Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Professor and the Madman,’ by Simon Winchester

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I bought this one because it’s going to be assigned in a class I’ll be taking later this summer. Since it interested me on its own merit, I thought I’d read it now and get a jump on things.

The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester, is a careful examination of the facts of a story that’s become a legend in the literary world. The popular account, first published by an American journalist in 1915, tells how Professor James Murray, chief editor of the magisterial Oxford English Dictionary, wished to meet in person his most valuable volunteer contributor (in those pre-database days, the literary citations necessary to trace word meanings through the centuries were gathered by an army of volunteers who combed old books for examples of word use and sent them to Oxford on slips of paper). So he wrote to Dr. William Minor of Crowthorne, Berkshire, asking to visit. Receiving his invitation, he took the train to Crowthorne, and was driven by carriage to a great, walled estate out in the countryside. Ushered inside to an impressive office, he asked the distinguished man behind the desk if he had the honor of addressing Dr. William Minor. The man said he was not. “I am the superintendent of Broadmoor Asylum. Dr. Minor is one of our patients.”

The actual events, which author Winchester documents, are a little less dramatic, but the overall story remains a fascinating one. William Minor was born to missionary parents on the island of Ceylon. He studied medicine, became a surgeon, and served in the American Civil War. Suffering increasing paranoid delusions in the wake of his war experiences, he eventually moved to London (Lambeth), where early one morning he murdered an inoffensive workman with his Colt revolver. His obvious insanity earned him a suite at Broadmoor, where he answered a call for volunteers to help with the massive, multi-volume dictionary.

Simon Winchester is an excellent writer, and the story is a fascinating one for anyone who loves books and words. I have a set of the OED myself (the two-volume micrographic edition, which you have to read with a magnifying glass), and it’s a treasure. Winchester notes that the purpose of the project was different from that of other nations. Unlike the French, for instance, there was no intention to “fix” the language in a definitive, unchangeable form. The OED was designed to trace the history of each English word, and to include all current variations.

The author’s attempt to parallel Murray’s and Minor’s life stories is not entirely successful, in my view. Yes, they were both raised Congregationalists, but in different countries, and their life’s paths were not all that similar. It is suggested that Minor’s childhood Puritanism may have contributed to his breakdown, but that theme is not hammered on too heavily.

All in all, a masterful book about a masterful project. Recommended.

Music

Pilgrims’ Hymn

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This piece by the late Stephen Paulus bears repeated listening. The video was recorded last year in the Milwaukee Art Museum with the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire Choir under the direction of Dr. Gary R. Schwartzhoff.

Religion, Uncategorized

Two Dangers

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Randy Boyagoda of Ryerson College talking about Richard John Nauhaus:

What happens when you’re not allowed as a person of faith to speak from your deepest convictions to matters of singular importance in the world around you. Fr. Neuhaus made this case against two groups. One would be secular progressives who would want no place whatsoever for religion in public life. Probably for most of us, these are the groups we would think of as the great challenge to a religiously informed public philosophy. But Fr. Neuhaus actually argued that there was another group that was somewhat just as problematic. For him it was the Moral Majority. In other words, a Christian fundamentalism that had no publicly available account for how religion should matter in politics and public life but instead says, “you need to believe this because we believe this about the Bible.”

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Anniversary,’ by Mel Parish

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I have to review this book just because it fooled me in a couple ways. It’s not a bad novel, but what stuck with me was the non-plot-related surprises.

First of all, although the story is set in America, it gradually dawned on me as I read that the author had to be English. I noticed, eventually, that double quotation marks were set inside single quotation marks in dialogue, in the English style. Also the author threw in English-isms like “bonnet” for the hood of a car, or “Too right,” as an idiomatic phrase.

The second surprise only came at the end. More on that later.

The story of The Anniversary centers on Paul Rigby, a police detective in a small town. For the past year he has been balanced on the edge of career disaster. He’s approaching the anniversary of the death of his fiancée. He loved her deeply, but learned after she was gone that she’d lied to him and betrayed him. Since then he’s been drinking heavily, getting into fights, and being self-destructive in general. The only thing standing between him and unemployment is his police chief, who has a fatherly fondness for him and has allowed him to live in an apartment above his garage, where he can keep an eye on him.

The plot of the book involves an accountant who’s arrested for embezzlement, but swears he’s innocent. Rigby narrowly avoids going to bed with the man’s wife, and does his best to investigate the case, in between fights and suspensions from duty and getting his ankle in a cast.

The character of Rigby was well-conceived, but went a little too far for my taste. What I mean is, it’s fine to create a damaged personality with lots of anger and pain in him, but so much time was spent on Rigby’s unhappiness that (for me) it slowed the story down and told us more than we cared to know.

Which was all explained when I discovered that the author, Mel Parish, is not a man as I had assumed, but a woman. Usually I can (or think I can) identify a male character written by a female, but Rigby fooled me. What I took for a failure in narrative was in fact just a woman’s point of view. Author Parish did a better than usual job of getting into a man’s head, but (in my opinion) spent too much time in there, describing the exotic furnishings.

Not perfect, but you might enjoy it. Some rough language and mild sex. And some violence, of course.

Authors, Fiction

Could Use A Few Jokes

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Lunar ExplosionAs the gods would have it, someone is talking about the fictitious author Neal Stephenson over on The Millions.

In the 1990s, Stephenson looked like the best thing to happen to science fiction since William Gibson blew things open with Neuromancer the previous decade. Snow Crash (1992) and The Diamond Age (1995) tangled with big ideas like the onset of the Web and nanotechnology years before they entered the popular nomenclature and knocked them into dramatic shape with humor and pop-culture savvy. Here’s the famous opening of Snow Crash, establishing the character of one Hiro Protagonist, a master of samurai sword usage, hacking, and near-future high-speed pizza delivery.

Apparently, his novel Seveneves could use a bit more of that lack of seriousness, what with a moon-exploding apocalypse and all.

Authors, Bookselling, Publishing

John Scalzi Lands 13-Book Deal

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John Scalzi, author of Redshirts, which is being adapted for television, has scored a ten-year deal with Tor Books for thirteen new books.

The executive editor at Tor said that while Scalzi hasn’t had a top-of-the-list bestselling book, “One of the reactions of people reading a John Scalzi novel is that people go out and buy all the other Scalzi novels.”

Redshirts

Fiction, Reviews

‘Police at the Funeral,’ by Margery Allingham

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I’ve been interested to read one of Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion books ever since I saw Peter Davidson’s portrayal on a BBC television series some years back. Books in the series have recently become available for Kindle at low prices, so I bought Police at the Funeral.

Albert Campion, the amateur detective of these books, bears a resemblance to Dorothy Sayer’s Lord Peter Wimsey, and it’s not by accident. Campion began as a parody of Lord Peter, but took on a life of his own. Nevertheless, they’re still alike enough to be brothers, except that Campion wears horn rimmed glasses instead of Wimsey’s monocle.

In Police at the Funeral, Campion goes to stay in a great house in Cambridge, at the request of a friend, and of his fiancee who is a lady’s companion there. The resident family is an eccentric and crotchety assortment of elderly siblings and cousins, all constantly quibbling and chafing under the iron rule of a formidable great-aunt. One of the residents has disappeared, and soon his body is discovered, bound with a rope and shot to death.

The story is perfectly a perfectly adequate example of the “cozy” English variety of mystery, but I found it less interesting than I hoped. Perhaps my tastes have been spoiled by the ugly realism of the modern mystery, or perhaps I just compared it unfairly to Dorothy Sayer’s books, which are (in my view) a notch brighter and more interesting.

Not bad, though. I’m sure many of our readers will enjoy it.

Authors, Non-fiction

A Portrait of Shakespeare Made During His Lifetime?

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ShakespeareMark Griffiths, a historian and botanist, was writing a book about English horticulturist John Gerard, who was a contemporary of Shakespeare, and decided to work out the ciphers and symbols on a famous book of Gerard’s. His study has convinced him that he has found the only known portrait of Shakespeare made during his lifetime. Many clues point in this direction. For example:

A figure four and an arrow head with an E stuck to it. In Elizabethan times, people would have used the Latin word “quater” as a slang term for a four in dice and cards. Put an e on the end and it becomes quatere, which is the infinitive of the Latin verb quatior, meaning shake. Look closely and the four can be seen as a spear.

“It is a very beautiful example of the kind of device that Elizabethans, particularly courtiers, had great fun creating,” said Griffiths.

The discovery was published in Country Life, which apparently is enough to make scholars mock its veracity.

First up, Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham.

“I’m deeply unconvinced,” he said. “I haven’t seen the detailed arguments, but Country Life is certainly not the first publication to make this sort of claim.” (via Prufrock)

Uncategorized

Here’s a “Great” Idea

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The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks brings us signs with curious punctuation. There’s a sign for a nursing home that people say is “20 minutes from here,” a place with (quote, unquote) parking in the rear, ice cream that’s “homegrown” somehow, and this notice written by someone who doesn’t appear to have any idea what quotation marks are for.

Have you ever seen this kind of thing in the wild? I think I’ve only noticed misplaced apostrophes.

This reminds me of a note I put in the copy room where I once worked. “This is a Lanier copier,” I said. “You cannot ‘Xerox’ on it.”

They loved me for that.

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