Reading / browsing books with lots of pictures is like, well, watching a good documentary on television. Or better?

These days I sometimes browse through Vic Gatrell’s City of Laughter, a very detailed account of the satirical prints published in London between 1760 and 1820: with lots of color-illustrations. The text is a bit too detailed for the level of my interest in 18th century London culture, but the prints are great. Review in the Guardian: http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/history/0,,1933468,00.html.

Less academic – so closer to watching a documentary on tevee is The Seventy Great Journeys in History, published by Thames and Hudson. I love a book like this for the pleasurable way in which it fills gaps in my knowledge. And it’s nothing I have to know for any special reason.

I love clicking from one wikipedia-entry to another too as a way of discovering, filling in gaps and learning, but sometimes you just want to lie in a chair with a picture book.

Omar (Munoz-Cremers, but he’s Omar here) has made a selection of his writing on music (mostly done for Kindamuzik and De Subjectivisten), burned a pdf of it, gave it the title Toekomstdagen 2002-2007 and put it online at lulu.com as a free download. Which means you can order a hard-copy as well: http://www.lulu.com/content/1285472.

“According to Fielding the whole world of letters was becoming a ‘democracy, or rather a downright anarchy’; and there was no one to enforce the old laws, since, as he wrote in the Covent Garden Journal (1752, no. 23,1), even the ‘offices of criticism’ had been taken over by ‘a large body of irregulars’ who had been admitted ‘into the realm of criticism without knowing one word of the ancient laws’.”

Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, The Hogarth Press, London, 1987 (1957) p. 58.

“…this unsettled way of reading … which naturally seduces us into as undetermined a manner of thinking. … That assemblage of words which is called a style becomes utterly annihilated. … the common defence of these people is , that they have no design in reading but for pleasure, which I think should rather arise from reflection and remembrance of what one had read, than from the transient satisfaction of what one does, and we should be pleased proportionately as we are profited.”

Richard Steele, in the Guardian, 1713, quoted in Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, The Hogarth Press, London, 1987 (1957). p. 48.

“‘The present age may be styled with great propriety, the Age of Authors; for perhaps the never was a time in which men of all degrees of ability, of every kind of education, of every profession and employment were posting with ardour so general to the press.’

‘The province of writing was formerly left to those who, by study or appearance of study, were supposed to have gained knowledge unattainable by the busy part of mankind.’

Dr. Johnson in the Adventurer, 1753, quoted in Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, The Hogarth Press, London, 1987 (1957), p. 58

I am working on an article about epic poetry – well, epic poetry now, in the light of internet, new media. Hmm. Those kind of assignments (“those kind” – what does that mean?) for me are a reason to order books that I’ve been wanting to read for a long time. The occasion presents itself.

So today the postman brought Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems and Albert B. Lord’s the Singer of Tales.

I’ve read quite a bit of the shorter poetry of Olson (from the Selected Poems, edited by Robert Creeley) and I like his prose-essay Call Me Ishmael. Olson is a bit of a strange type, and he could be a total nuthead it seems. (Is it HC ten Berge who calls him a ‘warhoofd’ in a fairly recent piece? I don’t remember). His poetry is straight out of Pound’s Cantos in many senses, and well, I’m simply drawn toward these really long poems (that one hardly ever finishes reading completely, from first till last page).

The ideas of Lord are well-known to me, as they form the fundaments of much contemporary knowledge of oral poetry and performance – but I’ve never read the actual book. So now’s the time.

I did however recently reread Bauman’s 1970’s essay Verbal Art as Performance – it was requiered reading for Literary Theory back in 1988. Rediscovering in a sense where I’ve picked up ideas on literature…

Even een aankondiging tussendoor:

Vrijdag 15 juni, van 13.00 tot 17:00
Symposium Bundel, Boek, Blog

“Tijdens de middag zal een groep literatuurwetenschappers, bloggers, mediatheoretici, dichters en vormgevers discussieren over de implicaties van het feit dat literatuur, en met name poezie, vandaag de dag steeds minder in boekvorm tot ons komt, maar verspreid wordt via websites & blogs, of voorgedragen wordt op poetry-slams. Wat betekent dit voor onze omgang met gedichten? Hoe ziet de toekomst van het boek als fysiek object er uit?”

Sprekers:
Thomas Vaessens
Arie Altena
Cornelia Graebner
Chrétien Breukers
Samuel Vriezen
Frans Oosterhof

Gratis alhier: Letterenfaculteit Universiteit Leiden, gebouw 1162 (Van Wijkplaats 2) zaal 002.

(Georganiseerd door de Nederlandse Vereniging voor Algemene Literatuurwetenschap en de Opleiding Literatuurwetenschap Universiteit Leiden.)

… the Arno Schmidt-reference library (see http://www.gasl.org) is an online collection of pdf’s of books that Arno Schmidt owned and to which he often referred in his novels. Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Tobias Smollett, Herodotos. Nice for the fans of Schmidt and the literature-professors.

But in the 3 years of its existence it has already send 400.000 texts into the world. Interestingly, from december 2006 on the downloads increased dramatically because China allowed province after province access to the reference library.

Says Günter Jürgensmeier of GASL, in an e-mail to the Schmidt-discussion list:

“Die Referenzbibliothek hat damit im zurückliegenden Jahr vermutlich erheblich mehr für die Bildung getan als die Bayrische Staatsregierung. “Jaja”, rufen da die Herren Goppel/Schneider unisono, “für die Bildung der Chinesen!” Naja, immerhin!)”

The Bayerischer Rundfunk does have a podcast for Hörspielen: http://www.br-online.de/download-podcast/mp3-download/bayern2radio/mp3-download-podcast-hoerspielartmix.xml. It now features many short re-makes of Ruttmann’s Weekend. Alas, very short bits.

I don’t really use podcasts as such. The main reason is my dislike of Itunes – that program has simply become too big and too slow to use. I prefer Cog. Podcasts I download as I download mp3’s. I also rarely use playlists since my music doesn’t fit on the harddisk of my laptop anyhow, certainly not on my ipod, and even at home I do not always have the external harddisks connected to the laptop. I only use playlists for ‘research’. Yesterday for instance I ‘lost’ 2 hours building a chronological playlist for all the Anthony Braxton I have collected, covering the first 10 years of his career as I’d like/hope to listen through all that in the next few days.

That said, podcast-functionality is perfect for keeping track of programmes that you forget about. I for instance forget that I am interested in audio art, radio art, German Hörspiel. I don’t encounter it in the places that I visit (places = websites, blogs, real places). Yes, I would subscribe immediately if the WDR and Deutschlandradio and Cafe Sonore would offer podcasts of their programs. There is a stream of course.

(Btw: yes, I saw that remark about no podcasts for audio art, during the discussions about Radio at the Balie running at the bottom of the screen).

So here, as a reminder, when the good stuff is on:

WDR 3: http://www.wdr.de/radio/
wednesday 22.00 Hörspiel; 23.00 Studio Elektronische Musik (yes, still wednesday, I am able to remember that!);
saturday 23.00 Studio Akustische Kunst;
sunday 23.00 Studio Neue Musik.

Deutschlandradio Kultur (well, that’s what I know as Deutschlandfunk) has a Hörspiel des Monats, and – that’s a coincedence – on the 13th of May that will be a piece by Raymond Federman: http://www.dradio.de/dkultur/sendungen/hoerspiel/610766/. An overview of their Hörspiels is here: http://www.dradio.de/portale/hoerspiel/. I’m afraid I don’t see any podcasts.

Cafe Sonore is the only programme left on Dutch (national) public radio that covers the ars acustica. Here luckily we have audio on demand (but not for download): http://www.vpro.nl/programma/cafesonore/.

Just reminders to self.