Sheesh. Last week my blog was down all week: I couldn’t post any new entries, and readers couldn’t comment. Now my U email is down, and it has been all weekend. I have a backlog of messages I want to send out.
Well, before I get my day started, I’ll post a link to this excerpt from Jubilate Agno, by Christopher Smart, one of the most interesting Methodists of the eighteenth century.
No, it’s not Friday, the traditional day for cat blogging and poetry blogging. Sue me.
…I’ll be going to see this:
William Blake (1757-1827): Visionary & Illustrator
Rare Books & Special Collections
Mezzanine Exhibition Gallery
Thomas Cooper Library
University of South Carolina
through September 15 2006This exhibition draws together both sides of Blake’s career–the illuminated poetry and prophetic writings for which he is best known and the wide range of his book illustrations and commercial engravings that often also reveal his distinctive vision.
The exhibition is designed as an introduction to Blake’s career, charting his development chronologically through both sides of his activity, from his earliest known work as an apprentice engraver in the 1770’s through the extraordinary originality of his political and prophetic poems in the 1790’s and early 1800’s, and the later illustrations he prepared for Edward Young’s poem Night Thoughts (1796-97) and Robert Blair’s The Grave (1808). Blake’s political sensitivity and humanity are evidenced in his illustrations for John Stedman’s Narrative (1796), about the suppression of slave revolts in Surinam (Guyana).
A number of the books for which Blake prepared engravings (including Stedman, Stuart’s Antiquities, Fuseli’s Lectures, Flaxman’s Theogony, and others) were acquired by the South Carolina College library soon after publication. Thirty-three of the 75 items on display (including Night Thoughts and The Grave) are original editions with designs or engravings by Blake. The illuminated books of poetry for which he is now best known, including Songs of Innocence (1789), Songs of Experience (1794), Europe (also 1794) and Jerusalem (from 1804), are shown in the Trianon color facsimiles sponsored by the Blake Trust.
It’s Reading for Pleasure Wednesday,1 and I’ve been reading Alison Bechdel‘s memoir, Fun Home. Bechdel is the creator of the fantastic, long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, and her memoir features the same wry wit, rich characterization, and distinctive visual style.
The focus of the book is Alison’s relationship with her father, a stern, emotionally distant but highly creative man obsessed with renovating the Victorian home in which the family lives. Alison is a voracious reader and budding artist in childhood, and as a college student, it is through reading that she comes to understand herself as a lesbian. Soon, she comes out to her parents, which leads her mother to inform her that Alison’s father had been having affairs with other men throughout their marriage. Not long thereafter, Alison’s father is struck and killed by a truck in a bizarre accident, and she worries over whether the accident was really a suicide. She’s saddened and frustrated by her inability to learn more about her father’s secret life.
Fun Home is one of the best nonfiction graphic works I’ve ever read, filled with literary allusions to such writers as James Joyce and Marcel Proust. It’s a very smart, humane, and funny treatment of the themes of memory, childhood, and identity.
Laura brings our attention to an impromptu Patrick White reading circle. I think that I shall join in. I met a lovely Australian couple while spending the night on a junk in Vietnam’s Halong Bay last fall, and they recommended White.
I’ve been getting a lot of reading done this summer, and Laura’s post is, I think, what they call “a sign,” pointing the way to future pages for consumption.
Update: The Vivisector has been chosen for discussion.
I’ve been thinking about writing a post on digital archives, commercialization, scholarship, teaching, and access, but Ray Rosenzweig, in “Digital Archives Are a Gift of Wisdom to Be Used Wisely” (Chronicle, sub req’d) has pretty much beaten me to it. Although Rosenzweig’s focus is on teaching, he brings up a central concern of mine, namely the cost of commercial offerings of digitized cultural heritage resources: if my university cannot afford to subscribe, then my scholarship and my teaching (i.e. my students’ education) are going to suffer.