… to blogging?

I’m about to find out. Being off to France for a week, I may be off the air for that long, but only if the withdrawal symptoms don’t get too acute.
A last word … in the Guardian yesterday an excellent piece on
Edward Said, which made me dig out my old copy of Orientalism, which was one of the most enlightening books that I have ever read. It helped me throw off many of the more unpleasant aspects of Australian middle-class culture of the Seventies, with which I grew up, although also left me with an excess of idealism that it took Thailand to throw off.

P.S. Just discovered that the dictionary wants to replace “blogging” with “flogging”. It’s not that bad, surely.

Pierre Bayle was a man with a big idea. In his own words:

“Somewhere about the month of December 1690 I conceived the idea of compiling a critical dictionary, i.e. a dictionary which should comprise a complete inventory, as it were of the various errors perpetrated, not only by lexicographers, but by writers in general; the details of each such error to be set out under the name of the individual town or city associated with it.” (p. 131.)

Like most of us, however, he was easily distracted: he implored his friends in various European capitals to send him news. “I recognise quite plainly that my insatiable craving for news is one of those inveterate diseases that set all treatment at defiance. It’s dropsy; that’s what it is. The more you give it, the more it wants.” p.125

And what happened to his ideas?
“Bayle’s brand of criticism is much too potent to be taken neat. It needed to be diluted … Being decanted into the Dictionaire it was removed from the province of purely theological controversy and came within the reach of people in general: there were the arguments plain as plain could be, and so it became the inspirer of heterodoxy in every land, the sceptic’s bible.” (p.141.)

(This from P. Hazard, The European Mind 1680-1715, Penguin, 1964 (French original 1935). A fascinating little book, in the most amazingly florid language, which I can only presume reflects the original French. I don’t think even in French they write like this any more, at least I hope not!)

What am I supposed to be doing at the moment? The ironing – shifting the wardrobe from summer to winter — ahh, that explains this post. Funny how when you’ve got a writing deadline to meet the ironing becomes a distraction, but when there’s no deadline, the trend of attention is reversed.

An interesting feminist journal, Third Space. There’s also an email list. Now can I possibly manage any more arriving every day? ….

Scribbling woman reports on a new(ish) site, Thesis Canada Portal, where Canadian theses since 1998 can be searched.

Great to see this further step towards a wired world. It always annoyed me as a writer of several theses (no, not a PhD one, not yet anyway) that you did two copies, one of which would rot on your shelf, the other of which would rot on some library stack. And someone else would probably go out and repeat your work all over again in a few years’ time, rather than be able to build on it and go forward. (This is why I’ve posted a couple of pieces of modest original academic research that I’ve done on my website, plus some UN-related work that I have done)

And I will soon be adding to it with my honours thesis, thanks to a supervisor who deserves a special award, Dr Denis Wright at UNE, who I emailed about something else last week, noting that my thesis wasn’t posted because somewhere in moves across three continents the electronic version had gone astray. He almost instantly emailed me back his electronic copy, which was my almost final version; all this 10 years after I graduated!

I’ve been interested in the Anglo-Saxon scholar Elizabeth Elstob (1683-1756) since I read an nice little volume, Before the Bluestockings, Ada Wallas, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1929.

She’s a great example of the difficulties under which women could labour to become scholars: when her mother died when Elizabeth was 8 years old, she already knew some Latin, but she then was sent to live with an uncle who had no truck with women’s learning, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that she was able to get permission to learn even French.

But she was able finally to move in with her brother in London and acquired knowledge of at least eight languages, one of them Anglo-Saxon, for which she prepared and published a Grammar.

I had thought this was heading off into very esoteric territory, until set straight by Norma Clarke’s The Rise and Fall of the Women of Letters, Pimlico, 2004. It says:

“Elstob was making a conscious polemical point. The argument for the vernacular tradition over the classical was of obvious use to women. The established institutions of learning, the Church and the universities, excluded women and rooted scholarship in classical training. [By} quoting a prelate … handing over possession of the native language ‘our mother tongue’, to women as their ‘proper’ concern, Elstob opened up a path for women that was independent of the old forms and practices, and untainted by foreign associations. The Anglo-Saxon grammar was represented in nationalistic terms as an aid to understanding ‘our ancient English poets’. Poetry in the vernacular could be freed from the powerful interests of established institutions and function as a vehicle for newly formed modes of working that had not tradition of excluding women.” (p.63)

I wonder was this followed up by other women?

More: a bibliography, a good description of her work and a small piece about one of her translations.

… on Things a Woman Wants to Know, No 12 in the Isobel Handbooks, Price One Shilling, perhaps 1930s.

Now get your mind out of the gutter, this boasts a special “illustrated section on The Folding of Serviettes”.

Plus: rules for sleeping (p.104)
“There are two rules for sleeping which everybody may adopt without hesitation. First, never let yourself be awakened, but wait until you have slept out your sleep. Second, get up as soon as you are awake. If you follow these two rules the hours of sleep will soon regulate themselves to the requirements of your constitution.”

… ahh, if only, I say, speaking as a night-shift worker who sometimes lies in bed in a dozey state trying to work out if I’m supposed to be going to sleep or waking up.

Mind you, I’m not too sure about “Ripe Tomatoes will remove ink stains from white cloth, also stains from the hand.” (p. 75)

(Yep, another frivolous purchase on Ebay antiquarian – I must have been trying to avoid something earlier this week.)