Household Opera

Remembering the memory theater

Some days, it feels like my career trajectory from literature-scholar-in-training to academic librarian has taken me a long way from my old set of intellectual interests. The things that interest me now, that make me sit up and say "hmm!", aren't the kinds of things I even knew to look for when I started grad school. But on other days, it feels like everything, sooner or later, comes back around, and I'm just tracing the edges of a long and intricate pattern that eventually repeats, or at least rhymes, if one follows it long enough.

Case in point: Thanks to the magic of iTunes U, I've been downloading and listening to Paul Duguid and Geoffrey Nunberg's "History of Information" course at Berkeley. It's fascinating stuff, exactly the kind of thing that makes my librarian heart beat faster. When I got to the classes on manuscript culture and the impact of print, I was pleasantly surprised to find Duguid and Nunberg introducing the idea of the printing revolution by playing a clip from James Burke's BBC series "The Day the Universe Changed," which I still remember watching, at age eleven, when it first aired on PBS. And then, to my great delight, I realized that the clip they were using in the course was the episode that stayed with me the longest: "Printing Transforms Knowledge," in which Burke spends a couple of minutes near the beginning talking about medieval memory theater.

It was fascinating to hear it again, because that couple of minutes inspired my dissertation. The whole "memory theater" concept fascinated me, and I never forgot it. (Especially since Burke visually recreates an example involving punning mnemonics for the seven liberal arts. The one I remember best is a snake — an adder: get it? — standing for arithmetic.)* More than a decade later, I thought of memory theater while working on a graduate seminar paper, and that paper topic in turn spawned my dissertation. At my defense, when my chair asked me to talk about where my dissertation started, I began that origin story with "The Day the Universe Changed."

And now, in quite another context, here it was again. Perhaps I've always been interested in information retrieval and its long, occasionally bizarre history, even before I started thinking about it in that light. And I've now got "The Day the Universe Changed" in my Netflix queue, for old times' sake; I suddenly want to watch the whole thing over again.

* I tried in vain to find that scene on YouTube so I could link to it, but no luck. There's a "Day the Universe Changed" channel, but I can't find the memory theater bit. I suspect the series was edited somewhere along the line.

The past is a foreign country; they write poems differently there.

My Material Cultures paper is coming together at last, with a little over a month and a half to go before I present it. I suspect a lot of the points I'm making have been made at least once or twice before, but I'm working with a body of evidence that doesn't seem to have been examined in a lot of detail, and I have so much to say about it that I'm going to have a hard time cramming it all into 20 minutes. There are so many more commonplace books I want to look at that I think this could very easily become an extended project of some sort: perhaps a journal article, or if I get wildly ambitious, I'd still like to build a database to track the reputations of individual poets and poems among Victorian readers.*

One of the things I've been realizing, as I pore over extract books from various points in the 19th century, is how different my own literary tastes are from those of the people I'm studying. One finds Familiar Canonical Poets in these commonplace books, of course. Shakespeare turns up regularly, mostly in the form of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations-style snippets from the plays; Byron was wildly popular, much more so than his fellow Romantic poets; the most famous 19th-century Americans—Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant—are heavily represented as well.

But one also finds dozens of now-obscure poets, not to mention reams of poetry that strikes the modern ear as sentimental, even treacly. The poems in these collections tend to be heavy on the moralizing, or on the kind of pathos that Mark Twain sent up so vividly in the person of Emmeline Grangerford. I've paged through entire albums filled with sad poems about dead children, pious poems about Christian resignation, and upbeat love songs. One can resuscitate the reputation of a Felicia Hemans or a Letitia Elizabeth Landon; but it's harder to do that with Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House (quoted seven times in one Boston woman's extract book), especially after reading what Virginia Woolf had to say about it.

On my most recent visit to Brown I encountered a poem by Edward Augustus Rand, an Episcopalian minister born in Vermont, which began:

Across the sands, strange darkness fell;
The sun had dipped beneath a cloud;
The waves now sullenly swept on,
The surf fast whitened to a shroud.

But then the speaker sees a sunlit white sail in the distance, and neatly unpacks the metaphor to conclude with "O souls that find in Christ the light, / Sail on across life's shadowed sea!" I rather liked the ominous first stanza, but I felt a distinct flash of disappointment when I saw how it ended. The combination of religiosity and sunny optimism was off-putting to my tastes, which were honed, like every other English major's tastes, on the irony and disjunctiveness and unsettlement of Modernism and its aftermath. This kind of poetry is exactly what 20th century literary culture revolted against.

But people clearly loved this kind of poetry—cut it out of newspapers, saved it in their albums and scrapbooks, copied it out by hand, shared it with each other, kept their compilations and passed them on to friends and relatives. And one of the things I'm interested in is getting past my own aesthetic prejudices, which are very much of my own time and place, to try to understand what the Victorians saw in their (rather different) canon.** There's something moving about all the effort so many people went through to preserve these poems; staying aware of that has been a useful corrective to my own literary snobbery.

Take, for instance, Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life," which was much beloved by Victorian readers but is apt to sound almost unbearably earnest nowadays. Not long ago, I found one of its most famous stanzas emblazoned on a vintage postcard from around 1913:

One's first impulse may be to roll one's eyes; but the fact that postcard companies could print poems like this on cards and sell them is yet another piece of evidence for their popularity. And the appetite for reassuring, uplifting, optimistic poetry hasn't gone away. I used to see "A Psalm of Life" quite regularly on the backs of Celestial Seasonings tea boxes, before they stopped putting entire poems on their packaging. (I could probably do an entire spinoff project on the detachable poetic quotation as it appears on various types of commercial products. But I have to finish this stage of the project first.)

Most of this won't fit in the paper, which is less concerned with aesthetics than with reading practices and with the physical construction of homemade texts, although I do plan to sneak that postcard into my slides. But I wanted to share it anyway, because it seemed to interesting not to think through.

* It would be an enormous amount of work, and there would be all sorts of logistical challenges, but I still think it would be a very cool project. Had I but world enough and time, &c.

** Joanne Dobson's "Reclaiming Sentimental Literature" (American Literature 69 no. 2, 1997) says a lot of what I'd like to say about the mismatch between 19th-century poetry and 20th-century aesthetic sensibilities.

In which an extracurricular project coalesces

Remember that idea I had for a project dealing with Dracula and information technology some months back? I think it may turn into an actual article, or at least the makings of one. I'd been thinking, over the winter break, about which of my various research ideas (some library-related, some more literary, some, like this one, in-between) that I might want to pursue in the new year, and the Dracula project suddenly started calling to me. I've been using some of the downtime before spring semester starts to pull together a bibliography, and I'm rereading the novel with a steadily increasing level of interest in what it has to say about documents and their circulation.

What's intriguing me right now is the parallel between Dracula's self-replication (by making more and more vampires) and the replication of documents by everyone else (by copying, transcribing, and typing out in triplicate). Dracula himself is a sort of oral register of Transylvanian history. The very last paragraphs of the novel call attention to the scarcity of "authentic" documents, e.g. handwritten ones, among the fictional archive of records out of which Jonathan Harker claims to have assembled the narrative. Lots of people turn out to have already written about Dracula and the telegraph, the phonograph, and other communication technologies of the 19th century, but I think there's something I can add.

I keep having to remind myself that even though I'm not by training a Victorianist, the great advantages of being an independent scholar are not having to produce at the speed of the tenure clock (and hence more time for research into new subject areas) and being able to work on whatever one wants to. If something good enough to publish or present comes out of it, I'll be very pleased; but it's also a nifty project that unites a bunch of things I'm interested in—history of the book, technologies of writing, supernatural literature—but haven't really had a chance to write about yet. It may take a while to finish, but I'm remembering just how much fun a good research jag can be.

Evidence for the history of reading

I think I've previously blogged about the Reading Experience Database, a project based at the Open University in London; as the name suggests, they're building a big database of evidence of what (and how) people read in Britain, from the advent of printing to 1945. When I last looked at the project site, the database wasn't open to the public yet. But now it is, and you can search it in a variety of interesting ways. I tried a search to see who read Milton's Paradise Lost, and another to see who was reading conduct books before the 19th century. You can also search for particular readers, such as Samuel Pepys. Fascinating stuff, all of it.

It's very much a work in progress, but they're also looking for people to contribute; I hope I'll get the chance to send them some evidence. It pleases both my inner book-history geek and my inner web-2.0 enthusiast to see how participatory this project is, and how useful it could eventually become.