Reviews and News:
Paul Griffiths at Duke is accused of being a racist and bigot for encouraging colleagues to ignore “racial equity training.”
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Images of the earliest known draft of the King James Bible: “It is rare that archival research makes the national news. Jeffrey Alan Miller’s identification of a draft of a portion of the King James Bible hit the headlines in October 2015: not only was it the earliest known draft, but was uniquely a draft written by the hand of one of the translators, who was known by name. The notebook in which Miller found this work – Sidney Sussex College, MS Ward B – had belonged to Samuel Ward (1572-1643), Master of the College from 1610 until his death. Eighteen months after the discovery, the notebook has been digitised in full and published on the Cambridge Digital Library.”
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Lyndal Roper has written a great book on Luther the man but not Luther the monk.
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Derek Turner reviews a new edition of Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death: “The idea of death as universal equaliser is a cliché, but in the hands of Holbein it was carried off with exuberant originality.”
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Bob Dylan’s songs aren’t poems, but he still deserves the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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As many as 7,000 bodies may be buried on the University of Mississippi Medical Center campus.
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Irish beach reappears 33 years after it washed away. (HT: Priscilla Jensen)
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If you dabble in poetry and like hamburgers made “Just like you like it,” you may want to enter Whataburger’s #BurgerVerseContest. You could win free Whataburger for a year and a $500 Ticketmaster gift card.
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Yorker, Charlotte Higgens writes about paleographer Roger Tomlin’s reading of everyday Roman objects:
“Between 2010 and 2014, archeologists digging in London’s financial district, on the site of a new British headquarters for Bloomberg, made an astonishing discovery—a collection of more than four hundred wooden tablets, preserved in the muck of an underground river. The tablets, postcard-sized sheets of fir, spruce, and larch, dated mainly from a couple of decades after the Roman conquest of Britain, in A.D. 43, straddling the period, in the reign of Nero, when Boudica’s rebellion very nearly got rid of the occupation altogether. Eighty of them carried legible texts—legible, that is, to Roger Tomlin, one of the world’s foremost experts in very old handwriting.
“Tomlin is perhaps best known as an editor of The Roman Inscriptions of Britain (‘RIB,’ to its intimates), an ongoing, multivolume compilation of Latin texts carved in stone. But his most striking accomplishment is deciphering Roman ephemera—wooden and lead tablets that, miraculously, archeologists still unearth from time to time around the province formerly known as Britannia. While the lettering on Roman masonry is, for the most part, wonderfully regular, striding along in neat capitals, the tablets are written in cursive, which is wildly various in style and quality. Occasionally the writing is tidy and clear, but most often it is rushed, sloppy, fragmentary, and damaged, and can, to the uninitiated, even to one who knows Latin well, resemble not so much actual writing as a series of bewilderingly arbitrary strokes and curlicues. Tomlin is one of a tiny number of people in the U.K. skilled in reading this script. Catharine Edwards, the president of Britain’s Roman Society, has called his ability ‘uncanny.’
“The thrill of the Romano-British texts, Tomlin told me recently, is that they provide ‘random glimpses of things not meant for posterity.'”
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Photo: Chocolate Hills
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Poem: Jerl Surratt, “On a Napkin”
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