The Scandalization of Punctuation: Dot. Dot. Dot.
Back in early autumn last year, I came across the Brilliant Club, a charity which sends researchers into schools, teaching their work to 14-year olds. The groups are small, and half of the participants come from less advantaged backgrounds. The kids visit your institution at the beginning and at the end of the seven-weeks course, write […]
Splendid Isolation Book Two: Punctuation and Progress
As we continue social distancing from others and working at home in our pyjamas (welcome to the life of an academic), I’m continuing my punctuation book review with a handy little quarto by Norwegian media researcher Bard Bord Michalsen. Signs of Civilization: How Punctuation Changed History (2019) intrigued me for its provocative title. Apart from the inevitable […]
Stop. Start Again.
One of the more straightforward tasks of punctuation is to clarify the boundaries between words and sentences in a written text. Visual cues are spaces between words, and marks, such as hyphens, commas, full stops. In contrast to scriptio continua of classical times, whenwordswouldbestrungtogetherwithoutsuchspacesorsigns, it was impossible to sight-read a text. So, punctuation helps us realize where one word […]
Splendid Isolation
Like most of us, I haven’t been able to work much these past two weeks. It’s slate winter/spring 2020. The escalation of the current situation makes everything else small. So it’s been a bit of a drag to open a book, or even think of research. Not because I don’t like it, or don’t believe […]
The ‘sensuall-lyfe’ of Punctuation: Hyphen Part 3
Since it’s early stages of my project, I am focussing on brackets in romance in prose, but eventually I’d like to cover brackets in all kinds of romance, prose, poetry, and drama. So, as preparation for that second stage (and because it’s fun), I called up two manuscripts of John Harington’s Orlando Furioso translation. One, a beautifully-bound clean book […]
Bracket Spotting
Yesterday, I chatted to a friend via text, trying to find a day to take a walk together, and touch base. We hadn’t seen each other for a very long time, although we live in the same town (entirely my fault!). Sunday, I said to her, would be best, as on all the other days […]
Craving Good News
I went to see Crave by Sarah Kane on Halloween. It’s one of her less violent ones, at least visually so. Emotionally-speaking, it’s tough, of course: four people talking at cross-purposes for 50 minutes, topics ranging from paedophilia, suicide, loneliness, loss, abandonment, and whatever else life throws at people in general, and people at each other. The […]
Remember the Porter! Or the bracket on the 5th of November
ve been teaching Volpone by Ben Jonson today, and, in my preparation for the seminar, discovered the wonderful British Library pages on early modern drama and dramatists. They also showed an autograph letter of Jonson to Robert Cecil, James’ secretary of state, and secret service guy, written just days after the revelation of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. On […]
Damnable Practices?
Damnable Practices, 1619, a ballad from the Pepys collection, via English Broadside Ballad Archive, EBBA 20058. The article pointed towards some fascinating knee-jerk responses by our bodies to danger, such as something looking like a spider over-riding inattentional blindness, that is, us not noticing something obvious if we are focussing on something else (that gorilla-basketball experiment). […]
Desirable Difficulty
If you can’t read this (easily), that’s exactly what should happen. This typeface has been named Sans Forgetica by some Jacques aficionado genius, because it’s supposed to help you not forget what you’ve read. It’s got gaps and is back-slanted so that it becomes difficult (though not impossible) to read. It’s been developed by researchers of psychology, […]