Month: August 2014

The Georgian Postal System(s), and Cross-Writing

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As I’ve been harping for a while now, modernity didn’t just spring out of nowhere… it got built out of chaos, and it got built, primarily, in the form of systems, since people realized that systematization was an effective way of converting chaos into order. Modernity thrives on order, for better or worse, but as is clear to anyone living in a big city where modernity is a recent import (and not yet completely metabolized), you cannot have a modern metropolis without highly functional, highly integrated systems. As I’ve mentioned lately, it seems to me that it was in the Georgian era that a lot of …

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Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722)

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I’ve read a lot the last few months, and not posted much about the novels I’ve finished, but I’ll make an exception for this… and for one nonfiction book on governesses, which I’ll get to later this month. (And a few thoughtful posts on novels I wasn’t crazy about, which… well, they’ll go up eventually, I suppose, if they seem worth it when I revisit them.) Moll Flanders was an enjoyable enough book, once I got past the way novels were written in that time, which is to say, once I got past the lack of any kind of expository description of anything. Sure, Swift does …

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Write-a-Thon Final Progress Report, Week 6

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Week 6 of the Write-a-thon ended, for me, yesterday. (I did the writing on a week that runs Monday-Sunday.) Here’s my weekly update! If you don’t know what this Write-a-thon is, and want to know more, see here. (While I have a few generous sponsors already, I’d still love a few more, and if you’d like, it’s easy. More info on what’s in it for you at the link above.) Clarion West is still taking donations for the next couple of weeks, if you’re interested in supporting an amazing workshop program.

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Books For Malt-Worms

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Today, a light post, but still relevant to beer and brewing in the early 1700s, following my recent post on “Books of Secrets.” Like all industries, beer and brewing are connected to both the industries that produce their raw materials, and spawn other industries as well. One of the more interesting industries that has been spawned by the beer business is the “beer book” business. Most homebrewers think of “beer books” as books on homebrewing–either style guides and recipes or technical manuals. Some beer history buffs will also think of books on beer history, of which a few great ones exist out there. The former has been …

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Bookes of Secrets (and How to Read Them)

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Books of Secrets (also called Secreta) are a whole genre of books I didn’t even know existed a little while ago. Genres (I mean like the novel, the epic poem, the Christian hagiography) are like media: they peak, and then they convalesce, and sometimes they die. The book of secrets is an example of a dead literary genre… sort of, though the conceptual basis and the ideology are alive in well, in transmuted form. In their original form, one might look at them basically as recipe/how-to books–and it was through the translation and distribution of books of secrets that alchemical knowledge proliferated in …

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