Gaudy at Trinity: 3

E-mail to Trinity College Archivist, 5 October

Many thanks, Clare, for the trouble you took and the time you gave me on Friday afternoon when letting me handle those Johnson letters!

This was the first time in my life that I have held in my hands REAL primary sources: those that I read for my special subject as an undergraduate (Great Britain in the Mediterranean, 1797-1802) were PRINTED cabinet papers, despatches etcetera.

And thank you too for arranging with Sharon that I could get hold of David Fairer's 'Correspondence of Thomas Warton' overnight. It was interesting to read in it how he dealt with ambiguities when attempting to read unclearly-written words. I discussed this point with the bod from the Bodleian in the Old Library and he made clear (as of course you had done) that a learning curve is always involved when reading manuscripts.

All of this was for me the cherry on the cake of a memorable gaudy.

Thomas Warton was a friend of Dr Johnson, a fellow of Trinity College and at various times both Professor of Poetry at Oxford and Poet Laureate. He played a major role in enabling Johnson to be awarded an MA which the lexicographer considered to be essential to lend credibility to his dictionary which was published in 1755 after eight years of toil.

Johnson had originally optimistically thought he could complete the massive project in just three years, which opinion was greeted with incredulity by many. Boswell records this snippet of patriotic conversation:

ADAMS. This is a great work, Sir. …. But, Sir, how can you do this in three years? JOHNSON. Sir, I have no doubt that I can do it in three years. ADAMS. But the French Academy, which consists of forty members, took forty years to compile their Dictionary. JOHNSON. Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.

This post is clearly a specious attempt to show that the gaudy for me was not just cakes and ale.

Gaudy programme

Gaudy for men matriculating 1953—1959
Friday, 2 October 2009

The President, Fellows and staff extend a very warm welcome to you and they hope that you will have a very enjoyable and memorable evening.

4.30 pm	Afternoon tea in the Beer Cellar
5.00 pm	Exhibitions Old Library Exhibition ; Archive Exhibition in the Old Bursary amd Exhibition of Photographs given by Charles Chadwyck-Healey in the SCR
6.40 pm	Chapel Service, ending with the Founder's Prayer : O GOD, The Resurrection and Life of them that put their trust in thee, Who are always to be praised as well in the Dead, as in the Living; we yield thee thanks for Sir THOMAS POPE, Knight, our Founder, and the LADY ELIZABETH, his wife, deceased, and for all our other Benefactors, by whose liberality we are here brought up in godliness and learning ; Beseeching thee to give us grace so to use their benefits bestowed upon us, that with them we may come to the endless glory of thy resurrection, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
7.00 pm	Reception in the Danson Room (or the Beer Cellar in the event of heavy rain)
7.45 pm	Dinner in Hall
	Game terrine with Trinity crab apple chutney and walnut bread Fillet steak with girolles, pumpkin and cauliflower purées, lentils and bacon Fig Tarte Tatin with iced chestnut parfait and vanilla sauce Dessert Coffee and petits fours St Romain, Domaine Pascal Brunier-Bonheur 2006 Château Guibot la Fourvieille 2001 St Emilion Late Harvest Sauvignon Blanc 2004 Maule Valley Trinity College Late Bottled Vintage 2003
Midnight	Beer Cellar bar closes

Dr Johnson and Trinity

I spent a week in Budapest last month completing a second series of dental implant sessions. Incidentally, the saving in cost, including air fares, accommodation and meals, comfortably exceeded the cost of the university course I am currently doing. Additionally I have had four trips to a delightful city.

On this last trip I decided, as I had done a lot of sightseeing on previous ones, to spend most time reading, in particular Boswell's Johnson. What came as a matter of considerable surprise to me was his appreciation of my old college rather than the one he briefly attended, Pembroke. In particular, he spent some weeks lodging in Kettel Hall, a college building in which I had rooms for two years. Consequently I did some work on a database to produce a date chart of Johnson and his contemporaries, as a preliminary to perhaps writing an essay to be entitled Trinity: Doctor Johnson's favourite Oxford college?

Only the skeleton of this got written, but what I learnt was that some of his letters are in the college archive, so I asked if I could see them before the gaudy dinner. I had this reply yesterday.

Dear Mr Randall,

Tom has forwarded to me your email about the letters from Samuel Johnson to Thomas Warton in the Trinity Archive. I was most interested to learn that you are writing an essay about Johnson at Trinity - it's a subject which has been much on my mind recently as two weeks ago Sharon Cure (the Trinity librarian) and I put on a small exhibition with that very title in the Old Library for the delegates of the Johnson Tercentenary Conference (held at Pembroke College). There is a brief booklet which we produced that I can give you - it summarises information about his various connections with Trinity and a bit about what the college was like in the 18th Century, which you may find useful. You will notice that besides the letters, the archives which we have are rather scanty, but we did our best to give them a good spin!

I think it should be possible for you to see the Johnson/Warton letters tomorrow afternoon, although I will be rather busy setting out an archive exhibition for the gaudy in the Old Bursary. Can you give me a rough idea of what time you will arrive - earlier in the afternoon would be better for me - and then you can settle in the archive reading room while I dash up and down the stairs!

I look forward to meeting you tomorrow,

Clare Hopkins
Archivist

I replied as follows.

Dear Clare

Second para: excellent news! I'll arrive after lunch, say 14:00, unless you'd like me there earlier.

First para: woeful news! I feel a bit like somebody setting sail westwards to discover a New World only to land and read a sign Columbus Woz Here – but nonetheless I look forward to reading it.
Cheers, Tony

After breakfast this morning I receive this e-mail.

Dear Tony,

2.00 will be good for me. Shall we meet under the chapel arch, or if you prefer, ask the porter to give me a ring and I will come down from the tower to let you in?

I don't think you need worry about competition from our very trivial researches on your subject! But one good source I would recommend if you aren't aware of it already is David Fairer's edition of the correspondence of Thomas Warton. It's in the college library if you'd like to take a look at it while you're in college.

Clare

Well, well, well! I'd better get this posted quickly and get ready to catch the X5 to Oxford.

Term paper: researching journals

Yesterday I spent some time in the Hunter Street library scanning the contents pages of the University of Hawaii's Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly from the current issue backwards in time. I was beginning to despair of finding anything relevant when I hit pay dirt with the 2003 winter issue, which had the overarching title OnlineLives. Here are the titles of the main articles it contains:

• Screening Moments, Scrolling Lives: Diary Writing on the Web
  
• Teaching an Old Genre New Tricks: The Diary on the Internet
  
• That Different Place: Documenting the Self Within Online Environments
  
• The Gnome in the Front Yard and Other Public Figurations: Genres of Self-Presentation on Personal Home Pages
  
• At Home in Cyberspace: Staging Autobiographical Scenes
  
• Technobiography: Researching Lives, Online and Off
  

Even though these were written over six years ago, they clearly all need to be read carefully over the next month. Although the university has a subscription to the printed journal it does not have access to the online version. The Subscription page on the University of Hawaii's website did not permit ordering of single copies so I sent off an e-mail.

From: A G Randall [mailto:agrandall@btinternet.com]
Sent: 01 October 2009 14:49
To: 'uhpjourn@hawaii.edu'
Subject: Biography: Winter 2003 

How can I get hold of a copy of Online Lives, preferably in digital form? I couldn't find a way to do this on your website, I'm afraid.  

Best wishes

This morning I receive this response:

From: UHP Journals [mailto:uhpjourn@hawaii.edu]
Sent: 01 October 2009 23:35
To: A G Randall
Subject: Re: Biography: Winter 2003

Dear Mr. Randall,

If you are affiliated or have access to an institutional facility with access to Project Muse, you may access all electronic versions of each issue from 2001. I noticed, however, that University of Buckingham is not listed as a Project Muse subscribers. You may, however, browse the following listing for other institutions that do have Project Muse access:  

http://muse.jhu.edu/about/subscriptions/subscriber_list_country.html  

If you do not have Project Muse access, we can send you a PDF version of the issue via email for US$20. A hardcopy of the issue is also available for the same price, including shipping via airmail. Should you wish to order, please secure payment with a Visa or Mastercard via our web order page. I am sorry, but our online order form is not yet set up to accept single-issue orders; however, if you fill in all of your information and indicate in the "additonal comments" section, the material you wish to order, your order will be duly filled and charged the appropriate amount. If you have any futher questions, please let me know. Thank you.  

Sincerely,  

Norman Kaneshiro
Subscriptions & Advertising Mgr.
Journals Department
University of Hawaii Press
2840 Kolowalu Street
Honolulu HI 96822
VOICE: (808)956-8833 FAX: (808)988-6052
EMAIL: uhpjourn@hawaii.edu
 

I reproduce this in its entirety to bring to the attention of the world the singular courtesy of Norman Kaneshiro. I have of course thanked him personally, telling him that I hope to get an electronic copy of the journal through my Oxford connection this afternoon, but his reply was so prompt, so clear and so helpful that I felt his action should be more generally acknowledged.

 
 

Gaudy at Trinity: 1

Today I go to a gaudy at Trinity for men who matriculated between 1953 and 1959.

This one sentence contains three examples of a fundamental problem faced by people wanting to write an autobiography on a blog: how do I explain the meaning of a specialised word, like 'gaudy' used as a noun or 'matriculate', or the significance of a proper noun, like Trinity?

I can't use footnotes; I don't want to break up the narrative flow by putting explanations in parentheses, both because of the need to write concisely on a blog and because it is condescending to those people who do understand; I could use hyperlinks to online dictionaries or to Wikipedia, but these are laborious to insert, even if one has, as I do, competence in HTML; or I could write a more generalised sentence like this: "Today I go to Oxford to attend a celebratory dinner with people who were at my college in the fifties".

The generalised sentence is only 25% longer than the one I wrote at the beginning, but it is less precise; it is flabbier. Therefore I will continue to write using precise words rather than generalised ones, expecting whoever reads them to deduce them from context or from pictures, which I am trying to use today for the first time.

Preliminary work on term paper

The Autumn Term is devoted to Autobiography. We are required to write a term paper of 3,000-5,000 words by 27 November. The subject is to be one of the topics discussed at weekly classes or a subject of one's choice, subject to approval.

The film Julie and Julia showed me how a blog could be a medium for publishing autobiography, or rather a slice of autobiography. In the film Julie Powell embarks upon the Julie/Julia Project, in which she sets out to cook in a tiny flat all 524 of the recipes in Julia Childs' Mastering the Art of French Cooking while holding down a full-time job. The story she tells of this quest is amplified as she tells how it impinges upon the people around her: her friends, her work colleagues and above all her husband, who accuses her at one stage of having embarked upon one massive ego trip.

This film inspired me to propose writing a term paper on Autobiography on blogs and our professor agreed to this at our meeting yesterday. I intend to use this blog to be the place where I can store, under the label Term paper, my plans and summaries of what happened in trying to execute them. It might perhaps be better, if I were solely interested in writing a paper to use a conventional wordprocessor in the preliminary stages as well as the final one, but I want to explore how to undertake a task like this using what is to me a new tool, since this will also help me to understand better its limitations while I am researching how, if at all, one can write an autobiography on it.

Here, then, are the things that I intend to do as the preliminary steps towards writing the paper.

• Google [autobiography blog] and [biography blog], then see how these terms need refining to reduce the massive number of responses they will generate, then start a Word file with the URLs of sites that might merit fuller examination, along with a note of what was first seen
  
• Use Wikipedia, and perhaps other sources, to get a better idea about the development of blogs and in particular what search engines there are for blogs, then start a Word file summarising results
  
• Study the Julie Powell blog, then start an Access table to store potentially-useful quotes and their URLs: as a preliminary to this I need to look at the MHRA Style Book which we were told about yesterday, to see how bibliographical details of material published on the web should be recorded.
  
• Check at the library how to access the University of Hawaii's Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly and check what other journals if any I should look to see what has been written on my topic
  
• Contact biographical societies in the USA (e.g. via The Biographer's Craft website) and UK (e.g. the Johnson Society of London) to see whether any of their members has written anything useful about blogging and biography: this item is a posteriority
  

Writing this to-do list gives me the comfortable feeling that the paper has actually been begun: you don't eat a salami by swallowing great mouthfuls of it, but by cutting it into thin slices and carefully chewing them one at a time.

I am also happy that embarking on the study of this topic will also help me towards my dissertation at the end of the course, provisionally entitled How technology is changing how biographies are made. When I announced this at our meeting yesterday, the question "What do you mean by technology?" was immediately raised by colleagues. After all, the development of a method to produce solid graphite out of powdered graphite and clay made pencils vastly cheaper, just as the development of the biro made pens vastly cheaper. This question must for the moment be put on the back burner.

First meeting of Biography course participants

It's always an interesting moment when you are about to meet a group of people whom you are destined to come to know well over a period of time: is your reaction going to be Omygod or Wizard? How happy I am to say Wizard!

There is more, quite a lot more, that I should and would like to write, but I'm actually a bit knackered; after all, it's not every day that you go back into the snake pit of a new school; I awoke this morning long before the first sparrow had greeted the dawn.

I gave the URL of this blog to my professor and my fellow students. When I post a wholly commendatory comment like this about them they might well respond, with Mandy Rice-Davies,

"He would say that, wouldn't he?"

Tomorrow I will edit this post to create a link to a page to explain what this particular quote, from the Macmillan era, says to trainee biographers about the reliability of what people say. I'll also talk about what we'll be doing this term.

Added 29 September

I have added the HTML code, target="_blank" , to seek to make the link from the quotation open in a new window. This used to work in the days when I built websites but, as the code is listed in my 1996 reference book as a nonstandard extension, it seems likely that the latest version of Internet Explorer ignores it.

Unless and until I can sort this out, I will cause links to open in the current window. This will mean, however, that you will have to use your Back button to return to this blog. Go to my first post, and see what happens when you click the quotation there.