My big holiday present this year was a subscription to the Times Literary Supplement. I’ve asked for one for several years, and this year someone finally believed me. I was (and am) over the moon about it, and my first issue arrived in the mail yesterday.
Two other excellent things that recently came in the mail:
• A galley of James Wood’s How Fiction Works. You can read a tantalizing bit of it here.
• The Oxford University Press edition of Goethe’s Faustus, translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I probably shouldn’t admit this to the world wide interweb but the arrival of this made me weep a little, I was so happy (what can I say? It’s been a hard winter). As you may remember, I mentioned pining for this book a while back; a couple lux little birds took notice, and OUP was kind enough to send one.
The book is very scholarly and beautiful, with many engravings and an interesting “stylometric analysis” in the back to support the editors’ claim that Coleridge was indeed the author of this mysterious 1821 translation (a hypothesis first floated in 1971). A stylometric analysis!
More on both of these books to come. For now just a couple observations:
1. I worry that a stylometric analysis of the contents of my mailbox would show a tiny old don lived at this address.
2. This tiny old don wonders about creating a Venn diagram displaying circles for “people who refer to Oxford University Press as ‘OUP'” and “people who after referring to Oxford University Press as ‘OUP’ have an irresistible urge to follow it up with ‘Yeah, you know me.'”
Archives for January 16, 2008
CAAF: It is what it is
Today is Mr. Tingle’s birthday. The photograph shown here is one he took this past weekend that I like a whole lot. If you’d like to see others, he keeps a photo blog, which he’s lately resumed updating (after leaving a graveyard snap up for the holiday season).
When he started Serial Photo he would leave many of the photos unnamed. I said, “It’s going to be hard for people to tell you which photographs they like when they’re all called ‘Untitled’.” He responded with this title.
Photo: “Backyard Buick” by Lowell Allen
TT: Almanac
“They say you lose your head for nostalgia, as you get older. That’s also the time when waves of it come sweeping down without warning. You have to ration yourself, or a sudden dose knocks you out, as it did me.”
Anthony Powell, Temporary Kings