Alan Jacobs

Samuel Johnson, in his life of Dryden, reports that throughout the spring of 1686 the fifty-six-year-old laureate could often be seen strolling Leicester Field at daybreak, barefoot, in his nightclothes, skimming dew from leaves into a glass beaker. Dryden apparently ignored anyone who addressed him during these excursions. The beaker full, he would disappear into 44 Gerrard Street to work, in the same nightclothes, on The Hind and the Panther. No one is sure what Dryden did with the dew. Johnson admits uneasily that he is supposed to have drunk it, though Green and Giordani argue that he used it to boil gallnuts for ink. According to neighbors, Dryden sometimes leaned from his study window during work and in an inaudible whisper asked passing children or carriages to be quiet while elaborately pretending to shoot them down with bow and arrow. At 1:00 PM sharp, Dryden would scratch out his last five couplets, rise from his writing desk, pray, dress, and walk to his day job as Historiographer Royal, where he behaved normally. At day’s end he went home, dined with his wife, took laudanum, and slept with an upholstered wood block for a pillow.

In my experience, if a contemporary reader of poetry has never before heard this account of Dryden, it can add considerable interest. I know this was true for me, and I made the whole thing up.

[gallery] Time for a caption contest, I think.

And, finally, a key component often overlooked: Dylan’s artistic process. On a fundamental level, he doesn’t trust mediation or planning. The story of his recording career is littered with tales of indecisive and failed sessions and haphazard successful ones, in both cases leaving frustrated producers and session people in their wake. You could say the approach served him well during his early years of inspiration and has hobbled him in his later decades of lesser work. Dylan doesn’t care. During the recording of Blood on the Tracks, which may be the best rock album ever made, one of the musicians present heard the singer being told how to do something correctly in the studio. Dylan’s reply: “Y’know, if I’d listened to everybody who told me how to do stuff, I might be somewhere by now.”

Vernon Watkins wrote in an obituary that Thomas had lived his life as a consistent manifestation of Christian principle. This has provoked some mockery, or at least some condescending remarks about the blind affection felt by the fathomlessly patient, saintly and charitable Watkins. But he was serious. Thomas was no admirer or adherent of conventional religion; but his entire work struggles to articulate both a sense of the appalling and rich depths of the natural world and a clear-eyed compassion for all the varieties of human oddity.

Eli Jenkins’s evening hymn from Under Milk Wood is another over-anthologised piece, certainly inviting the label of sentimentality. Yet those rather haunting words – “O please to keep Thy lovely eye / On all poor creatures born to die” – tell us volumes about Thomas; about a poetry (and prose) “singing in chains” about our human invol­vement in a material world where death and birth alike open doors of perception.

Aldus was smart about exploiting the combination of new, humanist learning with the physical intimacy of smaller books. To effect this intimacy, Aldus and his punchcutter, Franceso da Bologna, turned to the cursive forms of handwriting used by chancery scribes — flowing forms, with many connecting letters and swooping ascenders and descenders. Legend has it that the cursive Aldus chose to emulate was the handwriting of no less than Petrarch, but this is likely little more than canny marketing. The idea was to make a book that looked like it had been written out by hand — not a medieval manuscript book, of the kind that was still being produced in scriptoria, but something more like an author’s draft copy, or a piece of private correspondence. With its many ligatures and variations to suggest handwriting, Aldus’s italic had more than fifty separated letterforms for its lower-case characters. For printing purposes, it was unwieldly and impractical, but its look was widely admired — and swiftly copied. Although Venice gave Aldus exclusive license to use the cursive typeface (which they called not “italic,” but “Aldino”), new versions spread — and as they did, the typeface was streamlined and simplified. Its oblique flow captured not only the letter of Renaissance humanism, but its spirit as well.

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Via the Smithsonian Libraries. Let’s just say that all together: The Old Fashioned Beer which makes friends on first acquaintance and holds them forever in the spell of its exquisite flavor. Ah, there were giants of advertising copywriting on the earth in those days!

DAY 1: Let there be light, God said, and there was light.

DAY 2: Let there be morons, God said, and there were morons.

DAY 3: Hey, morons, God said, I created LIGHT.

DAY 4: I mean, I’m just saying, God said. None of you guys could have created light. You’re too stupid! Hey, you want me to part the earth from the waters? OH WHOOPS BECAUSE SOMEBODY JUST DID HEY WAIT THAT WAS ME.

DAY 5: [God performs subtly aggressive victory dance.]

DAY 6: What, God said, you don’t like the way I’m doing things? Oh, right, like you morons could RULE THE FRICKING UNIVERSE.

DAY 7: You … you what? God said. You want me out? You know what, FINE. I would rather rest anyway. Enjoy creation, suckers.

[gallery] classicpenguin:

blackballoonpublishing:

Penguin Books Founder Allen Lane with a Penguin and, ah, a penguin

Happy Birthday, Penguin and Thanks for Inventing the Modern Paperback Book

Thanks blackballoonpublishing! A happy birthday indeed to Mr. Lane!

As comedian Penn Jillete elegantly pointed out, the way people avoid giving offense to Islam amounts to a damning condemnation in itself. It is perhaps the worst Western insult offered to Islamic people in the Middle East that we almost universally assume there’s not much point in asking them to recognize the human rights of Christians.

We don’t even expect polite reciprocity. Italy is expected to welcome one of the largest mosques in the world, funded by Saudi Arabia. But no one can build even a modest church in Saudi Arabia. In Egypt, Christians can’t even repair a wall in a church without explicit permission from the sovereign. Qatar has laws that punish people who convert from Islam to Christianity with death, but there’s no planned boycott of their upcoming World Cup because of it. We watch ISIS blow up what many consider the tomb of the prophet Jonah and just sigh, helplessly.

The new regime is not totalitarian, fascist, socialist, capitalist, conservative, or liberal, according to the accepted and common definitions of those terms. It is not even adequately described as corporatist, although corporatism is very much at home within it. The “pink police state” is not a police state in the sense that George Orwell would be familiar with, but one in which a militarized, national policing apparatus is woven into the fabric of trillions of transactions online and off. Nor is it a “pinko commie” regime in the sense of enforcing “political correctness” out of total allegiance to Party; rather, it enforces the restrictions and permissions doled out by its sense of “clean living.” To invoke Michel Foucault again, ours is an age when governance is inseparable from hygiene in the minds of the elite that rules over both the private and public sector. To them, everything is theoretically a health issue.