What BOOK are you reading right now?

Trevor seems interesting, thx for the clue.

I got more books and DVD 'stolen' by friends than I care to remember. I take it as a good thing. Good books are worth sharing. They are worth a steal and in fact, I've stolen my fair share when I was younger. That was more than 20 yrs ago so I can now confess my statute-limited crimes.... In stores generally, but once I borrowed a book from a friend which I did not return. A comic book actually, Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. Definitely worth the steal!

I got a CD of Burlingames "ABRAHAM LINCOLN--A Life" Volume II. I finished volume I and was underwhelmed at how the author decided to write yet another volume of primary resource on Lincoln.
Vol I ends just prior to Lincoln composing his first inaugural address and being involved in the great "peace Conference" as an outgrowth of the Crittendon Compromise.
Vol I was like the "life of Jesus", THE HIGH SCHOOL YEARS.
I guess primary resource writings have to act like that.

I hope Vol II is going to be moe than a test of endurance

What do you mean by primary resource writing?

Primary sources are original materials that have not been altered or distorted in any way. Information for which the writer has no personal knowledge is not primary, although it may be used by historians in the absence of a primary source. In the study of history as an academic discipline, a primary source (also called original source or evidence) is an artefact, a document, a recording, or other source of information that was created at the time under study. It serves as an original source of information about the topic. Similar definitions are used in library science, and other areas of scholarship, although different fields have somewhat different definitions. In journalism, a primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation, or a document written by such a person.

True. Now I can enjoy that my crumpled - I do mean crumpled - Life and Death of Cities went to a good architect who recommended me for projects.
Still, I miss the book, I'm very sentimental.

I do really rue one book. Some damn thing about So You Want To Be A Doctor, which I did, then, very much. My father wrote in the first few pages. I leant it to a girl at my new college. Her mother cleaned it out. My father soon died.

A tidy mother clearing the book had never occurred to me. And I liked the girl, as usual one of the few in the sciences then, though I should have noticed she changed her name and had a nose job.

The thing is, the name I remember for her is the older one.

On books, mostly I think of them as umbrellas, as they can't be owned. It just seems so.

I just borrowed The Twelfth of Never : A Memoir by Louis Nowra (Australian playwright & novelist)

I first heard of Nowra in my teens courtesy of a 'picture book' he compiled of cuttings of strange and weird news stories - it always put my brain in a strange place. But I've never seen one of his plays or read one of his books - this one starts with a killer opening :

Ron's definition is quite on the money, although , also, in history, any text that attempts to stand as a comprehensive source for future scholarship is often called a "primary source" out of sheer exhaustion.
I was KINDA kvetching a bit about Burlingames writing style. It aint Elmore Leonard. The book is a must read for anyone that wants to get some more details about the WHy's of Lincoln and his worldviews. Is it enjoyable??
Well, for one, it aint a page turner. Im more proud of myself that I made it through at all. Im glad my wife got me the CD of Vol II.

What book is on your night stand now?
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I don’t take books to bed any more. I read and write for 6 to 8 hours every day. Sometime between 9:30 and 10:30 p.m. I take my anti-psychotic and anti-depressant meds for my bipolar 1 disorder. The medication cocktail is: Seroquel and Effexor, and within an hour or so I can’t read or write any more. I am in a state of sleepiness and quasi-euphoria. I watch a little TV and go to bed, usually by 1 a.m. at the latest. This has been my routine for the last 21 months.
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When and where do you like to read?
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I read just about everything in my study, a small room near the toilet on the upper-level of our split-level home. Having the toilet near is useful because I have to urinate on average every hour because I am in stage 4 of moderate chronic-kidney disease. I read and write, perhaps, two hours before lunch, three hours in the afternoon and three hours in the evening. Everything I read come in on the internet as I sit in front of my computer in a comfortable chair my son bought for me several years ago.
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What are your reading habits? Do you stick with electronic everywhere? Do you take notes? Do you snack while you read?
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I always read electronic on my Microsoft Word 2010, Windows 7. I still touch paper because I have dozens of subject files where I keep photocopied material and notes I have made. I highlight and take notes, and I have notes on my computer from dozens of sources, especially since I retired from FT, PT and casual work in the years 19999 to 2005. Before 1999 and going back into the 1980s, I still have some notes and photocopies. Snacks are always good: my morning pills with juice and yogurt, coffee, water, chocolate. I have a 2-litre plastic container of water to drink whenever I am thirsty.

Anselm Hollo, in his book The Poet's Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets(WW Norton and Co., NY, editor, Stephen Kuudisto, et al., 1995), wrote that: "I love reading poets' notebooks. Poets are curious critters, and it is a pleasure to relax with the jottings and musings of such literary practitioners." Many writers and poets, though not all, keep notebooks. In my Pioneering Over Four Epochs, section IX, readers will find information relevant to my notebooks. What readers find there provides a general framework for the many notebooks I have kept over the years.

There are generally two types of notebooks which I use. One is the type wherein I keep notes on a particular subject. I have kept notebooks on a great many subjects which I do not list here, but I list them elsewhere for my own interest and record. Another notebook is the type where I keep quotations on the specialized subject of writing, the literary process: poetry, reading, autobiography, diary/journal keeping and letter writing, inter alia.

In this latter category I have a dozen major files and in the former category I have some 300 files. There is material in these notebooks going back to the 1960s, the beginning of my pioneering experience, my experience since leaving the town I was born in and the town in which I grew up; but, for the most part, my notebooks assumed the form they did by degree in and after 1992, as I could see the end of the tunnel of my FT employment and especially after I retired from full-time employment in 1999, part-time work in 2003 and casual-volunteer work in 2005.

I now have some 300+ notebooks covering millions of words and many subjects and topics. These notebooks now serve and will serve as an important part of the base for my many writing projects in these early years of late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++). I rarely read a book or even part of a book which does not involve some exercise in note-taking, although I must say that many people over the years loan me books that are of little value to me personally and no note-taking has been involved. I should add, too, that since I gave up teaching English Literature in 1994 I rarely read fiction.

I have been gathering resources now for forty years, 1974-2014, but only seriously for the last twenty-five, 1988-2013. I have been fine-tuning my collection of notebooks since retiring from FT work in 1999.

Ok, I was aware of primary source or primary data. Farmerman used it as a synonym for 'reference material' or 'monograph'.

A very stupid tidy mother, that was... But I don't get the connection with the name and nose change.

Generating another primary source is often a derisive "compliment" when issued by academic historians.
Youre a Brit no?
Chalk it up to two countries separated by a common language.

I'm French.

So is my husband.

Olivier0000000000000000000000RUN!

You reminded me go 'lucky Eddie' in Hagar the horrible sitting on a bar stool next to a woman who says 'You look like my third husband.'

'Really? How many times have you been married?'

'Twice.'

In a review of The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis, editors) Richard Wittington-Egan points out("Oscar Wilde According To The Epistles, Book Review, Contemporary Review, 2001) that "as sea-salt is to spume, so letters are to conversation, solidifying and preserving the froth of wit and wisdom, fret and fume, which would otherwise have died still-born on the air of their delivery." But more than that in the case of this gigantic bundle of the collected epistles of Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde: the letters track his life. This is somewhat true of my own letters, although the track is not a clear delineation from go to woe. Wilde's letters are, as Merlin Holland, his grandson, points out, the autobiography that Wilde never wrote.

The letters chart his footsteps from Irish nursery and school, through undergraduate days at Trinity College, Dublin, and Magdalen, Oxford, his aesthetic tour of America, which ate up 1882, and the brief candle-flare of success and fame before the setting of his feet on the via dolorosa, leading to prison, disgrace, exile and early mysterious death. My letters don't take this linear chart quite as clearly down the road of my life.

As these letters amply show, to think of Wilde as a greenery-yallery, light weight, green-carnationist teller of fairy-tales, and tell-taler of Society comedies, is to be naive. He was a first-rate classical scholar, Classical Demy at Magdalen, a highly refined, heavy weight, intellectual artefact. My own letters, on the other hand, may be seen by readers as evidence of a light-weight trivializer. It is difficult to say; I am strongly disinclined to even make a tentative assessment as I write these words in the early years of my late adulthood.

It is fascinating to watch the character of Wilde change, chameleon-like, according to the features of the surrounding landscape of his life. As he sets forth to ascend the ladder, there is a leavening of respectful epistolary seeking after favour from those whom he identifies as potent providers of a leg up. Success brings a speckling of pomposity, a soupcon of arrogance -- both so tempered with humour and sagacity as to be overall unobjectionable. Does success in my life bring the objectionable qualities of arrogance and pomposity?

After Wilde's fall in his last 12 years, 1888 to 1900, the veneer of art, artifice, paradox, epigram and metaphor grows progressively thinner, the underlying substance of the 'decent man' glows through. Out of Reading Goal emerges the piecemeal De Profundis 'letter' addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas -- the full original manuscript printed in ninety-seven pages in this collection of his letters. Finally come the letters of a penitent but unreformed remittance-man in exile, their sheets peppered with pound-signs, tirelessly plainting for funds. I wonder how a publisher might categorize my own letters in the years to come, assuming they get categorized at all by anyone.

The first major edition of Wilde's letters -- 'a landmark in modern scholarship' Ellmann called it -- was published on 25 June 1962. I was only 18 at the time and the collection of my letters had just begun. Work on Wilde's collection had begun in 1954, under the editorship of Allen Wade. He died suddenly in July 1955, and Rupert Hart-Davis grasped the nettle. For seven long years he slaved away, sporadically chronicling in his to-be-published correspondence with George Lyttelton, news of the netting of fresh letters and the progress of his obsessional, no-pains-sparing composition of thousands of hardwon, enlightening footnotes. Hart-Davis collected 1,298 letters. In his The Letters of Oscar Wilde, he printed 1,098, discounting the other 200 as 'brief notes, often to unidentified people, of no literary, biographical or other interest'.

In 1985, he published More Letters, containing a further 164. The grand total represented by the two volumes was, therefore, 1,262. Sir Rupert Hart-Davis died in December 1999. The story of my own collection of letters is written elsewhere and I won't repeat it here. If these letters are ever published I will take an avuncular interest from whatever position I enjoy in that Undiscovered Country, assuming I am given the time and assuming the interest still exists in my soul in that land of lights.

The new centenary Complete Letters(1900-2000) adds a further 300, that is, a total of 1,562 letters. But mere statistics aside, what is just as important or even more important, is its remedial provision of the full texts of many letters previously culled from mere fragments in catalogues or typescripts disfigured by myriad inaccuracies. Thus the originals of the six letters to the English composer and pianist, Dalhousie Young, published in Resurgam (1917), edited by Clement Shorter, have come to light, and their sound texts are published here. Likewise, the twenty-five constituting Some Letters from Oscar Wilde to Alfred Douglas (1924) have had the results of A. C. Dennison and Harrison Post's inaccurate editing corrected. Similarly, errors of transcription which appeared in Sixteen Letters from Oscar Wilde to William Rothenstein(1930), have all been corrected by publication here of text taken from the discovered originals.

More importantly, it transpires that the thirty letters printed by Ada Leverson in her Letters to the Sphinx from Oscar Wilde with Reminiscences of the Author(1930), had been heavily cut and doctored. Only eighteen of the originals were hitherto available for textual verification. Now, all but five of the originals have been found, and these, along with others which Mrs. Leverson did not print, are included.

The widespread deliberate destruction, or at least determined squirrelling away, of what were in the persecutory climate of 1895 thought of as incriminatory documents, in conjunction with the discreet sale of others outside the public arenas of the sale-room and the book dealers' catalogues, has made the garnering of the dispersed harvest timorously protracted and practically difficult. What does not help either, is the manifestation of a disturbing new trend: the keeping of Wilde's unpublished letters from being published, with an avaricious eye on future commercial gain.

A discriminatory hazard is involved too, for there have been several circulations of forged Wildean letters and manuscripts. A small number were purchased by the Dublin booksellers, Messrs. Hodges and Figgis. Sufficiently skilful to, at first, ensnare the judgment of Wilde's bibliographer, Stuart Mason (Christopher Millard). He subsequently, and rightly, repudiated them. They are thought to have been the artistic output of Wilde's nephew by marriage, Fabian Lloyd.

What were obvious forgeries were reproduced in facsimile in J. M. Stuart-Young's 'preposterous' book, Oscar the Self-Sufficient (1905). And a third bogus clutch, which was doing the rounds in 1962, now, nearly forty years later, apparently still is. They are invariably, and one is tempted to say appropriately, addressed to Leonard Smithers, and are often on somewhat crumpled, ruled or squared paper.

Whatever one's concept of Wilde, be it derived from Sherard, Ransome, Harris, Pearson, or Ellmann, the surest picture is undoubtedly that of the unconscious self-portrait painted in the words of this superbly put together book. Here is unquestionably demonstrated the extraordinary multiplicity of the man; on the one hand, gentle and generous of heart, contradictorily kind of act and cruel of tongue, on the other, arrogant, conceited and, albeit self-architected-circumstance-driven, mendacious and mendiciary. In fine, as paradoxical as any of his paradoxes, as enigmatic as any of his most tortured and tortuous epigrams. But, at bottom, a far more decent human being than many who reviled him.

All these permutations and combinations of issues and problems regarding Wilde's letters may arise when my own letters get to a similar stage of publication. But I must confess little interest in the subject of what, how, when, where and why. I leave it all to those mysterious dispensations of Providence.

Oscar Wilde was a man worth knowing. There is now no better way of getting to know him than listening to him speak for himself in this most attractive volume, addressed to the general reader and the scholar alike. If I am a man worth knowing and can throw some light on the enigmas of life by my letters and other genres. That would be, I suppose, one of those concrete manifestations, contributing factors toward an ever-advancing civilization.

Ron Price
March 31st 2006

Nobody's perfect...

AHH, Thank for you and Spain for helpin us out in that little disturbance with the Brits 230 years ago.

AHH, Thank for you and Spain for helpin us out in that little disturbance with the Brits 230 years ago.