Philobiblon

A fascinating collection of posts on the 18th-century email list has been exploring historic inks. It’s a reminder of how much more complicated everyday living was in the past; how much you had to know about all sorts of things that now happen invisibly, off stage.

I once intended to learn Chinese painting – might even get back to it one of these days, since I love the results – so I have got a lovely stone palettes and ink sticks, which just have to be ground with water.

But in the West these don’t seem to have developed; instead you started from scratch. There are some recipes here. (And if you are wondering about the seemingly essential “gallnuts” they are: “A nutlike swelling produced on an oak or other tree by certain parasitic wasps.”)

But the results, it seems, from the The ink corrosion website – which deals in detail with “major threat to our cultural heritage” – were not always ideal.

This left me musing about modern inks: pen and computer. How durable are they? But then again as librarians often warn, electronic records are certainly worse.

* Women’s eNews today has a commentary on the lack of visibility of prominent women in the media. I found it hopelessly naive and US-centric, but it did remind me I’d been meaning to point to Pratie Place’s post on the Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai. If you were going to write a book on “great women of the modern world” she’d be near the top of the list.

* Research into the death of Christopher Marlowe that looks somewhat better founded than such reports usually are.

* Two Australian journalists face jail for refusing to reveal a source. This was not some issue of “national security”, but a wrangle over veterans’ pensions that embarrassed the government. So sad to think that little more than a decade ago Australia was one of the world’s leaders in human rights. It is getting more like the “Land of the Not-Free” every day – which of course suits John Howard just fine. Still, I suppose it is at least not yet AS bad ….

* Alabama’s use of the death penalty sounds like something out of the 19th century:

All 19 of Alabama’s appellate court judges are white, as are 41 of its 42 elected District Attorneys. Odds are 1 in 3 that your jury will be all white as well. …Though black people account for only 26% of Alabama’s population overall, nearly 63% of its prisoners are black. Of the 23 people executed in Alabama between 1975 and 2001, 70% were black.

So much for the right to life.
(Via Pen-Elayne.)

I’ve been planning it, then drawing back from it, getting excited, then getting cold feet, but I finally handed in my resignation at work yesterday. So soon (well probably in three months – that’s the contract period) I’ll be out on Grub Street, trying to earn a crust with whatever ideas for stories I can dream up (and, hopefully, some time soon, a book contract!)

Wish me luck – I’ll need it.

(The image above is from a Punch cartoon – my source simply dates it as “Victorian”. The text underneath says: Old-fashioned Party (with old-fashioned predjudices). “Ah! Very clever I dare say. But I see it’s written by a lady, and I want a book that my daughters may read. Give me something else!”)

Fearless prediction of the day: Sir Ian Blair, Chief of the Metropolitan Police (London), won’t be in his post in a month. That follows his astonishing inept handling of the aftermath of the shooting of the innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes.

It probably won’t be the disgraceully hysterical policing that led to the shooting down of an innocent man by police that does for him – though it should. The inquiry will be dragged out long enough, and the water muddied enough (where did those CCTV tapes go?) that the media will have him out before then for his personal actions. (This post* does an excellent job of outlining what went wrong, so I won’t go over this ground again.)

But the man who keeps questioning why “so much fuss” is being made over the police shooting rather than the criminal bombings (Excuse me – you’re the state and you killed one of your own citizens for no reason at all) and who makes an unbelievable joke of his response when told – he says 24 hours after the shooting on learning of the mistake he thought “Houston, we have a problem” – is sure to keep making so many errors that the politicians already emerging like football chairmen to express “total confidence in the manager” will soon be changing their tune.

There’s only one thing I’m worried about. I’m agreeing with Tim Hames. That’s never happened before.

* Found on Britblog Roundup No 27, in which yours truly also has a humble part.

A joint production with the National Youth Theatre, a musical comic/tragic updating of an ancient Greek classic – introducing Antigone at Hell’s Mouth, at the Soho Theatre in London like that will make most people run a mile. It sounds like a production you’d be dragged to kicking and screaming only because a Significant Other has a starring role. Yet the fact is Mike Shepherd’s production is good, very good – a mature, sophisticated show to which the traditional youth adjectives of “energy-packed” and “vibrant” can also be fairly applied.

Nick Darke’s story for the Cornish Kneehigh Theatre company has the Kernow Liberation Front finally deciding to throw out the colonisers and their second homes, taking back possession of the land, the sea and the very air for the people of Cornwall. The initial clash takes a youthful form, in a doubly fatal game of “chicken” with stolen cars. The rebel’s champion was “Johnny Throttle”, and while his opponent and brother, entombed still in his crushed vehicle, is to be given a state funeral in London, the bones of Johnny are to be thrown to the gulls. But his sister Gonnieta (Kate Hewitt) has already secured “Johnnny Throttle’s Throttle Foot” as a holy relic and is, of course, determined to secure the rest for a decent burial.

On the other side the new “Duke of Cornwall” (Mike Davis), resplendent in beauty pageant-winner’s sash, is just itching to exercise his newfound power, which includes the right to inflict capital punishment – such a step-up from being a singer in a fifth-rate cover band with a dubious family past. He’s backed by a ridiculous pirouetting brigadier from London and a Machieavellian secretary who coaches him into his role. The members of his former band form his reluctant and ridiculous bench.

Yet interspersing these dramatic scenes of confrontation, which end in genuine tragedy, just as an Antigone should, are delightful comic interludes. Definitely the best are those of the Second Home Owners’ Wives chorus, boasting faux posh accents, fluffy lapdogs on sticks, and a nice line in handbag swinging. But Zeus the dog – the Duke/Prince/King’s human hound – played in fine playful Jacobean jester style, is another highlight.

The serious side of the chorus is a collection of blind, mystical archaeologists in boiler suits and gas masks. I wasn’t sure about their opening of the play, but in its closing they provide a logical finality, and they settled comfortably within the simple but effective staging – the dust to which all will eventually fall plays a central part. The music too is evocative but never overwhelming.

There’s barely a weak link in any aspect of this production. Check the full talent list; you’ll read most of the names again soon.

The only other review I’ve found is here.

Theatre

Archaeology has to be central to our understanding of ourselves and our world – will help us to keep our feet literally and metaphorically on the ground, Jennifer Wallace argues in Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination. Well she would say that, you might respond – her background is in archaeology.

Yet she makes a persuasive cases that enmeshes the reader in accounts of post-modern theory, Romantic poetry, Victorian treasure-hunting, Freudian psychology and popular science. In the wrong hands this mix would be a half-baked mish-mash, hidden behind a palisade of incomprehensible jargon, but Wallace writes simply, directly, and with informative brevity, while often allowing her key figures to speak for themselves.

She is particularly taken with figures who operate in productive, even paradoxical, binaries, rather than the traditional definitive forms. So she introduces the poet Margaret Keogh, who immersed herself in the classical world of Pompeii from her English home. “Pompeii was impossibly distant for her and so it became a place of desire … She feels dead whereas Pompeii is paradoxically vivid and alive; she is grey and sad while Pompeii is sunny and happy … Men would travel to Pompeii and include it on their Grand Tour; women had to stay home and read about it.” (p. 86)

Wallace makes an argument for archaeology forcing a materialistic, practical view of the world, which she calls “scepticism” and compares to Hamlet’s experience in the graveyard scene, saying “the literalness of the dying process … runs counter to any possible religious interpretation … when faced with withered fragments of bone and tooth and hair … worse when those remains are mingled with the dust”. (p. 130) Yet she also asserts its importance as an indelible record, particularly in its modern use in forensic science: the undeniable witness at war crimes trials around the world.

These conflicting views of archaeology are at the heart of early Christianity, Wallace says, comparing Eusebius’s discrete refusal to acknowledge Helena’s rediscovery of the “True Cross” with the nun Egeria’s enthusiastic embrace of a physical religion of place, “that it was at these spots that the stories cohered and where they appeared to make most vivid sense”. Wallace admits the logic and reality of Walter Benjamin’s explanation of the “aura” of archaeological objects, and, implicitly place, yet also drily points out that ” hills of the Golan, for a start, are not as they would have been in Jesus’ time, being studded with landmines”. (p. 169)

The study of archaeology and, in particular ancient history, frequently appears innately conservative, with its roots in that old standard “The Classics”, but Wallace says that: “Stratified history is necessary for an effective, grounded, radical politics” (p. 20). She goes back to a National Assembly deputy who used it as proof that regimes could and did fall, grouping that view to Shelley’s Ozymandias.

Wallace accepts the view of Deleuze and Guattari, that: “Stratigraphy … enables knowledge, and it only through knowledge that we can organise political campaigns, establish communities, create a vibrant culture.” (p. 187) But these she says, following these two authors, are in fact only useful fictions, a view also shared by post-modern archaeologists: “archaeology should move away from the hierarchical privileging of depth over surface and examine rather surface sites, delimited areas, nebulous spaces. It should be prepared to leave objects without a definitive explanation. And it should see archaeology as a form of rhetoric, rather than ‘reflection’ upon this world”. (p. 189)

If you’re interested in history and archaeology, and particularly their place in the world of thought, this is a book you should read.

But don’t be put off by the theory. If you’re just interested in the history of archaeology and society’s interaction with it, there are also many great tales. I was particularly taken with the story of the plundering of Milton’s grave as an example of what might be called the “naive” archaeological imagination.

Another review here.

History, Books