae … [Amsterdam] : [Cornelius Nicolai], [1598]. This map was produced to highlight the three expeditions undertaken by Dutch explorer and cartographer Willem Barentsz (c.1550-1597) between 1594 and 1597 in search of a Northeast Passage. It depicts he Arctic regions including Greenland, Iceland, northern Scandinavia, and northern Russia, as well as the routes that Barentsz’ ships took, not to mention numerous map monsters. (alc ff G3270 1598.B3)

4. Tennyson, Alfred. The ode by Alfred Tennyson on the opening of the Exhibition, 1862. [Coventry] : [Charles Newsome], [1862]. Part of the Gerald N. Wachs Collection of Nineteenth-Century English Poetry, this silk souvenir ribbon from the 1862 International Exhibition features Tennyson’s Ode on the opening of the Exhibition and a woven image of the Crystal Palace, where the exhibition was held. Tennyson was asked to write a piece which would be set to music by composer William Sterndale Bennett and performed at the opening of the Exhibition. The ribbon was designed by Edwin Rollason and produced by ribbon manufacturer Charles Newsome of Coventry. Newsome’s intertwined monogram appears at the top of the design in gold and cream. (ff PR5568.O15 1862)

5. Apian, Peter. Astronomicum Caesareum. [Ingolstadt] : [Peter Apian], [May 1540]. Another beautiful hand-colored 16th century imprint, this edition includes 22 volvelles, several of which feature the striking dragon design seen on the title page. SCRC’s copy is inscribed by Tycho Brahe to mathematician and astronomer Paul Wittich. (alc ff QB41.A639 1540 Rare)

6. Gart der Gesundheit. [Augsburg] : [Johann Schönsperger], [5 June 1486]. This German herbal printed in 1486 includes a wonderful example of a printer’s error, that of fallen type, near the end of the text. Fallen type occurs when a piece of type gets snagged on the leather covering of the ink balls while one of the pressmen is inking the form, gets pulled out of its place in the form, and ends up getting imprinted long-wise onto the page. These errors are fairly infrequent as the error would typically be noticed when the paper was removed from the press and the printer would return the fallen type to its place in the form and continue on with the job. (Incun 1486.G17 RareCr)

7. Dante Alighieri. [Divina commedia]. [Venice] : [Bartolomeo de Zanni de Portesio], [17 June 1507]. This copy of the 1507 printing of Dante’s Divine comedy has been heavily censored, probably in accordance with "Index librorum prohibitorum et expurgatorum ... D. Sandoval ex Roxas" of 1612, with the questionable sections of the text completely crossed out with wide vertical stripes of ink. (PQ4302.B07)

[ethanpaltridge0-blog]

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