Personal Note: I'm baaaack!

[nebroadwe]

So here I am, returned from Lake LaogaiRare Book School -- which was equal parts exhilarating and exhausting because it packed more information transfer per class-minute than just about any other short-term seminar I've ever taken. My goodness, what a ride.

The course dealt with the manuscript/movable type overlap of the fifteenth century in western Europe, co-taught by a print guru and a manuscripts maven. Each was both learned and witty, which made for an entertaining experience as well as an educational one. We looked at all kinds of material, and I must say that facsimiles, while helpful and all that, simply do not do the original stuff justice. You can't tilt a facsimile of a mid-fifteenth-century German impression of a Latin treatise by Matthew of Cracow under the light and see the toothy indentations at the edges of the columns that suggest (along with a lot of other evidence) that it was printed from two-line "slugs" cast from the type of its first setting. You can't stick a facsimile of a Book of Hours with illuminations by the Master of Catherine of Cleves under the light (unless it's a much better facsimile than any I've seen, anyway) and watch the gold leaf shine as brilliantly as whatever Gerard Manley Hopkins was looking at when he wrote the first line of "God's Grandeur" and the other colors -- red, blue, green, yellow -- just leap off the page at you. (Indirect museum lighting also fails to give this effect, sadly.) You can see the autograph of Jean, Duc de Berry or the various founts employed by Johannes Gutenberg, but there's a definite goshwow! factor to having the thing itself displayed before you. Not to mention, again, the pleasure of having its significance explicated by someone who really knows what he's about. I must put my notes into some kind of order before I begin to forget what all the details meant.

My fellow classmates were all charming, knowledgeable folks -- a lovely bunch. I had some great conversations with them over tea and (warm! fresh! yummy!) baked goods during our coffee breaks. I also had a small-world experience with one colleague, a woman from Chicago who overheard me telling a story about a friend's experience learning Greek at Regis High School in NYC. Turns out her husband went there as well, so she asked me which class my friend had attended. Long story short, they were only a year apart and good friends, still in touch via the vast conspiracynetwork of Regis alumni. Boggle. I just don't expect to trip over people this way, even in the relatively restricted sphere of fifteenth-century book enthusiasts.

So, all in all, a good week. I also used my commuting time to zip through Noriko Ogiwara's first Good Witch of the West light novel (in translation from Tokyopop) and Jim Butcher's Grave Peril and Summer Knight. Ogiwara is quite light and YA-ish and the first book is all about introducing the characters and their world so that we can get on to the meat of things in the next installment, but I think I'll continue. Having read Butcher's more recent Harry Dresden stuff first, I'm finding it interesting to go back and observe him writing at an earlier stage of development. He's got the snarky narrative voice down from the get-go, of course, but I'm noticing that his handling of secondary characters is a little more slapdash at the outset than it becomes later (e.g. the way Meryl, Fix and Lily are dropped into Summer Knight with very brief introductions that don't quite prepare you for the roles they'll play in the climax). It's all good train reading, though. I'm now attempting to blaze through Cornelia Funke's Tintenherz (Inkheart for you non-Germanophones) before the movie comes out, having idiotically decided to be a language purist and read it in the original before trying the English translation. Argh. We'll see how that goes.

Must also catch up with my f-list -- of course everyone on it seems to have had a massive burst of creativity whilst I was away ...

Comments

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

No, no, not at all. *laughs*