Hazel Stuart, "Robert Kirk's London Commonplace Book, 1689-90"

 

Hazel Stuart has lived in Leicestershire since 2004. She was born and brought up in Aberfoyle, Scotland, and attended university in London. She has previously published an academic paper on Poststructuralism, an award-winning children's fiction series and, most recently, a creative contribution in the University of Leicester's Other Lives in Samuel Pepys's Diary e-book. She has an ongoing interest in early modern history and the intersection of politics, religion and the occult. 

About Robert Kirk's London Commonplace Book, 1689-90, transcribed and annotated by Hazel Stuart
Robert Kirk's London Commonplace Book, 1689-90 is a transcription of the private journal belonging to a brilliant Scottish minister, scholar and translator abroad in London in the early days of the Glorious Revolution. Visiting the capital to oversee the printing of the first ever Gaelic Bible, a project financed by the Royal Society's Robert Boyle, he chronicles the late-seventeenth-century city in meticulous detail. Through Kirk's remarkably tolerant and curious narration, we explore a city of religious diversity, toy with early modern science's understanding of second sight, and get to tag along to some of seventeenth-century London's best visitor attractions. This book is every bit as critical to historians as the diaries of Pepys or Evelyn. Beyond her faithful transcription of the commonplace book, Hazel Stuart has provided an introduction and notes, including the most comprehensive biography to date of its author, Robert Kirk, a man whose interest in second sight and fairies was ultimately to lead him to infamy. 

You can read more about Robert Kirk's London Commonplace Book, 1689-90, here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From Robert Kirk's London Commonplace Book, 1689-90

March 21, 1689, I also saw Gresham College, where the Hall pertaining to the Royal Society is, bestowed for the use of inquirers into nature’s phenomenon and mysteries by –

It is in Bishop’s Street on left-hand as you go forth to Bishop’s Gate. There is a square court there and a pole for mathematical experiments. But the Hall containing the curious rarities is not large but full of all varieties, above 2000.

Among which the main that I remarked and remembered were three manucodiatas with plain bills, long wings and tail, travelling feet: I took a feather out of a wing of one of them, and out of the tail of the ostridge’s skin. The bird of Paradise is carnivorous. I saw the pelican black, its bill was broad and as big as my arm, with a collar beneath. A Hudson’s Bay partridge white and long, with a few black feathers in the tail. A serpent of East India 7 yards in length, a small head and body as big as my leg at the ankles. A cassowary, duskish black fowl as big as an ostrich for the bones, though not so long necked, the bones of his leg are as gross as those of a man’s arm. The neck about a yard and a half in length, the legs three quarters. The blackish brown pigritia in shape like a man, a big body, slender legs, it goes but a yard and a half a day, though tis bigger than a cat. It climbs a tree, eats itself fat with fruit, and becomes lean before it creeps to the root of the tree.

Roger Bygott, "Ginsberg & Manchester"

 

Roger Bygott is a writer and researcher living in Manchester. He was an ordained Buddhist for twenty years and lived in a monastery in the Spanish mountains for three years. He studied Interactive Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, which led him to co-found and co-direct Manifest Arts, a biennial arts festival in Manchester that highlighted the city's network of arts studios between 2015 and 2019. His essays have been published in Beat Scene and Dark Mountain.

About Ginsberg & Manchester, by Roger Bygott
Allen Ginsberg visited Manchester twice. He barely figures in the city's history, and Manchester barely figures in his. Yet two brief visits — a summer afternoon in 1973, a Library Theatre reading in 1979 — hold richer stories than the bare facts suggest.

Ginsberg & Manchester brings together several figures whose lives were touched by Ginsberg in different ways: Alan Wise, a charismatic music impresario (manager of Nico, John Cooper Clarke and Donovan) from Salford, whose letters to Ginsberg span fourteen years; Steven Taylor, a guitarist born in Gorton who became Ginsberg's closest musical companion for two decades; Jonathan Williams, the American avant-garde publisher (Jargon Press) who first brought Ginsberg into the city centre; and Jampa Thaye, a Manchester grammar school boy who discovered Buddhism through Kerouac, became an influential Buddhist teacher, and who was Ginsberg's host when he came to the Library Theatre. This is a story about how a great American poet left a faint but enduring mark on an English city that never quite noticed he was there.

The book also features rare and unpublished photos of Ginsberg and his associates.

You can read more about Ginsberg & Manchester on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From Ginsberg & Manchester
In one of Allen Ginsberg’s date books, there’s a barely intelligible squiggle across the boxes for 4–6 June 1979. On the sixth day, at the end of the squiggle, is an arrow and the question: ‘Manchester?’ 

What was the story behind that asemic flourish? It had been five years since Ginsberg’s fleeting visit to Manchester in August 1973. There weren’t many reasons for him to return; his connection with the north-west of England was primarily with Liverpool, thanks to his fascination with the Beatles and connection with the Merseybeat poets. 

That arrowhead was inviting enquiry. What was he doing? Who was he travelling with this time? The existing biographies were of little help. Ginsberg could pack his days with meetings, readings, socialising and cultural events, so it’s not surprising that his all-too-brief visits to Manchester get short shrift in his letters and the many biographies of him.

Michael Schumacher, in his biography Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg, notes that in 1979, ‘Allen’s European reading tour included visits to Paris, Cambridge, London, Newcastle, Rotterdam and Rome – all in a whirlwind schedule that lasted less than a month.’  Manchester has got lost in the whirlwind. Barry Miles’s biography of Ginsberg mentions neither his 1973 nor his 1979 visit to Manchester. I started to wonder if the question mark in Ginsberg’s date diary might indicate a possible visit that never materialised. 

Then I discovered a June 1979 letter to his friend and fellow Beat poet Gary Snyder, sent from the Netherlands on 14 June 1979: 

After triumphant tour of the capitals of Europe – Genoa, Milan, Spoleto, Paris, Manchester, Cambridge, London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam – we’re dragging our weary tongues o’er the sea to Newcastle to visit [Basil] Bunting and last reading there … We brought Steven Taylor to guitar and sing and all turned out funny and energetic like a folkie tour. 

Steven Taylor, Ginsberg’s guitarist and musical director, is an integral part of the story. He was born to a working-class family in east Manchester, who emigrated to the USA in 1965 when he was ten years old. 

On 5 June, Taylor joined [Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Anne Waldman] on the 12.55 p.m. train from Euston, heading north for a reading at the Manchester Library Theatre ...

Kate Loveman, "The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary"

Congratulations to Prof Kate Loveman, whose book The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary has just been published!

Kate Loveman is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Leicester. She researches the literature and history of the seventeenth century, notably things to do with Samuel Pepys (who rarely met a thing he did not want to have to do with). She is the author of Reading Fictions 1660-1740 (2008) and Samuel Pepys and his Books (2015), and has edited Pepys’s diary for Everyman (2018).

About The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary, by Kate Loveman
During the 1660s, Samuel Pepys kept a secret diary, full of intimate details and political scandal. First published two hundred years ago, it is now the most famous diary in the English language. The Strange History of Samuel Pepys’s Diary explores why Pepys’s diary was written, how this secret diary came to be published, and the many remarkable roles it has played in British culture since then. Pepys’s journal has prompted creative responses ranging from Victorian fanfiction to World War II propaganda and COVID parodies. For two centuries, it has also encouraged debates about what counts as ‘history’ and about whose stories are worth telling.

You can read more about The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short excerpt from the book. 

From The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary
Pepys’s journal vividly describes momentous events, such as the plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London, alongside small moments – quarrels with his wife or jokes with servants. Since it was first published in 1825, it has variously been called an ‘incomparable masterpiece,’ ‘an historical and literary work of an outstanding character,’ ‘trifling,’ ‘tedious,’ ‘very amusing,’ ‘too gross to print,’ and ‘obscene.’ Those divided judgements come just from the people (the editors, the publishers, and the lawyers) who were tasked with getting this extremely bizarre, frequently filthy text into print. For most of the last two hundred years, significant sections of the diary were deemed unpublishable, thanks to Pepys’s habits of describing court scandals, his sex life, and his bowel movements. Since nothing could be more intriguing than a secret diary too shocking to print, this censorship only increased the public’s fascination. 

Laughter, Literature, Violence

By Jonathan Taylor

             Violence is of the essence of laughter.

- Wyndham Lewis, The Wild Body

I've recently had an academic book published by Palgrave-Macmillan, called Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840-1930. The idea for the book originally grew out of my own creative work: as others have pointed out, my writing style is often marked by a dark humour, even grotesque comedy. Initially, I was hardly conscious of this: the mixture of comedy and tragedy in my memoir, Take Me Home (2007), arose naturally, almost unawares, because they were intertwined in reality - in elements of my father's illness, and our experience of caring for him. It seems to me that in so-called 'reality' (whatever that is), comedy and tragedy are rarely monolithic. People laugh at funerals, cry at parties. Death, tragedy, horror, violence can be funny - or horrifically funny. That's why so many literary memoirs mingle laughter and tears, even when they're ostensibly concerned with the most serious, or distressing of subjects. I wanted to write reflectively about this strange emotional hybridity, particularly in relation to memoirs and short fiction - and, in that sense, the academic book makes conscious what I've been doing, over many years, in my own creative writing. It does so, for the most part, in a displaced form, in relation to literary texts by other memoirists and short-story writers; but, as Oscar Wilde famously claimed, all criticism is a kind of autobiography. In writing the book, I have learned a huge amount about the historical periods, about theories of laughter, about the writers - and also about myself, my own style, and my (sometimes dark) sense of humour. Here's the book's blurb: 

Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840-1930 investigates the strange, complex, even paradoxical relationship between laughter, on the one hand, and violence, war, horror, death, on the other. It does so in relation to philosophy, politics, and key nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary texts, by Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Gosse, Wyndham Lewis and Katherine Mansfield – texts which explore the far reaches of Schadenfreude, and so-called ‘superiority theories’ of laughter, pushing these theories to breaking point. In these literary texts, the violent superiority often ascribed to laughter is seen as radically unstable, co-existing with its opposite: an anarchic sense of equality. Laughter, humour and comedy are slippery, duplicitous, ambivalent, self-contradictory hybrids, fusing apparently discordant elements. Now and then, though, literary and philosophical texts also dream of a different kind of laughter, one which reaches beyond its alloys – a transcendent, ‘perfect’ laughter which exists only in and for itself.