one hundred and twenty-six

If I were to ever get a tattoo (sometimes I am tempted, but am so fickle that anything involving permanence freaks me out) I would want it to look something like this lovely little fox, a marginal drawing in Gerald of Wale's 'History and Topography of Ireland'.

(ps the British Library's online gallery of illuminated manuscripts in wonderful)

one hundred and fifteen

The Museum of London has made me want to buy an iphone.

They've launched an app, StreetMuseum, which guides users to various points in London where, via the iphone screen, historical images of the city appear.

Like this.

 

The word palimpsest describes a manuscript page from which text has been scraped off, so that it can be used again. These images are reverse palimpsests, then: the past refound and layered again on the surface.

one hundred and thirteen

'Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow,

The small raine down can raine.

Cryst, if my love were in my armes

And I in my bedde again!'

Some things don't change, no matter how many hundreds of years go by.

one hundred and seven

When my mum came back to London to celebrate her birthday, she stopped off at her sister's to pick up a big box of old photos.

It is strange to think of people I know or knew - my grandparents, my mum and her siblings, my mum's best friend - being alive in decades that I cannot help but think of as slightly fictional.

Granddad

Nan

My granddad and uncle

sixty-seven

For over a decade, leading cellist Beatrice Harrison dueted with nightingales.

In 1922, she had moved to the Surrey countryside, to an isolated house surrounded by woodland. Practising in the garden one afternoon, she was amazed when a bird joined in with her song: it followed her own trills, staying in tune with the cello.

She persuaded Lord Reith, the director of the BBC, to send a crew to her garden to record this duet. It was to be the very first live outdoor broadcast and Reith - despite his objections of cost - could not resist.

A million people listened to this first recording, and Harrison was almost smothered with fan mail; the duet became an annual event, carrying on for twelve years until Harrison moved house. After that, the broadcasts featured the nightingales alone. The pieces are lovely and ethereal, marrying human music and bird song in a strange partnership.

The transmission from 1942, however, is more chilling: the live broadcast was pulled when duty engineer realised he could hear the hum of approaching aircraft - not what the BBC wanted to be broadcasting in wartime.

And that distant burring of engines records the British airforce on their way to raid Mannheim, part of the 'Thousand Bomber' policy that would see German towns - most notably Cologne - devastated.

Some of the recordings, including the one made in 1942, can be heard here.

sixty-five

New (totally beautiful) glasses!

It feels so good to be able to see clearly again; I had forgotten that the world is not made of fuzzy edges and blurred pink ovals for faces.

I do worry that come the apocalypse I will be utterly useless: my glasses will break and I'll get eaten by a radioactive rat or something. I would probably have been equally useless living at any other point in history - tripping over people in a pleasure garden, messing up my needlework, misplaying the piano, accidently snubbing prospective suitors as I blundered past them in the street, half-blind... (for some reason I can only think of eighteenth century situations. The supervisors who taught me medieval history would be ashamed).

The earliest written record of using magnification to aid reading dates to the first century AD (Seneca the Younger writes, 'Letter, however small and indistinct, are seen enlarged and more clearly through a globe or glass filled with water'), my weak-eyeling ancestors had to wait a few hundred years for wearable glasses. A portrait of Cardinal Hugh de Provence, painted in 1352 by Tommaso da Modena, is the first pictorial evidence for eyeglasses:

Hey medieval dude, nice hat and specs. (And that is the cutting historical analysis that got me my degree in history.)

sixty-three

danse macabre

From the 1493 Nuremburg Chronicle

Now waggles the leg, and now wriggles the thigh,

As the troop with strange gestures advance,

And a rattle and clatter anon rises high,

As of one beating time to the dance. - Goethe, Totentanz

Holbein

My brain has been in my bones of late - maybe it is because it is already getting colder at night, and a chill has crept in past my flesh and settled in them. I've been drawn to all things skeletal, these lovely intricate illustrations in particular: they depict the dance of death, a popular motif in medieval Europe that reminded people of their mortality and the folly of human ambition; humans may construct social hierarchies, but we are all equal in death.

Book of Hours, Paris, c.1507

Dance of Death, Paris, 1486

Also, I love woodcuts. I wish books still had them.

forty-six

it has been a long time since a what i wore post. voila - and yes, the moody face was part of the outfit. as you can see, my fringe is the same length as the entire history of humanity. i think it has some kind of sentience, coupled with a vendetta against me (since it does its best to blind me/make me walk out in front of cars). i am getting it cut in two weeks, and that day can't come soon enough.

i spent some of today in the british library, as i have done for many days recently. i get to do a morning commute, which i love. travelling on a just-after-rush-hour train is great, as the train isn't like a can of sardines, but it is still early enough for a few business type people to be journeying to work. when i am dressed somewhat smartly (translation: in a blazer) i pretend i too am an adult person with a proper job who Reads Newspapers and has Responsibilities (the job changes daily: today i worked in an small, eccentric architect's office, as a PA). the library visits are because i am doing some research for the Guardian newspaper. this is incredibly exciting because:

1) i love the guardian! it is the middle-class leftie paper of choice.

2) i get paid to sit around reading about kings and queens, picking the most quirky or scandalous things to write about.

3) um, did you see the two above points?

i love the british library. you get a seat number and you have to collect your books from the front desk (leaving me to imagine the labyrinth within. i do like searching about for books myself, but this is the one place i will embrace other people doing the fetching. sometimes things are better left to the imagination). there are reading rooms on three floors, in a kind of receding balcony arrangement; this means that one wall reaches from the bottom to the top, a white cliff face, giving the rooms an airiness and sense of magnitude. when the sun shines through the windows, it leaves little bars of light on this wall, like DNA coding. it is very lovely.

today i was reading about queen victoria, who is actually quite amusing, and william iv , who once complained that he missed england - because the nice westminster girls didn't give him the pox when he fucked them. oh, you dignified royals. i am slightly concerned about my ability to finish the project on time... i shall just breathe deeply and (thankyou, hitchhiker's guide) not panic.

seventeen

today was an essay-writing day, as well a reading-all-the-sources-i-didn't-read-during-the-week-for-my-class-tomorrow day. a very hyphen full kind of day, as you can see.


i spent far too many hours in this position, or variations of it. i have not yet been able to work out a way to sit at a desk comfortably; it's been two and a half years of historianing now, surely, SURELY that is a long enough time to solve the problem? alas, i just end up slumped backward, feet rested in pulledout drawers -me and my desk are intimate friends. happily, i had grapefruit squash to help me through this diffcult time (see the mug? it's covered in little illustrations of gardening implements. why? noone knows. it is simply brilliant, and there are no further explanations needed).

the reading and writing would have probably taken less time had i not been sucked into flickr- damn you, beautiful, seductive flickr. what kind of person makes BAJILLIONS of wonderful photographs available to me on my laptop? what kind of person does that to a girl trying to do work? eh? eh? mean sadists, that's who.

favourites of the day:



from cluttershop



from Vaguery, who has a fantastic collection of public
domain images, like this one (which, if i'm honest
i found a while back, not today- but it is so beautiful
that i have to gaze upon it periodically)



a girl after my own heart.



thank you, michal, for making my day a bit more beautiful.

thirteen

My college history society held its annual dinner on friday: a good, oldfashioned five course meal (!!!. that is the only response i can properly articulate. cambridge is a strange place to me, still), complete with a ridiculous amount of cutlery and four different kinds of wine glass. the whole of the college's history 'community' is invited, from lowly undergraduates to the mountaintop high Regius Professor of Modern History, making for lots of awkward conversation. The four different kinds of wine help to lessen this awkwardness.

The meal was very nice, and my absolute fear of being sat next to a scarily intelligent historian was somewhat assuaged by her lovely normalness (the waiter acicdently poured her red wine into the wrong glass, and apologised profusely; after he'd left, she looked confused, and said very quietly, 'but all these wine glasses look the SAME'). It was the after-party, however, that made the night: we all went back to my friend D's room, and when i say all i do mean us normal undergrads and ALL OF OUR PROFESSORS, including mister.Regius Professor. it is quite a surreal thing to see the man who holds one of the most senior positions in our history faculty getting completely drunk in the corner of my friend's room.

to cut a long, rambling, alcoholsaturated story short, i ended up trying to explain lolcats to a man credited with being the cleverest young historian around.

'oh, right, does that stand for laugh-out-loud cats? why is she telling me this?'

yes, and it also stands for 'OH DEAR GOD I AM A DRUNKEN IDIOT'.

sigh. lesson of the night: lolcats should remain within the realm of the internet. also, do not try and verbally teach someone leetspeak.

twelve

oh dear. the neglect has started already- such a shame, in a blog so young. ANYWAY. look forward, not back, right? right? am i right? i'm right, right? right?

right.

this week i am reading about education and the enlightenment, a subject brimburstingfull of the (now) amusing views of stuffy old misogynist men on female reading. take John Bennett, for example, in the moral and instructional programme he addressed to his niece, Lucy:

'Plays, operas, masquerades, and all other fashionable pleasures have not half so much danger to young people, as the reading of these books.'

(folks, he's talking about novels. EVIL, CORRUPTING, SEDUCTIVE, IMMORAL NOVELS. consider yourself warned, and stay away from the bookshop, unless it's one that only stocks bibles, and knitting patterns.)

And it's not the young people in general he is worried about; no, he is in pure paternalistic, save-the-fragile-girls SUPERMAN mode, asserting that reading is particularly damaging because girls can do it 'in private, without any censure, and the poison operates more forcibly, because unperceived'.

WHAT IS THE SOLUTION TO THIS MORAL CRISIS, JOHN??

oh, i see, educate girls at home, where they can be under the 'immediate inspection' of their parents at all hours, and have their daytimes 'strictly arranged'. Good.




i read somewhere, a very long time ago, that comedy is often tragedy from a distance (i think it was in a paula danziger book. what, they had loads of well good moral messages). two hundred years is a good amount of distance, it seems.