Period Piece: Bob Dylan

A gem, from his 1993 photoshoot for World Gone Wrong.

Merry Christmas

"A ludicrous POETICAL INVECTIVE against Christmas Gambols, Minc'd-Pies, and Plumb-Porridge, &c. &c." from The Agreeable Companion; OR, an Universal Medley of Wit and Good-Humour (London: Bickerton, 1745) 242-243.

See the last line of this poem.
According to the OED, "daggled" means skirts covered in mud, splattered, bemired.

Watch for dirty whores!

Hark! a Vagrant

East coast cartoonist Kate Beaton writes history-themed comics, titled Hark! a Vagrant.


Kate's comics range from the Tudors to the French Revolution to Wilfred Laurier; quite a number are from 18th century history and Canadian history, and they are awesome. I was lucky enough to meet her a couple of weeks ago. Here is a short list of my favourites: Montcalm, Robespierre, Mme. Pompadour, Poe, James Joyce, Yeats and Maude, Pierre and Margaret, Byron and the Shelleys, The Turnip Factory, The Brontes, Sir Sanford Fleming, Mister Darcy, Stompin' Tom, Beethoven, and finally, the Merveilleuses.

Luckily, Kate provides an archive, which makes viewing a little easier, but all her comics are worth seeing. Check them out.

Companionship

I picked up the brand new Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne (Ed. Keymer, Thomas) at the 2009 CSECS/NASECS Conference in Ottawa this past November, and am selectively making my way through it. The opening article by Sterne biographer Ian Campbell Ross has, so far, impressed me the most. Tim Parnell's chapter on the Sermons is also pretty great. Also notable is Christopher Fanning's "Sterne and Print Culture" (Fanning presented his work on Burke, Sterne, and aesthetics at the conference, while I tried to track down Thomas Keymer to autograph my Companion, no success there). Chapters 11 and 12 (modernist moments and post-colonialism) I could respectfully do without, but are helpful nonetheless. Also worth mentioning is the chapter by Peter de Voogd (editor of The Shandean) on "Sterne and Visual Culture".

"Although capable of generous acts of private charity, Sterne was widely considered by strait-laced neigbours as ill-suited to the cloth, not only for occasional neglect of his clerical duties but, above all, for his ill-concealed and eventually notorious sexual liasons with his servants (his wife once discovered him in bed with their maid) and prostitutes in York" (Ross, 8).

(painting: Yorick and the Grisette, scene from ASJ, Gilbert Stuart Newton, 19th century)

"Trust me, my dear Eugenius, I should have said, ''there are worse occupations in this world than feeling a woman's pulse.' ... The beautiful grisette looked sometimes at the gloves, then sideways to the window, then at the gloves, and then at me ... She looked into my very heart and reins. It may seem strange; but I could actually feel she did" (A Sentimental Journey, 60-63).

18th Century Scavenger

I frequently find 18th century-related items around the university. Such finds include Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer and The Vicar of Wakefield (a double whammy), a 1798 edition of the Greek New Testament, Richardson's Pamela (just found yesterday), an art-deco edition of Boswell's Life (published in 1931), Great Expectations, and so on. My favourite salvage, however, is this nineteenth-century porcelain dish, illustrating Uncle Toby and Widow Wadman from TS:

"I know not what, has got into this eye of mine ... Do look into it--said she. Honest soul! thou didst look into it with as much innocency of heart, as ever a child looked into a raree-shew-box*" (Volume VIII, Chap. XXIV)

There is likely no value, but I keep it for sentimental reasons.

*A raree-shew box was an 18th century-style peep-show, of sorts.

Bow Street Runner and The Black Page

I must share this online game, Bow Street Runner, produced by UK Channel 4 and set in London’s Covent Garden in the 1750s: “an open sewer of filth, vice, and corruption.” It is a changing time in England. An increase of vicious crime and gin drinking has encouraged Henry Fielding to institute the beginnings of police law and order. This game is quite historically accurate. The premise is to collect evidence from a series of murders in London as one of Fielding's "Bow Street Runners." This game is rich in detail and realism, from stitching up a dead whore to testing polluted gin on a slum rat. The narrative is adjusted based upon the player's progress. Hogarth’s interactive woodcuts lay about for historical reference. There are a series of tasks to complete and the environment is chocked full of historical tidbits (actual clippings from The London Current, for example, and a 1754 map of the city). Highly recommended for the eighteenth-century nerd who loves interactive history.

THE BLACK PAGE Exhibit and Auction: this is the project of Shandy Hall curator Patrick Wildgust (who I once called "Goldwind" by accident while visiting Shandy Hall, to which my traveling companion replied, "Goldwind? That sounds like a girl's bicycle") to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Vols I & II of T.S. by Sterne and the black page found on (the original pagnation) page 73 in the first volume. The black page follows the death of Parson Yorick, which has prompted a variety of suggestions about its meaning: Yorick's last flip to his critics and collectors, the impenetrablility of being and non-being, and so on. Mr. Wildgust asked 73 artists and authors to each fill in their version of the black page for auction (which closed 31 October 2009). The black pages, however, are certainly worth the view. They are presented without attributions, so viewing becomes a guessing-game when one considers the list of participants and the style, theme, and appearance of each page (I think, for instance, that Black Page 65 is the work of graphic novelist Martin Rowson). All money that was raised contributed to a grant by English Heritage to repair the roof of Sterne's medieval cottage (see: photo below)

This short film, produced by The University of York's Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past, features Mr. Wildgust reading from Tristram Shandy. This even shorter film of the same series is a very beautiful introduction to Shandy Hall and the village of Coxwold.

(see: roof) [photo taken January 2008 during my stay]

(My favourite of the Black Page series is probably Black Page 20, a very literal rendition with Hogarth's Marriage-a-la-Mode).