A Little Englishman's Greek New Testament

Re-reading F.W.Farrar's excellent (and slightly gossipy) 'Lives of the Fathers' (Church fathers, that is -written in 1889), I came across a reference to his slightly earlier work 'The Early Days of Christianity' written 1884. "Hmmm...." I thought.

Now I have a problem (actually, several problems) in that if I find an author that I enjoy, I hanker after possessing all that author's corpus. It happened with Thomas Hardy. It happened with Nikos Kazantzakis. If it weren't for the fact that there are so damn many of them, I dare say that it would happen with the Loeb Classical Texts too. As I was in town with daughter no3 on Saturday, I bargained with her that if I accompanied her to various music/clothes shops, she might indulge her ma by stopping off at the very excellent Barbican Bookshop on our way home. I love that shop...the smell of old books, damp, mildew whatever....the rickety stairs....the antiquarian section, locked away behind old glazed doors...the sense that there are treasures to be found and bargains to be had. And indeed there were! On the 'Early Church History Shelf' was a copy of Farrar's 1884 volume, for a mere £3!!! Furthermore, in the Greek and Hebrew section my eye fell on 'The Englishman's Greek New Testament', a little 6x4 pocket volume from 1896 (the 3rd edition) that manages to pack onto each page the Greek text complete with an interlinear literal English rendering and, packed around the margins the 1611 Authorised Version. It is indeed a thing of wonder and beauty, but the text is very, very small indeed. Even with my new spectacles, eyestrain sets in within minutes!

Damned Unpleasant

Actually, Huysmans' 'The Damned' has some really, really unpleasant stuff in it that was most disturbing. I shan't go into detail lest it bring the sickos who surf the web searching for that sort of thing flocking like flies round....well, you know. Suffice to say that I have revised my opinion about Huysman. Even if graphic descriptions are presented as reportage, they are still graphic descriptions and, in my opinion, just as bad as writing purely for titillation.

I'll Be Damned...

I rather like the wall of black Penguin Classics in my local Borders book shop. They look....well....pretty serious and intriguing. I think Borders has a Bit of a Problem knowing what to do with 'the classics', be it either of the Aristotelian or the Brontean sort. They started off a few years ago with a pretty good collection of Greek and Roman stuff (better than Waterstones, which doesn't even have a Classics section), including a few Loebs (drool, drool), general histories and Classical texts (but only major authors) in translation, all arranged in broadly alphabetical order. It seemed to work quite well. 'Classic' authors like Tolstoy and Hardy could be found slotted into the fiction section where alphabetically appropriate. That seemed to work quite well too. Over the past few years there has obviously been a rethink and subsequent revamp, and all the works by 'classic authors' (be they 4thcentury BC or 19th century AD) were lumped together, the Oxford Classics translations cheek by jowl with the Wordsworth Classics (very cheap and not to be underrated- my Aeneid was more faithful to the Latin than quite a few others I could name!), the stark black Penguin Classics and the lurid lime green bargain classics (which i can't bring myself to look at). This motley assembly obviously offended whoever is in charge of the shelf displays, and more recently the books have been divided by publishing houses. The Oxford Classics now present a wall of white, with red tips (a bit bland); the Wordsworths - a wall of blue, with cute little cameo pictures on the spine; the lime green monsters just look hideous, but the Penguin Classics look sombre and studious and rather lovely. I like riffling through them for unknown (to me) gems, and it was this approach that led me to find and buy Huysmans' 'Against Nature' which I absolutely loved, enjoying every rich and bejewelled sentence. Last Friday, my duties discharged for the week, I took a copy of 'The Damned' up to the in-house Starbucks with the intention of leafing through it over a cup of de-caf Americano. But, as luck would have it WHO was sitting across the room from me but a priest acquaintance, who waved at me cheerily. Thinking that 'The Damned' was probably on the Index of Banned Books, and not wishing to give offence, I turned it over and covered it surreptiously with my copy of the Independent. So I did not get a chance to skim through it as I had wished.

I returned a few days later, however, and bought it, as the half-term holidays were coming up and I have the rare chance to read first thing in the morning for a week. I hope it will be as intriguing as 'Against Nature' - I've read a few online reviews and many of the people who 'get' Huysmans' writing (and there are many who complain that 'Nothing Happens' - well, duh!), rate it just as highly, and some even more so. He was such an encyclopaedically knowledgable writer. His discourses on the various topics within his books are fascinating lectures in their own right: I loved the chapter on the decay of Latin literature and envy his breadth of learning. Only this morning I read a wonderful description of the Grunewald Crucifixion.

Incidentally, whilst walking out of the book shop, who should I see walking in but my priest-acquaintance, who again waved cheerily at me. Fortunately I had my purchase secreted deep in my bag.

Not Quite a Book

The doctoral studies rumble on: I'm getting to put down a fair number of words per day at the moment, which is quite gratifying, particularly since I have to meet my supervisor in ten days or so for a progress review. I think he was rather startled by my sudden interest in philosophy of language - the 'meaning' of meaning etc. - but was probably just happy that I'd actually got something down on paper, if not quite his area. I've put that topic on hold at the moment to tackle an examination of verb-forms in Paul's epistle to the Galatians, which is very much revisiting the territory of my MA. This time I'm looking at discourse prominence with reference to verbal aspect. One seminal, and not a little contraversial, book on the subject is Stanley E Porter's tome 'Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament', which, although thorough and impressively scholarly, is probably one of the most user-unfriendly books that I have come across: arbitrary changes in font-size (some disconcertingly small) and no subject index. The referencing isn't too hot either. There is an annoying tendency in academia to try and get away with stuff that wouldn't pass muster in, say, industry. And I'm not just talking about publications, either. The whole of academia seems chaotic, lacks planning, foresight, punctiliousness, punctuality, clarity, mired in a morass of information and words that lack cohesion, where arguments and hypotheses have to be teased from what seems to be unneccessary and willfully obscure prolixity. A clear, insightful mind and confident theory avoids obfuscation, surely: opaqueness cannot equal brilliance.

Another thing that is exercising my patience at the moment, is the sheer quantity of PDFs that are accumulating in boxes around my desk. I download a fair number per week, so I'm starting to wonder about the advantages of an iReader or the like. Would that work for PDFs? I must investigate....although I dislike reading text on screen (makes my eyes ache), the sheer mass of paper is becoming overwhelming, not to mention the expense of ink-cartridges (why so costly?) and paper. It's a tempting thought.....though Not Quite a Book.

A Bit of a Lull

All quiet on the book-buying front, thank God. Or rather, O Dear! Buying = cheerful, but abstinence = despondence. O dear o deary dear. Still not quite right from the Christmas virus, I suppose. Can't think of anything I want to read particularly except fluff and postcards. Deep down, I know that I am a complete lightweight.

When I feel full of energy, I completely over-estimate my capacity for reading and schedule a bizarre programme that entails waking up extra-early to make room for 'intellectual' reading. But strangely enough, I don't schedule in any of the huge pile that I have to wade through for my doctorate: o no! I'll choose some random tome that I imagine will give me some deep insights but, because I am not versed in the language of that particular discipline, I end up abandoning it like some leaky tub. Amusing books are failing to amuse and I feel more and more like the hero of Huysmans' 'Against Nature' trying all manner of things to pique a jaded appetite and calm jangled nerves. Stephen Fry is failing to keep me either awake or interested. Yesterday I just sat, gormlessly staring into the middle distance, doing nothing, thinking nothing, unwilling to move until asked if I felt alright. Yes, I feel alright, but I am certainly not the person that I was a few weeks ago. My get up and go has got up and gone. At least temporarily. The lassitude has also crept into my writing: sitting at my desk today, I struggled to make sense of anything that I wrote last week, or even to care. Not helped by the presence of a dischooled child. I should maybe curl up with Thomas Aquinas, or Epictetus, or.......