Author

 

Summers were spent wandering the bluestone lanes at sunrise, shifting found objects into unusual positions, for effect. A derelict car was covered in a kapok blanket. Hard rubbish went Renaissance. David and I set up table and chairs in a Pigdon Street roundabout for breakfast. We played Perec with commuter traffic, in the days before we’d ever read Georges Perec. Our favourite word was “Author!”, which we would direct at anything that met full critical approval, fairy floss crepe myrtle at a wrought fence, Etruscan-looking graffiti, a cloud in the sky. Days were spent at respective digs making vast collages from 1978 magazines and trashed art books, to a soundtrack regularly interspersed with the first Dire Straits album. I fully imagine many of those cumulative masterworks are still in one of David’s meticulous files. His father, Ian Victor, was a well-known educationalist, also known for his sartorial elegance, both strong influences on David’s life. With friends we would go to jazz shows, peculiar and/or marvellous art shows, excessive student theatre. Talk was always perceptive and silences peaceful. Gradually David left Melbourne, but over time there were visits and dinners in China Town and messaging, back when postcards were a thing, opening ‘Dear Hearty…’ and ‘signed Handsome’. One of his public triumphs was the John Glover show at the National Gallery of Victoria and elsewhere (2004), another his book ‘Dempsey’s People’, which arrived in a big parcel on the doorstep in 2017. This week I read ‘A Tear in the Glass’ by Mary Ryllis Clark, an intuitive memoir of Melbourne curator Nina Stanton, and googling Nina Stanton I discovered that David had been awarded a prize in her name in order to extend his education studying in royal houses of England. All of which made perfect sense, unlike the news received in my ABR (Australian Book Review) mailout two days later reporting “the death of David Hansen, art historian and public gallery director”, with a reprint of his brilliant, timely, and essential 2010 essay ‘Seeing Truganini’. This is the way we receive the news these days, at several removes, electronically. Memories and loss come to the fore, as they will. Seeking further information online I was stopped by sites wanting me to prove I am not a robot, a case of the digital Renaissance turning into soft rubbish. I did at least gather that ‘Handsome’ passed away on the 13^th of January 2024 in Geelong. I keep thinking of how many single- and multi-syllabic pronunciations of Geelong we would have tested, back in the day, the day apparently being that time when we wander Carlton bluestone and wave at the rat race driving their insane Volvos and Datsuns in the direction of, if not fame typically, at the very least a small fortune.  

Doomscroll

 

How do you feel about poets writing about some form of oppression they have had? Do you think it is good for the world? These questions came my way recently from a fellow poet. If anything is a subject for poetry, then the simplest answer is yes, you can write about oppression. Oppression is cause for suffering. Suffering itself is personal experience, experience that is a fact of individual being. Sharing the experience through words is one way towards understanding, towards empathy, towards not living alone with the suffering. At least up to this point, writing about oppression is both a good and even a necessity. You should write about oppression, is a more convinced, imperative way of answering the question. In fact, oppression is a root cause of poetic activity, bound up with our responses to our conditions. More to the point is how we write about it, so that it’s both personal and common. Some of the most humorous, light poetry imaginable can prove to be founded in suffering and oppression, it is a regular feature of comedy. Making fun of the object of your unhappiness is a tactical release, often something that comes naturally. Trickier is naming the oppression and expressing the displeasure, the outrage at length in doomscroll. This is my word for the wrongs that turn into rants, the well-worded exposés that transform into pages of unending rage. The risk here is losing the message and the emotion in stretches of doomscrolling, where only those who enjoy spending hours reading bad news will find something to their liking. The singing contortionist Iggy Pop exclaimed that someone has to suffer for their art and it may as well be the listener. This perverse twist on the Romantic notion of personal suffering needs to be kept in mind when you venture out on the theme of your oppression. Do you wish the listener to understand and empathise with your declarations? Or make them endure the oppression vicariously, thus adding to the sum total of unhappiness? This is the last thought on the minds of doomscrollers, as they plough their furrow from here to the horizon. The risk of sounding self-indulgent escalates. My fellow poet adds that these personal stories are sacred so they wonder how I felt about that. In reply I would say that confessional poetry can focus deliberately on the ‘I’ for good or ill and that you will be drawing attention to yourself and not just the oppression. Is this necessary? Our own experience is, as you say, sacred. For this reason, how directly you tell these stories, or how indirectly or obliquely, is a measure of the value you place on this sacredness. After all, poetry might be about how we think and feel, but in our written and spoken relationship with the other the central concern is how we make them think and feel, through words alone.

Square

 

Image: Collins Street, Melbourne in 1905, lantern slide photograph 

taken by my great-uncle John Henry Harvey. Held at the State Library of Victoria.

When illegal Van Diemen’s Land settlers first sailed up Birrarung, why did they imagine a street grid extending a mile in each direction behind all those mangroves? Their thoughts were on a city, not a village, from the first fatal impact. Until then, not one line in the landscape was straight. The square came from Indian garrison towns, keeping everything wanted inside, everything unwanted outside. Such grid towns were seen in maps of ancient China, square as the imprint of a red ink stamp marking possession. The streets were set out in rapid order, exact measurements, perfect corners. The only anomaly to this army fortress being Parisian boulevards launched into bushland in the general direction of the blue hills, the distant prospects, Sydney somewhere, gold someplace, Antarctica. A city was the idea, but what kind of city? So many squares, no city square. Each generation succeeded in avoiding the overwhelming question, as city blocks were populated with buildings grand as London. It took the demolition of a street of Victorian goodness gracious grandioseness behind the cathedral to come close to a city square. Half a square anyway. Lacklustre, with views onto drab sidewalls and lasting but a season, the square became the scene, most memorably, of a moratorium against an Asian war, a conflict based on the unlikely premise that this city will be invaded anytime soon by an army from Annam. This finest hour of popular resistance to stupidity was the square’s raison d’être, in all cultures the square being the agora where everyone meets to congregate, to celebrate, to market, and to protest. Bereft of mangroves and piebald from the Wrecker, the city made half-hearted efforts at a square. Then a main street was turned into a mall, betraying its true shape in commercial interest: a square is there for the market, once citizens sidestep roving trams. Later came Fed Square, a place for the well-fed rather than the fed-up, an eccentrically irregular dodecagon, not a square. Not one inch of its surface was flat, which is how the planners wanted it. Comically yet, the commercial sector vied, year in year out to be the centre of the city. A complex called Melbourne Central was an outstanding example of this complex, which was only ever central in a businessman’s mind. Half the city blocks laid claim to being the centre at one time or another, but none of them, thus far, have been cleared to make way for a city square. Meanwhile crowds will turn into congregations, celebrations are organised where possible, and protests are so carefully stage-managed that police merge in with the protestors. The citizens take coffee in side alleys then walk the grid maze some more, well knowing their bearings, knowing well they’ll not find the centre, that they could wander rubik-like for days without finding their city square.

Tradie

 

Tradie music is its own genre, evolved over decades on work sites the length and breadth of the worksite across the street from the listener’s home. Loud talking in the crisp air before breakfast is the overture to an upbeat of vehicles coming to a screeching halt on nature strips, slamming of car doors, clamorous unbolting of trailers, with toolboxes rattling at about 100 decibels. The to-and-fro of onsite planning is rarely heard at ordinary plain-talk levels but must be raised to shouting for adequate reception, then tanked up further when musicians wish to have full vocal control over the entire site, if not most of the surrounding neighbourhood. Local listeners adapt slowly to tradie music as it seeps under doorways, tests window fittings, and emanates through solid walls. Introduction of dozers and diggers sets the tone for some weeks, as high-pitched tradie vocals can scarcely be heard under a savage mix of concrete clearance and subterranean excavation. Out with the old and in with the new, as the previous house is carted away in unpeaceful pieces upon thunderous lorries. Great trenches are mauled in the earth for swimming pools, foundation posts, and underground carports. Then they turn on the radio, Fox or Nova the choice, a case of out with the new and in with the old as greatest hits of the seventies, eighties, and nineties blast across the battered terrain in attempts to entertain passengers in passing planes. Requests are not being taken from local residents, whose heads are now under three pillows or wired for sound to deflect the onerously unsonorous drone. Total erasure of the past is in keeping with the terra nullius vision of landscape, a void created that must then be filled in with tradie music as brute force, massive mechanicals, and unmanaged noise achieve the predictable, an apartment block overpriced even for this part of town. Google ‘tradie music’ for song lists, a jumble of pumped-up platinum, dad rock, and brickie’s trance. Though nothing compares to the verismo industrial sounds of jackhammers uprooting footpaths and blokes yelling from upper-storey scaffolding incomprehensible directions, incomprehensible even to the few people in the street who have not by now left the area for the day. This crushing combo of broad strine, 4WD revs, and nail gun staccato blasts unstoppably through the afternoon, where even a twelfth radio replay of ‘Enter Sandman’ is not a hint that it’s time to turn off the heavy machinery for another day and go get some shuteye. Crescendos continue like waves at a beach until abruptly, or gradually, depending on the thirst, tradie music disappears down the street until tomorrow in a last fart of acceleration and exhaust fumes.

Cana

 

Image: the altar at the ‘Cardboard Cathedral’ in Christchurch

Aotearoa New Zealand, choir stalls, pulpit, and cathedra, November 2023.

Reflection on John 2.1–11 for the Third Sunday after Epiphany, the 21^st of January 2024.  Written by Philip Harvey for the pew notes of St Peter’s Eastern Hill, Melbourne 

As happens in life, we suddenly find ourselves at a wedding. Everyone is here, it seems. We are told it is the third day, a familiar expression. Thomas Merton puts it this way in his poem ‘Cana’:

Once when our minds were Galilees,

And clean as skies our faces,

Our simple rooms were charmed with sun.

Our thoughts went in and out in whiter coats than God’s disciples. 

But somehow the party is flagging and it’s Mary who flags the problem, “They have no wine.” Views vary on her exchange of words with Jesus. Rainer Maria Rilke reads it thus (‘Of the Marriage at Cana’):

And so she followed after him, amazed.

But there on that day at the wedding feast
when, unexpectedly, more wine was needed,
she looked, and begged a gesture at the least
and did not understand when he protested.

Then he did it. And she saw much later
how she had thrust him then upon his way.
Now he'd become a real miracle-maker,
and in this act unalterably there lay
the sacrifice.  

Alexander Pope says what happens next in a one-liner: “The conscious water saw its master and blushed.” A line Pope seems to have elaborated from Richard Crashaw and John Dryden, but what is language in all its abundance, if it isn’t here to share? 

Graciously invited by Jesus, the first to test the waters is the chief steward, whose middle management job is defined by Seamus Heaney in ‘Cana Revisited’ as “to supervise consumption or supplies.” So, imagine his surprise and relief at finding the best wine kept until now, the weight of responsibility lifted in an act of equalising grace.  There is more than enough for everyone. This is called the first miracle Jesus performed and it is an epiphany, revealing God in our midst, then and now for everyone.    

Malcolm Guite, in one of his sonnets, says it is “A truth that you can taste upon the tongue … Where you can taste and touch and feel and see,/ The spring of love, the fount of all forgiving,/ Flows when you need it, rich, abundant, free.” Cana astounds, but it is not a transitory event. This good wine is offered to everyone to partake, as Guite states clearly in conclusion:

Better than waters of some outer weeping,
That leave you still with all your hidden sin,
Here is a vintage richer for the keeping
That works its transformation from within.
‘What price?’ you ask me, as we raise the glass,
‘It cost our Saviour everything he has.’

Tattoo

 

The blue people walk supermarket aisles. A lacy cobweb funnels out of a neck, suspends along the spine. A universe wraps their calf muscle lightly, darkly. Indigo twinkles turn to timeless wrinkles around an inky ankle. Unlike watches and earrings, the blues cannot be taken off at a moment’s notice. Mermaids rest permanently on their leg, in full view. The blues keep resolutely to the point. Primarily, self-expression. A name in cursive signifies a bicep. In initials epidermis speaks the language of love time cannot easily erase. Numbers emote, remotely. A Vermeer appears, all eyes and shouldering only so much responsibility. Self is a many-splendoured thing, wiggling its cutting collage should another self see them and seize the day, surrender. Self can be a celtic knot on rotating wrist (one hour’s application) or go the full Monty in duotones (ten hours, ten days, ten months). Or the full Michelangelo, right down to the fingertips. The blue people collect their blue periods overseas. Their pink period is superseded by blue. Japan leaves a permanent impression. Aotearoa makes a mark. Une collectionneuse is a walking gallery of passport stamps. For other blue people discretion is the greater part of colour. Waves of subtlest Quink undulate below gossamer clothing. Superheroes butterfly over crosshatch landscapes bristling with regrowth. The blue people crowd into carriages. Their physical graffiti a silent motion picture-show of desires. Unfinished scenes from life are shaped, shadily, into permanence at the end of a needle. Skin deep, the animal within has risen to the surface of writhing torso. An insubstantial teardrop expresses a secret. The blue people comprise a respectable figure of the population. Hearts will always be surrounded with roses, or punctured too rapturously for words by an arrow. ‘Mum’ is somewhere around, never far from their minds. The blue people attend the tennis. Their forearm, their perfect balance, their back-step regularly a surprise. Most of us can only imagine what it’s like to be the blue people. Later in the day the blue people go to the bar. Hyperrealism sips sapphire gin. Fine lines wine and dine on signs and that’s mine, what’s yours. Or then the blue people go home, they rest with their sleeve on their heart. Like everyone, they live with their decisions, they recline on them. They wear seismograph skin that does not switch off even for something as daily deep as sleep. The moody blues sing of nights in white satin. Dreams surface beneath the dark blue universe of their city sky. A blurring remnant of stick-and-poke knits up the ragged sleeve of care.

Helmet

 

Writing in his Substack daily, Wes Westgarth reviews the new artwork with characteristically breathless enthusiasm: “The mini-Christo-and-Jeanne-Claude pop-up at one of the world’s hubs of cultural experiment is Banksy-like, an anonymous celebration of the mundane turned into an aesthetic triumph. Familiar objects – a hydrant and a bicycle helmet – are brought together by layers of duct tape and instantly transformed into an arresting statement of the zeitgeist. The untitled sculpture invites titles, while simultaneously deferring them, perhaps indefinitely, or until the work is dismantled by a council worker.” Comments from passersby are more prosaic, ranging from “That’s odd!” and “You’d think people had better things to do with their time,” through to “What a waste of a good helmet!” and “I’m sure there’s a law against that!” Iconoclastic grouch Frank ‘FFS’ Fitzroy wants this stopped before it starts, declaiming to his email-list of ex-students and fellow-grumblers: “The inner-city crowd find time away from their turmeric lattes to stick together makeshift models for new tennis stadiums. This flagrant misuse of public property is a form of the toxic ‘graffiti objectivo’ that now disfigures many European cities, driving away the tourist dollar. The hydrant is the thin edge of the wedge.” While the good-humoured piece in the Weekend Age from Berenice Brunswick picks up on Westgarth’s aesthetic turn: “It is hard not to notice the matching of those favourite Pre-Raphaelite colours of green, grey and red with those of the Lord Newry Hotel across the street. Placement offsets while complementing the classic line of the noble facade with the playfulness of the foregrounded rough vernacular.” Social analysis is all we would expect of Carla Carlton, who offers this pungent political critique: “The helmet, grotesque computer-generated headwear of twilight capitalism, is fastened inextricably and fundamentally to the hydrant, last symbol of bourgeois government’s desperate efforts to appease the revolutionary instinct through the cynical control of an essential need, water, and an irresistible force: fire. This whole transparent sham is held together by the flimsiest of covers.” At present no one has laid claim to the artwork, raising questions as to whether the untitled germ of a hundred similar artworks across the metropolitan area is art, or a prank masterminded by a couple of skateboard kids on their way to the rink they call home in the Edinburgh Gardens. Local bourgeois representative in the parliament, Morrie Moreland, has no time for this sort of conjecture: “Serious head injuries are being sustained by cyclists refusing to wear the helmets they hire. It has to stop! This sculpture, if that’s what you call it, is a memorial cairn for an accident waiting to happen.”

Microcard

 

Image: Winter Leaflets No. 7 (2021)

First published on the Carmelite Library blog on Thursday the 15^th of January, 2015 under the title ‘Marshall McLuhan and the Microcard’. 

“It is perhaps characteristic of many areas of human interest that whenever a new technology appears it should act as a mirror for the preceding technologies. In this century electric memories have introduced an entirely new skill into the storing and retrieving of information. By microcard it is now possible to have the contents of all the libraries of the world on one desk top.” 

Marshall McLuhan was a curious Canadian with a sizable appetite for communication theory and a peculiar propensity for making outlandish prophecies. Here are the opening sentences of his review of Frances Yates’ book ‘The Art of Memory’, as found today on page 61 of the March 1967 issue of ‘Encounter’, that erudite London journal of literature and politics. Her book details how ancients and moderns invented memory systems. She considers such things as the medieval cathedrals that told the mythic story of its society in glass windows, and Dante, whose long poem is a mnemonic warning about how the things you do now will have consequences later. ‘The Art of Memory’ is a classic of its kind and belongs in any theological library. 

But what is a microcard? Webster says it is “a sensitized card approximately 3 in. × 5 in. on which printed matter is reproduced photographically in greatly reduced form”, first used in 1944. This definition alone reduces McLuhan’s claim to a reductio ad absurdum. Everybody knows you cannot have the contents of all the libraries of the world on one desk top, even in 2015, let alone on microcards in 1967. So what is he talking about? 

It is as though that visionary part of his mind was eager to see something that reality had not yet caught up with. Reality certainly wasn’t about to prove him right about the full potential of a microcard. It seems McLuhan wished to see the future as a place where the contents of all the libraries of the world were available at his elbow and that it only took a small leap of faith, and illogic, to believe it so. How he read these microcards is not explained, as he then launched forth on an analysis of the communication past, as explained by Frances Yates. 

Perhaps he was a prophet of the world wide web, even though the technology was not yet in place to make that happen. His interest in ‘electric memories’ is one that anyone dealing with a computer today recognises, indeed must adapt to, for we now have to live with not just our own personal memories, of various standards of fleshly excellence, but with all of those billions of electric memories pushing in upon us each time we google. 

It is doubtful if there will ever be time when it is possible “to have the contents of all the libraries of the world on one desk top.” The web is one big library and library holdings are now available on screen from all over the planet, but it has to be asked if we even want to have the contents of all the libraries of the world there for us to access. It is not only an impossible dream but a nightmare from which we would wish to awake. It is disconcerting to consider McLuhan’s fantasy about the technological future, now that we live in that future. The truth, as so often, is not just the truth, but otherwise than the truth. I must jot that down on a microcard. For future reference.

Update: my spellchecker in 2024 underlines ‘microcard’ in red. Google’s main understanding of Microcard is as follows: “MICROCARD is a European research project to build software that can simulate cardiac electrophysiology using whole-heart models with sub-cellular resolution, on future exascale supercomputers. It is funded by EuroHPC called Towards Extreme Scale Technologies and Applications.” 

 

Document

 

First published nine years ago on the Carmelite Library blog for Thursday the 22^nd of January 2015, under the title ‘The word “Document” according to Richard Chenevix Trench.’

 DOCUMENT. Now used only of the material, and not, as once, of the moral proof, evidence, or means of instruction. 

They were forthwith stoned to death, as a document unto others.

            Sir W. Raleigh, History of the World.

Utterly to extirpate all trust in riches, where they abound, is only possible to the Omnipotent Power, and a rare document of divine mercy.

            Jackson, Justifying Faith. 

In,  ‘A Select Glossary of English Words Used Formerly in Senses Different from their Present’, by Richard Chenevix Trench, Dean of Westminster. 2^nd ed., revised and improved. London, John W. Parker, 1859, page 62.

 

Dean Trench’s little books of word studies were one of the inspirations for the foundation of the Oxford English Dictionary. Trench devised a way of talking about words that became the model and benchmark of the descriptive method of definition in the OED: precise and concise definition, apposite quotation based on known usages and preferably the earliest provable usages. To write a Glossary like Trench’s you had to have both an extraordinary depth of reading in English writing of all kinds coupled with a very retentive memory. He was a Victorian Johnson. 

Trench’s own purpose was not to make a dictionary but to indulge, one could say, in a favourite pastime, the fascinating study of how, but more especially why, words change meaning over time. His analysis of ‘document’ plunges us straight into the Victorian world of high-minded intellectual pursuit, done for no better reason than its own sake and the furtherance of generally agreed knowledge. We would have to reach for his biography, if it exists, to find out the method in his method, which is still in the nature of scientific amateurism. It took someone like Sir James Murray to turn such wayward literary behaviour into a professional practice of world standard. Trench did it because it was what came naturally. 

The 1859 update on ‘document’ is perhaps not as final as it first sounds. Even in our own time, while we do not use the word as a noun meaning ‘moral proof’, it still often carries the weight of moral meaning. When lawyers reach for the documents they are seen as not only getting the material evidence for the court; it is expected that that evidence has a binding moral credibility. We do not expect a lawyer to place false evidence before the court, only evidence that may be relevant to the case, and therefore true, at least on face value. 

Examples in the subsequent OED tell us though that ‘document’ had shifted appreciably in meaning by the age of Dean Trench. When Paul Bunyan trusts “That they might be documented in all good and wholesome things,” we do not instantly appreciate that he means the people in question may be “instructed or admonished authoritatively”; nor when John Dryden admits “I am finely documented by my own daughter” that she has rebuked him, or opened his eyes to his own foolishness on some matter. 

It is but a century or so from the standardisation of ‘document’ as the material evidence or means of instruction, for ‘document’ to have become not just formally the record or official paper of evidence, but for it to mean almost any kind of written item whatsoever. Or not even written, now that digital has overwhelmed our patterns of printed exchange. A similar fate has overtaken the use of that other word of ancient lineage, ‘text’, as well. 

The good Dean would no doubt have absorbed with sang froid the new use of the word ‘document’, being of a nature to appreciate the vicissitudes of English language change. We have grown so used to a document being almost anything of record in any material media that it is still helpful to ponder the definition in the pc.net dictionary http://pc.net/glossary/definition/document 

‘A document is a type of file that has been created or saved by an application. For example, a text file saved with Microsoft Word is a document, while a system library, such as a DLL file, is not. Examples of documents include word processing files, spreadsheets, presentations, audio files, video files, and saved media projects. 

‘Each document has a filename, which identifies the file. It also includes an icon, which visually identifies the program associated with the file. In most cases, the document icon is generated by the program that created the document. When you double-click a document icon, it will open in the corresponding application.’ 

We are almost at the stage of saying a ‘document’ is whatever the carrier carries and whatever the load can take. It may seem all very specific to computers and online communication, when in fact it is the universality and commonality of these daily utilities that drives the use of the word. As Trench may have said. Indeed, ‘document’ has almost come to be whatever circumscribed item of information, in any form, we care to call a document. It almost enjoys the status of that ‘thing’ in common parlance, whatever material the text or other length of information happens to have been put upon. 

Its moral proof has vanished. A document may contain words of witness the very opposite of anything we judge as morally meaningful. Even its material evidence is hard to ascertain with the naked eye, hovering in the netherworld of the hard drive or database, there to disappear by Monday morning. 

No doubt Richard Chenevix Trench would have gone for a long walk around London or Dublin in order to sort this new definition in his head, or perhaps have discussed the matter with his wife over a cup of tea, or both. 

And so I humbly submit this document on ‘document’ for your consideration. If you regard the author as a “rare document” in the Elizabethan sense, then that is as may be, there at the other end of a mileage of cords and satellites.  

 

Annotation

 

First published on the Carmelite Library blog over ten years ago, Sunday 7^th of July 2013, this is one of my responses to David Pearson’s Foxcroft Lecture, given that year at the State Library of Victoria. 

In this the penultimate essay in response to David Pearson, I wish to dwell on one of the truly attractive aspects of his lecture. In asking for us to consider new ways of approaching books and libraries, he takes a special interest in annotations. The social impact of books over time can well be judged by the written words that surround and sometimes scribble right over the printed words on their pages. Annotations give us a first-hand testimony of how the reader responded to the contents of the book itself. Whatever our feelings, and our library rules, about this practice, we must concede that the further away in time the annotations, the more revealing and interesting they become. As Pearson says, “all previous ownership is part of the historical fabric worth investigating,” whether the owner be famous or not, whatever the relative value of the book in hand. To save annotated books is a cause worth considering and we all know of archived libraries of individual writers that are there as much for the research value of the annotations as the bibliographical significance of that writers’ personal library. One can only commend Pearson’s view that it is our job to be saving annotated books where and when we find them. 

Annotations are usually associated with book margins, scraps of paper, the edges of A4 printouts. We think of armchair philosophers and playful juveniles as readily as immersed scholars or scintillating scientists. The Latin root of the word means precisely what it says, adding notes to notes. One good deed deserves another. Any bad deed deserves further correction. Yet careful reading of critical literature, in particular, and history texts tells us that these literatures are themselves grandiose forms of annotation. While we say a literary critic is engaged in the practice of criticism this sounds impressive, as though criticism were part of the literature itself. How deflating when we claim that it’s all just annotations really, you know. Understood in this way, how many books in our libraries belong in the category ‘Annotations’? David Pearson is serious about preserving annotated volumes, but are we not in fact in the business of protecting unmarked volumes that are Annotations? Our libraries are chockfull of writings made after the bird has flown, after the horse has bolted, after the deluge, even. 

Scripture itself must have been written after the Deluge. We gaze in amazement at the expressions of Revelation. We cannot help but respond, somehow. But are our responses to be thought of as anything more than annotations, no matter how lasting and profound? The Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard wrote: “From a Christian point of view the whole of learned theology is really a corollary; and is declined like mensa.” I take this to mean that theology is an annotation of the Word. It is an appendix, a thesis but only a thesis, extra statements about God. Seen in this light, it is humbling to accept that our great theological libraries are decent, well-maintained storehouses of annotations. That they are also extraordinary collections of human achievement, eschatological signs, and precious beyond words to say, is not in dispute. Our task is to save as many of the valuable annotations as possible. 

Postscript: There is no Library of Congress subject heading for ‘Annotations’, in fact Annotating in LC terms means abstracting a text, not Marginalia at all. The Scope Note for ‘Marginalia’ says what we mean here by Annotations: “Here are entered works on notes, scribbles, or editorial comments made in the margins of books. Works on drawings and flourishes in medieval illuminated manuscript margins are entered under Marginal illustrations.” While the heading ‘Annotating, Book’ has the Scope Note: “Here are entered works on the technique of writing a brief description of the scope of a book and its author's approach, in order to allow readers to determine whether the book interests them.”

Approximately

 

First published on the Carmelite Library blog ten years ago, Thursday 28^th of March 2013, this is ‘Little Essays on the Rules (3) Approximately’ by Philip Harvey. The Rules refer to the change in codes of library cataloguing (RDA, AACR2, &c.) taking up librarians’ thoughts at that time. 

The musical and poetic sunburst sometimes known as Bob Dylan’s first ‘electric period’ (1965-circa 1967) is one of the seminal moments in the history of rock music. The lyrical extravagance and originality of recordings from that time extends to the titles of the songs, one of the most memorable being a ballad of emotional confrontation that goes by the name ‘Queen Jane Approximately’. This was typical of the outrageously playful titles that Dylan gave his songs through this short period of his career. 

Maybe the singer is saying that this is one version of the story of Queen Jane, whoever Queen Jane may be. Maybe the adverb says that he can never describe fully the person who is Queen Jane. Maybe Queen Jane is but one aspect of something more complex. Dylanologists would greet these conjectures with interest but also justifiable amusement, because trying to say exactly what the title means is not the main idea. We are dealing in poetry, where the title will mean whatever the individual brings to it. I myself sometimes think the song is about Joan Baez, or marijuana, but its strongest meaning is the memories it conjures of my own late teens and certain friends of that time. 

But still, what precisely is ‘approximately’? This question has been taking up my thinking this week after RDA (Resource, Description and Access) officially announced the word will replace ‘circa’ in author name authorities. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary says ‘circa’ is a preposition from the Latin, “About, approximately in or at (with dates etc.),” first introduced into English in the mid-19^th century. A reason for replacing ‘circa’ is that it’s a Latinism, which is odd when you consider that ‘circa’ has been a common English loanword since the time of Queen Victoria (no relation to Queen Jane, at least not in the genealogical sense, or that we are aware of). Odd too, because ‘approximately’ is a Latin root word via Middle English, very Latin indeed. ‘Approximately’ though seems to be less Latin than ‘circa’ in the mind of RDA, even if almost three times the length. 

For me, an issue here is that despite the dictionary definition of ‘circa’, ‘approximately’ is not a very precise synonym. The Shorter Oxford defines ‘approximately’ as “nearly, with near approach to accuracy.”  While we may say that ‘circa’ qualifies a date with a near approach to accuracy, it does something more: it circumscribes the date itself. Whenever a date has ‘circa’ against it we know that date to be accurate within the terms of the available information about that person’s life. ‘Approximately’ does not always have this relationship to the date it qualifies, its meaning in English can be read to mean “anytime around this time”, or even “not exactly this date, at least that we are aware of.” In other words, in usage the two words can have slightly different meanings, which is why both words are in use in the first place. 

If ‘approximately’ or even its abbreviated form ‘approx.’ could make ‘circa’ redundant, it would. But it won’t. When we google the search ‘dylan circa’ we get “About 3,250,000 results (0.28 seconds)”. Notice that Google doesn’t say “Approximately 3,250,000 results”, but uses the very Anglo-Saxon, very very English word ‘about’. Why didn’t RDA use ‘about’ if it wanted to replace Latinisms like ‘circa’? ‘About’ is much more common, and shorter, than ‘approximately’. A browse of page one of the Google ‘dylan circa’ display confirms that ‘circa’ is a common English word. Abandonment of ‘circa’ just in order to follow a policy decision at RDA is a victory for ideological correctness over common sense and common usage. 

The example we have been given in the document ‘Changes to Headings in the LC Catalog to Accommodate RDA’ is this: 

Under RDA

: Backus, Yvonne, approximately 1910-2001

Not:

Backus, Yvonne, ca. 1910-2001 

Does this mean Yvonne Backus lived approximately from 1910 to 2001? Does it mean that 1910 is a date “with a near approach to accuracy’? Does it mean she was born sometime either side of 1910? These are questions we would not ask if ‘ca.1910-2001’ were employed as her name authority. This is why many bloggers, e-listers, and commentators have responded to the introduction of ‘approximately’ by saying it’s silly. Cataloguers will be typing out ‘approximately’ forever more, which is creating work, not saving time. Yvonne Backus is only one example of the confusions that are going to arise because of the change. Instead of having Yvonne’s birth date fixed with a fair measure of certainty, we have Yvonne Approximately.

 

 

 

 

 

Chattest

 

Epiphany begins early for the dozens of lorikeets and honeyeaters breakfasting loudly in the top outcrops of our flowering gumtree. The colour of the flowers is red-orange, a colour currently not available as an option in any pencil box or paint set. Microsoft Paint is pitifully unprepared for this version of red. Lorikeets screech, whistle, chat and chatter, leading at times to the communication known as chattest. Chattest is very long and loud, making all other thought impossible for anyone in close proximity, all lorikeets in the area engaging in chattest simultaneously. Honeyeaters, demure even by contrast, keep to lower branches, or else bide their time until the lorikeet storm has passed, which won’t be any time until they have had their fill of pollen and nectar. Our nearby plum tree is netted, like a white cloud, to save the satsuma plums for the humans. The photograph appended demonstrates how difficult it is for a camera to distinguish tree from birds. Their bodies are dark green as the leaves yet banded with light green, again like the leaves, such that they may be a leaf, or even a flower, if there are any left. Flowers, because beaks and undersides of wings are the same red-orange as the gum-flowers upon which they breakfast louder than any breakfast radio host, a coincidence of colour that would make even a Charles Darwin sit up and take notice. Their heads, furthermore, are the strong blue associated with the summer sky, especially the summer sky as seen as triangles and other geometric forms through leaves of a flowering gum on the morning of Epiphany. Already the day is opening up in ways familiar to many of us. Honeyeaters, not birds we normally think of as demure, arrive in the flowering gum as gradually lorikeets reduce their chatter to a chat and as gradually, dash colourfully away in twos and threes. The strings of LED-light microstars will soon be unlaced from the Christmas Tree, thence to be coiled into their box and returned to a top ledge until next Advent. Angels, donkeys, shepherds and the like will be unpinned from tips of branches, thence placed carefully in their own Chinese lacquer box until next time this year. And the tree itself will be unbolted from its boy scout base, to meet its end on the nature strip or, more likely, the green waste bin. Christmas cards will be taken down, re-read, notes made about senders who have left special hints in their cards, then stacked in a shoebox until such time as a decision is made about what to do with the outcomes of this friendly convention. Already the day is warming up, with a prediction of 31C, which is 87 in the old language, so not a scorcher but best to keep in the shade. It pays to get out early and come in early.     

 

Sandringham

 

The certainty of life keeping to a certain order continues into a new day, a new month, a new year. An alcoholic has had to reform on their terms. Diets have taught restraint, a new perspective on appetite and need. A declutter of the house gives residents cause to take stock. This is certainly the case in Sandringham, as most anywhere else. The grass is slightly yellower, the conversation more practical, the waves at the beach politer in Sandringham, even if that is only the Sandringham in our own mind. One is not required to have been to Sandringham for twenty years, or at all, to live with the certainty that things go on going on. Social media takes up too much time, sleeping in is all part of the fitness program, a walk to the shops is a plan, in Sandringham. Dreaming of voyages to romantic locations, like Port Douglas, Verona, or the Moon, can start at the local terminus station known as Sandringham. True, Sandringham makes no claims to be the Eighth Wonder of the Modern World. Its train platform is without stage presence. There is lack of a level crossing, so conversion of the station into a transport palace is remote. Yet of a certainty, carriages arrive at orderly, frequent and regular intervals to relieve a person of carrying their baggage, then transport them somewhere other than Sandringham, romantic or not. The bogies have come to a comfortable halt, wheels winningly in the groove. Windows beckon inside, where elaborate seating and moderated heating and cooling systems promise the same comfort expected, year-round, at home. Racks for storing baggage were dispensed with some models ago, in the days when suitcases fell on top of unsuspecting travellers and dangling schoolbag hooks caught them in the eye. Spacious waist level storage areas are available for those with a long way to go and a lot to carry, of a certainty. Half-empty smoothie containers and crumpled corn chip bags are amongst the few visual blemishes in this transport of delight, the odd sharpie badge of Death’s Head Graffiti (DHG) adding to the décor of rules and rail maps along the walls. Prospective test cricketers, up-and-coming screen actresses, future Prime Ministers know they can go quietly about their business in Sandringham, escaping the nagging at home, self-training their personal boundaries, or just shooting the breeze on their monogram-studded mobile by stepping onto the next train to Flinders Street Station. They can join the daytripping Jaded Bayside Commuters (JBC) tripping dazedly back onto the carriage, each keeping a sensible distance from the others, making ‘hey’ while the Sun shines. Narelle from the Network requests that passengers be kind to one another through the crackling intercom and have a nice day, as the carriage starts leaving the platform behind, the terminal unterminated again.