Fitting the battle of life

I am a sucker for the old Waterstones 3 for 2. Especially when I’m being dragged around Norwich by my mother and sister looking at shoes all day – popping into any bookshop is frankly a relief. And I love books.

I just finished Libra by Don DeLillo, and am (and have been for some time – pesky exams getting in the way) two-thirds of the way through Underworld by the same. And yet there I am, bored out of my mind, and I’ve got £20 left in the bank. A 3 for 2 on £8 paperbacks is tempting at the best of times, but witht that little money in my account you’d have thought it would be a firm no. But the shoes were getting on my nerves…

…so I bought (for probably a lot more than I could have paid online, but hey – I enjoyed the process of buying them, because it saved me from the shoes):

• We Need to Talk About Kevin,
• Midnight’s Children, and
• No Country for Old Men,

which I might get round to reading this Summer. Maybe. Perhaps.

This week I recommend:

• In film, This is England. (Watched it tonight, and it’s brilliant, just brilliant. The dialogue’s great, the soundtrack is perfect, and most of the acting is great too.)
• In music, Portland Rise. (Yes, I have a bit of a vested interest in these guys, but would recommend them even if I didn’t know them.)
• In books, Under the Net. (Iris Murdoch’s first novel, and unfortunately the only one of hers I’ve read, but will try and rectify that this summer after my exams.)

That’s my watch, listen and read for this week. I might even make it a semi-regular feature, depending how revision goes.

• (And as a bonus, in podcasts, the Ubuntu-uk podcast episode 2, or uupc as it is become known. It even got a mention on lugradio this week!)

Well, I piled up a few of the books I’m reading at the moment/will start reading in the next few days and realised I have quite a bit to get through. It’s not even all of them, just the ones I have lying around my bedroom at the moment. Fun times ahead!

A few Books well studied, and thoroughly digested, nourish the understanding more, than hundreds but gargled in the mouth, as ordinary Students use

I think we would do well to remember this dictum. What’s the point of knowing only a little about lots when you can know lots about a little? The latter is arguably more impressive; when you know little of lots, you can easily be caught out on the present subject by someone who has but one fact more. Very few can trip you up when you’re an expert in a field.

This is more of a discursive, get-my-thoughts-down-quickly post. Apologies to anyone who isn’t at all interested in this.

This mainly comes from my recent work on (you guessed it) Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets. Now, this is a collection of some hundred-odd poems, and to be quite frank, I’m not going to write an essay that includes all of them. I don’t even want to have to read them all, to find out which ones are easy. So, I sat down with the book and a bit of paper, and noted down which ones dealth with, for instance, the art of poetry (so looking for reference to the Muse, to poetry, other poets, etc).

Without paying for a research assistant, I don’t want to do this myself. It’s a tedious task that takes up time that could be spent doing other things, like actually reading and responding to the poems themselves. Oh, and then of course I need to find poems by other authors, or other poems by the same author in different books, that treat the same subject. Admittedly, often there will be introductions that give you some kind of overview of a writer’s context, but what if you’re not reading an edition aimed at students? An older edition, perhaps, or a website?

What we need – and by ‘we’ I mean lazy literature students like myself, and by ‘need’ I mean ‘could do with to let us be even lazier’ – is some kind of metadatabase of poetry. Google are already digitizing books and making them searchable, but I’d like to see this go further. Why show you the whole book, when you need only the one chapter on the history of the sonnet for your essay? For poetry, it should suggest other poems that are similar – sorted by importance. Poems by the same author on the same subject would be ranked highest, and then other authors, those closest chronologically ranked highest. Some kind of weighting could be factored in to show a known connection – we know Wordsworth read Smith, so perhaps he should rank higher than Shelley, for instance.

The only problem is, such a database would require a vast amount of work. All books currently digitized would need cutting up into individual poems, chapters – perhaps so far as paragraphs (which would return Wordsworth’s ‘There are in our existence spots of time’ verse-paragraph out of Book XI of the Prelude). And then tagging: form, style, period, author, subject (this would be a little subjective). I don’t know how it would work. I’d just like it to! It would also help to make concordances and other geeky English things like that.

Maybe there is something already quite like this, maybe not. Perhaps I should spend my summer scanning out-of-copyright books and making my own database. But maybe I shall just wait for Google Books to come out of beta.