The blogosphere is full of news of the latest litigation related to JK Rowling and the Harry Potter mythos. This Legal IQ post explains the background and parties: Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project Defends RDR Books Against Copyright Lawsuit Brought By J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros.
The case hinges on "fair use" - whether RDR Books' Harry Potter Lexicon has sufficient characteristics to allow its particular reassembly of material from Rowling's works. This is a subtle decision based on four criteria: 1) purpose (e.g. commercial or not); 2) nature of original (you can get away with reproducing more of a non-fictional work than a fictional); 3) how much of the original was used; and 4) market effect (i.e. does it undercut the market for the original?). See the Fair Use Network for more on this. Anthony Falzone, the defendant's lawyer (who is associated with the Stanford Center for Internet and Society's Fair Use Project) argues that the case is highly important, in that Rowling's winning would set a precedent majorly eroding the centuries-old right to create concordances and other derivative works. This idea is expanded in Joe Nocera's New York Times article, A Tight Grip Can Choke Creativity (bugmenot).
Dan Slater at the WSJ's Law Blog, reporting on the final day of the trial, thinks it looks good for the the defendant, RDR: Potter Trial: On Last Day, Defense Outshines Rowling. At Info/Law, Derek Bambauer, Assistant Professor of Law at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit, Michigan argues otherwise in Harry Potter and the Lexicon of Fair Use. Much of the legal argument is well over my head: I'd never heard of estoppel and laches - loosely, the doctrine that someone's case is weakened by their having acted in a way suggesting approval for what they're now complaining about - so I won't bother to speculate which way it'll go.
We won't know the result immediately: as this Bloomberg account says - J.K. Rowling Returns to Witness Stand, Defends Authors' Rights - the lawyers now have three weeks to submit final briefs. The presiding judge, U.S. District Judge Robert Patterson, had urged both sides to settle, mentioning Bleak House (the futile Jarndyce and Jarndyce case where legal costs ate up the disputed estate). But no deal. Whoever wins, it'll likely go to appeal, because both sides have strong interests to defend and deep pockets.
Wednesday, 16 April 2008
Tuesday, 15 April 2008
Views of the countryside
One well-represented area in Joel Segal Books is English topography, and I was just looking at A Corner of England, North Devon Landscapes and People, by the late James Ravilious. His work can be seen at James Ravilious - photographer of rural life and his scenes of North Devon life and landscape in the 1970s to 1990s show him as a masterly exponent of rural photography. Another photographer whose work I like is Simon McBride, whose The Spirit of England is a very nice collection of rural photos over England in general. The genre is fairly timeless - just focusing on the West Country, I can skim the shelves and find WA Poucher's Westcountry Journey and Photographic Memories of Devon and Cornwall from the Francis Firth Collection, as well as the pre-photography images of The Perfection of England, Artist visitors to Devon c. 1750-1870 (published in association with the 1995 University of Plymouth art exhibition of the same name).
It's all testimony to the long-lasting appeal of a beautiful landscape, both of Devon and of England itself......skreet! (FX: the scratched-record noise that's the TV convention when stopping unreliable narratives prior to debunking). At this point I'll contrast another photographic publication that came in recently: Rural myths was the theme of issue #12 of the now-defunct photographic journal Ten.8. Founded by a group of Birmingham-based photographers and journalists including Derek Bishton, explored an alternative/activist agenda on photography in relation to areas such racism, unemployment and social unrest, along with an general brief of analysing the meaning of photography. Rural Myths makes a strong case for the essentially pernicious nature of many of the conventions of rural photography, arguing that imagery of rural scenes has been shaped, from the start, by the social and political agendas of those making the pictures.
For instance, John Taylor's "The imaginary landscape" looks at how 19th century photography portrayed as "natural" a landscape that was actually radically transformed by agriculture and, especially, how it omitted rural poverty; and Stevie Bezencenet's "Landscape - Image - Property" looks at how photography's view of landscape as a prompt for aesthetic pleasure almost never confronts the reality of the land as property. Terry Morden's "The Pastoral and the Pictorial" and Peter Dormer's "Fantasy Island" both look at how photographic conventions tie into maintaining a certain reactionary status quo about the countryside: as a place that is expected to remain picturesque. This is a controversial topic that I won't go into here, but it deserves consideration because, if Ten.8's thesis is true, it affects not merely photography but many topical debates about land use (consider any debate where the word "eyesore" crops up).
It's interesting to re-read the photographic books in this light, as some are more in recognition of such issues than others. Full marks to Photographic Memories, which notes the focus on beauty and tranquility but makes clear that this is primarily because the Frith photos were picture postcards intended as holiday mementoes. Zero marks to The Spirit of England, which apart from one "powerful" scene of cooling towers treats England as an anachronistic pastoral landscape (for instance, boats are predominantly sail, and roads predominantly empty - a selective view in 1989). The Rural Myths point about lack of social and historical reality definitely applies to its picture of Slapton Ley, whose caption mentions its use for D-Day landing practice but not the most significant event of that time and place, the Operation Tiger disaster. Middling marks to A Corner of England: James Ravilious does portray cars, motorbikes, shops and a school computer alongside consciously archaic aspects of the countryside such as horse-drawn ploughing. Its intro by Robin Ravilious also acknowledges that the North Devon landscape is a man-made one, but nevertheless attempts to strongly evoke stereotypes of regret at the loss of the "old ways", and ascribes a particular character - "gentle melancholy" - to the landscape.
I'm not sure where I stand on this. On the one hand, Ten.8 makes a very strong case, but it has a rather Dave Spart edge to it that doesn't fully acknowledge the genuine beauty of many rural locations and the strong effect they have on people. On the other, a yearning for an unspoilt rural world is an aesthetic that runs deep in the English collective pysche, and if that yearning is based on unrealistic fantasy, it's right to expose it to analysis.
-Ray
Addendum: in all this, I forgot a book I have at home, Britain from the Air by Jason Hawkes. Hawkes' work has won numerous awards, and genuinely reflects the diversity of British landscape, everything from wilderness, via farmland and ancient towns, to the most intensely urbanised areas.
It's all testimony to the long-lasting appeal of a beautiful landscape, both of Devon and of England itself......skreet! (FX: the scratched-record noise that's the TV convention when stopping unreliable narratives prior to debunking). At this point I'll contrast another photographic publication that came in recently: Rural myths was the theme of issue #12 of the now-defunct photographic journal Ten.8. Founded by a group of Birmingham-based photographers and journalists including Derek Bishton, explored an alternative/activist agenda on photography in relation to areas such racism, unemployment and social unrest, along with an general brief of analysing the meaning of photography. Rural Myths makes a strong case for the essentially pernicious nature of many of the conventions of rural photography, arguing that imagery of rural scenes has been shaped, from the start, by the social and political agendas of those making the pictures.
For instance, John Taylor's "The imaginary landscape" looks at how 19th century photography portrayed as "natural" a landscape that was actually radically transformed by agriculture and, especially, how it omitted rural poverty; and Stevie Bezencenet's "Landscape - Image - Property" looks at how photography's view of landscape as a prompt for aesthetic pleasure almost never confronts the reality of the land as property. Terry Morden's "The Pastoral and the Pictorial" and Peter Dormer's "Fantasy Island" both look at how photographic conventions tie into maintaining a certain reactionary status quo about the countryside: as a place that is expected to remain picturesque. This is a controversial topic that I won't go into here, but it deserves consideration because, if Ten.8's thesis is true, it affects not merely photography but many topical debates about land use (consider any debate where the word "eyesore" crops up).
It's interesting to re-read the photographic books in this light, as some are more in recognition of such issues than others. Full marks to Photographic Memories, which notes the focus on beauty and tranquility but makes clear that this is primarily because the Frith photos were picture postcards intended as holiday mementoes. Zero marks to The Spirit of England, which apart from one "powerful" scene of cooling towers treats England as an anachronistic pastoral landscape (for instance, boats are predominantly sail, and roads predominantly empty - a selective view in 1989). The Rural Myths point about lack of social and historical reality definitely applies to its picture of Slapton Ley, whose caption mentions its use for D-Day landing practice but not the most significant event of that time and place, the Operation Tiger disaster. Middling marks to A Corner of England: James Ravilious does portray cars, motorbikes, shops and a school computer alongside consciously archaic aspects of the countryside such as horse-drawn ploughing. Its intro by Robin Ravilious also acknowledges that the North Devon landscape is a man-made one, but nevertheless attempts to strongly evoke stereotypes of regret at the loss of the "old ways", and ascribes a particular character - "gentle melancholy" - to the landscape.
I'm not sure where I stand on this. On the one hand, Ten.8 makes a very strong case, but it has a rather Dave Spart edge to it that doesn't fully acknowledge the genuine beauty of many rural locations and the strong effect they have on people. On the other, a yearning for an unspoilt rural world is an aesthetic that runs deep in the English collective pysche, and if that yearning is based on unrealistic fantasy, it's right to expose it to analysis.
-Ray
Addendum: in all this, I forgot a book I have at home, Britain from the Air by Jason Hawkes. Hawkes' work has won numerous awards, and genuinely reflects the diversity of British landscape, everything from wilderness, via farmland and ancient towns, to the most intensely urbanised areas.
Thursday, 10 April 2008
Rural photography - the shaping of aesthetics
I've just been reading Rural myths, #12 - a theme issue of the defunct photographic journal Ten.8 that came by the bookshop where I work.
Ten.8, founded by a group of Birmingham-based photographers and journalists including Derek Bishton, explored an alternative/activist agenda on photography in relation to areas such racism, unemployment and social unrest, along with an general brief of analysing the meaning of photography. Who photographs and what influences their topics? Who benefits from its display? And so on. If the Rural Myths issue is representative, even if you don't agree with the politics this is a thought-provoking approach and one unusual in photographic magazines, which largely focus on the nuts-and-bolts of hardware and technique, and, at most, practical issues of the rights and responsibilities of photographers.
Rural Myths contains several essays on the same theme: how photography of rural scenes has been shaped, from the start, by the social and political agendas of those taking the pictures. For instance, John Taylor's "The imaginary landscape" looks at how 19th century photography portrayed as "natural" a landscape that was actually radically transformed by agriculture and, especially, how it omitted rural poverty; and Stevie Bezencenet's "Landscape - Image - Property" looks at how photography's view of landscape as a prompt for aesthetic pleasure almost never confronts the reality of the land as property. Terry Morden's "The Pastoral and the Pictorial" and Peter Dormer's "Fantasy Island" both look at how photographic conventions tie into maintaining a certain reactionary status quo about the countryside: as a place that is expected to remain picturesque for the benefit of viewing by those who don't work there.
There are interesting asides about how conventions alter in relation to current opinion: for instance, how the 19th century's traditional artistic convention of offsetting salient features became modified by early 20th century didactic tourist publications into centralising objects of interest. It's somewhat embarrassing, as a photographer, to find yourself repeating the conventions described, such as the urge to eliminate modernity, concentrating on the folksiest parts of town and country. It'd be naive to deny that such conventions work in the sense of pushing the right buttons - any number of my own photos fit into the stereotypes of the "Englishness" of a scene, and I wouldn't have taken the picture if making the composition didn't have that effect on me quite intensely. But at least that self-knowledge might make me think a little more about breaking out of that script.
This aesthetic I think runs deep in the English collective pysche; it applies not merely to photographing rural landscapes, but is also a factor in shaping policy about land use. Attitudes to rural land are not permanent fixtures; historically, parts of rural England were intensely industrialised, such as the mining districts of Cornwall and West Devon, Even the quintessentially rural Kent, the "Garden of Engand", contained the Kent Coalfield (which remains surprisingly little-known despite the last pit closing as recently as the late 1980s).
A Kent coalfield would be inconceivable now, as would many other projects such as building a new railway tunnelling through spectacular coastal scenery, as Brunel did at Dawlish. We've moved now into an era where conservation is the dominant philosophy, where the aesthetic appearance of English rural landscape is a major factor in the debates over, for example, polytunnels, windfarms and new towns. It's right to consider the local and regional impact of such developments, but Rural Myths is interesting in highlighting the role in such considerations of ingrained and sometimes simply untrue memes of what kind of landscape rural Britain was, is, and should be.
- Ray
Ten.8, founded by a group of Birmingham-based photographers and journalists including Derek Bishton, explored an alternative/activist agenda on photography in relation to areas such racism, unemployment and social unrest, along with an general brief of analysing the meaning of photography. Who photographs and what influences their topics? Who benefits from its display? And so on. If the Rural Myths issue is representative, even if you don't agree with the politics this is a thought-provoking approach and one unusual in photographic magazines, which largely focus on the nuts-and-bolts of hardware and technique, and, at most, practical issues of the rights and responsibilities of photographers.
Rural Myths contains several essays on the same theme: how photography of rural scenes has been shaped, from the start, by the social and political agendas of those taking the pictures. For instance, John Taylor's "The imaginary landscape" looks at how 19th century photography portrayed as "natural" a landscape that was actually radically transformed by agriculture and, especially, how it omitted rural poverty; and Stevie Bezencenet's "Landscape - Image - Property" looks at how photography's view of landscape as a prompt for aesthetic pleasure almost never confronts the reality of the land as property. Terry Morden's "The Pastoral and the Pictorial" and Peter Dormer's "Fantasy Island" both look at how photographic conventions tie into maintaining a certain reactionary status quo about the countryside: as a place that is expected to remain picturesque for the benefit of viewing by those who don't work there.
There are interesting asides about how conventions alter in relation to current opinion: for instance, how the 19th century's traditional artistic convention of offsetting salient features became modified by early 20th century didactic tourist publications into centralising objects of interest. It's somewhat embarrassing, as a photographer, to find yourself repeating the conventions described, such as the urge to eliminate modernity, concentrating on the folksiest parts of town and country. It'd be naive to deny that such conventions work in the sense of pushing the right buttons - any number of my own photos fit into the stereotypes of the "Englishness" of a scene, and I wouldn't have taken the picture if making the composition didn't have that effect on me quite intensely. But at least that self-knowledge might make me think a little more about breaking out of that script.
This aesthetic I think runs deep in the English collective pysche; it applies not merely to photographing rural landscapes, but is also a factor in shaping policy about land use. Attitudes to rural land are not permanent fixtures; historically, parts of rural England were intensely industrialised, such as the mining districts of Cornwall and West Devon, Even the quintessentially rural Kent, the "Garden of Engand", contained the Kent Coalfield (which remains surprisingly little-known despite the last pit closing as recently as the late 1980s).
A Kent coalfield would be inconceivable now, as would many other projects such as building a new railway tunnelling through spectacular coastal scenery, as Brunel did at Dawlish. We've moved now into an era where conservation is the dominant philosophy, where the aesthetic appearance of English rural landscape is a major factor in the debates over, for example, polytunnels, windfarms and new towns. It's right to consider the local and regional impact of such developments, but Rural Myths is interesting in highlighting the role in such considerations of ingrained and sometimes simply untrue memes of what kind of landscape rural Britain was, is, and should be.
- Ray
Wednesday, 9 April 2008
Tea and performance in The Cafe
 On Sunday 6th April, the Cafe in Topsham kindly hosted a get-together for friends and customers as an official opening event for the new book annexe of The Cafe. Along with tea and cake, by fortunate circumstance we were able to have as guests the American poet Jay Leeming and the British storyteller Martin Shaw. Jay Leeming read from his anthology Dynamite on A China Plate (examples here), and Martin Shaw told one of the many versions of the story from Celtic mythology, Fionn Mac Cumhail And The Old Man's House. I didn't know the speakers' background at the time, but Googling, I find that both have literary and philosophical connections with the eminent poet Robert Bly (both, for instance, attended Bly's 2007 Minnesota Men's Conference). Bly is, rightly or wrongly, probably best known outside the poetry field as the author of the controversial 1990 bestseller Iron John: A Book About Men. This essentially sought to rediscover, via mythology, archteypal truths about the nature of the male role (for instance, the importance of initiation ritual) whose lack, Bly argued, was behind a cultural malaise among American men. Iron John, rooted around Bly's analysis of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale Iron Hans, was a leading inspiration behind the Mythopoetic men's movement. In this light, the connection becomes clear with Martin Shaw's work, which focuses on applying mythological insights about initiatory ritual and rites of passage to skills such as leadership. - Ray |
Saturday, 29 March 2008
Bookshelves galore
Via MetaFilter: Bookshelf, a niche weblog devoted entirely to documenting creative and often bizarre bookshelf designs, along with trompe l'oeil decor, wallpapers and other imitations of bookshelves.
- Ray
- Ray
Wednesday, 26 March 2008
Strychnine - a lesser-known past
Today at the bookshop I found a little book behind the counter, Principal Drugs and Their Uses, a 1934 Faber & Faber pocket guide for nurses by A.L. Morton (a tutor from the Royal College of Nursing, not the Marxist historian Arthur Leslie Morton.
There a quite a few surprises; the book reveals the 1930s to be an era when morphine and opium derivatives were still commonly prescribed as sedatives, diamorphine (i.e. heroin) for bronchitis and various coughs, and mercury compounds (under picturesque names like blue pill and grey powder) as laxatives. Probably the scariest example, though, is strychnine: "General tonic. Prescribed in various nervous disorders. It is among the most valuable and widely prescribed drugs".
The useful property was that strychnine, in small doses, is a stimulant. This, however, led to its misuse, before amphetamines came on the scene, as a performance-enhancing drug in athletes (this use was apparently known to the ancient Greeks, but lost until its rediscovery in the 1800s). The book Doping in Sports (page 233, Detlef Thieme & Peter Hemmersbach, Springer, 2010) mentions its use by 19th century cyclists, and its possible implication in the death of the Welsh champion cyclist Arthur Linton in 1896. It was also one of the drugs used in the now-defunct Victorian sport of pedestrianism.
Pedestrianism took various forms, sometimes cross-country, but its classic version was a gruelling track-based race called a Six-Day Go As You Please or a "Wobble". Competitors walked around a track for six days, the winner being the one who covered the greatest mileage. Entrants came from a broad social spectrum, from elite gentleman athletes to the lowest working classes (for instance, men who had developed superhuman stamina working as navvies), and the races attracted big money, both in prizes and the associated betting.
The record distance was set in 1888 by George Littlewood, who covered 623.75 miles (an average pace of 4.33 miles per hour) despite bad burns from a saboteur setting fire to his alcohol footbath. Littlewood's achievement was finally bettered by a modern ultramarathon runner, but even before that, the physiologist BB Lloyd wasn't far wrong in his 1966 description of this as "probably the maximum sustained output of which the human frame is capable". See Athletics: Littlewood's giant strides ("The Anniversary: 110 years ago an Englishman defied sabotage and fatigue to run 623 miles" - Simon Turnbull, The Independent, 29th November 1998).
Running Through the Ages by Edward S Sears has a detailed history, "The Struggle for the Astley Belt" (previewed at Google Books) surrounding the most famous promoter of these races, the sports enthusiast and politican Sir John Astley. This contemporary account by J. Ewing Ritchie, quoted at Lee Jackson's The Victorian Dictionary - Chapter VIII, Pedestrianism - gives something of the flavour of the races, as does this 1888 New York Times piece about an American race at Madison Square Gardens, Started by the Marquis.; the Go-As-You-Please pedestrians all hard at work.
As to the point: strychnine and pedestrianism form the backdrop to an excellent crime novel by Peter Lovesey, Wobble to Death. His debut novel, the first in his Sergeant Cribb series, it won the Panther/Macmillan First Crime Novel Competition and is a fine example of building a story around bizarre-but-authentic historical detail. I won't spoil the plot for you, except to say that it involves the mystery surrounding the sudden death of a competitor in mid-race, under circumstances where possession of strychnine doesn't necessarily prove murderous intent.
- Ray
Update, February 7, 2013
Ptak Science Books has a piece - Strychnine for Weak Women, 1920 - mentioning a patent medicine called Nuxated Iron, which undoubtedly relied on the stimulant effect of strychnine.
There a quite a few surprises; the book reveals the 1930s to be an era when morphine and opium derivatives were still commonly prescribed as sedatives, diamorphine (i.e. heroin) for bronchitis and various coughs, and mercury compounds (under picturesque names like blue pill and grey powder) as laxatives. Probably the scariest example, though, is strychnine: "General tonic. Prescribed in various nervous disorders. It is among the most valuable and widely prescribed drugs".
The useful property was that strychnine, in small doses, is a stimulant. This, however, led to its misuse, before amphetamines came on the scene, as a performance-enhancing drug in athletes (this use was apparently known to the ancient Greeks, but lost until its rediscovery in the 1800s). The book Doping in Sports (page 233, Detlef Thieme & Peter Hemmersbach, Springer, 2010) mentions its use by 19th century cyclists, and its possible implication in the death of the Welsh champion cyclist Arthur Linton in 1896. It was also one of the drugs used in the now-defunct Victorian sport of pedestrianism.
Pedestrianism took various forms, sometimes cross-country, but its classic version was a gruelling track-based race called a Six-Day Go As You Please or a "Wobble". Competitors walked around a track for six days, the winner being the one who covered the greatest mileage. Entrants came from a broad social spectrum, from elite gentleman athletes to the lowest working classes (for instance, men who had developed superhuman stamina working as navvies), and the races attracted big money, both in prizes and the associated betting.
The record distance was set in 1888 by George Littlewood, who covered 623.75 miles (an average pace of 4.33 miles per hour) despite bad burns from a saboteur setting fire to his alcohol footbath. Littlewood's achievement was finally bettered by a modern ultramarathon runner, but even before that, the physiologist BB Lloyd wasn't far wrong in his 1966 description of this as "probably the maximum sustained output of which the human frame is capable". See Athletics: Littlewood's giant strides ("The Anniversary: 110 years ago an Englishman defied sabotage and fatigue to run 623 miles" - Simon Turnbull, The Independent, 29th November 1998).
Running Through the Ages by Edward S Sears has a detailed history, "The Struggle for the Astley Belt" (previewed at Google Books) surrounding the most famous promoter of these races, the sports enthusiast and politican Sir John Astley. This contemporary account by J. Ewing Ritchie, quoted at Lee Jackson's The Victorian Dictionary - Chapter VIII, Pedestrianism - gives something of the flavour of the races, as does this 1888 New York Times piece about an American race at Madison Square Gardens, Started by the Marquis.; the Go-As-You-Please pedestrians all hard at work.
As to the point: strychnine and pedestrianism form the backdrop to an excellent crime novel by Peter Lovesey, Wobble to Death. His debut novel, the first in his Sergeant Cribb series, it won the Panther/Macmillan First Crime Novel Competition and is a fine example of building a story around bizarre-but-authentic historical detail. I won't spoil the plot for you, except to say that it involves the mystery surrounding the sudden death of a competitor in mid-race, under circumstances where possession of strychnine doesn't necessarily prove murderous intent.
- Ray
Update, February 7, 2013
Ptak Science Books has a piece - Strychnine for Weak Women, 1920 - mentioning a patent medicine called Nuxated Iron, which undoubtedly relied on the stimulant effect of strychnine.
Thursday, 20 March 2008
Tryphena Sparks' grave
I just added a minor addendum to the Hardy perennials post: a photo of the grave of Tryphena Gale (born Tryphena Sparks), Thomas Hardy's cousin and possible lover in his younger days. A friend kindly helped us through a gap in the hedge to show us the location.
-Ray
-Ray
Friday, 14 March 2008
Victorian waterbeds
Minding the shop this morning, I had a very interesting phone conversation when I answered a call to relay a message intended for Lily. It turned into a discussion of Henry Mayhew, Gibson & Sterling's The Difference Engine, and the whole area of research for novels - particularly the problem of when research conflicts with popular belief. Sarah, the caller, mentioned the problem of a writer using the word "beverage" in a mediaeval setting. It's totally authentic for the period - from the OED:
But to most readers the word has a modern flavour that jars.
The message for Lily regarded waterbeds. Surely a quintessentially 1960s invention? Yet this concerned a reference in Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 novel North and South: Mrs Hale is ill, and from Chapter 21 - The Dark Night - onward there are a number of references to a waterbed.
In fact it's mentioned so many times over the next few chapters that you'd almost suspect product placement. I promised I'd try to find details, and here they are: Google Books finds a couple of contemporary texts online. An Encyclopaedia of Domestic Economy (1855), pp. 309-311, mentions Dr. Arnott's Hydrostatic Bed, which is described in more detail in a London Medical and Surgical Journal article, Volume II, 1833 (pp. 165-168). Essentially this waterbed was a trough of water covered with an "India rubber cloth" - rubber-impregnated canvas - upon which other bedding was laid. Its use wasn't recreational or novelty-value, but medical.
As the latter article reports, Dr. Arnott made no proprietary claims to the construction, and it appears to have had genuine medical benefits by evenly distributing pressure, preventing pressure sores that were common with invalids lying on hard mattresses (which were typically stuffed with wool or horsehair). The article comments that spiral spring mattresses, predating this by some 70 years, had similar potential. But the concept had gone into patent, confining it to the luxury market and stifling modifications for medical purposes.
- Ray
c1325 E.E. Allit. P. B. 1433 Bryng hem now to my borde, of beuerage hem fylles
But to most readers the word has a modern flavour that jars.
The message for Lily regarded waterbeds. Surely a quintessentially 1960s invention? Yet this concerned a reference in Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 novel North and South: Mrs Hale is ill, and from Chapter 21 - The Dark Night - onward there are a number of references to a waterbed.
But, I think, if we could get a water-bed it might be a good thing. Not but what she will be better to-morrow; pretty much like herself as she was before this attack. Still, I should like her to have a water-bed. Mrs. Thornton has one, I know. I'll try and call there this afternoon. Stay,' said he, his eye catching on Margaret's face, blanched with watching in a sick room, 'I'm not sure whether I can go; I've a long round to take. It would do you no harm to have a brisk walk to Marlborough Street, and ask Mrs. Thornton if she can spare it.'
In fact it's mentioned so many times over the next few chapters that you'd almost suspect product placement. I promised I'd try to find details, and here they are: Google Books finds a couple of contemporary texts online. An Encyclopaedia of Domestic Economy (1855), pp. 309-311, mentions Dr. Arnott's Hydrostatic Bed, which is described in more detail in a London Medical and Surgical Journal article, Volume II, 1833 (pp. 165-168). Essentially this waterbed was a trough of water covered with an "India rubber cloth" - rubber-impregnated canvas - upon which other bedding was laid. Its use wasn't recreational or novelty-value, but medical.
As the latter article reports, Dr. Arnott made no proprietary claims to the construction, and it appears to have had genuine medical benefits by evenly distributing pressure, preventing pressure sores that were common with invalids lying on hard mattresses (which were typically stuffed with wool or horsehair). The article comments that spiral spring mattresses, predating this by some 70 years, had similar potential. But the concept had gone into patent, confining it to the luxury market and stifling modifications for medical purposes.
- Ray
Sunday, 9 March 2008
Predictions
Much the same applies in literature. Some works are deliberate attempts to predict: I've previously mentioned here the accuracies and inaccuracies in HG Wells' The Shape of Things to Come (see ... and roads not taken). Others are clear satire: it's the reviewers who insist on phraseologies like "a chilling prediction". A particular case in point is George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. It's very worth reading Anthony Burgess' 1985 - reviewed here by Martin Amis - which apart from its own dystopian tribute to Nineteen Eighty-Four includes a series of essays on the roots and themes of Orwell's book, such as a reflection on the language of IngSoc, and the connections with Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We, which also may have influenced Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
Burgess argues highly convincingly that Nineteen Eighty-Four is a very dark satire on the period it was written, a period in which wartime alliance with Russia had turned instantly into the Cold War (akin to the shifting but officially nonexistent alliance shifts in Nineteen Eighty-Four). Anyone from that era, Burgess writes, will remember the rationing, the shortage of razor blades, and the Bennett Correspondence College with its post-war "Let me be your big brother" advertisements. * Room 101 was a hated conference room at the BBC's Broadcasting House.
Burgess's 1985, incidentally, is itself no exception to the rule of predictions being wrong; it is partly right, though many years late, in its portrayal of the importance of Islam, but completely wrong in its expectation of trade union dominance, which in the real world was dismantled in the Thatcher era.
Addendum inserted 31/7/208: I highly recommend Dr Ralph Harrington's paper ‘The old enemy’: Anthony Burgess and Islam, which is a detailed analysis of Burgess' views on Islam, which in 1978 were remarkably prescient.
Of peripheral interest, I notice that the Sylvester Stallone film Demolition Man is on UK television this week. If you're of a mind to do so, it can be read as an adaptation of Brave New World (among other explicit allusions, one main character is called Lenina Huxley) though the relationship is even looser than that between Terry Gilliam's Brazil and Nineteen Eighty-Four that inspired it.
- Ray
Wednesday, 5 March 2008
Bookshelves by colour
This one might especially interest Lily (whose colour-coordinated window displays are a popular and regularly-changing feature of the shop). At COLORlovers, there's a very nice blog post, Organizing bookshelves by color, on just this subject. It cites the Rainbow of Books Flickr group, which has further pretty examples. Perhaps the most ambitious example, though, was in 2004 when the artist Chris Cobb persuaded Adobe Bookshop, San Francisco, to let him reclassify its used book section (some 20,000 books) on this basis as a public installation called "There Is Nothing Wrong In This Whole Wide World". Here are some pictures.
- Ray
- Ray
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