Korrektiv: Medieval Edition
The Means of Communication issue of Lapham’s Quarterly contains a fabulous collection of complains and marginal notes by the monks assigned to copy manuscripts in the era before the printing press. With their bitchy complaints—“I am very cold,” “Oh, my hand”—they insert themselves into the holy texts and often, in the process, disrupt the sanctity of the words they’re supposedly copying: “Now I’ve written the whole thing: for Christ’s sake give me a drink.”
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Marginalia might include comments like the ones from our miserable monks, but also an entire free-flowing range of artistic flourishes and doodles that make up the edges of medieval manuscripts. “Once the manuscript page becomes a matrix of visual signs and is no longer one of flowing linear speech,” Camille writes, “the stage is set not only for supplementation and annotation but also for disagreement and juxtaposition—what the scholastics called disputatio.”
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That these psalters and books of hours often contained sacrilegious sentiments right alongside their holy piety, it seems, was perhaps the point: “We should not see medieval culture exclusively in terms of binary oppositions—sacred/profane, for example, or spiritual/worldly,” Camille explains. “Travesty, profanation, and sacrilege are essential to the continuity of the sacred in society.”
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A 1323 missal illuminated by Petrus de Raimbeaucourt [...] contains [a] picture of a scribe harassed by monkeys: while he tries to copy, they mimic him, drink his ink, and distract him. One moons him, an obscene gesture suggested by a suggestive line break in the Latin above: the word culpa, “sin,” is cut at cul, so that the line reads instead Liber est a cul—“the book is to the ass.”
Today in Disclaimers
Most of you won’t want to read this piece in GQ about porn’s effect on sex, the upshot of which is “porn used to be the poor man’s substitute for sex; now the latter has to be gussied up with facials and ball gags and D-grade dialogue to be even half as enticing as porn.” (It does include the astute observation that many modern sexual practices are, thanks to porn, “more like masturbation with a fellow 3-D person,” but again, you probably don’t want to read about it.) The reason I mention the piece at all is to note what has become the standard disclaimer: “Before you brand me some sort of sexual neocon, let me say: I like sex. I watch porn.” Reminded me of this piece in the NYT on the tired ubiquity of strip-club scenes in TV and film: “First let me say that I yield to no man in my fondness for naked women. I have seen several in person, though none recently, and rank them right up there with a good sunset or a crisply turned double play on my list of things worth looking at…” You know, because without those disclaimers, these people simply wouldn’t be worth listening to. Because then, they might be suggesting something was wrong with modern sexual mores. And heaven knows, we can’t have that.
Betty Did a Bad, Bad Thing
Well, not really. I just wanted an excuse to play off of Chris Isaak. But seriously – Friend of Korrektiv Duffy wrote a bit on the manosphere, and all hell broke loose in the comments.
I blurbed a book
Travis Naught asked me to write a blurb for his fine collection of poetry, The Virgin Journals, and I was glad to oblige.
Kickstarter Korner
when you need to blow
off a little angry steam
a haiku can help
Today in Kindle Fire
The New York Times takes aim at some weaknesses in the Kindle Fire…
“A few of their many complaints: there is no external volume control. The off switch is easy to hit by accident. Web pages take a long time to load. There is no privacy on the device; a spouse or child who picks it up will instantly know everything you have been doing. The touch screen is frequently hesitant and sometimes downright balky…”
Uh-oh. The dreaded spouse or child. But wait! There’s hope!
“There will be improvements in performance and multitouch navigation, and customers will have the option of editing the list of items that show what they have recently been doing. No more will wives wonder why their husbands were looking at a dating site when they said they were playing Angry Birds.”
“Dating site” is my new favorite euphemism.
Outside the Campus Dental Clinic
For some reason I was standing there,
Behind this older female faculty chair,
And watched her pluck a strand of hair.
It was with such casual intent
That thumb and forefinger went
Right to where they were meant,
But it took her another try or two
To find get the perfect one, to do
What she intended to,
Which was to use it, boss,
For dental floss.
“When You Feel Shame, Get Your Shit Together”
“It’s as old as the bible”. Go to 2nd Samuel, or, if you have nine minutes and thirty-four seconds, have a listen. Warning: Adult Content
Today in Successful Crowdsourcing
A propos of Expat’s project, here’s a story of somebody making what people want.
Looks like I picked the wrong day to stop drinking before noon.