An interesting examination of the libretto of Messiah and how it relates to Georgian England, with an emphasis on slavery. Messiah started as Charles Jennens’s commonplace book, with headings on hope, suffering, and redemption. Jennens was a Handel superfan and had money, and he worked out a deal with his favorite composer, whom he call “The Prodigious”. I wish the book said more about the music, but you can’t have everything.

Question: King makes a point that the first contralto aria in the Dublin premiere was “He Was Despised”, and that Mrs. Cibber’s exquisite acting (and, I presume, phrasing) more the compensated for the shortcomings of her voice. But don’t you need an alto in Part I for “For who may abide the day of his coming?” and “O thou that tallest good tidings to Zion?”

December 6, 2024 (permalink)

A. J. Liebling wrote wonderful columns about food for The New Yorker in a time when food writing was seldom considered suitable for anything but the women’s pages. His account of being an impoverished art student in interwar Paris and choosing between good food and good wine is memorable, and is also a modern morality.

December 2, 2024 (permalink)

A beautiful book of immense erudition and perception, this book has influenced my work deeply. It does things I did not think possible, and draws connections I did not think could be drawn. Yet, it is plainspoken, considerate, and unfailingly entertaining.

November 12, 2024 (permalink)

A fascinating study of Vienna between the wars and its immense contributions to modernism and to computing. Vienna was a huge capital city that governed what had become a small country. Austria had lost her empire and her markets, the economy had been shredded, and vast numbers of people from the former provinces converged on a city with insufficient housing, a place that had long seen itself as governed by schleppers. Yet, for a decade, it became the intellectual center of the world, before the Viennese threw it all away for the satisfactions of Fascism.

November 12, 2024 (permalink)

A wonderful and thorough history of the intersecting philosophical and mathematical circles in Vienna from the early 1920s to their end in Austrian Fascism and the Anschluss. Sigmund offers sensitive and intelligent portrayals of the most notable participants (though he rather neglect John von Neumann) as well as those who, like the note-taking Dr. Rose Rand, were ill-treated in life and neglected afterward. This deserves special praise because, in this broad group biography, few of the characters are easy to identify with. Sigmund is equally at home with the ideas with which these circles wrestled, and if he occasionally despairs of explaining set theory to a general audience, his effort to explain Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem by way of Sudoko is both clever and effective.

November 11, 2024 (permalink)

From 1912 to 1915, Venetia Stanley, then inn her 20s, carried on an intense, primarily epistolary, romance with Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, who was considerably older. He called Venetia “dearest”; she called him “Prime”. He wrote to her several times a day, often including state secrets in the letters. Incredibly, his half of the correspondence survives. From these letter. Robert Harris has crafted a thriller which is often fascinating, if inevitably tinged with sadness.

November 11, 2024 (permalink)

A delightful and fascinating contemplation of two threads that run through nearly three thousand years of historical writing. Herodotus tries to tell us about the world; if he knows something interesting about a place he will tell you about it. Thucydides tries to tell us what happened in the great war in which he himself played a part; if something important happened when he was elsewhere, he works to find a source who knows about it. If it wasn’t important to the war, to hell with it. Thucydides became the patron of historians, Herodotus the patron of antiquarians; Momigliano, a historian, is gracious to antiquarians and fast to point out that, today, some of the most interesting and important historical writing is attuned to Herodotus while we may have had our fill of political and military chronicles.

November 9, 2024 (permalink)

Ruskin was an early Modernist critic and a great fan of Turner’s brilliant colors. Whistler was a late modernist, eager to explore fog and darkness. They did not like each other, and Ruskin eventually took the opportunity to deplore Whistler’s painting.

Whistler, who was having a terrible time getting people interested in his experimental painting, sued for libel. The result was a spectacular trial, which Murphy covers very well indeed. Whistler still couldn't sell his work; eventually, he did manage to make some big sales to Americans, and some of his critical work now hangs in the Harvard Art Museums.

November 9, 2024 (permalink)

A surprising treatment of Engelbart’s crucial and influential (though short-lived) effort to augment human intelligence. Engelbart’s group really got started in the mid-60s, and broke apart in the 70s. Bardini is exceptional in trying to understand the collapse as well as the glory days. A lot of evidence is drawn from a roman a clef, which is discomforting, but it is reinforced by the group’s copious electronic records.

A key lesson is that Engelbart was not alarmed by the prospect that this line of research might bring about the apocalypse of the singularity. Indeed, Engelbart welcomed that: if there were to be a singularity, why not face it with better intellectual tools? Bardini makes this fairly clear, where in several conversations he and I had at various conferences, Doug could not.

October 26, 2024 (permalink)

A short but fascinating book about the development and variety of scripts — of methods of writing. Thoughtful, unique, and printed with style and elegance.

Drop a word in the ocean of meaning, and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough. Now drop two or three words in at once. Interference patterns form, reinforcing one another here and canceling each other there. To catch the meaning of the words is not to catch the ripples that they cause; it is to catch the interaction of those ripples. This is what it means to listen; this is what it means to read

October 25, 2024 (permalink)

For the new book, it seems I need to explore Byzantine note-taking and related practices, and this reminds me that I know nothing about Byzantium. Herrin is reputed to be the best and most accessible introduction, and it was quite enjoyable.

October 25, 2024 (permalink)

A delightful book. Benjamin left his small town in northeast Spain sometime in the 1160s and went...everywhere. Rome, Constantinople, Israel, Baghdad, Cairo. Everywhere, he asks (and notes down) the same questions. “How many Jews live here? How badly are they oppressed? Who are the smartest and most interesting Jews?” And also, I fancy, “What’s for dinner?” He talks Talmud with anti-rabbinic Karaite Jews in Constantinople, and goes star-gazing with an astronomer in Tiberias.

In Damascus, he observers that “It seems to me that the Karaites are an acerbic bunch, very argumentative. Arguing may be their only pleasure…. Yet the Karaites are avid proponents of return to the land of our forefathers.”

October 25, 2024 (permalink)

A delightful collection of surprisingly-engaging papers on reading in the ancient world. Lots of people could read, and they did read quite a bit. Interestingly, Book Historians continue to think that Romans mostly read out loud, while classicists are pretty sure that most reading was done in silence. The classicists have the better case.

We know more than you might think about ancient libraries — even if we look only at the two or three extant ruins that we know are libraries because the signage is still in place. (Ephesos, Timgad, and the villa dei papiri in Herculaneum.) For example, it seems that Romans preferred to read sitting down, but they didn’t put the scroll on a table or lectern. They did like to have a very low table nearby, presumably for their note pad and — who knows? — maybe a beverage.

I borrowed this volume to finish reading the paper on libraries. I packed it up to return the book, but on the train I started reading an essay on references to personal reading in Roman poetry, and that was so witty and intriguing that I renewed the book.

October 18, 2024 (permalink)

As I started the new book, I wanted to shore up my understanding of the ways books have been used in other times with a dip into The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium. That convinced me that I really don’t understand Byzantium at all, and thence to Judith Herrin’s sympathetic Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire. Throughout, I keep learning that details in from this wonderful space opera are actually real: when cultural liaison Three Seagrass is driving with her newly-arrived ambassador through the Palace Quarters, she offers to recite (with improvisation) pertinent sections of a famous imperial poem on The Buildings. It turns out we have (parts of) an actual treatise on The Buildings by Procopius (c. 500–565), which a cultural attaché might quite plausibly recite to an ambassador from (say) Armenia or even Francia a few hundred years later.

I think I’m going to need to read the author’s dissertation chapter on such an ambassador, though where am I to find the time?

A delightful novel.

October 18, 2024 (permalink)

A peculiar and disturbing picture of the ways a childhood that was not ideal, albeit far from awful, can warp everyone’s life. Patchett’s writing is terrific, and Tom Hanks’s reading in the audiobook seems perfect — and Hanks is really well cast here. Still, I found the pacing to be sluggish and, often, neither I nor the characters seemed to have much to look forward to.

October 16, 2024 (permalink)

Oh, what fun! Houston carefully weighs the evidence for libraries and book collections in Ancient Rome. To be safe, he limits most of his study to a few places which we are absolutely certain were libraries. There are two building, one at Ephesus and the other at Timgad, where inscriptions still in place announce that this is The Library. There is one villa at Herculaneum in which hundreds of carbonized scrolls were found; we know that this was some sort of private library because we have (at least part of) the collection, most of which was found on the shelves of Room V but some of which was lying here and there about the house. We have two or three piles of papyrus from Oxyrhyncus in which a bunch of literary papyri seem to have been discarded together, and these seem to be the remains of libraries or private collections that were thrown out because they were no longer wanted, or perhaps because they had been copied to codex books and the scrolls were worn out. We have some pictures and sculptures of people reading and writing; Romans sat down to read, but while they liked to have a low table on hand for writing implements, candles and the like, they don’t seem to have used tables for either reading or writing. A really delightful book.

September 25, 2024 (permalink)

Linguistics were crucial to establishing a role for computing in the humanities. During World War II, a Czech refugee, linguist Roman Jakobson, ran across Norbert Weiner’s cybernetics while studying in a program for French-speaking refugee professors set up at the New School. In that program, he recruited Claude Lévi-Strauss for a seminar on computing and the structure of things. That seminar transformed French, and eventually European, academe.

For my purposes, Robins’s short history leans a little too heavily in to Greece and Rome and hurries through the Twentieth Century, partly because Robins supposes that students will already know the recent ideas. Saussure gets about three pages, and that’s not really enough for me to follow. Still, this volume did what I asked it to do.

September 25, 2024 (permalink)

A strong collection of fascinating research on how cafés actually worked. Sartre and Beauvoir worked at Flore, sitting side by side. This was how books got written. The café was also the place one met with students, argued with colleagues, conspired against rivals.

September 22, 2024 (permalink)

The Digital Humanities began in Vienna cafés — notably the Arkaden — where a group of student philosophers and mathematicians worked out, for the first time, the power and the limitations of the computer. They had no interest at all in making machines: they were interested in those limitations.

I’m not sure Pinsker knows this story: he is more interested in the literary debates that went on at the other tables. But they’re part of the story, too: those students (mostly guys, but also a couple of young women) met at cafés because that is where you argued about ideas. And they were used to arguing about ideas because they were university students, and because they were Jews.

Everyone knows about those Vienna cafés, but that cafés were Jewish spaces was news to me. That so many of these students were Jews would have been, I think, news to them: they weren't religious, they weren’t observant, and their parents’ Judaism was, for some at least, a quaint family detail, of no importance. The world was about to prove them wrong, but they didn’t know that, not yet.

September 22, 2024 (permalink)

Annabel, an Oxford undergraduate, has an essay to write about Shakespeare’s sonnets. This novel is about a long Sunday, narrated in lively detail, during which learns a lot about the sonnets, and about dark ladies and sexy young men, The Scholar and The Seducer. A terrific, and at times a very funny, book.

September 22, 2024 (permalink)