[lit-ideas] Re: Tuesday Hermeneutics (Was: Monday Poem)
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 09:47:37 -0700
David: You wrote, "My current weakness is encyclopedia Britannica. I just
bought my third set, which will allow me perhaps to say a thing or two about
the transition from the eleventh to the thirteenth edition."
By coincidence, I have an Eleventh Edition. And I also have the three
volumes that presumably comprise the additions that along with the Eleventh
make up the Thirteenth Edition. In fact, those three volumes, entitled
"Thirteenth Edition," led me to believe that there was no integrated
Thirteenth Edition; that is, that the Thirteenth Edition consisted of an
Eleventh Edition plus the three volume addendum. Pray tell, what three
volumes do you have? I was once tempted by an earlier edition, perhaps the
ninth or the tenth but resisted. I do have a 1990 Fifteenth, but I have
never become reconciled to Mortimer Adler's innovations.
Lawrence
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of David Ritchie
Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2007 9:22 AM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Tuesday Hermeneutics (Was: Monday Poem)
On Oct 23, 2007, at 8:27 AM, Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx wrote:
David, I hope you can do better than L. "Helm" Helm, who, when I offered my
heart-felt interpretation, all he said was that it was 'beyond' what he
meant, and that his creation being too recent, he felt unable to cope with
an exegesis of it.
I'm happy to try.
I did not understand a lot of your nice verse. "Chartlon" is a hue of white?
That's one entry in the OED, 'Charlton white'.
Charlton is an area of S.E. London, near Woolwich. It has a football team.
I lived there for a few weeks when we were between houses, which is to say
that we had to move out of the house that we'd sold and couldn't yet move
into the house that we'd bought. It was a grim place.
I'm not sure what you mean gentleman's appliance shop. No such thing in the
OED. I suppose you mean they would sell things like shaving cream, but that
you'd rather think it was all pornographic (and women fallen from an
honourable life). I can't see how you can say this belongs to your
childhood. It sounds more Victorian to me.
I think the shop sold trusses of various sorts, devices for people who
wanted to avoid the surgical repair of hernias. But why young adults had to
be kept out is a bit of a mystery, hence the speculation that they had a
second line of business. It's hard to imagine that there was a sufficient
market in trusses. What else would they sell? Male corsets perhaps?
Condoms maybe? I thought the place worth including in a poem because it was
so much of an era, but it's not something I can describe further because I
never went in.
On researching collocations for 'gentleman's', I was intererested in "the
gentleman's C", which was now a B+ and what someone (male) gets just for his
legacy and good breeding.
I am interested in reminiscences. I suppose the gentleman's appliance shop
applies to your childhood in London.
I can't see why you have to EXPLAIN an ad, Victorian or other. Don't you
find that teachers are on many an occasion asked to explain something that
it's self-explanatory. Especially in literature classes, I find it rather
irritating that someone is explaining a novel which was never meant to be
explained and that does not need a relevant "Novel Studies" to make it be
relevant. Your other parts I understood better. You teach medicine? I
thought you taught art.
One of my seminars this semester, in an art college, is "History from Fifty
Defective Newspapers." I bought a stack of nineteenth century newspapers on
e-bay and we are trying to figure out what can be learned from this
"defective" archive. My task is usually either to suggest where further
information is available or to supply some of same, hence the discourse on
hernias and prolapsed bladders, which were so much the bane of nineteenth
century women that you can still find chairs with built-in potties. I far I
also told them about McDowell and Sims and the early history of
gynecology--a long time ago I taught the history of medicine--which may have
been too much indelicacy for that hour of the morning.
Yes, fall (or autumn) is very nice, and I liked your imagery of the leaves
going to the gutter, which reminds me of another Londoner (like you),
Gertrude Lawrence. Noel Coward said she knew about things and that she was
proud to say that she came not in, but from the gutters.
We did try to race leaves in the gutter just as you race objects in a
stream. And yes I was considering both innocent and experienced
understandings of "gutter".
And you have to let me know, under the other thread, what your favourite
Loeb, or the one you'd feel like reading now, is.
Of Loeb, I am entirely innocent; I know nothing about the subject. I am a
modern historian, straying sometimes towards the early modern period, but
not tempted further back. My current weakness is encyclopedia Britannica.
I just bought my third set, which will allow me perhaps to say a thing or
two about the transition from the eleventh to the thirteenth edition. Or
maybe I'll just enjoy the essays.
Best wishes,
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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