pumpkinstrokemarrow

My early Christmas present to myself was a book by one Derek Bickerton on the evolution of language. Interesting and easy read but rather marred to my mind by the jokey style favoured by writers of popular science these days. Plus a fair amount of space is given over to having a pop at all the other people ploughing their furrows in this particular field, although to be fair he does admit to having been wrong himself a few times in the past. To my mind jokey style is apt to come with sloppy thinking: but maybe sloppiness not really a problem given the state of this particular art. We can slop around for a few more years while the thicker theories mature.

But a book I will probably not be getting is a scholarly edition of the letters of Van Gogh. In six volumes and 2,249 pages at £325 if I place my order on or before New Year's Eve. I have puzzled before who might actually read all this kind of stuff, however splendidly it is got up, which these books apparently are. However the review (by Frank Whitford) was interesting. I wonder about the place of all these letters in the chap's oeuvre - which to my mind should stand without the need of this kind of prop. Oeuvres should be free-standing, sufficient unto themselves, portable and reasonably permanent - formulation designed to exclude a lot of what passes for Brit Art. While a helping hand with consumption does sometimes help, I am not sure about this sort of helping hand. I learn that while most of us remember Van Gogh as a drunken nutter who knocked out a few paintings of sunflowers, and maybe think that being a drunken nutter is a necessary condition for artiness, he was actually a sophisticated and literate painter who knocked out of lot of paintings - 800 or more it seems - and who was able to write in an interesting way about the process in two or three languages. I learn that in translating these letters, the translation team leader required the translations to use target language which was contemporary with the subject language. So in translating, say, French slang to English slang, the translators attempt to find contemporary English equivalents for the French. An interesting device.

Lastly, I feel the need to mention Sebastian D. G. Knowles whom is alleged by the TLS to be a professor of English at Ohio State where he specialised in Joyce studies. But this did mean that he felt the need to read that half of this oeuvre known as Finnegan's Wake. He confessed to this lacuna in his education at some Joycean conference, maybe after a drop too many of the dark stuff, which confession did not stop him being pushed further up the Joycean ladder. All very strange; not a book I have got very far into myself, but then I do not set myself up of as a professor. To be fair to the chap, he has now, it seems, managed to get through the thing.