London and the ESTC

As I promised, this week I will write about Oxford again instead of French novels. Well, sort of, since I also went to London this weekend. Anyway, let's just get to it.

Sweet ruff, Drayton.

So I spent the rest of last week reading stuff, like I mostly do. This week in my C-Course we were reading Drayton and Herrick, which are not my favorite sonnet sequences, but I guess they're kind of interesting because of their flaws. Drayton's Idea's Mirror is pretty uninspired...lots of the sonnets are pretty much a ripoff of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, except not as good. Actually the most interesting thing about Idea's Mirror is Drayton's persistence with it - basically when it came out in 1594 no one really liked it; the whole concept of it, which is writing Petrarchan-style love sonnets to "idea" as a personified entity, is perversely abstract. This, however, did not stop him from revising and reprinting the sonnets like four more times in different volumes of his other poetry. Perseverance is apparently the key to sonnet sequences. 

Too many poems, Herrick.

Herrick is a different story; after I finished reading the sonnets in his Hesperides (1648) and skimming through the rest of the 300 pages of short poems in that work I felt like I was losing my mind. His poems range from 2 lines to 100, and the collection has really no discernible ordering principles - it skips from topic to topic without any real cohesion or narrative thread. Most of the poems are written alternately to real noble personages and fictional imaginary mistresses with various colorful names; some of them are to himself, others to his book, others to readers, some about nothing. This one was one of my favorites:

Not every day fit for Verse. 

'Tis not ev'ry day that I
Fitted am to prophesy:
No, but when the spirit fills
The fantastic pannicles,
Full of fire, then I write
As the Godhead doth indite.
Thus enraged, my lines are hurl'd,
Like the Sibyl's, through the world:
Look how next the holy fire
Either slakes, or doth retire;
So the fancy cools:--till when
That brave spirit comes again. 

First of all: "not every day fit for verse"? Then DON'T FRICKIN WRITE. Jesus. Hesperides has 1,400 poems in it. Maybe you should take a break once in a while, Herrick. Secondly: full of yourself much? "'Tis not ev'ry day that I / Fitted an to prophesie" - uh-huh, sure. "Prophesying" is what you're doing, 'cause your poems are just that amazing. What an egotistical twat.

Someday I will have time to read this.

Man, that felt good. So moving on, as I said, I spent Saturday in London. What was I doing in London, you ask? Well the answer is being a BIG GEEK with the Anime Soc. Unfortunately Meagan couldn't make it because she was visiting family in East Sussex, so it was just me and the (other) otaku. We left early in the morning and took the bus and then the tube to right by the British Museum, where there's this cute litte comic store that I never knew existed, even though I've been to the BM like 8 times and stayed around that area for two week in 2008 - yeah, who knew? They actually had a crap manga selection but I had to try really hard to keep myself from buying The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, which I've been meaning to read since I got on my Neil Gaiman streak like 6 months ago. I've got it on my iPad but it's so nice to physically have the book. But then I have to fly home with it and attempt to make the weight limit. Sigh. 

Can't wait for the new season!

Anyway, we had lunch and moved on to Forbidden Planet, this rad store sort of by Covent Garden that, again, I never knew existed even though I've probably walked by it a bunch before. They're self-described as a "Cult Entertainment Megastore," or as I like to think of it, Geek Heaven. They had seriously everything geek: Doctor Who, Harry Potter, Star Trek, Star Wars, comics, collectibles, anime, manga, DVDs, books, etc, etc. I got a little 11th Doctor's sonic screwdriver since I obviously couldn't resist, and a copy of Newtype (the Japanese version) that came with sweet Star Driver pullouts since I obviously couldn't resist. Oh yeah, and I cried because they had a bunch super awesome, super cheap DVDs that I couldn't buy because of stupid region locking. Media distributors, why do you make it hard for me to give you my money? 

The last place we went was TokyoToys, which is around Leicester Square and was kind of a bust. They had collectibles and character goods but the selection was tragically limited and hardly any of it was actually imported. Mostly it just made me want to go back to Ikebukuro....boohoo. 

One of the cooler things I did in London was walk through Chinatown - since it was just Chinese New Year everything was festive...they even had a dragon dance going on down the main street. I also successfully dragged all the people I was with into a Chinese bakery so I could buy dan ta, my favorite chinese treat that you obviously can't get anywhere in Oxford. It's like a little egg custard tart that's incredibly delicious. I really ought to learn to make them myself actually; maybe it'll be my next culinary adventure! 

So that was pretty much the excitement of the weekend, and since yesterday I've been mostly just working on my new research project for my B-Course, which has so far involved spending hours on EEBO (Early English Books Online) and the ESTC (English Short Title Catalogue) searching for names of printers of various narrative poems printed in the 1590s, which is a lot more troublesome than it might sound, actually. The problem is that on some title pages the printer will spell his name Richard Jones, on others R Jhones, or R. I., or Richard Iones, and the ESTC doesn't search for variations, so you have to do a bunch of searches spelling it as many ways as you can think of to get a comprehensive list, which looks something like this: 

Yesterday I was pretty excited because I thought I was on a new track with this project, but after spending all that time on the ESTC today with little to show for it I'm feeling kind of discouraged about it all. There are definitely some interesting relationships between the printers in this period, but I'm not sure if there's anything there to write about really. Hmph. Tomorrow I'm going to go to the Bod and rifle through some more catalogues to see if I can't kick up anything interesting on this topic. I'm supposed to email my professors with a tentative topic/title by Friday, and give a presentation on this next Tuesday,  so hopefully I will have something a little more concrete to go on by the end of the week at least. 

Well it's getting late here so I better wrap up this post. Next week might be kind of hectic since it's getting into the second half of the term and things are getting intense. Don't worry, though, devoted subscribers, I will still make some time for the ol' blog. 

TTFN,

KQ

Let your galaxy shine!

P.S. In my post last week I referred to GONZO as a studio that was dead and gone, which I thought they were since they went bankrupt like 2 years ago and pretty much disappeared. Well apparently the universe was determined to prove me wrong, because not three days after I wrote that they apparently rose from the dead and announced that they're working on a second season of Last Exile. Go figure.