I was sitting this afternoon in the Starbucks opposite the British Library, wrapping myself around a soy-milk chai tea, shamelessly people-watching, particularly the guy with the swish wi-fi lap-top, the tasteless crumpled T-shirt, the chiselled jaw and impossibly high cheekbones. (He was about 22; I was only looking.)

I was also reading Jean Baudrillard’s The Perfect Crime, which I had just picked up for £4, together with several other books, from the academic remainder bookshop.

I was thinking this was as close to heaven as I was going to get. I spent the day in the BL, but not in my usual mad flurry, just cleaning up some lose ends and checking out the new Dictionary of National Biography – to my relief there was nothing to demand any major rewriting of what I’ve done – a few extra bits and piece only: phew!

What I really need is much more time to read, to think, to reflect, not always rushing. (People who know me will have problems imagining me doing anything but.) I have absorbed rather a lot in the past 20 years, but there are still vast amounts of things I want to absorb, and indeed put out. I really need to make time to make that happen.

Only yesterday I was saying this wasn’t a personal blog, and mostly it isn’t, so for real content, a little Baudrillard. (I absolutely totally disagree with his end-point — I think he’s typically masculinist in his inability to accept the existence of the body* — but I do so often read him and say : “Yes! That’s a brilliant idea!”)

“… the main objection to reality is its propensity to submit unconditionally to every hypothesis you can make about it. With this its most abject conformism, it discourages the liveliest minds. You can subject it – and its principle (what do they get up to together, by the way, apart from dully copulating and begetting reams of obviousness?) – to the most cruel torments, the most obscene provocations, the most paradoxical insinuations. It submits to everything with unrelenting servility. Reality is a bitch. And that is hardly surprising, since it is the product of stupidity’s fornication with the spirit of calculation … (p. 3)

And for the historical bent:
“The iconolaters of Byzantium were subtle folk, who claimed to represent God to his greater glory but who, simulating God in images, thereby dissimulated the problems of his existence. Behind each of these images, in fact, God had disappeared. He was not dead; he had disappeared. That is to say, the problem no longer even arose. It was resolved by simulation. This is what we do with the problem of the truth or reality of this world: we have resolved it by technical simulation, and by creating a profusion of images in which there is nothing to see.” (p. 5)

(Translated by Chris Turner, Verso, London, 1996)
* Although I also get annoyed with “female” and “the body” always being grouped together.

From today’s Sydney Morning Herald spike column.

Proposed new words for Advance Australia Fair, by Geoff Francis and Peter Hicks:

“Australians all let us rejoice
For we have tasted greed
Our interest rates mean more to us
Than mere humanity
Our land abounds with credit cards
And John Howard took us there …

While digging around the Gatehouse, I came up with a lovely piece that I printed out at the British Library (at the ridiculous cost of 20p a page – such a rip-off!) for no reason other than I thought it was a brilliant tale: “A Poem on the archbishop’s hearse: puritanism, libel and sedition after the Hampton Court Conference,” by Alastair Bellany. It is a reminder there’s really nothing new about the activities of Greenpeace et al.; people have been engaging in spectacular stunts to get their views across for a very long time indeed.

Imagine the scene: the solemn funeral of Archbishop John Whitgift in March 1604, at the Croydon Parish Church. As is traditional, wellwishers (and toadies) have placed laudatory epitaphs on the hearse, but – shock horror – among them is a tirade of doggerel against the dead man and his successor (“dumb dickye”).

An extract:
“Your great Patron is dead and gone,
& Jockey hath left dumb dickye alone.
Popishe Ambition, vaine superstition,
couloured conformity, canckared envye,
Cunninge hipocrisie, faigned simplicity,
macked impiety, servile flatterye,
Goe all dance about his hearse,
& for his dirge chant this verse … (p. 138)

The author explains that many of the complaints are typical of those of the Puritans of the time, and he compares it to “the mocking songs of the carivari. (See
earlier post.)

The culprit, it emerged nearly a year later, was one Thomas Bywater, a suspended preacher. Dragged before the Star Chamber, attempts to claim you could not libel a dead person failed (the perfect defence today, provided there are no inconvenient relatives around), because it was held that it had offended a representative of the Church, and therefore Queen Elizabeth, and therefore that legal entity called “The Crown”(p. 158).

Pickering was sentenced to pay a fine of £1,000, a year’s jail and to be pilloried in London, Croydon and Northampton. If he did not confess, his ears were to be nailed to the pillory. (p. 160) He did not suffer all of these punishments, although certainly spent from time in jail.

Interesting thought on the punishment: the pillory and, not infreqently, mutliation. “Punishment for libel was, in itself, a ritualized form of libel.” (p. 159) For a great example: William Prynne.

Editors today might count themselves lucky.

From: Journal of British Studies 34, April 1995, pp. 137-164.

A little post of mine on Saturday about Mary Lady Broughton widow and “Keeper of the Gatehouse Prison” (in Westminster), caught the attention of Sharon at Early Modern Notes. She shared her existing knowledge and added more, and has discovered a whole dynasty.

To continue the collaborative effort, a bit more on the gatehouse. It must have been a pretty grim place by the 17th-century, old jails usually being so. It was finished in 1370 “as the new gatehouse to the conventual buildings of Westminster Abbey at Broad Sanctuary. It contained then, or later, two jails: one used by the bishop of London for prisoners to be judged by clerical law, and the other for lay offenders. Both were administered by the abbot of Westminster …. The approximate site of the prison is that of today’s war memorial to former scholars of Westminster School, outside the abbey”. (From The Annals of London: A Year-by-Year Record of a Thousand Years of History, J. Richardson, Cassel & Co, 2000, p. 50) The Gatehouse was demolished in 1774.

The only reason most people would have to have heard of it is Richard Lovelace, the Cavalier poet, who was held there in 1642, when he wrote: “Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage; Mindes innocent and quiet take That for a Hermitage.” You can find out more about him here and a copy of the poem, To Althea, From Prison.

Yep, ebay again. I just couldn’t resist the “Georgian Vellum Indenture 1722 Eliza Heald Lincoln”.
Thirty pounds seems a reasonable price to me, not that I actually did any research on the subject; I was captivated, so I bought it. I have got an idea of how I might get the money back, but I really don’t care if it works out.
Yes, an utterly frivolous purchase, but rather better than a new item of clothing, I think!
P.S. If you are thinking “that should be in a museum”, well you’re probably right, but my will does leave all my books to a library: that’s my excuse anyway!

An Ode to the King of his Return from New-market
(for Charles II after the collapse of the Rye House plot)
Set by Mr. Baptist, Master of the Queen’s Musick, London
Printed for R. Bentley, in Russel-Street in Covent-Garden, with the Authors Consent 1684

“England’s Hope and Rome’s Despair
Earth’s delight, and Heaven’s care!
…
“O Live for ever!
Happy keep us still, and free,
We no successor wish to see.”