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Mariangela
Ian SeedThree texts
Rupert M LoydellVessel
Melita SchaumSome Guts
Simon Collings (with collages by John Goodby)Three Short Fictions
Meg PokrassThe Campus Novel
Peter RobinsonCharlie Boy and Captain Fitz: A One-Act Play
Alan WallSnapshot, Sachsenhausen and three more poems
Peter BlairSeven short poems
Lucian Staiano-DanielsFour prose poems
Olivia TuckThe Back of Beyond and two more prose poems
Tony KittTwo poems
Moriana Delgadofrom Reverse | Inverse
Lucy HamiltonSix haibun
Sheila E. MurphyKingfishers and cobblestones and five more new poems
Kitty HawkinsZion Offramp 76–78
Mark ScrogginsCome dancing with me and two more new poems
Marc VincenzPlease swipe right
Chloe Phillips‘Three Postcards’ and a prose poem
Linda BlackStill life
Melita SchaumIn memory of
John Taylor with drawings by Sam ForderImmortal wreckage
Will StoneNew in Translation
Snowdrifts
Marina Tsvetaeva, trans. by Belinda CookePoems from Prière (1924)
Pierre Jean Jouve, trans. by Will StoneSix prose poems
Pietro di Marchi, trans. by Peter RobinsonThe goddess of emptiness.
Jean Frémon, trans. by John Taylor -
A new Review of John Matthias’s Some Words on Those Wars by Garin Cycholl.
Anthony Howell’s review, A Clutch of Ingenious Authors: Michelene Wandor Four Times EightyOne: Bespoke Stories | Annabel Dover Florilegia | Sharon Kivland Abécédaire
Essays by Alan Wall
· ‘King of Infinite Space’: The Virtue of Uncertainty
· AI: Signs of the Times
· The Lad from Stratford
· Stanley Kubrick: Sex in the CinemaWill Stone’s Missing in Mechelen and At Risk of Interment
G. Kim Blank’s Civilizing, Selling, and T. S. Eliot Curled Up behind the Encyclopædia Britannica
Tronn Overend’s Samuel Alexander on Beauty
AND Conor Robin Madigan’s Master Singer, Simon Collings’s Robert Desnos, Screenwriter, and Igor Webb’s Never Again
Simon Collings, Carrying the past: The Afterlight by Charlie Shackleton.
New Fortnightly Serials
from The Runiad
Anthony Howellfrom White Ivory
Alan Walland much more below this column.
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Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections, Blind Summits and Oblique Lights
Previous Serials
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
10 reliable poetry venues in NYC.
· The funeral of Isaac Albéniz
· Coleridge, poetry and the ‘rage for disorder’
· Otto Rank
· Patrons and toadying · Rejection before slips
· Cut with a dull blade
· Into the woods, everybody.
· Thought Leaders and Ted Talks
· How Mary Oliver ‘found love in a breathing machine.’
AND read here:
· James Thomson [B.V.]
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
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Refer Madness.
A Fortnightly Review of
You Could Look It Up
by Jack Lynch
Bloomsbury, 2016 | 453 pp | £21.09 $30.00
By ROBERT McHENRY.
MAN, BY NATURE, desires to know, or so we have been told. But man, in his fallen state, must go to a job and share in the housework and clean the gutters and attend futile soccer games and so cannot always take the time to conduct independent study. In this dilemma he resorts to reference books, where the accumulated knowledge and experience of mankind has been classified, summarized, fact-checked (let us hope), and published in easily affordable and usable form.
Jack Lynch isn’t sure when the reference book — or reference wall painting, or reference clay tablet — originated, but he begins his survey of the genre in the 2nd millennium BCE, with the stele engraved with the set of laws attributed to Hammurabi. From there he meanders his way down to the electronic present in 25 short chapters, each comparing and contrasting, Plutarch-like, a pair of innovative and historically significant works. Along the way he mentions so many others, in brief or only in passing, that the reader may begin to wonder what else mankind has managed to accomplish these many years. Of making many reference books there is no end, the preacher did not exactly say, but, reading this book, it seems true nonetheless.
The chapter pairings are sometimes the obvious and unavoidable ones — Hammurabi and Justinian, for example, or Diderot’s Encyclopédie and the Encyclopædia Britannica — but sometimes Lynch avoids the obvious for the more interesting, as in not pairing Dr. Johnson’s dictionary with Noah Webster’s but those with the French Academy’s Dictionnaire and that of the Brothers Grimm, respectively. Other pairings may be odd, as Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians with Emily Post’s Etiquette; or wholly and delightfully unexpected, as a seventeeth-century sex manual, craftily credited to Aristotle, with an 18th-century guide to London’s ladies of pleasure.
Both Google and Wikipedia come in for discussion, but for some reason Lynch has chosen not to give them a chapter. Instead they form the matter of an epilogue titled “The World’s Information: The Encyclopedic Dream.” On both of these tools he is even-handed and provisional in judgment.
Following each chapter is a short digression on some more general matter relating to the making and using of reference books, such as the use of alphabetical order, plagiarism, errors and omissions, and the impossibility of completing a reference work on time. (Among the errors we learn, finally, the true story of the illusive “dord.”) Chapter 22 1/2 (that is how these asides are numbered) offers a selected list of “unlikely reference books.” These include a Dictionary of Dainty Breakfasts, an encyclopedia of show-business homicides, an encyclopedia of stupidity, and what Lynch slyly refers to as “the best protozoogenetical dictionary in the Moldovan language.”
IT IS CLEAR that Lynch loves his subject and harbors a quite admirable fondness for those peculiar souls who work so hard at producing works that, however wildly various their subjects and forms, all have as their goal the provision of utility to their users. If he is uncertain about anything it is what, exactly, composes that utility. Like most of us, he tends to use the words “information” and “knowledge” interchangeably, as though they were the closest of synonyms. But there is a strong argument that they are not, or at least should not be so used.
I attempt the New York Times crossword puzzle each morning. Increasingly over the years I have noticed that I often can’t answer questions about current popular culture, simply because increasingly I don’t pay much attention to such things. Yet I do not consider myself less knowledgeable about the world than I used to be; on the contrary. An extreme example of what I am suggesting was my one-time boss Mortimer Adler, long the chairman of the advisory board of distinguished scholars for the Encyclopædia Britannica. He once startled an audience by blithely announcing that not only did he not consider himself well informed, he had no interest in being so. His interest lay rather in being well educated.
(There is a cartoon by James Thurber that shows a man, morose and ill at ease, sitting apart at a cocktail party where others are chatting amiably. A woman explains to another, “He doesn’t know anything but facts.”)
You Could Look it Up doesn’t cover almanacs, but those who remember the “Information Please” series or others like it will readily distinguish between what it offered — chiefly lists of things — from what an encyclopedia strives to supply. Not only is there a distinction to be made, admittedly with difficulty at the margins, between information and knowledge, there are the questions of whether one can “know” an erroneous fact, or whether theological statements can be called knowledge, as Lynch does in one place. But he is not doing epistemology and so we must forgive him a certain looseness. It is perhaps telling, however, that in his prologue to the book Lynch uses the words “information” and “knowledge” an equal number of times, but when, in the epilogue, he turns to Google and Wikipedia, he writes “information” twelve times and “knowledge” not once.
Perhaps modern technology could more usefully clone Benjamin Jowett, theologian, scholar of Greek, and long-time master of Balliol College, Oxford, who was renowned for his learning. One or perhaps several of his students composed a comic quatrain that concluded:
I was pleasantly surprised by how few typographic and other minor errors I noticed, given the trend of the last couple of decades for publishers to outsource or skip proofreading and even substantive editing altogether. I suspect that calling the thirteenth-century Catalan theologian Ramon Llul by the name Lull is a consequence of autocorrect somewhere along the production line. No such latitude, however, for putting Alexandria in Upper rather than Lower Egypt.
Oddly, You Could Look it Up is somewhat deficient in reference tools. The table of contents fails to note the works considered in each chapter. Chapter titles like “Grecian Glory, Roman Grandeur: Victorian Eyes on the Ancient World” or “The Good Life: The Arts and High Society” don’t convey much, ahem, information. And the index is skimpy to the point of cheeseparing (and that’s what Lynch gets for ignoring thesauruses). Notwithstanding, it is a very good book, one that I am happy to give a prominent place to on the bookshelf and to which I no doubt will refer often.
♦
Robert McHenry is the former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He is the author of How to Know (Booklocker, 2004). His work has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Skeptical Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune, and the American. He is the “Q.V.” columnist at The Fortnightly Review, where he provides notes and comment on reference works.
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Publication: Monday, 4 April 2016, at 08:53.
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