A Word Tree is a very basic idea. You cut out small leaves from brightly coloured paper, you write down positive words about yourself (or get others to name your positive traits if you cannot think of any), and you tie those leaves to a branch you put in a vase on your coffee table/window sill.

I know the younger version of me would have called that idea all sorts of names, but these days I am a bit gentler, less derisive and less prone to name-calling. Although don’t ask me to Feel the Fear or say icky positive affirmations into the mirror. I have standards.

A few assorted links:

• I absolutely love these photos from a quilt exhibition. How inspirational.
• I have discovered the entire In Our Time radio archive which has actually made the choppy seas much less choppy. Bonus joy: Lawrence Rainey appeared in the IOT podcast on TS Eliot. I shrieked with ill-contained glee. Fangirl. Related: The Scottish Network of Modernist Studies meets just down the road. Maybe one day..
• When craft & print culture collide: hand-sewn Penguin book jackets.
• The curtain at the Oslo Opera House is really quite special.
• I’ll be in Edinburgh for work this week and I’ll be heading here for post-work snacks. I cannot wait.

Spending cuts hurt. Before Christmas, many of my physicist friends were shocked when spending cuts to the tune of £115m were made in the science research sector. When I graduated from university in Denmark some seven or eight years ago, I saw what huge spending cuts will do to scientific research. It was not pretty. My then-department went from being autonomous with at least six new PhD students every year to being yoked together with five other subjects and get one PhD student every other year. The departmental restructuring made for some interesting cross-pollination, but also for disastrous academic results.

And so I learn that Kings College London may have to shut down its Palaeography department in order to meet budget targets. No restructuring, no “let us marry you to Library Science (however awkward) or maybe History or how about Archaeology?” and no shuffling the cards. I am not just saddened. I am shocked. KCL is the only place in the UK to have a Palaeography department and, I believe, even the only place in Europe.

Palaeography, the study of ancient handwriting, may sound like a very obscure subject – and really it is an obscure subject – but it is also incredibly important to scholars. Printing being a very recent invention, most available written material was done by hand and scholars need to be able to decipher handwriting. You get different writing systems (think Cuneiform), different alphabets (think how different the Phoenician alphabet looks to the Latin alphabet) and then different ways of interpreting the alphabets through writing. Pre-printing, many European kingdoms would have their own way of combining and forming letters – Johanna Drucker is particularly good on this, if you want to read more – and some handwriting is only intelligible to specialists who have studied handwriting traditions of a particular area (South Germany, for instance). So much material is now being made available by library specialists, but now I wonder who will be around to read, understand and disseminate this material.

(If I had know that Palaeography existed as a discipline when I started university, I would have ended up in a very different place to now. As is, most of my knowledge is filtered through print culture, so I apologise for any glaring mistakes)

The twentieth century is slipping away before our eyes:  one of its greatest intellectuals, Claude Levi-Strauss has died. I always assumed that he had passed away before I began studying critical theory, although I cannot tell you why, but instead Levi-Strauss lived to the ripe old age of 100. Rest in peace, you structuralist giant.

“It is a sign of a deeply disturbed civilization where Tree huggers and Whale huggers in their weirdness are acceptable… while no one embraces the last speakers of a language.” -Werner Herzog

Found here which looks at whether we should preserve languages and whether a world with monolithic language usage would be a bad thing? More on this later.

Mooncalf left an astute comment on my last entry wherein I had a mini-rant about Danish lifestyle blogs being smug and self-satisfied. She linked two blog entries, both of which reacts to the Martha Stewart-ness of some blogs. I really enjoyed reading the entries and I have taken some of their points to heart. I think it is important to remember that all blogs are edited in one way or another. We all have messy tables, bad days, sweaters that do not fit, unread books and frozen pizzas. I tend to shy away from confessional blogging (and I’m also notoriously private for someone who has blogged continuously for almost nine years), but I do attempt to create a fairly realistic picture of my life whilst leaving out things I would feel uncomfortable sharing.

So, bearing all this in mind, please ask me a question.

And, going back to the idea of language, notions of identity etc etc, I found this little tidbit in one of my commonplace books:

“As there is no selfhood without some other, a national canon — whether attached to land or language — is constituted in such a way that its identity has both intra- and intercultural aspects. In other words, it is mediated by the memory of the other and its development always involves at least two cultures. The court of Louis XIV, English Classicism, or the Weimar Klassik defined itself with reference to Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Thus, it is possible to argue that national canons reveal an interacting with other creeds. They are intercultural manifestations, conflictual as well as mutually complementary, configurations that are, in relation to each other, not only powerfully reciprocal but also strongly oppositional.” -Mihály Szegedy-Maszák

I think that pretty much reveals my stance on whether we should preserve* languages or not.

(* I’m not of a prescriptive bend, mind.)

“This is going to alter our perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England… as radically, if not more so, as the Sutton Hoo discoveries. Absolutely the equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells.” – Leslie Webster, Former Keeper, Department of Prehistory and Europe, British Museum

The UK’s largest haul of Anglo-Saxon treasure has been discovered buried beneath a field in Staffordshire by an amateur metal detector enthusiast. The Staffordshire Hoard comprises of more than 1,500 individual items and most objects appear to date around the 7th century. You can read the entire press statement here.

I am incredibly excited by this hoard. One of the items which really intrigues is a strip of gold bearing a Biblical inscription. I’m excited because we don’t often see examples of handwriting from this age as most writing would have been done on (easily perishable) wax tablets. The Lindisfarne Gospels date from around the same period, of course, but seeing writing employed outside a manuscript page is just really, really fantastic – particularly as you are seeing a religious inscription on an arguably secular item.

You can see beautifully detailed photos of the hoard on Flickr and while the Staffordshire Hoard website is currently struggling to cope with the number of visitors, I encourage you to seek it out.

Via John (and presumably everybody else on the interwebs): Buffy Summers meets Edward Cullen.

“It’s an example of transformative storytelling serving as a visual critique of Edward’s character and generally creepy behavior. Seen through Buffy’s eyes some of the more patriarchal gender roles and sexist Hollywood tropes embedded in the Twilight saga are exposed in hilarious ways.”

As John says, “..I have a sneaking feeling that a Spike meets Edward Cullen remix would [also] be a thing of beauty and a joy forever.”

* I nearly fainted when I saw Jewel Spears Brooker was speaking on “The Fire and the Rose: Eliot and Julian of Norwich”. Phoawr!

So, the much-fabled, oft-taught and already-classic Flaubert’s Parrot which I may or may not have read previously but which I have definitely read now?

How did I read it?

Well. I felt tempted to make a check-list of post-modern fiction trademarks, so I could check them all: fragmented self (constructed out of texts); history understood and recast as fiction (as the past is inaccessible to us except through texts which by their very nature are linguistic constructs and thus unreliable); the text as bricolage (assembled by quotations and various types of texts); no such thing as Truth but only truthS; &c.

In short: it read like a lesser Pale Fire (true to his metier, Barnes does keep name-dropping Nabokov) but without Pale Fire‘s mania and fevour. My head placed Flaubert’s Parrot next to Graham Swift’s Waterland. Barnes’ novel is a textbook case of post-modern fiction, just like Swift. I did not particularly care for the book – to me, it reads old in way that much older books do not. Because it is such a full-blooded second-generation English post-modern book, it feels very dated to me.

That’s how I read. My head assigns books their place in the literary canon based upon their kinship with other books/authors. I measure them against similar books I have read (and often against unrelated books). How does the writing hold up? Does it surprise me anyway? Does it make me work hard or does it lead me gently through the pages? Will it make me reassess books I have already read? Does it point me towards books I need to read in order to fully appreciate the book I hold in my hands?

Next: a post on things I find in secondhand books. It was my intention to post this today, but someone has not charged the camera batteries. Boo.

What does “enjoyment” mean? Does it correspond to Roland Barthes’s plaisir/readerly texts where the reader (passively) consumes a product and derives pleasure from the act of consumption? Let us look at the sentence “the point of reading is enjoyment”. Looking at it objectively, it follows that the act of reading is not about the actual act of reading itself but rather about the degree of enjoyment derived from the act. The focal point is not the book being read but the reader him/herself sitting in a chair. Should the act of reading actually be described as an exercise in narcissism?

This is my main problem: every time I read or hear about how “the point of reading is enjoyment”, I end up thinking of a narcissistic little twerp who only likes books where you can identify with the protagonist, consumes them like they’d consume shoes, music or any other product and who would never read anything published before they were born (except if there’s a connected TV series or a film out gathering a fair amount of publicity). I have issues, clearly.

So, why do you read?

I have long been interested in and worked on the shift from (handwritten) manuscripts to the (printed) books. The shift is not as abrupt and clear as many people assume; post-Gutenberg handwritten manuscripts were still produced and printers arguably sought to make their product look as much like handwritten manuscripts as possible. Although The Scottish National Library do not hold any incunabula (as far as I know), I was pleased to see some early 16th century books which still displayed evidence of this urge to mimic handwritten manuscripts: typefaces designed to resemble handwriting, woodcuts trying to look like hand-drawn illustrations and rubrication (emphasising parts of the text using red ink). Gorgeous, fascinating stuff.

And Edinburgh was her usual, gloomy, beautiful, fantastical self.

I like visiting the city but I couldn’t live there, I think.