Snake-Eyes Watchin' You

Following my book-buying surge over the last few weeks things are on a bit more of an even keel. I still waiting for Fanning's book to arrive, but my breath is definitely not bated! I'm ploughing through Daniel Everett's Don't Sleep, There are Snakes and am finding it by turns interesting and annoying. I think that one of the reviews that I read of it mentioned that it could have done with a damn good editor, and I have to concur. There is a distinct lack of evenness of tone, veering from really quite gripping accounts of life in the jungle to odd and stilted sections of linguistic observation, like he'd just copied out his notebooks. It's neither one thing nor another genre-wise. There is also a breath-taking arrogance at work here: Everett installed himself and his family in the malaria-ridden Amazon without any emergency back-up and when things go wrong he assumes that the native population should just rally to his aid. They do, and the account of the journey with his desperately ill family to the distant missionary hospital is hair-raising and unbelievable. How could he put his family, particularly his children, through this suffering? And how dare he, on his eventual return to life amongst the Piraha people presume to tell them what was right for them? No wonder they wanted him dead on occasion! I may or may not finish the book. Depends if something less irritating comes along.

footnote: the blurb celebrating this book is by Edward Gibson, Professor of Cognitive Sciences, MIT 'Everett is the most interesting man I have ever met... a fascinating read' : har har...didn't Everett study at MIT?

Monsters, Grotesques, Crystal, Porter and Fanning

Two recent purchases courtesy of my 'stipend' have been David Crystal's Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics and Buist Fanning's Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek, books that I need rather than want. The former is the sort of book that is regularly useful to all sorts of linguistics students and thus is regularly recalled by the library, or lives in the short loans shelves, neither of which is great when you live over a hundred miles from campus. The latter, a seminal book for my PhD, is conspicuous by its absence - which is strange as they have Stanley Porter's contemporaneous tome on Verbal Aspect. Even though I put in a purchase request at the beginning of my studies (endorsed by my supervisor) they still haven't bought it (or if they have, they haven't got round to registering it and putting it on their shelves yet, which it useless). It's mighty expensive but I can't do without it, I'm afraid, so the bullet had to be bit. I'm just waiting for the uni library to recall Porter's book to make my joy complete. Sometimes - nay, often! - it's a bit of a pain being so far away. The very lovely bookshop on Minstergates (at least 5 storeys of winding stairs, low windows, uneven floors and interesting little rooms crammed full of books) always has a shelf of books outside to tempt the temptible (like me) and it was from there that i picked up very appealing British Library booklet on Grotesques and Monsters in Medieval Manuscripts by Alixe Bovey. Now I know all about blemmyae and sciopods - which is more than you do!