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!

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.

Christmas Books Past and Present

Christmas usually brings me at least a few books. Whenever quizzed about what I would like for Christmas, my list is ever-simple: good espresso-ground coffee, wine, dark chocolate or a book. I'm easily pleased. This year I already know that I am getting the second Loeb volume of Epictetus (books III & IV, plus the Enchiridion). Hurray! I love the Loeb series: the handy-size, the small, neat font, the air of studiousness that they give out. I strive to collect them and have serendipitously bought a number from charity shops which tend to price them cheaply (best buy: 2volumes of Aristotle's Historia Animalium; £7 for both. I use small chunks to teach Greek to The Boy). With Christmas books I generally have to make specific requests and direct the purchaser to the most appropriate outlet. I remember one year asking for 'Spartan Women' by Sarah(?) Pomeroy and saying that it could be bought from the classics department at a certain bookshop (I'd actually seen it on the shelves). However I got a story back that it wasn't in stock, they'd never heard of it so they couldn't order it. All patently untrue. I sulkily took myself in, the week after Christmas, picked off the very shelf where I'd last seen it and bought it for myself. Not sure what happened there.

I often ask for easy reading at this time of year: Stephen Fry's 'The Ode Less Travelled', 'Pistache' by Sebastien Faulks, Alan Bennett, that sort of thing. Last year though, my Christmas reading was the New International Greek Testament Commentary on the Gospel of Luke by I.Howard Marshall. Fascinating.

I have finished 'This Breathing World' by Jose Luis de Juan, purchased last week. It was well-written (or at least, well-translated) but I'm not really sure what was going on with the plot: two parallel storylines nudge up against one another, but there is no satisfying unifying denouement (which it cries out for), just a low-key trailing off. I was (and still am) running a temperature whilst reading it, so it was all a bit vague and fever-dreamlike. I should get on with some serious reading: Constantine Campbell, Stanley Porter and Bernard Comrie, but I think I'll wait until I feel better for those heavyweight guys.

I'm going to start my Hardy novelette ('The Well-Beloved') either today or tomorrow, if my eyes stop aching. It always takes me a while to get into Hardy's idiolect, but I do love his writing so.

The annotated Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass was a revelation: so interesting, and Lewis Carroll's wordplay breathtaking. It can be savoured so much more as you get older. Sometimes I think that childrens' books are wasted on children!

I am trying to resist the newspaper book supplements: there are always so many books that I fancy reading at any given moment. I used to note them down for future reference, but the backlog is now just getting ridiculous. My dog-chewed (as opposed to dog-eared) notebook must remain firmly closed for a while.