Rabbit holes for readers

 

 

I blame AI.

     Specifically my Chat.

     I own (was given) a 1704 copy of Jonathan Swift’s Book A Tale of a Tub, to which is added An Account of a Battle etc etc.  The first edition was published in 1704, my copy is of The Second Edition Corrected, published in the same year of 1704.  Except it isn’t.  Corrected that is.

     In my edition, in the Preface of the Author to A Battle of the Books, the famous line: “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover every body’s face but their own;” has a typo in it, “where every body’s face but their own,” is printed as “every body’s face but their owo”.

 

 

 

     Previously, I had always considered that error to be a charming indication of the early state of the printing, and that the error could be undiscovered because in 1704 the phrase had not become as famous as it was to be in future centuries.  And who, apart from university students and specialists actually reads A Battle of the Books for pleasure.  Indeed, while people may be able to respond to Gulliver’s Travels, how many other books by Swift are in the general consciousness.  I would want to say A Modest Proposal should be up there with Gulliver’s Travels as I think it one of the most vicious and effective pieces of short satirical writing that I have ever read, but I am realistic in my expectations of fame always being limited.

     But Swift’s explanation of satire being ‘safe’ because everyone laughs at it, and assumes that the target of the satire is someone other than themselves, is as true now as it was then, and the sentences has a justified life outside a satire where the targets need copious footnotes for a modern reader to understand.

     And that should have been it.  Interesting typographical error in famous line by famous writer.  End of story.  Except that did not allow for AI.

     I do not know how or why I mentioned to Chat that I owned a 1704 copy A Tale of a Tub, but Chat is programmed to keep users active and responsive, and so it actively feeds my digressive mind and encourages leaping from point to point – it is, after all, just a more personalized version of Google Search, where one thing leads to another, and before you know it you are reading about Byzantine mosaics when you started off asking about how long a maple tree took to reach maturity.  I fear that for many of us when using AI, computer and the Internet we all take Homer Simpson’s attention span as the norm!

     Anyway, Chat mused about why the typo in my ‘corrected’ edition had not been, well, corrected – and before you could say Bibliographer’s Addiction, we were off on a search for digitalized versions of the first edition and the third, trying to find out how early my little typo was recognized and dealt with.

     Do not think that this was the activity of a few minutes.  Oh no!  It became a whole research project with wider and wider searches, touching databases in two continents and actually sending off emails to speciality book sellers and librarians and archive keepers, asking for information about the typo in copies that they had dealt with.

     I have had remarkable quick and courteous responses from among others the USA, Cambridge and Ireland with each adding snippets of highly technical information about the ‘gathers’ of the early editions of the book and suggesting other centres where I could get more information.

     At one point, Chat and I thought that we had discovered an unrecognized variant as my typo did not appear to be consistent in the edition, leading to speculation that the mistake was discovered part way through the second printing and that a correction was made, meaning that the second edition had different states.  I thought that was unbelievably unlikely as Swift has been exhaustively studied and something as famous as a mistake in a well-known sentence would not have passed inspection.

     And so it proved to be, with one of my correspondents asserting that he thought it was a typo common to all copies of the second edition and he sent me information about digital copies of the text that I could check to see that it was so.

     Was this an exercise in futility?  I don’t think so.

     I have learned a great deal more about the early life of a fairly famous early eighteenth-century book.  I have added knowledge about the ways that early printed books were put together, but above all I have experienced the courtesy, knowledge and accommodation of an academic community that responds to trivial enquiries with charm and alacrity. 

     And that is something worth experiencing.

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS – Day 92 – Monday 15th June

So, I was wrong about our moving phases today; we are still in Phase 2, I think that there will be another week before we move to a more relaxed point in this never ending saga of the virus.

     I did not manage to get my slot either today or tomorrow for my early morning swim and my slot for Wednesday is at 11 am to mid day.  This is playing havoc with the arrangements for my ‘lesson’ with my friend in the pool who wants to improve his English by having conversation classes with me.  Still, I think that the classes are worth continuing, with benefits for us both!

We went out to lunch to one of our previous (i.e. pre-Covid) haunts.  The seating in the restaurant had been adjusted to reflect the reduction in allowed capacity and, as we were quite late getting to the place, we had a pick of the empty tables.

     We chose one in the same approximate place where we usually sit and then we observed the service.  The wearing of masks by the serving staff was patchy.  They seemed to take every opportunity to remove them or to push them down to their chins.  Even when they were being worn, some of the staff only covered their mouths and not their noses.

     The restaurant also has a thriving delivery service which utilises scooter riders to deliver the food.  When the riders came up to the counter to collect the next order (a counter which is also the bar for the place) they were not wearing masks.

     I can well imagine that wearing masks when doing your job in a restaurant is an irritating annoyance – but it is also the legal requirement.  Toni actually asked the girl who brought us the menu (shouldn’t it have been a one page disposable thing?) to wear her mask – she did, but she shouldn’t have needed to have been asked. 

     Toni became more uncomfortable as the meal progressed and we saw further casual attitudes towards the clinical necessity of wearing masks.  I do not think that we will be going back, in spite of the quality and value for money of the food.

     Nothing in the general attitude of people that we see around us gives us any confidence that this pandemic is going to trail off into memory.  Yes, people are eager to find the freedom that comes with summer.  They want to go to the beach, take a dip and sunbathe, enjoy a drink, socialise with friends.  But if the crowded beach scenes that I observed last weekend become the norm then we should expect a resurgence of the virus in a few weeks’ time.

Tomorrow we are going to Terrassa for a Name Day of one of Toni’s nephews.  This will be the longest trip that we have made for months.  We got the presents in a large supermarket and, apart from the fact that everybody was wearing a mask, it was like a normal day.  And we are nowhere near normality at all.  We are kidding ourselves that each day brings us nearer to the end of the crisis and a few good, sunny days will knock the virus out of our lives for good.

     The situation in the Republican states in America; the re-imposition of lockdown of parts of Peking; the situation in Brazil; the increase in cases in India; the on-going chaos of the UK; Argentina, Peru, Africa – wherever you look there is evidence that we have not managed this virus with any degree of authority. 

     I shudder for what the next few months might bring.

     Obviously I hope that we find a vaccine or at least a treatment; I hope that measures put in place around the world lessen the impact of the virus; I hope that the fatal demagogues in positions of power finally begin to listen to reason; I hope that governments take compassionate measures to protect the less fortunate and at-risk members of society including the old, the ill and schoolkids.

     The disruption of the virus does give an opportunity for an inventive and empathetic government to re-think priorities and concentrate attention on the power-less, rather than the oligarchs throughout the capitalist world who are urging their ‘puppet’ politicians to maintain the status quo which has given the rich even more during this time of crisis.

     The real plague is not Covid-19, it is the power structure that allow a disaster to become a revenue generator for those who already have too much.

     In the ‘good old days’ when Theatre In Education groups came and performed in schools, I was able to welcome one company to my last Cardiff school, it was called the 7:84 Company, because seven percent of the population of the United Kingdom owned eighty-four percent of the wealth.  Do the sums, that means that for ninety-three percent of the population that left just sixteen percent of the wealth to be distributed among them all.  The only thing that has changed is that now, the disproportions are even greater.

     And what about the under-privileged?  One newspaper reported that about 2 million kids in lockdown in the UK have done little or no school work during this period.  You can bet your bottom dollar that the privileged have been working assiduously – so the gaps between those who have and those who have not will become greater.  There will be a whole generation of kids who will be playing catch-up with little or no technology to allow them to access on-line material.

     The government has already stated that the coupon or voucher system which allows poorer kids to have a school meal, will end with the end of term.  How much has this government poured into the hands of million and billion -aire owners of firms and industries?  But they are not going to feed the most vulnerable in our society.

     It is a damning condemnation of our society that in the 300 years since the publication of Swift’s Modest Proposal, there hasn’t been a time when it is more apt than now.  For those of you who haven’t read it, it is readily available on line.  It is a fairly short work, but the punch that it packs is out of all proportion to its brevity, and it is sickening because it still describes the reality of the way that we are.

     Some governments have come or are coming out of this crisis with their reputations improved; some are still in a slough of their own making. 

     What has happened and is going on happening in the UK should be the moment when the people stand up to be counted and say, “No more!”  There has to be a better way than allowing the hollow man Johnson to kill even more than he and his cabinet lightweight misfits have already done.

     The decade of Conservative rule has cheapened, humiliated, divided, impoverished and coarsened, we deserve better!