Magpies

One of those oddly beautiful phrases Wikipedia throws up: "...belongs to the Holarctic radiation of monochrome magpies."

Binder

On we stride, carrying death with us at every step. [Image from Der Orchideengarten ('The Orchids-garden'), Phantastische Blätter or 'Fantastic Pages') was a German magazine that was published for 51 issues from January, 1919 until November, 1921].

Rolls versus codices

"Gradually the book in codex form superseded the papyrus roll. The literary codex was already known in the first century A.D., but in the second century more than 98% of the Greek literary texts which we possess were still written on rolls (the percentage might have been notably lower outside Egypt, but there is no specific reason to think so). In the third, fourth and fifth centuries the figures sink to 81%, 26% and 11%, respectively. One group in Egypt, however, had already long given its allegiance to the codex: the Christian biblical papyri of the second century, which are few (eleven are now known), are exclusively from codices. From roughly 300 A.D. the total production of literary texts in Egypt declined markedly, and those that were produced were mainly in codex form.

In order to understand this change we have to consider these two phenomena together: the overwhelming preference of the Christians for putting their holy books into codex form, and the much slower decision of those who wrote and commissioned non-Christian writings to change to the codex, a decision made during the last decades of the third century and the first decades of the fourth. [...] the suspicion must remain strong that the Christians saw some other specific advantage in the codex form, and, as others have suggested, this is likely to have been the greater ease with which a particular passage can be found in a codex. To find the passage which you want to read to the faithful or use against your opponent in a theological squabble, you would commonly have had to unroll up to ten feet of papyrus. How much easier to mark a page and turn to it immediately! It is interesting that in the lists of second-century codices that are unconnected with Christianity or Judaism, of which seventeen are currently known, six or more are texts which may have been needed for consultation and quotation more than for ordinary reading. Some are also texts which are likely to have been wanted in "one-volume" editions, such as Plato's Republic. Thus the codex had a number of advantages over the book-roll, and it should in general have made it easier for people to read literary texts. It certainly made it easier to look things up in a technical handbook, or in a legal textbook or in a collection of enactments such as was to be found in the new legal codes of the 290s. The victory of the codex over the book-roll was natural in an age in which religious books were gaining in relative importance, and in which consultation and quotation instead of independent and disinterested reading were becoming commoner.

The copying and the practical availability of secular literary texts underwent a decline which probably started in many places in the third century." [William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Harvard 1991), 194-95]

The Yorkshire Vampire Limerick

Listen t’t children of’t night:
They mak beautiful music, alright?
They’d sup up your blood
From Humber to Hudd-
ersfield—by Ilkla Moor 'at bite.

Marxism as a Philosophy of Wonder

"I would describe Marxism as a philosophy of wonder: what appear before consciousness, as objects of perception, are not simply given, but are effects of history. ‘Even the objects of the simplest “sensuous certainty” are only given him through social development, industry, and commercial intercourse.’ To learn to see what is ordinary, what has the character of ‘sensuous certainty’, is to read the effects of this history of production as a form of ‘world making’." [Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (EUP/Routledge 2004), 180]

Villains

In the preface to his 1911 play The Fountain, George Calderon says 'my inspiration was certainly not derived from [Shaw's] Widowers’ Houses. Bernard Shaw, like Lloyd George and all those nurtured in the socialism of the early eighties, still believes in the fantastic old Wicked Rich myth. Wren’s jaunty epigram "Villains are a literary invention of the Elizabethan drama inherited from the demonology of the Middle Ages" expresses a truth which has certainly never entered the Shavian head. Mr Shaw’s villainous landlord does not correspond to anything in real life, but is derived straight from the Iagos and Don Johns of the Tudor stage.'

I'm very struck by the line he quotes: ‘Villains are a literary invention of the Elizabethan drama inherited from the demonology of the Middle Ages’, but I can't seem to nail it down. Google is no help. I can't even be sure which Wren Calderon means (surely not this one? And if not him, then whom?). Still, the more I think about it, the more I find myself inclining towards its truth.

Adulthood's End?

"Nobody knows how to be a grown-up anymore. Adulthood as we have known it has become conceptually untenable."

'The Death of Adulthood in American Culture' by A O Scott. The article everyone's talking about (today, at any rate). It's very interesting, though -- I think -- wrong. How and why it's wrong will take a bit of unpacking, so I'm parking the link here until I've a bit more time.