Department of Spell-Check

Another day, another set of reading notes, and another word not found in the MS Word dictionary: plagiarization.  As in, a good number of pamphlets on everything from astrological prognostication to the best way to grow cabbages were simply plagiarizations** and cut-and-pastings of other, earlier works.  The OED has quotations for this noun form starting only in the rather late nineteenth century, with the latest quotation taken from the Economic Times from 2003, to wit: "Plagiarisation has become a habit with today's music directors and it probably existed before I was born. There's nothing wrong in it." Well, it certainly has existed for quite a while, in all aspects of creative life, but as to the fact that there is nothing wrong with it, well....

Plagiarism has indeed had a long and venerable history blah blah blah Adrian Johns' Piracy*** blah blah blah.  Now back to my regularly scheduled readings.


** Though, to be fair, I just google-booked the word inside of the book I just read, and the word doesn't appear there either.  But, the OED says it's a word, so I'm running with it.  I like it better than plagiarism in the context in which I have written it.

*** Really good book, and my 'blah's really don't do it justice.

quotation of the day

One sticks one’s finger into the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is: I stick my finger in existence — it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint?
Søren Kierkegaard

I am still reading Cyrano's Voyage to the Moon.  "What is this thing called the world?"  It's a sentiment that would undoubtedly crossed the mind of our fair narrator, and it's certainly one that crosses my mind at least half a dozen times a day.  I told myself that until my generals exams are over, I'm not allowed to read any theater of the absurd-- it's just to demoralizing.  I suppose that goes double for thinking about Kierkegaard.

Cyrano de Bergerac

I am in the process of reading Cyrano de Bergerac's The Comical History of the States and Empires of the World of the Moon in an 1899 Doubleday reprint (on Google Books, thanks Google Books!) of the 1687 translation by A. Lowell (or, as the work says, "Englished" by Lovell).  A few choice quotations from the section about the author:

• “The fortune of his early education made him fall into the hands of a country curate, who was an insufferable pedant (the species seems to have been common at that time), and who had no real scholarship (the two things are by no means contradictory).  Cyrano dubbed his master an “Aristotelic Ass,” and wrote to his father that he preferred Paris.”

• “He lived the Paris student’s life, burning honest tradesmen’s signs and ‘doing other crazy things.’” I feel like such a lame student in comparison.  Why, I haven't burned a single tradesman's sign over in Grad School City.  I haven't even thrown a stone at the townies (though sometimes I am sorely tempted).  Perhaps I should remedy this situation, and take up the life of a 17th century Parisian student.      

• On Cyrano's famed nose: “not ridiculous, but monumental! … It is said that this nose brought death upon more than ten persons…”  Even Cyrano himself had hilarious things to say about his nose though—“This veridic nose arrives everywhere a quarter of an hour before its master.  Ten shoemakers, good round fat ones too, go and sit down to work under it out of the rain."

The section was written by a Curtis Hidden Page, a professor of English literature at the turn of the century (no, not this past one).  His is a name straight out of a Jasper Fforde novel!

Andreas Vesalius

I am currently reading (and, for some parts of it, re-reading) O'Malley's biography of the sixteenth century anatomists, Andreas Vesalius (as well as drinking some coffee from the grad lounge coffee machine (it seems to have picked up an interesting.... terroir of grad lounge filthiness, but I have a raging cold, and can't taste anything anyway).  O'Malley really seems to have closed the book on Vesalian studies-- after Roth's earlier biography of the man, this seems to be the only good biography of the dude, and besides his inclusion in every general history of medicine that was ever written, there seems to be a paucity of books dedicated to Vesalius and his work (at least in comparison with, to chose some contemporaneous examples, Nicholas Copernicus or Girolamo Cardano**).  But, at any rate, O'Malley's book is filled with some marvelous details, and it's not like books about Renaissance medicine are in short supply...

Some great quotations/hilarious anecdotes from the book:

• "Some of the dissections were apparently carried out by Vesalius alone, or possibly with certain chosen students, in his own dwellings, upon cadavers from rifled tombs or from executions, and, as he wrote in the Letter on the china root, sometimes kept in his bedroom for several weeks. Unquestionably he was an enthusiast, and just as unquestionably it was best that he had no domestic responsibilities at that time."  I understand that as a new professor, he might have had small digs, and would have trouble finding a place to put extraneous things like cadavers, but I think that leaving them in his bedroom seems a bit… strange.  Enthusiast of what, I sometimes wonder…
• Is Vesalius coming to your town?  Lock up your graveyards and guard your cadavers—whenever he traveled to give lectures in other universities, there was a wave of body-snatching in his wake.  This practice became so widespread that in 1550, the Venetian senate publicly threatened to actually enforce the existing ban against grave robbing. 
• Vesalius, on the capriciousness of artists:  “[No longer] shall I have to put up with the bad temper of artists and sculptors who made me more miserable than did the bodies I was dissecting.” (Letter on the china root).  That is pretty miserable; those bodies must have stunk up to high heaven. 
• The printer of the Fabrica, Joannes Oporinus married poorly, because (according to O’Malley, at least) the lady was “an ill-tempered shrew.”  Editorializing much?  
• Worst name encountered so far: Polycarp.  Polycarp Cratander was the son of Andreas Cratander; the two were in a father-and-son printing getup in Basel. They had decided to give up the business, and they sold all their equipment to Thomas Platter, Balthasar Ruch, Robert Winter, and Oporinus (all of whom were partners in their publishing firm)
• “As the emperor’s [Charles V] far flung empire was the result of inheritance from many sources, so like his physical and mental inheritances were the result of many and various dynastic marriages, of which some might better have been left unconsummated. […] More somber was the emperor’s inheritance from his mother, Joanna of Spain, whose mind, delicately balanced if not always somewhat unbalanced, was finally toppled by the combination of her husband’s long absences and infidelities, and then his early death in 1506.  Presumably Joana was the unlucky heir of her grandmother, a Portuguese princess who died quite mad.”  Royal lineages, so much crazy stuff!
• Oh, Vesalius, you snarky, snarky man!  “I esteem [Jean] Guinter for many reasons, an in my books I call him a teacher of medicine, but I do not consider him an anatomist, and I should willingly suffer him to inflict as many cuts on me as I have seen him attempt on man or any other animal—except at the dinner table.” 

And that's one more book that has been read. It's time to celebrate-- break out the coffee!





** Interesting fact: all three of those men practiced as physicians, although Copernicus never finished his medical degree (he instead got a degree in canon law from Ferrara).

Petrarch and absence

Life is busy.  Today is no less busy.  Tomorrow will be no less busy than this.  My second year is going by in a haze of sleepiness.


I am reading Petrarch, and thinking about time, loss, and ruin, but that is no less of a reason to note the other quotations that speak to me for some other reason.  So, from Petrarch's Rerum familiarium libri, book 1




‎"For me, I am arranging my belongings in little bundles, as wanderers are wont to do..."


"it seemed rashness, indeed madness, to have undertaken so many long and demanding works in such a brief and indefinite period of time, and to have directed my talents which would hardly suffice for limited undertakings to so great a variety of writings." 


On defending his plain style: "But in what manner can I please everyone when I have always striven to please a few?"


"Between the blindness caused by love and that produced by envy there may be a great difference in point of cause, but there is no difference in effect." 


"We must therefore be content with the limits of the talents that God and nature granted us.  If we do not so this we shall never be able to live without anxiety.  And as long as we pursue the knowledge of things, a road we must travel without interruption until our very last breath, new areas of darkness will appear daily into which our areas of ignorance cannot reach.  This is the source of our sorrow and indignation and disdain. ... And this is why knowledge which ought to be the source of sacred pleasure becomes a source of very troublesome anxiety and extinguishes the very life which it promised to serve as guide." 

Department of spell-checking

The word 'alterity' isn't recognized by Microsoft Word's spell check.  A quick gander at the OED entry tells me that the word became more widely used in 20th century critical and cultural theory (not something that the writers of whatever dictionary Microsoft uses are too familiar with, I guess), but at any rate, the earliest quotation is from 1425:

Speculum Sacerdotale 234   Sche [sc. woman] made an alterite and an oþerhede in that tyme, that sche made alienacion and partynge bitwene God and man.

 I also found an awesome (now obsolete) synonym in differency.  I think I'm going to incorporate that into my vocabulary after this.  Or not.