Isebrand.com

Paul Williams, the father of rock journalism, promoter of Philip K. Dick, author of "Common Sense"

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across a 1986 edition of a 1982 pamphlet Common Sense: A Guide to the Present Situation by Paul Williams. It wasn't until days later that I first spotted his name on it. It's noted on the back side of the title page but it's not on the cover. I didn't know at the time that Williams is considered by many to be the father of rock music journalism, that without him the science-fiction canon might lack Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and therefore cinema most likely lack Blade Runner (1982), or that early-onset Alzheimer's--triggered by a 1995 bicycle accident--finally claimed Williams' life less than two months ago.

Common Sense has nothing obviously to do with rock music, though the cynic may say it has something to do with science fiction. It's a call to self-actualization and the work of world peace in an age of nuclear weapons. You can read it online.

From Williams's obituary in The New York Times:

Paul Williams, a writer and critic who founded the alternative pop music magazine Crawdaddy, one of the first outlets for serious writing about rock music, and whose critical support helped rescue the science fiction author Philip K. Dick from obscurity, died on Wednesday in a nursing residence near his home in Encinitas, Calif. He was 64.

From the obituary also comes this summary of his remarkable early 20's:

He lived on a commune, smoked his first joint with the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, became the manager of Timothy Leary’s short-lived 1969 campaign for governor of California, and dropped in on John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “bed-in” in Montreal long enough to sing on their recording of “Give Peace a Chance.” Did he make it to Woodstock? [his second wife] was asked. “He hitched a ride to Woodstock in a limo with the Grateful Dead,” she said.

Williams was married twice, the first time to Sachiko Kanenobu, an Osaka-born musician significant in the history of Japan's music scene in the late 1960's--her album Misora debuted in 1972 and was reissued in 2006. She drew the cover illustration for Common Sense.

From the pamphlet:

A few people can build a bridge
that can be walked on by many.
.....
How dare I be discouraged in the work
by anything so trivial
as the fear of personal failure?

You can send donations to the Paul Williams family.

The Icelandic Sagas on In Our Time and "Memories of Old Awake"

You can get an overview about the Icelandic sagas from a recent program (episode) of In Our Time on BBC Radio 4, hosted by Melvyn Bragg. (More on IOT from this blog.) Below is a short documentary produced by one of the Lord Bragg's interviewees, Emily Lethbridge. It uses music, landscape videography, and interviews of Icelanders to evoke the spirit of the sagas. 

Follow the God of Wednesday blog for more insights about the sagas and medieval literature. (More on God of Wednesday, and Song of the Vikings, from this blog.)

Memories Of Old Awake from Cambridge University on Vimeo.

God of Wednesday & Song of the Vikings

Hooray! I won a copy of Nancy Marie Brown's latest book, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths! It's about Snorri Sturluson who in many respects is the principle source of our knowledge of Norse mythology and therefore the ultimate influence behind some of the great imaginative works of J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings) and Richard Wagner (The Ring Cycle of operas).

From Nancy's blog, God of Wednesday.

In my March 1 post I offered to raffle off an autographed copy of my book Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths. To enter, you had to answer the question, Who is the god of Wednesday and what does he have to do with this blog? Explain me to myself, I pleaded. I promised to print the best answers.

Yesterday the names went into a hat and … Congratulations to Scott Isebrand! Scott is a most deserving winner, as you'll see when you read his answer below.

via nancymariebrown.blogspot.com

Shakespeare Cats

From Susan Herbert's Shakespeare Cats (2004).

“Blow winds, and crack your cheeks, rage, blow.” King Lear, Act III, Scene ii.

Hat-tip to John, a.k.a. Scriptor Senex, of Rambles From My Chair.

(Click image to make kitties bigger.)

Of Monks, Medieval Scribes, and Middlemen

Exceprt from "Of Monks, Medieval Scribes, and Middlemen," Peter K. Yu. Michigan State Law Review, Vol.1 (2006 )

The Rule of St. Benedict...“contained a specific instruction that a certain number of hours in each day were to be devoted to labour in the scriptorium. The monks who were not yet competent to work as scribes were to be instructed by the others.” 

Notwithstanding the Church’s active participation, the production of knowledge remained parochial. The copying of books was also slow, tedious, and very time-consuming; it took years for a scribe to complete “a particularly fine manuscript with colored initials and miniature art work.” When Bishop Leofric took over the Exeter Cathedral in 1050, he found only five books in its library. Despite immediately establishing a scriptorium of skilled workers, his crew managed to produce only sixty-six books in the twenty-two years before the bishop’s death in 1072. Likewise, although the Library of Cambridge University had a remarkable collection of 122 books in 1424, it “labored for a half-century to increase the number to 330.”

To make the copying task even more difficult, the working conditions in monasteries were “far-from-productive.” For instance, “[t]he weather might be uncomfortable, the light poor..., and the text difficult to read or tedious to contemplate.” In addition, monks had to “concentrate on material they [might] not have been interested in—or even understood,” and they often feared that they would make an error or would not be able to complete a given work within the specified time. Under these conditions, it is, therefore, no surprise that monks sometimes jotted remarks about their frustration and relief in the margins, or the colophons, of their manuscripts. Examples of these remarks included “Thin ink, bad vellum, difficult text,” “Thank God, it will soon be dark,” and “Now I’ve written the whole thing: for Christ’s sake give me a drink.”
.....
Because the monks focused on the process, rather than the contents, it was not uncommon to find them writing over materials on the same parchment or copying “useless texts in illegible scripts.”  After all, the goal of such writing assignments was not to produce or preserve knowledge, but rather to keep their hands and minds busy and away from sins or idle thoughts. By the twelfth century, towns emerged, and communities grew in size and wealth. As a result of the spread of literacy, the demand for books increased dramatically, and a large number of new texts appeared. “[M]onastic libraries [soon] found it more and more difficult to keep their collections up  to date, and they began employing secular scribes and illuminators to collaborate in book production.” Meanwhile, schools became independent from cathedrals, to which they were originally attached, and guilds of lecturers and students gathered to form universities. With the changing lifestyle and the emergence of new educational institutions,

[i]t became more and more common for people to want to own books themselves, whether students seeking textbooks or noble women desiring to own beautifully illuminated Psalters. By 1200 there is quite good evidence of secular workshops writing and decorating manuscripts for sale to the laity.  By 1250 there were certainly bookshops in the big university and commercial towns, arranging the writing out of new manuscripts and trading in second-hand copies. By 1300 it must have been exceptional for a monastery to make its own manuscripts: usually, monks bought their books from shops like anyone else, although this is not quite true of the Carthusians or of some religious communities in the Netherlands.

As universities began to rely on scribes to produce and reproduce texts, supervision by the university faculty became necessary. Ordinances, therefore, were developed “to regulate the work of the copyists, to lay down the minimum requirements of formal presentation and substantial correctness, and  to prescribe the selling price of  duly certified copies.”....

“The English book trade...developed not around the universities, as on the Continent, but in London, where the stationers formed a guild as early as 1403.” This guild was known famously as the Stationers’ Company.... Despite the professional growth, medieval scribes continued to be treated as mere laborers.... “The average scribe in the later Middle Ages...had to work three to seven days for the sum earned in one day by a common foot-soldier slogging through Scotland in King Edward’s army.”

Nevertheless, the commercial book trade continued to flourish in major European cities, and  the number of scribes and  illuminators increased substantially as a result. “By the late thirteenth century in Paris (a century later in England)...[t]he names of scribes, illuminators, parchment-makers and binders...[can be found] in tax records, though few names can be linked with surviving books.”

Hat-tip to Medievalists.net.

Image: The Monk Eadwine;  c. 1150 Illumination on parchment, 457 x 330 mm; Trinity College, Cambridge. 

The monk Eadwine, the prince of scribes (as the inscription calls him) is shown in this mid-twelfth-century portrait in a luxury glossed Psalter written at the cathedral priory of Christ Church, Canterbury. Eadwine is working with a pen and a knife together.

Tolkien's mythic borrowings

It is well known that J.R.R. Tolkien in creating his mythopoeic books like The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit extensively borrowed and adapted from the mythologies of Northern Europe, in particular the tales of the Poetic Edda, also known as the Elder Edda, a collection of poems written in the 1270s in Old Norse. It includes the legend of Sigurd and the fall of the Nibelung (Niflung or Niflungr in Old Norse), the tale that also served as Richard Wagner's principle source for his grand operatic cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung (Der Ring des Nibelungen in German), completed about 50 years before The Hobbit.

Some of the specific ideas from German and Norse myth that Tolkien used include a powerful magical ring, races of dwarves and elves, horses of supernatural speed, and men who transform into bears. Even some of the character and place names in Tolkien's works can be traced to the old myths. Here is a small sampling, some alongside images from the films The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Frodo, the protagonist of The Lord of the Rings, is the Latinized name of a character in Hrolf's Saga, which was written in Iceland in Old Norse prose in the 1300s, the original Old Norse being Fróði (Old English, Frōda, Latin Frotho, as in Saxo Grammaticus'sGesta Danorum--i.e., History of the Danes).

Bilbo, the protagonist of The Hobbit, is also an archaic English word meaning a well-tempered sword; bilbo was presumably derived from the Spanish town name, Bilbao. In The Hobbit, Bilbo's aquires a sword, Sting, which plays a crucial role in events, and in The Lord of the Rings, too. German and Norse myth has magical swords, too; one of the most well-known is Leg-Biter, a cursed blade, featured in Icelandic saga.

Beorn, the name of the man who can transform into a bear in The Hobbit, is the Old English word for bear, and such shape-changing occurs in old Norse myth. Its modern Anglicized equivalent, Bjorn, is common as a name even today in Scandinavian countries--as Björn in Swedish and Icelandic and as Bjørn in Norwegian and Danish.

Middle-earth is the English translation of both the Middle English word middel-erde and its Old English antecedent middangeard, (Miðgarðr in Old Norse) the world of men in German mythology, which featured nine worlds, though more literally it might be translated "middle-enclosure".*

orc, the singular noun in Tolkien's works meaning one of the race of orcs, a prevalent evil in Tolkien's Middle-earth about which Tolkien wrote in a letter, "the word is, as far as I am concerned, actually derived from Old English orc 'demon.'" Tolkien used the term goblin in The Hobbit to indicate an orc.

ent, the singular noun in Tolkien's works meaning one of the race of ents, which are large sentient trees, is the Old English word for giant, as in the Old English poetic line, orþanc enta geweorc ("work of cunning giants")

Orthanc, one of the two towers referred to in the title of Tolkien's work The Two Towers, from the Old English word orþanc, which I referenced in the poetic line cited above in the entry for ent. (In Old English, as well as Gothic, Old Norse, and Icelandic, the letter þ--known in Anglo-Saxon as the thorn--is pronounced as th in the modern English word that or in the word thief depending on its placement; the thorn is still used in modern Icelandic.) I like to pretend that it was the inspiration for The Shard.

troll, the singular noun in Tolkien's works meaning one of the race of trolls, is of course a word in use in English today, but its origin is as the Old Norse term meaning a fiendish giant or demon, but it carried supernatural connotations (in modern Swedish, trolla means to bewitch), while the trolls of Middle-earth are not magic users--in fact, they can be thunderously stupid.

Meduseld, the hall of the king of Rohan, Théoden, in The Lord of the Rings, is a combination of the Old English medu (mead) and seld (hall), "mead-hall" being a term in Old English lore; the most famous mead-hall in literature being Heorot, the mead-hall featured in Beowulf.

Grima, the duplicitous and false adviser to Théoden, king of Rohan, is also the word for mask in Old English and Old Norse, and it survives with the meaning intact in modern Icelandic as gríma.

warg, a type of large wolf and stead for orcs in Tolkien's works, is the anglicized word for of the Old Norse vargr, meaning wolf.

Eärendil, a character of Tolkien's Silmarillion, was inspired by the name and deeds of Éarendel of two of the Crist poems (that is, Christ poems)--Christ II and Elene--by the Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf ("kin-wulf")* 

There are other clear, and some merely probable, sources in Norse and Germanic myth serving as inspiration for Tolkien during his creative work. The above is not an exhaustive list. But, if you go to see the recently-released film The Hobbit or enjoyed the film trilogy of The Lord of the Rings, I hope you'll appreciate not only that behind the films rest Tolkien's books, but behind the books are shades--or perhaps better described as the soft, even fading, light--of what one might call, curiously, "true myth," sagas and stories, sometimes of religious significance, told fireside among, and often about, Northern Europe's pre-modern people undertaking genuine quests for survival and a better life. We have more to thank them for than their tales, but I think it's good to treasure those, too.

Gore Vidal's "Writers and the World" essay (1965)

From Gore Vidal's essay  "Writers and the World," Times Literary Supplement (London), November 25, 1965:

The obvious danger for the writer is the matter of time. "A talent is formed in stillness," wrote Goethe, "a character in the stream of the world." Goethe, as usual, managed to achieve both. But it is not easy, and many writers who choose to be active in the World lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made. This is sad. Until one recalls how many bad books the World may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers turned Worldly. The romantic-puritans can find consolation in that, and take pleasure in realizing that there is a rude justice, finally, even in the best of worlds.

via www.gorevidalpages.com

From Gore Vidal's essay  "Writers and the World," Times Literary Supplement (London), November 25, 1965:

The obvious danger for the writer is the matter of time. "A talent is formed in stillness," wrote Goethe, "a character in the stream of the world." Goethe, as usual, managed to achieve both. But it is not easy, and many writers who choose to be active in the World lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made. This is sad. Until one recalls how many bad books the World may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers turned Worldly. The romantic-puritans can find consolation in that, and take pleasure in realizing that there is a rude justice, finally, even in the best of worlds.

Helen at Ephesus, ep 03 of Troy - "The gods are no more to me than a figure of speech."

From the final episode of the three-part 1998 BBC Radio 3 drama,Troy (Jeremy Mortimer, prod./dir., Andrew Rissik, writer) now available for a limited time on BBC Radio 4 Extra, the words of Klytemnestra (Clytemnestra) portrayed by Lindsay Duncan CBE:

Power or the lack of power; there is nothing else....When you live beside a brutal man, you are frightened all the time. The fear never leaves you completely even when you know you're in favor.... Oh, you gods, revenge means that the weak, the innocent, do not suffer for nothing; the wheel goes on turning; the dead rise up against the living; those who commit crimes pay for them at the end, however powerful they think they are.
.....
Sometimes I think it is better not to forgive.... It is easy...to be mastered by rage or lust, to hate without restraint.

The cast also includes the late Academy-award winner Paul Scofield CH CBE, Julian Glover, Michael Sheen OBE, and Geraldine Somerville.

Words of Helen:

I knew that my husband loved me, yet the more he desired me the colder I became. Something inside of us, to which you give the name God, strives to ruin us. It...seems often to possess a force stronger than our own strength. It haunts us with dreams beyond our scope to fulfill them, and engenders in us lusts and longings which, if we enact them, turn our spirits to vain or evil ends. We call this unquietness of soul by many names.... I say that what divides us against ourselves, what speaks to us in our visions and dreams, is only our own mortal nature.... For everything that we do, we bear the responsibility alone.

Image: Clytemnestra from the Battlements of Argos Watches for the Beacon Fires, (1876). Frederic Leighton (1830 - 1896). Oil on canvas. Leighton House Museum and Art Gallery, London. 35.4" x 54.2".

The Legacy Of Gore Vidal

HuffingtonPost asked me to write something about Gore Vidal for the HuffPost Books section.

Vidal tributes and obits will briefly abound. Yes, he was a sharp, cynical, free-thinking satirist in the style of Mark Twain and H. L. Menken. Yes, he was raised in the twilight of the Washington D.C. political class when there actually was such a thing, when Washington was still a shockingly sleepy Southern city vacated by the electeds every summer. (Vidal once remarked that air-conditioning helped found the American empire by letting bureaucrats stay in town year-round making mischief.) Yes, he had a lot of cameos in a lot of films, wined and dined a lot of famous friends at his Ravello home, La Rondinaia, had famous foes, and managed to outlive pretty much all of them.

And he made it all look easy. But it wasn't.

More at www.huffingtonpost.com

Gore Vidal (1925-2012)

In Memoriam

Left: Warrant Officer Junior Grade Gore Vidal circa 1944, the Gore Vidal Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University; right: Gore Vidal in 2006 © Stathis Orphanos

October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012

Writer and provocateur of America's mid-century political and literary circles, Gore Vidal was raised in a prominent Washington D.C. Democratic family but describes himself as a conservative. He was the son of airline pioneer Eugene Vidal, grandson of Oklahoma Sen. T. P. Gore, stepbrother of Jackie Kennedy, and friend of writers and actors including Tennessee Williams, Anaïs Nin, Christopher Isherwood, Tim Robbins, and Paul Newman. A man of contradictions, he has been described as controversial, playful, acerbic, arrogant, and warm; as a gadfly, a conspiracy junkie, a paleo-isolationist, an America-hater, and a patriot; but also "the master essayist of our age" by the Washington Post and America's "greatest living man of letters" by The Boston Globe. He explored history, religion, sex, politics, and power in 25 novels--including his "Narratives of Empire" series about American history--several plays, movie scripts, and more than 200 essays.

PHOTO GALLERY, The New York Times: Gore Vidal 1925-2012

The New York Times: Prolific, Elegant, Acerbic Writer

San Francisco Chronicle: Gore Vidal, Celebrated Author, Playwright, Dies

BBC News: US Author Gore Vidal Dies Aged 86

The Guardian: Gore Vidal, US writer and contrarian, dies aged 86

CNN: Chronicler of American life and politics, dies (and CNN "This Just In" blog: A dozen thoughts from Gore Vidal)

The Atlantic: Gore Vidal - A Salute to Self-Absorbed yet Selfless Genius

Word & Film: Remembering Gore Vidal - Cultural Polymath, Political Gadfly, and Social Butterfly

AntiWar.com: Gore Vidal - the Last Jeffersonian

HuffingtonPost: The Legacy of Gore Vidal

 

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•