John Lindsay, Reader in Information Systems Design, Kingston University, UK
Written some time in 2005?
Reader questions (rendered in this colour) by Detlev Fischer
1 | This essay will not contain the usual scholarly apparatus; at this stage it consists merely as pointers, for there is much more to be done, but it needs opening out. The usual scholarly apparatus is itself part of information and social change, that it needs deconstructing, not simply accepting. (It will contain sections in (), where I am locating comment on the process of information, following an essay in ISC 2004, dealing with scholarship and method in general. In an hypertext document these may be organised in other ways, but in linear text, or serialisation, or pdf, the either form a separate section, in which the connections are lost, or they are inserted as here.) (I end with a possible representation which might make a difference.)
2 | We could start with a walk from Hampton Villa and the Shakespeare rotunda to Chiswick Villa.
2D1 | It may not matter so much where these are but I have no clue. Would a map distract from the argument? Is the argument so general that it could be any villa or rotunda? If not this might be the place for a link?
2D1J1 | We need to separate this as an essay, where we are dealing with the meta concepts, and the instance of a real walk or event. This essay is attempting to identify concepts which might be applicable to a wide viariety of semantic scenes.
2D1J2 | It might add riches to be able to identify Hampton Court, by a link, but that might be a distraction?
2D1J3 | We could have a notation which says that Hampton Court is an instance of a concept, and a hover over button which explains the instance, a place on the Thames Arcadia, and the concept Arcadian place?
3 | It might in fact be several walks. That is a problem already sorted called classical transport, and we have the movie.
3D1 | I don't want to be petty but if several walks means return walks on different days, what transport element is here that is not there in the first place (getting to that vila or rotunda)? I conclude you mean walking near the villa, taking transport, then walking near rotunda? And why classical transport? If the total trip consists of short walks with transport legs in between this is not classical (in day-to-day business it is fairly common but for some reason not so in 'recreation'?) Finally, what movie? Did anyone take a video camera? Another linking opportunity?
3D1J1 | Villa or rotonda are examples of a very large class of objects. In the case of Thames Arcadia, which this one comes from, I linked together the public transport, the river bank walks, the crossings, the public rights of way as necessary, and all these at the minimum level to manage. I called it classical transport as it deals with the conceptual issues of the Thames Arcadia.
3D1J2 | All I did then was take the frames in which I marked the necessary connections, originally in power point then in keynote, then turned them into a quicktime movie, which runs tho at several mb. I have also made the poster. Then I took the places and associated them with the designers, for example capability brown. The next step, which I have so far only on paper, is to build the scholarly apparatus.
3D1J3 | Clearly there would be useful links with video. I have had about fifty students looking at the thames arcadia to work out how to do the document management. There is a big project called the thames landscape strategy which is spending a lot of money on upgrading what after all is one of the most important conceptual constructions in human history :)
4 | We could add to it the enlightenment gallery, also already a movie. There is also the Hampton Court Gallery. That is three artefacts constructed using the new technology and one form of indexing.
4D1 | OK, so there is a collection of movies I don't know about - let's see...
4D1J1 | This is easy. There are indeed a lot of movies which take us for walks around landscape galleries, but I haven't worked out yet how to organise them. I haven't really worked out yet how to organise any of the landscape galleries apart from text files like this one.
5 | Now what we want is to be able to associate the objects with their original owners, their original sites, their provenance, how they came to be where they are now.
6 | Is that why the British love their Baedeckers, according to the clich´? I need some personal reason to care about the owners—even history seems a bit of a transient tack-on. I know the information will run off, evaporate if there is nothing (no pre-conceived interest) that will make it cling—, make me form a collection and thereby, recollection. However, such interest in your case would probably trigger the trip in the first place? My conclusion is that there is no 'we' that wants to do this association, there may be a community of the dedicated and may be a community of those who should care about it so that they are educated, but usually the don't care.
7 | But even that isn't enough. The associations which exist in my head will need further indexing.
8 | It does rather surprise me that thirty years after we became capable of doing this using the new technology, and some progress has been made with librarianship, really how little has been done.
8D1 | May be the reason is that everything encourages us to put these things in various professional and private silos? There is a strong motive not to link, to stay narcotic: Less pain.
8D1J1 | I think the professional silos are part of it. I think there is also the alienation of day labourers. There is the fetishisation of commodities and the marketing of goods. Motorism is the triumph.
8D1J2 | In the technology, some considerable progress has been made with the communications, the web as file transfer, but almost nothing beyond grep with information.
9 | I am going to need to build a series of cases as evidence, but first I think, a framework?
9D1 | Since you asked, I suggest starting with the evidence and only build as litttle framework as needed.
9DJ1 | Ah, this is a big one. I think you have a framework in order to decide on evidence, and the work on the evidence proves, tests and validates the framework. Empsom in the Structure of Complex Words does quite a bit. Foucault in the Order of things and the Archaeology of knowledge gives some good cases. There is a political argument about theory and practice which tells us that those who don't want to deal with theory are simply living with an old one. I think this is such a substantial issue that it would need a branch to a different thread otherwise we would lose the whole of this one.
9D1J1D1 | So let's create a separate file which I will provisionally call how much theory?
10 | Start with the idea of the landscape garden. This strikes me as a strange oxymoron. Landscape and garden are opposite one another, point and counter point. Like human nature or free will. Yet landscape garden has a vast scholarly apparatus. As do free will and human nature. Why do such opposites attract? What are the social conjunctures which form them?
11 | Let us take landscape garden long back, then forward, sort of retreat on it, then advance, and then only approach.
12 | Let us go back to Theocritus. He, we will suggest, was an urban sophisticate, writing for friends who are urban sophisticates, amusing pieces on which they may ponder. Tales to amuse, but with a touch of sadness and a touch of irony. His shepherds, with their music, their poetry, their singing, point to a memory of a simple life which never was, a memory of life outside the town, a life of suburban simplicity. So suburban is a sort of country town or town country, a unity of opposites. He describes what is pleasant about it, green, groves, water, rocks, groves, caves, cool, springs.
13 | He gives us names. Daphnis. Thyrsis. Corydon. Damoetas. Heracles, Hylas, the Dioscuri, Adonis, Lysidas, Ganymede, Diocles, Polythemus, and quite a lot more. How many of these names and these idylls are his construction, and how many of them exist already? Is there such a simple dictionary? Not, apparently. Tracking them through the Graves Greek Myths means trying to work out which associations might be appropriate and which imaginary.
13D1 | Just to do a test using only Lempriere's classical dictionary produces the following:
13D1J1 | We are eating meat now.
13D1J1 | This is where we would want to federate all sorts of resources across a lot of communities, and begin to assemble. I have done this on Saturday, in a walk with Timon's dog in Birmingham. That can follow this. These people and their associations now need to map into the evidence base which needs a visual representation.
13D14 | Not sure how many of these will be referenced online (Wikipedia? A specialist dictionary?)
14 | We need another thread here, the bucolic and the pastoral, for this will occupy much space, what are they, what do they mean, all dealing with everything except that to which I want to point.
15 | Let us go back to Plato. We have more names, Lysis, Socrates, Alcibaides, Phaedrus. More stories. Not in the form of idylls but of dialogues. The consequence is that the form separates, for documents will appear in different places in libraries and bookshops. The strings idyll and dialogue (or even dialog) will produce different results, while (idyll and dialogue) or (idyll or dialogue) unlikely to make much sense anywhere for things have not so been built. We also have genre, with one meaning.
16 | In the Phaedrus I find evidence which moves the suburban thread back too, for they walk out of the town, indeed there is a comment on what size the town should be, and how and why harmonious the walk. Then a description of where it is pleasant to sit, and why. Stream, green, cool, walking, water.
16D1 | First not sure what 'in the Phaedrus' refers to, now I seem to remember, a famous Platonian dialogue. But this cannot be taken for granted. Who is still around with a classical education? 1 in 100? They are all dying, as I will in about 40 years perhaps.
16D1J1 | The Phaedrus is like the others above, so it will need something which points to what it is; the full text is available on the web, the reason I am using it here.
17 | Back from Plato we need to go to the Iliad. Achilles and Patroclus are the two we want. (But here a danger, I am feeding what will be my proposition into my selection; this is a construction. I am now moving from the general to the particular, and to a particular particular.)
17D1 | Yes and there are indvidual preferences which will resist return to the general, or maybe, construct a wrong general. But the term 'wrong general' itself points to an impasse, to the ideological nature of the very discourse: How can a claim to the general be substantiated other than through some ugly system hung from uglier hooks of learning? I actually believe the argument can be made but you loose all your audience while making it.
17D1J1 | Yes, this is it in a nutshell. In part that depends on communities in practice, and returns to the framework problem in 13 which generated a sidebar. I think the only way to process this is to assemble parallel evidences which may then be compared. So in this case we are doing satyrs in suburbia. We will have another, nearly finished, Timon's dog. There is a third I am making on Bach's secular cantatas. And then there will be one the Choice of Hercules. On that evidence does the case stack up?
18 | Then, after I have written four thousand words, about enough on any topic, I find a reference to Anacreon, of whom I have never heard. In Encyclopedia Britannica gives twenty seven references, linking some of what follows, more evidence, and giving me new names too. In volume two of the Loeb lyrics, so now I have another thread to follow, between Plato and Homer, and a good search term. So Anacreon might follow Theocritus one day?
18D1 | Just to tell you what 's in the Lempriere:
18D1J1 | Lempriere is interesting, I know it not and have never heard of it. In England the Oxford or Cambridge classical dictionaries, or encyclopedias might be the point beyond Britannica, which is probably the most general starting point?
18D1J1D1 | There is a wikipedia entry on Lempriere. His dictionary is still around and not even that expensive (£19).
18D1J2 | Now with the new technology we have wikipedia. Then there is the specialist lgbtq but that is going to be special pleading to the converted.
18D1J2D1 | What is lgbtq?
18D1J3 | The step beyond the general into the particular knowledge organisations is then slippery, for ideology, semantics, politics, all become inter-related. This involves what I have called infopolecon.
18D1J3D1 | Here is a pointer to infopolecon. Not sure whether this is all there is on the term/concept...
19 | Now we may move forward, we have enough for now. Forward to Virgil and Horace. Virgil uses Corydon with Alexis in the second eclogue. Do we need to go through the whole of all their texts pointing to names or stories which are told in the same or different manners, and do we need to go through the whole corpus to find references which show that Virgil knew Theocritus and do we need an entire scholarly apparatus to question whether any connection is valid? Will half a dozen do, for they all tell different stories, and none mine. Halperin, Gow, Lawall, Colie, Rosenmeyer, Ferrari, Sinaiko, Hammond, Bredbeck? For these I should make the effort of minimal citation otherwise no one will have a clue to what is being referred. (Is it worth making the point here that these are also so badly indexed that finding out whether they have referred to something (rather than someone), often means a complete rereading of the text.) (Is it also worth pointing that the way citation and bibliography are organised makes the difference whether you can actually find out whether someone cited someone or not without a complete rereading of the text?)
19D1 | I feel I have too much on my plate already; and I remember we started with a rotunda and a villa and walks. I feel there is too much to ever get on top of it: in worlds such as classical learning, I get lost, build impromptu clusters that may matter to no one else, increasing the heat of any individual impression and thereby the likelihood that I will remember any particular of this, but for whom? For my own sake? To feed it into dinner conversation? I guess we are getting somewhere to lessons to learn for the indexing of aboutness, to give us better reasons to go there or not to go there?
19D1J1 | I see the problem; one does have to be engaged for some purpose present to follow. The issue of indexing in itself as alienated labour; the failure of most knowledge systems for they cannot be built other than by the builder? How then can we make transferability? And is it better to run tests in things that don't matter, than in important things like Iran or Palestine?
19D1J2 | But at issue is the gathering of evidence in order to make a case.
20 | Virgil and Horace have an association with the villa of Maecenas, Horace a farm in the Sabine Hills (as he calls it, now on the map a place outside Tivoli). Was Maecenas' villa at Tivoli too? What would count as evidence? Now both our threads rejoin. The suburban, the satyrs, but much more clear now from the first eclogue, irony. How many have made this reading?
21 | (Do I need to explain this? Virgil lost his land in Augustan resettlement, Theocritus Arcadia a desolate backland no one wanted, more would be an essay in itself. Is this the wrong place to put this, does it loose the narrative and the dramatic tension?)
21D1 | I'd put it there as footnote / link that you don't have to follow if you are going for the main narative.
21D1J1 | By now we have enough of these that we should have developed a method foramangement?
22 | Our next stop is Hadrian's villa, also near Tivoli. Another huge literature. But in particular we are after associations with Antinous. Lambert is help here. There are all the statues of Hadrian, all the statues of Antinous and all the statues which were at Hadrian's villa, though as it was occupied for some hundreds of years after his death, associations might not be appropriate. In particular we are looking for statues which make connections back to the Hellas of Theocritus and Plato, the names, the characters.
22D1 | More names. Not clear how these deepen rather than broaden the evidence that finding evidence is hard work and may be not even worth while. But thinking of it (I am too lazy to check) Lempriere often has cross references, variants of stories acccording to different writers, and literature references to the classical authors. This seems a prime tool if you want to make these connections?
22D1J1 | I think the depth, bredth issue is a crucial one, along with rich and reach and grid and group. These might be the three components of an information architecture?
22D1J2 | How many at what depth invokes Occam's razor, but the problem is only after the case has been made.
23 | Now we have enough pieces to take a great leap forward. This is not to say there is nothing in between, simply that it would be a lot more work to dig it out and we have enough to be going on with for now. Jump to Spenser and the shepheards calendar, January. A short move back for he refers through an apparatus called E.K. which has aroused enough literature. Which brings in Aretino, which will bring in Titian, Perez and Philip of Spain, but those we will leave a short while.
24 | Around Spenser (not Spencer) is Sidney and Arcadia. Did I mention Arcadia earlier? Or do we now have to move backwards through all the previous to Arcadia, or to Arcadia as a string? Does that mean starting all over again? (Notice that paragraph in brackets earlier.) When we remember Virgil's first eclogue and we find that Arcadian was the area which the Greeks couldn't be bothered conquering because it wasn't worth the effort, and that when Theocritus uses Doric, it is regarded as archaic or quaint, have we now the justification for irony?
24D1 | You confuse me. Still more stuff. What is the point of the promised leap?
24D1J1 | I've lost the promised leap?
24D1J2 | The issue of Arcadia is quite important though, and like 21, we introduce a concept, but at three different stages in the process. This is an essay; it is therefore the third stage. The first stage was having the idea which is to become a concept; the second is the collecting of evidence and the running of tests. But all three run in parallel. If during the essay writing a concept emerges?
24D1J3 | Incidently we might add another thread, which is the idea Popper promoted of three worlds for these three stages might map? Popper left out what we are dealing here, which is the indexing through which the three are connected, but particularly 2 & 3, which leads to my infopolecon.
25 | Hovering around us are Francis Bacon, his brother, Daphne (not Daphnis) du Maurier, and when I find Hammond or Smith, a bunch of others of whom I have never heard. Bacon made a landscape at Twickenham Park and at Gorhambury, Raleigh at Sherborne. Indexing the parks in the landscape and the writings will now slowly have to commence. And this will open up another separation, the visual and the textual.
26 | (Could we have a process document, rather than linear text?)
27 | Round about this time, the collection of sculptures and paintings began, in a serious way. We have texts on artists and gardens and we have painters of landscapes. We have collectors. We have tapestries, which have been collected for a long time for they were also furnishings, and verdage (vendure). But these are put into Dewey as textiles. Painting with little blobs of oil is a great work of art, with threads a wall covering. Finding out where these are, who made them, what they were saying, where they are now, their provenance is even harder than for paintings.
28 | There will be a point about tapestries but I haven't found enough to make it with justification. They deal almost all with inside outside and outside inside. They have landscapes and gardens, flowers, yet writings on landscape and garden seem to have paid little attention to them? (We see why I said I wasn't going to equip this with scholarly apparatus. Is this point justifiable? How many writers would I have to cite? If someone then pointed to one illustration, would that refute my proposition? Would I have to take the form in n illustrations, y refers to tapestry? Which takes us back to discipline and decorum.)
29 | Shall we also make a couple of joins at this stage? Of the sculptures which are being collected, which came from Hadrian's Villa, which are of Antinous? Where are they now?
30 | Insert here perhaps that those which are in places like the Vatican Museum mean a trip to Rome, which has to be planned; those in Wilton knowing when it is open, whereas those in Hampton Court are a walk across a meadow. Windsor Castle, a bit of a journey, the British Museum at the end of a corridor. But what is where? How the index?
31 | Now we approach the national icon and the forest of Arden. Such a vast literature, we wouldn't live long enough to read. Now we have Wells, Cousins, Hammond, Smith, and they refer in parts to how he was managed before. We also have drama and theatre, a genre as yet untouched. Two points here. Genre is genus or generic. The form dominates the contents. Secondly, in performance all sorts of references might be made, which might be understood by some, but never be recorded. The record is selection.
32 | In this case, I build one on As you like it, for it seems to have been skipped, around Ganymede, except by Smith. This allows us to involve another national icon, Peter Hall, in trying to see what may be worked out. Troillus and Cressida has had more attention. But another thread in now we want to weave. For the story of Achilles and Patroclus, Troy and the Greeks, Troillus, Hector, and the rest, seems to me not only a story, but a fable about politics, in which the current is made comment on. What is the role of Essex? But there is another layer of politics, how did the world of the reformation cope with the realisation of the classical? Religious reference takes us to what people actually thought about fate, about life and death, life after death, good and evil, heaven and hell. And how their thoughts determined their actions, or was it the other way round?
32D1 | A this point I am getting the impression that for anyone not brought up in British higher education there are too many unknowns to make sense of all the names and references. It is simply not clear what they are here for unless you can decode the connotations and contexts they probably evoke in learned British readers.
32D1J1 | There are certainly a lot of anglo saxon peculiarities but a lot of the material comes from the US where the bulk of the scholarly apparatus is generated, along with most of the internet. There is though a German tradition in the 19th century, many of the concepts we are dealing with, hellenism, for example, are German.
33 | We had better put in Marlowe though on him there is much? Hero and Leander will recur, as of course, in case we think we didn't know about him, or his sticky end, Edward II. Or Marlowe's. We had better put in Barnfield too. Mentioned in the Variorum on As you like it, a sort of throw away line, then because I now have the string, find in Borris, and google to Norton. Then we discover Fraunce, but we will leave that for another occasion.
34 | (There is something particular in the academic writers I have referred to so far, they use us, we, our, as if we all know what this pronoun includes. But I don't know whether I am included in the communities to which they seek embrace. To say that we share a culture is to put the answer to the question into the question. Quite often, I don't even know what they are talking about, never mind why they are talking about it, or what they think my response might be. They seem to chunk and clump stuff into categories, then put stuff into categories different from what I would expect. To demonstrate this assertion with too many representations would make all this over long, and might be a different essay from one about indexing, but one example will do? Smith constructs a category passionate shepherd (which is fine, that strikes with my pastoral) and a category shipwrecked youth, (which is fine, I can see that though I hadn't thought of it), and then puts As you like it and Ganymede into the latter and not the former. Why?)
35 | (This leads me on to a point about the nature of scholarship and criticism in a world of indexing. Trying to describe what you think someone is saying, then criticising your thinking of their saying seems to me to lead to the sort of clutter and impenetrability which I find in many of these texts. Were they to respond, then turf wars proliferate, starting at the most simple, of the author saying you hadn't correctly understood what the author was saying.
36 | If the author is alive, asking for evidence of connection, why is passionate shepherd in shipwreck, would seem to me richer, if the author dead, suggest connections as evidence and let others add evidence. It is perfectly reasonable not to know something and valuable to have it pointed out, if it adds to the matter. If you judge it not to, it be because you are on another matter. End of sidebar on method.)
37 | In the court of the dying Elizabeth then James all these threads come together. 1604 has its tri centenary as I start this, and there have been activities or celebrations or scholarly events around it. Yet in none of them, can I find the connection I am making here. Yet Betteridge has made a book? Is this modern construction of history dishonesty, unknowing, perfidy, or what? Who has an obligation?
38 | In his title he used renaissance. Is that a thread as substantial as Arcadia? Should it too have a capital? There is a vast literature on renaissance. That takes us back to Pico, to Ficino, Aretino, Petrach, Dante, Plato, and to Perez. Perez was in England, perhaps with Francis Bacon? (Then in an essay in Hammond figuring I find a reference to Philip and Lerma, neither indexed, and the reference source improperly cited, so how important is that going to be, will I need to note it, how will I ever find it again, and can I litter the essay with these little asides on method while holding any thread?)
39 | This essay is finished in the approach to the first lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, history month, what a mouthful, February 2005. Now we have enough of an apparatus to be able to make a modern connection? Near Hampton Court is Ham House. As part of the Thames Landscape Strategy an avenue has been opened up across scrubland called Ham lands. A little forest of Arden has been formed. But for a long time, though I don't know how one would track the history, other events have happened here. How we have a new concept, dogging, and dogging surrey in google produces us a nugget: Sandy Lane. A new reality has been made. Suburban arcadia.
39D1 | What is dogging?
39D1J1 | Ah, this is it in a nutshell again. We have an emergent concept which has an history of which we do not know. Try dogging in google, and then dogging surrey and all will be clear.
39D1J1D1 | It turns out there is a wikipedia article on dogging
40 | (Here we do our first scappod, an outdoor podcast, which will raise a whole new issue in indexing.)
41 | Let us simply gather the threads into a string so we may remember. Theocritus, Plato, Virgil, Horace, Maecenas, Hadrian, Antinous, Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, James VI and I. Now we move forward.
41D1 | This string does not help me remember anything. Instead everything blends into an ugly compote
41D1J1 | Ah, I love compote, I cannot imagine an ugly compote.
41D1J2 | But the string has semantics for me; it summarises the logic, the evidence, the case and the test. But I accept that there are five grounds at least for someone else not.
41D1J8 | We might apply Occam's razor to these.
42 | (But an insert, for at some point we found Norton, and almost all of this he had worked out in 1974, but I must assert in good faith thirty years later, I did almost all the above myself. Then in Borris I find Norton's essay of 1974 reprinted with an editor's note on its significance. That was the year we were starting the Gay Librarians' Group and making the argument about gay as a concept.)
43 | Milton and Marvel now we find a literature. Milton the key was Lysidas. Had I mentioned him in Theocritus, the seventh idyll? But then I found him somewhere else, though I can't remember where, and of course I can't know whether it is intended to be the same or another, or anew. Christopher Hill even says there is no need to imagine Milton even knew Edward King!
44 | Hammond is hotting up the Milton and Marvel literature. Marvel's the garden had seemed obvious to me a time ago, and probably also his Appleton House. This was continuing the landscape and garden connection, in case it has been a little lost in the literature. We have also lost a little the pictures, the sculpture collection, and so far not mentioned enough the grand tour?
45 | Round about now we have a political point where a lot comes together and separates. We might make another thread, simply to show how much uncertainly people were having to make. From Bosworth Field, to the death of Henry VIII, then of Edward, then of Mary, then of Elizabeth, then Charles, then Charles again and James again (though not dead), then William, then Anne. Hardly an ordered transmission of authority, each possibly could have gone another way, religion on the surface, but each groups in and out of power. I wonder how Starkie will deal?
46 | Which allows us to jump forward, to Burke. For by then these bushes have been cleared and a new thicket made, slavery, the colonies, though an old thicket, Ireland and another, women, remain. (When can I introduce the atheism and the science and the native thickets?) Burke in his essay on the beauty and the sublime makes a connection and a difference which makes no sense to me. He refers back to Longinus but doesn't seem to me to be writing about what Longinus was writing about. Burke, I have seen, in a meeting with the ladies of Llangollen made a comment which might include himself. How much Burke do we need? But that took me back to Hogarth and his analysis of beauty with the illustration. The serpentine line is not the dancing master, it is the bottom of Antinous.
47 | We are nearly there.
47D1 | That's what they always say when they lead you astray through endless wastelands of names and cultural references. All this needs to be tied to an clear argument or all of this is useless.
47D1J1 | This seems to me insuperable. It is a clear argument, but only for the writer. Thereafter apply 41. But even as indexing it might be useful.. See lgbtq
48 | For Hogarth was a next door neighbour of Burlington. Burlington at Chiswick House. It is still there. Statues from Hadrian's Villa. They are still there, I think. Though the indexing and the cataloguing means I can't be sure.
49 | Connecting Burke and Hogarth is Walpole and he has been outed by Mowl.
50 | Round Burlington is Handel who has been outed by Harris. And she has done much more, showing in the cantatas (whereas I was thinking of the operas) how the characters make classical references and how the clients formed clubs. I had picked the Arcadian Academy earlier. Burlington and Kent had been outed by another Harris, and by Uglow but neither cite any sources so leave us dangling.
51 | Only one national icon is missing, Pope. We have the pastorals, in particular Alexis, which take us back to the Eclogues. And tucked away on page 46 of the Twickenham pastoral poetry is that Thyrsis metaphorphed into Delia. (Then I pick up a link to Damon, which isn't in the Twickenham index but is the title to the spring, or first pastoral, to Trumbull. Did I mention that he was secretary to William III? Had I mentioned Keppel or Bentinck?)
52 | Burlington, Kent, Handel, Pope, to which we add John Gay, who has been outed by Nokes. Chiswick, Pope's Villa, Walpole Strawberry Hill, Stephen Fox and Redlynch, Lincoln, Castle Hill, Rousham and Esher, Oatlands and Claremont, Cobham and Stowe, Sanderson Miller, Shenstone, Leasowes, Lyttleton and Hagely and we want to add one more. Frederick, Prince of Wales, for he will unlock a lot more. But that will take us into 1733 and I don't have enough material yet for that story. It also gives us dogs, I am his master's, and that takes us back to Theocritus and the first idyll and the cup with the wolves and the bunch of grapes. For then I find among statues in the Ludoviski collection dogs and bunches of grapes and satyrs. Here is a whole new feast which must be celebrated.
52D1 | Is this outing business about outing them as gay? If this is important I am not clear how it relates to the argument.
52D1J1 | Ah, we are getting there :)
53 | But we have enough for the points I want to connect.
54 | What I am suggesting is that men wanting to have sex with men forms an association with religion and politics, that in order to communicate these things they formed associations with the suburban, which allowed for genre. (Rough trade) That outside the town, behaviour was possible. These stories were then decorated as art, in words, in images, which could be interpreted, knowing and unknowing. Knowledge management. But older men also fancied younger men, not necessarily reciprocated, which meant either artifice or the exercise of power.
54D1 | Ah!! Here is the argument?
54D1J1 | Eureka!
54D1J2 | But to get back to 52, there is a problem, for we are using a post '68 word in a post '68 context to refer to things over the previous 3,000 or more years, so we have to deal with a=b? We also have bent, queer, and so forth.
55 | Sometimes there was love, but this is a design we haven't yet decoded. Love might include the erotic, desire might include the physical connection and that might include sodomy. Now there is a particularity which will allow us another thread. But I can't for the life of me see why one would want to allow it so much voice?
56 | There is so much else.
57 | Indexing, as well as a pointing finger, seems to me to have three distinct meanings. There is what we might have at the back of a book, which might or might not be well done. There is what you might do in a file such as this one, where I could using a package such as the one I am using, make at the end a list of strings and the pages on which they occur, and probably an hypertext connection forth and back. Then there is the building of an inverted file where every occurrence of a string is mapped against the fragment where it occurs. This allows for the Boolean., strings threaded, in a paragraph and so forth. As entire corpuses are digitised there will be new connections to be made, though proving propositions will be more difficult.
58 | But so far, one significant truth must be stated: in order to find a string you have to know the string. Otherwise you have to make a connection, and you can't tell whether the connection is true. To look up a word in a dictionary, you have to know how to spell the word, and you have to know the word. Though we do know how to make a thesaurus, which means a treasury, but the relation of the content and container is the machine of our devising and that will take us into another world which we will keep for another walk.
59 | We have now probably lost the word information in any useful sense at all. Perhaps we have lost the word indexing too? When people don't understand what is being done to them, or even that it is being done, they may hardly be said to be in charge of the social change of their lives?
60 | When I was very young and homosexuality was in Dewey as a medical condition, and by accident I presume I found Corydon by Gide, in the public library, I found another world. Nearly fifty years later, I found Theocritus, then unpacked a gallery of such works as imagination is made of. Had I known these fifty years ago, how different a life might I have lived? Those now learning for the first time how to index, how to catalogue and classify, how to blog, to podcast, will have a new world to make, in conditions not of their own making, in which dominant ideas will class. I wonder what they will make of it?
61 | There is a chunk of work still to be done. Those writing between now and then have to be discovered. Searching on the British Library catalogue on Phaedrus, Theocritus, produces a vast literature. Among them, in 1811, Polwhele, who on page 122 makes a plea for toleration which is tearful. We after 1968 have achieved something, but there are voices hidden in the past waiting for their liberation, in the way that Gay Switchboard was intended to allow connections to be made.
62 | Now I have to add the elements of an apparatus. I am putting in this only works I have read, not those cited elsewhere, and nothing like all that I have read. Just enough. I am also not giving references constructed according to some protocol, just enough to identify.
63 | I think I have answered the question I asked at the beginning, people make history in conditions not of their own making, and some, under some circumstances, shift the old dominant ideas into ones, some of which fail and others come to dominate. In the process the shards of the past remain and the prefigurative forms of the future form. This human nature, free will and landscape garden. The one I now find most useful is otium negotium. Unpicking that though I think I will leave to another essay, which might start with Horace and Pope?
Betteridge, Tom. Sodomy in early modern Europe. 2002
Borris, K and Kluwitter, G. The affectionate shepherd. 2001.
Bredbeck, Gregory. Sodomy and interpretation. 1991
Burke, Edmund. A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. 1757.
Colie, Rosemary. Shakespeare's living art. 1974. (She gets all the pastoral but none of the sexual)
Cousins, A. Shakespeare's sonnets and narrative poems. Longmans education.2000 (Has a line on queering the canon, which given this is an educational text is interesting)
Dollimore, Jonathan. (ed) Political Shakespeare. First edition 1985 which doesn't contain, apparently, Dollimore, J. Shakespeare's understudies, which is in the second edition, 1994. This contains much wider material than this essay needs but I'm inserting it simply to show a problem in apparatus.
Ferrari, G. Listening to the cicadas. 1987.
Gide, A. Corydon. 1920
Gow, Theocritus. 1952
Halperin, David. One hundred years of homosexuality. 1990.
Halperin, David. Before pastoral. Theocritus and the ancient tradition of bucolic poetry. 1983.
Hammond, Paul. Figuring sex between men from Shakespeare to Rochester. OUP. 2002. (Should we add this isn't available in main London bookshops at the beginning of 2005? It is worth buying. Does that mean we should add ebay, Amazon, google to the apparatus, or should I add the earlier essay in this set?)
Harris, Eileen. Handel as Orpheus.
Harris, John. The Palladians. 1981
Hill, Christopher. Milton and the English revolution. 1977.
Hogarth, Analysis of beauty. edited with an introduction and notes by Ronald Paulson. London ; New Haven : Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art by Yale University Press, 1997
Lambert, beloved and god.
Lawall, G. Theocritus Coan pastorals. 1967.
Lindsay, J. Knowledge Organisation: Information, Systems and Social Change. Paper in Information and Social Change, Vol 20, 2004. http://www.libr.org/ISC/articles/20-John_Lindsay.html (I put this in, not because I have referred to it in this text, but because it provides a foundation for much of what I am placing here about the nature of information.)
Maranon, Antonio Perez. 1954.
Maurier, Daphne du. The golden boys.
Mowl, Timothy. Horace Walpole : the great outsider. London : John Murray, 1996.
Nokes, David. John Gay : a profession of friendship. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1995
Norton, Rictor. Pastoral homoeroticism and Barnfield, the affectionate shepherd.1974. in Borris.
Norton, Rictor. web site.
Polwhele, W. Theocritus. 1811
Pope, Alexander. Pastoral poetry. Ed. Audra, E. Twickenham. Rosenmeyer, The green cabinet. 1969
Sinaiko, H. Love, knowledge and discourse. Plato on Phaedrus. 1965.
Sinfield, A. Faultlines. Cultural materialism and the politics of dissident reading. OUP, 1992. This is much wider than this essay, but I am including it to show a whole category, cultural materialism, of which I knew nothing, It is also worth including for he makes no mention of libraries, classification, controlled vocabularies, or any of the matters which I was saying in 1975 are themselves part of that social construction.
Smith, B. Homosexual desire in Shakespeare's England. 1991
Uglow, Jenny. Royal Academy magazine, 2004.
Wells, Stanley. Looking for sex in Shakespeare. 2004.
Woods, Gregory. A history of gay literature: the male tradition. Yale, 1999.
I wonder whether it is possible to construct a visual index to this?
| Date line/genre | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Time | -500BC | about 0 | 1500 | 2000 |
| Literature | Theocritus | Virgil | Spenser | Smith |
| Landscape | hmm | Hadrian | Kent | Wilkie |
| Visual arts | Titian, Hogarth? | Jarman | ||
| Ideas | Bucolic | Idyllic | Pastoral | Arcadian |
Does this give enough of the idea? I have used particularities as anchors. We could go further, and make hyperlinks to the dominant section where we have discussed the category and the association? We could even use those as section header names, though I suspect that would lead to confusion as they in turn would need explanation? I have already referred to the arbitratiness of dating lines, centuries, birth of someone, periods with capitals, so my chunking and clumping is less arbitrary.
Then we could go a step further and show the references from one period backwards to another? But that would lose this simplicity and need a more careful outlining.
Do I need a reminding note on general method? In order to talk about something, an evidence, it has to have a name. This is my response to Wittgenstein's poker. In order to talk about a greater something, a case, it too has to have a name, but then the evidences must be listed within the case. At some point, there needs to be grouping and ordering, ordering and grouping, and these orders and groups have to have names. And so on.
When threads become tapestries, to see the whole, it helps to visualise. Working on methods for visualisation is the next step.