March 2009 - Posts
Rhetoric is being lost these days in public life. It is of course still alive and well in marital disputes, but we will not pursue that line of enquiry. In public Obama is excellent and there are few to rival him. We do have, on this side of the Atlantic, Euro MP Daniel Hannan who is in the running as the best of British. His recent demolition speech on the Prime Minister is receiving great attention and so it should. Not so much for the content, which we all know already, but for how the speech is put together http://tiny.cc/hannan This quality of parliamentary speech making has long been superseded by the "Yah! Boo!" form of debate, showing that even insults are now dumbed down. Enoch Powell was a great speaker and a great parliamentarian. He was also an educated man, which helps enormously. His 'Rivers of Blood' passage, which has had him branded a racist bigot was actually a rhetorical allusion to Virgil. Sadly the response has not quite the pleasure at an elegant turn of phrase that Enoch Powell may have hoped for.
I am now well into Chapter Five of A Dance to the Music of Time At present I am enjoying another dinner party. Anthony Powell's excursion into the Oscar Wilde school of writing has nearly run its course. Maybe someone told him not to do it. I can't understand why the story teller, who has recently married, gives detailed information about everybody except his wife and where he lives. I never cease to be baffled by this book.
I was reading about a few verses of St Mathew's Gospel on a fragment of papyrus in the library of Magdalen College,Oxford. Some scholars say it is the earliest extant Gospel text, dating from the mid first century AD. Indeed, maybe it was written in the lifetime of the apostle himself. This would be quite exciting in its way. Of course other scholars say it is nothing of the kind and the debate will continue. But what really interests me is the technology we now have to look at such material. This fragment was subjected to a confocal laser-scanning microscope, no less, which measured the height and depth of the ink. It was able to detect the imprint of the scribe's pen and separate writing from unintentional ink blots. All very amazing, but it does not seem to have finally resolved the date the manuscript was written.
I am now reading volume five of A Dance to the Music of Time. I came across a Youtube clip of the TV film, which had very accurate dialog. It moved the early action from an unnamed public school to Eton College. Well, I suppose they had to film it somewhere and Eton College has nice buildings. I wondered which unnamed University would be chosen for the next few scenes, but they weren't on Youtube.
I found a copy of The Bonfire of the Vanities in my other bookshop (not Oxfam, Caffe Nero). It is tempting to take a sabbatical from A Dance to the Music of Time and read it. I am holding out at the moment.
We have a new painting of Shakespeare. The only one painted in his lifetime. This has been owned by an Irish family ever since they inherited it from the Earl of Southampton who was a friend of Shakespeare's. It portrays a young man, richly dressed, who looks nothing like the known portraits of Shakespeare. We have two which are likely to be accurate. The engraving on the First Folio, which Ben Jonson said was a good likeness, and a bust in Stratford upon Avon church. Both of these were made a few years after Shakespeare's death and accepted by those who new him. So what about the young man? His chin and nose are very different to the First Folio portrait. He is young and the First Folio engraving is of an older man. But tests on the painting show that he was painted when Shakespeare was forty six years old. There is no doubt the Earl of Southampton knew Shakespeare, but he probably knew a lot of people. So I am not convinced. The BBC is saying it is a definite early portrait. With the BBC's track record of reporting uncertainties as definite I think the jury is still out on the new Shakespeare portrait.
I have reached volume five of A Dance to the Music of Time. Not a dinner party to be seen at the moment. Amazing.
Amazingly the Cambridge City Council is giving an opening date for the Central Library (no longer, imaginatively, to be called Library Central). It is May of this year, having slipped from February after slipping a year already. I would order the champagne for July myself - we'll see. The reason for the delays - unacceptable in government speak - were unsatisfactory building work, unforeseen delays and the discovery of asbestos. A translation would be, they picked the wrong builder, should have had a really good asbestos survey in an older building, may have got unlucky with a few items. I hope they can afford some books in these hard times for Local Government.
I have nearly finished volume four of A Dance to the Music of Time. So far I have found no discernible plot. I considered reading the book in reverse, starting at chapter twelve and meeting my ongoing progress at about chapter six, just to cheer things up a bit. Sadly there is a time line. There are also enough new characters to cause confusion in any direction. Anthony Powell seems dimly aware of this as he is now introducing characters we already know about, presumably in case we have forgotten them. It is possible that he has forgotten them himself.