Putting Away Books

Also making a large Shrimp Fried Rice, D coming out tomorrow to work on the Wrack Show, need lunch and dinner prepared and extra to take to the Deputy on Tuesday. Zoe broke water, twins on the way. Some notes. Birds are Avis "because the do not follow straight roads (visas)", Ursus the bear, connected to the word 'Orsus' (a beginning) said to get her name because she sculpts her young with her mouth (ore). Talk about naming: Linnaeus named 5900 species in one year. Must read Buffon, he certainly adumbrates Darwin, and said, somewhere, -Thus the fox will be known to be a different species from the dog, if it proves to be the fact that from the mating of a male and a female of these two kinds of animals no offspring is born... even if there should result a hybrid offspring, a sort of mule... (it) would be sterile. Lyell and Lamarck too, talking about acquired characteristics. Both Darwin and Wallace acknowledge great importance to "Maltus On Population" to the development of their theories. In the case of Wallace it was an epiphany during a fever. The Goddess Of Memory (Mnemosyne) was a Titan, before writing, memory was everything, EVERYTHING. Simonides offered to teach Themistocles The Art Of Memory, who famously replied -Teach me not the art of remembering, but the art of forgetting, for I remember things I do not wish to remember, but I cannot forget things I wish to forget- and, in fact, forgetting might be more important. Ebbinghaus' "forgetting-curve" shows that most forgetting takes place soon after learning. St. Jerome advised -a book should always be in your hand or under your eyes.- When Alcuin joined Charlemagne, to get more words on the page, he developed the lower case (800 AD), Carolingian Minuscule. The book becomes possible. Korean experiments, half a century before Gutenberg, had produced moveable type. Making books codifies language, expands literacy. Suddenly, vernacular literature. I have to go shoot a rabid dog and saute some shrimp. If we have to draw a timeline Rabelais is right here "Pantagruel" and "Gargantua". Caxton establishes the English language, then Shakespeare uses it, adding a good bit. For a book, we need paper, and binding. "Volume" is from the Latin, volvere, to roll, because they were rolls, early Egypt, paper was made from papyrus, Nile delta, called byblos from the port of the same name wherefrom comes bible, The Book. An alternative was parchment, after Pergamum, and vellum, a particularly fine parchment made from calf-skin (Old French, Veel) and manuscripts were no longer rolled but collated into a codex (or Caudex, tree-trunk, because they were bound in boards). The Chinese must have invented paper as we know it, because in some war some Chinese prisoners were brought back as slaves and the first paper we know, macerated fibers collected on a screen, were produced in Baghdad, 800 AD. Who knows how long they'd been producing it. I love this early colophon, Festina Lenta, "make haste slowly", colophon is Greek for "finishing touch". Incunabula are the earliest books, from the Latin, "swaddling clothes" or "cradle". Leibniz was a librarian, developed a system for classification, alphabetical schemes, organized several large collections, may be responsible for public libraries. At the end of the day, it's a great Shrimp Fried Rice that I eat out of the skillet, no mediation, and a list of facts that I believe to be true, but I can't guarantee anything. A slippery slope. In fact, one of my favorite poets, Ted Enslin, accused be of being a jack-daw, a raven, a crow, picking up anything and using it as my own, and he was right. More later, I'm not done with memory and books.