Marking time
50 years of Strunk & White
The elements of style (3rd edition, 1979) lurks on the shelf near my dictionaries and style guides. Some of its specific advice on grammar is weird, so it’s not a useful reference book. But as an argument for clarity in writing it’s wonderful.
White’s reworking of William Strunk’s original little book appeared in 1959, and was a publishing hit. Its anniversary has been marked by a new commemorative edition, and a flurry of comment.
American National Public Radio broadcast a couple of pieces about the book - one laudatory, the other critical. The critical one is an interview with Geoffrey Pullum, whose writings on Language Log are always good. The elements of style is a regular subject for criticism on Language Log.
While I agree with the language loggers that Strunk and White’s elements of style is flawed, I think that Robert Bringhurst’s elements of typographic style is a wonderful piece of work and deserves its place beside my bed.
David Malouf at West End Library
My local public library opened in 1929, and today we marked it’s 80th birthday with a talk by David Malouf, and a birthday cake.
Uncle Sam Watson made us welcome and talked about his grandchildren, and about his grandparents, and their grandparents, and their kin. He named the places they belonged to and pointed them out: over there and right here and out in the bay. These are ancient connections that continue into the present, and will last into the future. Sam talked about the kurilpa, the water rat that used to be common along the river. He said that since dredging of the river had stopped, there were signs the kurilpa were coming back. Good news.
David Malouf spoke about growing up in South Brisbane. He was born here in 1935, went to West End State School, and kept up connections here after his family moved to Hamilton in the 1950s. He had personal stories to show that multiculturalism (as he told us) was not something invented in the 1970s as some people thought.
He talked about libraries. He fondly recalled the State Library in William Street, and the South Brisbane Municipal Library (both part of my childhood too). He made special mention of the Workers’ Educational Association library in Trades Hall. Once David had demonstrated his credentials as a union member (of the students’ union) he borrowed many books that were not on the collections of the University of Queensland Library or the State Library; the WEA had continued to buy newly published fiction and poetry through the 1930s and ’40s.
Geohistoriography
Artist Tim Schwartz illustrates on his website his installation piece Geohistoriography.
This show captures how America views the world as seen through the lens of the American media. All data was collected from the New York Times, namely the number of articles written about a certain country for each year.
The two wall drawings are representations of the 2008 state of America’s view of the world. In one piece countries were morphed and expanded or contracted if they were written about more or less than average. In the pyramid piece, countries were organized in a ranked fashion depending on this same data.
The animation shows how America’s perspective changed over the last 150 years.
Panoramic Queensland
The other day I went to the State Library of Queensland to see Panoramic Queensland, an exhibition of panoramic photographs from the John Oxley Library collection. This is a fine showing of several dozen panoramas of Brisbane and other Queensland places.
There is an excellent catalogue — nicely printed on heavy stock in panoramic format with good quality reproductions, with foldouts, with an interesting introduction by curator Stephanie Lindquist, and it’s free for the taking.
Panorama photographs are wonderful things, spacious and full of detail. If I had to choose just one, my favourite in the exhibition shows a freshly-built Victoria Bridge on a quiet misty morning around 1874. It’s a big, sweeping picture with wonderful repetitive elements combined with quirky details. There are no people in it, but I can feel their presence — I know that all those rivets were peened and pounded by men with heavy hammers.
The exhibition is good, in parts. Call me grumpy, but I must mention some missed opportunities and things that didn’t work as well as they should.
Lighting: The light level in the exhibition is low, as it should be. But I was annoyed that lights behind me cast my shadow onto the works on the wall, and shadows made it hard to see items in the display cases. Some lights need to be shifted.
Noise loop: A seven minute video about the exhibition by librarian Simon Farley plays constantly in the exhibition space, filling the room with distracting noise. The spiel gets annoying on the fourth hearing.
Cameras etcetera: Four panoramic cameras were on display, trapped in display cases without their tripods, with labels that identified each camera more or less correctly (I thought the misspelling of the name of the Cirkut camera was unfortunate). These token display pieces alerted me to the missed opportunity to interpret the evidence in each of the panoramas of the technical methods used in their production.
Before and since: The material on show begins with an 1862 series of photographs taken from the windmill, and ends with a digital print of the corresponding view in 2008. Stephanie Lindquist’s short catalogue essay introduces the work of pre-photography panorama painters, and refers to Bowerman’s 1835 watercolour of Brisbane — There can be little doubt that early Queensland settlers had some knowledge of the panoramic tradition. … The first signed and dated painting of the Moreton Bay colony was in fact a panorama by Commissariat Officer Henry Boucher Bowerman, a trained topographical artist — but this picture was not included in the exhibition, surely an opportunity missed. And in the present time, when the use of photographic film has dwindled away, the exhibition misses the chance to interpret recent digital developments in panorama photography.
Lighthouse life in Queensland
It was my pleasure today to talk to members of the Queensland Women’s Historical Association on the subject of lighthouse life in Queensland. The association hosts morning talks each month at Miegunyah, its house museum at Bowen Hills. Before the talk we gathered on the verandah for introductions and chat. There were white table cloths, tea in china cups, and platters of dainty sandwiches. It was a warmish day, and kind ladies handed out fans to the members as they filed into the dining room for the talk.
My audience really enjoyed seeing a series of photographs of the Byrne family, taken at Sandy Cape Lightstation between 1903 and 1913. The photos are now in the John Oxley Library collection, and published on the web. The Byrne family story is also told as one chapter in the library’s virtual exhibition Travelling for love.
Merry and happy, again
As a sequel to a previous greeting card here is another nineteenth century photographic greeting card from Tasmania. This one is not an ordinary carte-de-visite, but a somewhat larger card measuring 125mm by 82mm. The Loebenstein Company of Vienna produced more than two dozen sizes of cards for mounting photographs. This size was known by the charming name of Elisabeth.
