Eighteenth-century diaries and journals. That’s what I’ve been reading the past few days. And I’ve found some really fascinating stuff. Part of what makes them so interesting is the fact that the individual entries are not very far removed in time from the events that they describe, something I had discussed in an earlier entry on eighteenth-century epistolary fiction.

A significant difference with these documents, though, is that they describe events that (presumablyl) really happened, and this can have a poweful effect on a reader. I read a couple of decades of one man’s life, month by month, from the time when the loneliness of the itinerant preaching life made him long for some kind of companionship, to when he met a young woman, to their marriage and their first children, to his sons dying, to his wife dying and him spending an entire month without preaching, changing his clothes, going to bed, or even leaving the house. It’s hard not to be affected, though he died almost two hundred years ago.

His hands held these notebooks and the pen that put the ink to the paper. There’s something of Walter Benjamin’s “aura” in all of this.

I’m officially a wordherder.

Yup, I’m migrating to the wordherders blogging collective that Jason started up.

The address of this blog is now http://ghw.wordherders.net, so please update your links and browsing habits. I will no longer be updating the blog at the old address.

I am very grateful to Jeff for giving me space on his CHLT server, and I’m not moving because I don’t like the current server. I just wanted to be join in a quasi-collaborative project with a bunch of my blogging friends. I am also very grateful to Jason for his help in getting this new address set up.

You know that scene in Best in Show where the young married couple explains how they first saw each other at Starbucks? Not the same Starbucks, though. She was in one on one side of the street, and he was in one on the other.

That’s how many Starbucks there are in downtown Manchester.

One of my UMKC colleagues has an English friend who lives in London but travels to Manchester frequently. I met him when he came to KC late last fall, and he’s been sending me useful info for months. Yesterday we spent the afternoon together, having a pretty good Italian meal at Cafe Uno on Albert Square, then going to the Whitworth Art Gallery to see their printmaking/Pop Art exhibit entitled “Editions Alecto: A Fury for Prints, Artists’ Prints and Multiples 1960-81“. (Editions Alecto has their own website). Aftwards, more conversation over tea. All in all, a great way to spend my Sunday.

Update: I forgot to mention one of the most interesting parts of our conversation. He’s a member of this organization devoted to eradicating the British monarchy.

This morning I went by the Alan Turing (1912-1954) memorial, a sculpture by Glyn Hughes in Sackville Park.

The following is summarized from the text accompanying the memorial. Turing published “On Computable Numbers” in 1936, “in which he conceived of ‘a universal computing machine’ which would be able to carry out thought processes using numbers and is thus regarded as the father of computer science.” During World War 2, he devised the machines that broke the German naval enigma code, a feat which played a significant part in the Allied victory of that war.

After the war, he joined a team at Manchester University “responsible for the most important breakthroughs in the development of the electronic computer.” He also wrote “a surprisingly readable manual on computer programming.”

When the police were investigating a break-in at his home, he casually mentioned his relationship with another man, which led to his prosecution for homosexuality, illegal at the time in Britain. Because homosexuality was thought to be a security risk due to the potential for blackmail, he was excluded from continuing his work at the university. He was also forced to take hormone injections to “cure” him of his sexuality.

Turing committed suicide at the age of 42 by injecting an apple with cyanide and taking a bite. “His work on artificial intelligence and the mathematical basis of biological forms remains unfinished.” We can only imagine how different modern computer science and computing technology would be if most of the twentieth century had not been characterized by unselfconsciously paranoid homophobia.

The memorial is a very simple statue of him sitting on a park bench with an apple in his hand. The apple obviously invokes his suicide, but also, of course, Sir Isaac Newton and the idea of forbidden sexuality implied in the story of the Garden of Eden.

A biopic called Breaking the Code was made in the 1990s, with Derek Jacobi portraying Turing.

Two very different quotes run through my head this morning after seeing the memorial and thinking about Turing’s life. The first comes from George Whitefield, eighteenth-century Methodist evangelist, on anti-Methodist prejudice in England and America:

Bigotry is as cold as the grave. It knows no remorse.

The second comes from a track, available as an MP3 for free, legal download at Protest Records, by the Cucumbers called “Illegal.”

Is there a circle around those you love?
Where does it start, and why does it end?

Illegal!

Well, what’re you gonna do
when the vast majority of people don’t think like you do?

Is what you want against the law?