Current reading

• John Senior's The Death of Christian Culture
• the essays of the late Joseph Sobran, the "reluctant anarchist" (read the essay)
• The Founders' Constitution, which is of only antiquarian interest now that the Old Republic is dead
• Ted Morgan's Wilderness at Dawn: The Settling of the North American Continent, a decent starting point for early American history - it's a bit heavy on the "representative anecdote", but then there's only so much you can fit into a couple of hundred pages

7 on the 7th

Our 7-year-old daughter just up and started reading books today! So far she's read seven with just a little bit of help from her 11-year-old sister. The first was "My First Colors Board Book", and the rest included the 8-year-old's first book, "Ducks in Muck." September 7, 2010 is a date to celebrate.

At extraordinary speed

A disquieting article in the Telegraph:

Simon Winchester, author of ‘The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary’, said the switch towards online formats was “prescient”. He said: “Until six months ago I was clinging to the idea that printed books would likely last for ever. Since the arrival of the iPad I am now wholly convinced otherwise. The printed book is about to vanish at extraordinary speed. I have two complete OEDs, but never consult them – I use the online OED five or six times daily. The same with many of my reference books – and soon with most. Books are about to vanish; reading is about to expand as a pastime; these are inescapable realities.”

We too should translate some books

From King Alfred's preface to his own Anglo-Saxon translation of Gregory's Pastoral Rule:

When I then called to mind all this, then I remembered how I saw, ere that all in them was laid waste and burnt up, how the churches throughout all the English race stood filled with treasures and books, and also a great multitude of God's servants, but they knew very little use of those books, for that they could not understand anything of them, for that they were not written in their own language, such as they, our elders, spoke, who erewhile held these places; they loved wisdom, and through that got wealth, and left it to us. Here men may yet see their path, but we know not how to tread in their footsteps, inasmuch as we have both lost that wealth and wisdom, for that we would not with our minds stoop to their tracks.

When I then called to mind all this, I then wondered greatly about those good and wise men that have been of old among the English race, and who had fully learned all the books, that they have not been willing to turn any part of them into their own language. But then I soon again answered myself and said, "They did not think that men would ever become so reckless, and that learning should fall off in such a way. Of set purpose, then, they let it alone, and wished that there should be more wisdom in this land the more languages we knew."

Then I remembered how the Law was first found in the Hebrew tongue, and again, when the Greeks learnt it, then they turned the whole of it into their own language, and also all the other books. And again the Latins also in the same way, when they had learned it, turned it all through wise interpreters into their own language, and likewise all other Christian nations have translated some part into their own speech. Wherefore I think it better, if it also appears so to you, that we too should translate some books, which are the most necessary for all men to understand - that we should turn these into that tongue which we all can know, and so bring it about, as we very easily may, with God's help, if we have rest, that all the youth that now is among the English race, of free men, that have property, so that they can apply themselves to these things, may be committed to others for the sake of instruction, so long as they have no power for any other employments, until the time that they may know well how to read English writing. Let men afterwards further teach them Latin, those whom they are willing further to teach, and whom they wish to advance to a higher state.

Such is education

Here's a bit by Roger Pearse, our great commissioner of classical translations, from his engaging post "Why We Need Akkadian" - I've left the part about Akkadian for your enjoyment at his blog; I wish to excerpt this bit about a good book he once read:

I remember the last time I ever went punting at Oxford. I bought, in a now vanished bookshop in St. Clements, an old ‘Everyman’ volume to read. The cover had gone, and someone had recovered it with some brown paper. Written on the brown paper in felt-tip were the words, “A century of English essays”. But I took it with me, and read as we punted into the Cherwell, along the green-brown muddy river and under the trailing trees. I have it still. It introduced me to the essays of Augustine Birrell. These in turn led me to Dr. Johnson, to an appreciation even of Gibbon, whom I might otherwise have known only as a less-than-honest polemicist, and a score more. Such is education, and a university the opportunity to acquire it.

What literature is all about

Paul Gruchow, via the Laudator:

At the University of Minnesota, on another spring day, I heard the poet John Berryman fail to lecture on The Iliad to a room jammed with students. He sat down at a table, as was his custom, put on his reading glasses, lit a cigarette, which he held at bottom of the space between his trembling index and middle fingers in the way that drunks do, and began to read to us from the poem in his dark voice, oddly powerful coming from such a frail man, paying as much attention to the stops in the lines as to the accents. He read to us the scene in which Hector and Andromache say farewell to each other. Hector is destined to die and Andromache to be hauled into slavery, and both know this by premonition. When he came to the end of the scene, Berryman was weeping and so, unexpectedly, were we. He made no effort to hide his grief, running from an ancient pen across the long centuries through a modern language into our hearts. He did not even brush away his tears. We sat, stunned, until he got up and left the room without another word, and then we, too, gathered up our books and emerged into the cruel sunshine. I hurried to my office (I was editor of the student newspaper) and locked myself in, and it was an hour or two before I could see anybody. It was the first time, I think, that any of us had ever been taught what literature is all about.

The "devotions" meme

Zoinks! I've been tagged by TSO on the favorite devotions meme.

Well, the last few years I haven't really done off-the-shelf devotions. I keep one of these excellent little rosary booklets on my bedside coffee table, but I haven't gotten into it in a really long time, and I never did get into the various chaplets and whatnot. So what passes for my devotions nowadays are -

• reading the Psalms and Canticles - in the King James or the old BCP on the old Benedictine schedule (the weekly schema in the Psalterium Monasticum) along with Neale & Littledale's magnificent old 4-volume commentary. Not every day - I just drop down into them now and then. Note the recurring refrain: old, old, old. Speaking of old, I have a handy rule of thumb: never join a new Catholic movement that's less than 500 years old. Saves a lot of hassle.
  
• reading the Fathers - I try to keep up with the week's Gospel in the old calendar by reading through the relevant commentaries and sermons in The Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers. For each week's Gospel, the relevant part of the Catena aurea of Aquinas is given, followed by a few of the complete sermons from which Aqinas gleaned his excerpts. I appreciate the old calendar's slow and steady emphasis on one reading per week over against the new calendar's frenzied whirlwind of daily readings. With SSOTGF you get the Gospel on Sunday, then you have a whole week to work through the Catena and a few patristic homilies before another Gospel comes up. Each of the homilies is from a preacher such as John Chrysostom or Gregory I, whose chief delights are stepping on toes and calling people to their senses. Works for me.
  
• reading Divine Intimacy - it's a mid-20th-century Carmelite book, keyed to the old calendar, with a short 3-part daily devotion. It's organized like Opus Dei's In Conversation With God series, but with more fundamental theology and less of something I can't put my finger on. It does come with lots of references to the chief Carmelite writers, which (grumble) I guess I can live with. Carmelites always read as though they've been translated out of French.
  
• quick Hail Marys - when I converted, I spent a lot of time with St Louis de Montfort's True Devotion and works of similar piety that I'd found at the Marian Center in Springfield, Illinois - a delightful mess of a bookstore. Somewhere, de Montfort emphasizes the power of a single Ave, and that has somehow stuck with me.
  

I basically read myself into the Church, and I guess I continue that today.

Current reading

Here and there:

• vade mecum: Russell Kirk's The Roots of American Order
• bathroom: Aelred of Rievaulx: Spiritual Friendship
• bedroom, morning & naps: Philip H Sheridan's Personal Memoirs
• bedroom, evening: Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers
  
• dining room: CS Lewis's The Discarded Image: an introduction to medieval and renaissance literature
  
• at the computer: Alonzo Reed & Brainerd Kellogg's Higher lessons in English: a work on English grammar and composition, the book that introduced and defined sentence-diagramming
  

James P. Hogan, 1941-2010

Sci-fi author James P. Hogan died a few days ago. I read his first novel, Inherit the Stars, in seventh grade, and it was a heck of a fun ride: modern-day lunar explorers discover a spacesuited corpse on the moon - he's fully human, and he's been lying in place for 40,000 years. A team is assembled to solve the mystery of "Charlie" and they manage to piece together a picture of his fully human, yet fully alien, civilization and culture. This leads to a now-familiar surprise about our origins on Earth.

Trailers for books

Nancy Nall mentioned trailers for books this morning, and I immediately thought, "Hmm... there's enough room on the north side of the house to put in a doublewide trailer filled with bookshelves..." Alas, she meant theatrical trailers, or video advertisements for books. Drat. It's still an intriguing idea, though, except for our Illinois tornadoes.

The Crazed Author

From Roger Ebert's super-secret club newsletter:

A taste for books

Bibliomania at Project Gutenberg: a resource page.

Unclear on the concept

From the local freecycle list this morning:

My sister is offering a set of encyclopedia's. They are probably 20 - 25 years old. They are in a near empty storage unit that we are trying to empty out totally. They would be great to cut up for school/college projects in history.

From the UPS man

The ISI edition of Orestes Brownson's The American Republic arrived today.  My initial impressions: good solid typesetting with a stylish but unobtrusive italic face (I would have known these faces 15 years ago); a beautiful buff and blue cover with a dark red spine; a readable and useful introduction by Peter Lawler that's nearly half the length of Brownson's work.

Every time I see the UPS man I think of Arthur Clarke's line upon receipt of Stephen Wolfram's massive A New Kind of Science at his Sri Lankan lair: "another ruptured postman staggers away from my front door."

My favorite book is online!

Bulwark of the Republic: A Biography of the Constitution, Burton Hendrick, 1937.

Here's a review from Time magazine the summer the book was published.  I don't recall the author being the enthusiast about the usurpations of Roosevelt II that Time presents, but then I haven't read it in a decade - my last reading of it was in '98 or '99 when our second child was a baby.   The reading before that was in '89 or '90; I recall reading the sections on Webster and Lincoln at the laundromat in Shelbyville back when I was working at Butch's Amoco in Findlay.

I'll give it another read now that one of our two copies has been discovered on a bookshelf in the foyer.

(Come to think of it, The Founders' Constitution is now my favorite book, with Bulwark probably coming in second.  All this is after the absolute frontrunners, Psalms and the Gospel of Mark.)

Randolph's library

An account of John Randolph's library, sometime after its scattering to the winds, as remembered by Hugh Grigsby in the February 1854 Southern Literary Messenger.

A young boy's books

John Randolph, born in 1773, described his boyhood reading:

One of the first books I ever read was Voltaire's Charles XII.; about the same time, 1780-1, I read the Spectator; and used to steal away to the closet containing them. The letters from his correspondents were my favorites. I read Humphrey Clinker, also; that is Win's and Tabby's letters, with great delight, for I could spell at that age, pretty correctly. Reynard, the Fox, came next, I think; then tales of the Genii and Arabian Nights. This last, and Shakespeare, were my idols. I had read them with Don Quixote, Gil Bias, Quintus Curtius, Plutarch, Pope's Homer, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, Tom Jones, Orlando Furioso, and Thomson's Seasons, before I was eleven years; also, Goldsmith's Roman History, 2 vols., 8 vo., and an old history of Braddock's war.

From an 1819 letter to a young relative which is signed, I have scribbled at a great rate. Do thou likewise.

CUA Fathers of the Church - online!

At least 33 volumes are available at the Internet Archive. It's a modern translation of the Fathers of the Church produced by the Catholic University of America in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, a complete listing of which may be found here.

A new project: Catholic books online

Catholic Books Online, in which I exercise (not exorcise) my table-of-contents mania.

What to write about

It seems the early Romans didn't find much to write about. From Edith Hamilton, The Roman Way:

A sense for poetry was not strong in the Roman people. Their natural genius did not urge them on to artistic expression. Rome was said to have been founded in the year 753 B.C., and the earliest piece of literature we know about is a translation of the Odyssey made at the end of the First Punic War, some five hundred years later. For all these centuries it would seem that the Romans felt little impulsion to express in any form what the world was showing them and life bringing them.