Bad books because you don’t want to bother, and good books because you don’t want to read them in less than optimal conditions, with the spirit sufficiently tuned to fully enjoy them.
The next two brief bits of The Pleasures of the Text (see previously) include insights from Barthes into the ambiguity (even in French, if not as severely as in English) of plaisir as contentment or “pleasure”, and jouissance as ecstasy or “bliss”, which are very different but also both pleasure (and even both plaisir); and relatedly a question as to whether bliss is just a more intense pleasure or a different, and even opposed, species of experience, with comments on the implications of the question for our understanding of history and the world in general.
Which seems to deserve its very own weblog entry! And which is (therefore and/or relatedly) one of the things that keeps me from reading beyond it, because have I really read it, understood it, turned it over in my mind, enjoyed it, as much as I ought to have before I proceed onward?
And so in picking out a book to read this morning I pass over Barthes and pick up “The Professor and the Madman“, which M passed along to me with a strong recommendation, and I start reading that instead. And it’s also very good! Written both about, and somewhat in the style of, events and persons clustered around the time of the height of the (self-assessed) glory of the British Empire, it gives one to think in various ways, and also touches upon various subjects of books and scholarship and literature (and I’m only on page sixty-six).
One reason I’m only on page sixty-six is that it mentions in passing “The dialect of the southern counties of Scotland” (1873ish), by James Augustus Henry Murray of OED fame, who is the Professor of the title. This sounded interesting, so I looked around and found a nice scan of it online, and have been reading that (also? instead? now?).
I may well not get past the extensive Historical Introduction, but that is fascinating in itself. The story of how the name “Scotland” and related terms came to gradually change denotation over the years is a gem.
“It is in this latter or geographical sense that the dialect which forms the subject of this paper is called Scottish. Ethnologically speaking, the Lowland Scotch dialects are Scottish only in the sense in which the brogue spoken by the descendants of Strongbow’s followers, or of the Cromwellian settlers, is Irish; or in which the Yankee dialect of the descendants of the New England Puritans is American – in other words, they are not Scottish at all. They are forms of the Angle, or English, spoken by those northern members of the Angle or English race who became subjects of the King of Scots, and who became the leading race, and their tongue the leading language of the country ; to which, however, another race, with whom the monarchy had originated, gave its name.”
Who knew? Actually I suppose I did, but haven’t been reminded of it lately, and might not have been able to describe it off the cuff.
Such fun!
ceoln 