Zibaldone-Paul Theroux Style

Apparently Paul Theroux has a sort of zibaldone regarding travel. 'The Tao of Travel'.  It is a hodge-podge of museings by various writers writers.  With a fair bit of Mr. Theroux sprinkled in, for good measure.

The book came out in 2011.  And I recently discovered it in my local library.  (If you can't actually travel, then the library is the best option, until you can). 

The reviewers don't seem to like it much.  And Hugh Thomson makes some excellent points in his review at the Independent.  Theroux does "make a great deal of himself", and perhaps he doesn't "exude inner calm.". but perhaps he tries to find that sense of peace.  A sense which only comes when he leaves home, and strikes out into the world, with no other purposed than to see it.  He doesn't desire to conquer it, or master it, or rule it.  

Too often in life that is what many of us find ourselves doing.  And here in this book are examples of others who did life a little different.  Saw life a little different.  Perhaps that is enough.  

I know it makes me long to get on a train, or a ship and see a view different than the one I see now, and will see tomorrow, and that I have seen for way too many months.  

A new notebook

As artists writers usually need a few supplies.  Pen and paper. Mostly.  Reference books and some sort of typing machine are always handy.  Yet the craft, the art can be explored with pen and paper.

I have dreamed of buying expensive pens and luxurious notebooks-the paper kind, not the electronic kind.  However the budget can only cover modestly priced pens and Dollar Store notebooks.  Yet the dream continues.

One of the dreams is about leather bound notebooks.  And the newest one is from bullandstash.com.  The great feature about it is that refills of paper can be ordered.  The refills are a little pricey at 7$ per, but that beautiful leather cover just might make it worth paying.  Happy Writing.

(photo from Bull and Stash's web site)

Examining Zibaldones

As I was looking into what a zibaldone is I came across John Dotson's book Merchant Culture in 14th Century Venice:the Zibaldone de Canal.  I also came across Eve Wolynes' book A Living Text:Literacy, Identity,and Fourteenth Century Merchants in the Zibaldone de Canal.

The Zibaldone de Canal is made up of 9 sections:

 (1) various information on matters mercantile, including simple arithmetical problems, (2) a memorandum of formulae for converting weights and measures and currencies between various places and Venice, (3) a fragment of the Tristan story of King Milliadus (Rivalen), (4) the characteristics of spices, (5) division of the parts of the day, (6) miscellaneous medical information, (7) a brief chronicle of Venice to 1303, (8) two sirventes: 'The precepts of Reviews 135 Solomon* (known elsewhere as the 'Doctrine of the slave of Bari') and "The God of love', (9) various prayers and charms.

This comes from John Pryor's review of Dotson's book in the July 1994 issue of Parergon.

I love that it is a hodge-podge of  interests.  Some were useful such as the formulae to convert weights and measures, and perhaps the characteristics of spices.  This could be handy if you think someone is trying to rook you.

The manuscript is held at the Beinecke Library at Yale.

It would be interesting to think about what areas of interest a modern merchant would find intriguing and write about.

Magical Manuscripts Need Transcribing

Chicago's Newberry Library is putting a call out for volunteers to help transcribe Magical Manuscripts that are in the Library's collection.

Visitation, from the Heures de Nostre Dame selonc lusaige de Rome. c.1400. Case MS 188.

Photos from Newberry Library

In an Atlas Obscura article by Tatiana Walk-Morris the manuscripts are part of the Museum's multidisciplinary project Religious Change, 1450-1700.  One is able to go to the web site and help to transcribe part of a rare manuscript.  

 
A detail from The Book of Magical Charms, one of the manuscripts the Newberry Library is seeking to transcribe(example from Tatianna Walk-Morris article on Atlas Obscura)

Apparently there are three manuscripts to work on: The Book of Magical Charms, The Commonplace Book, and Cases of Conscience Concerning Witchcraft. 

If my Latin was better and if I could read 500 year old handwriting I would be jumping in.  Alas, fair Latin I know not well.  And as I was exploring how this project works, I felt my eyes crossing as I closely examined the handwritten English.  I thought my handwriting was bad. I would hate to get a potion mixed wrong because someone couldn't read their handwriting.  

I look forward to checking out the upcoming exhibition.  This is a fascinating project and it will be wonderful to explore the transcribed texts.

New manuscripts online

In the newest copy of The American Scholar there is a small article by Noelani Kirschner regarding the Virtual Hill Museum & Manuscript Library Reading Room.

According to Kirschner scholars at Saint John's University in Collegeville, MN have digitalized manuscripts from ancient times to the present.  Their work is now online and ready to be explored.

The researchers have visited "540 libraries in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and India" in an effort to "scan and upload hundreds of thousands of manuscripts while exchanging metadata with other libraries."

How awesome is this?!?  Pretty cool.  As Father Columba Stewart explained many of these manuscripts have "been virtually unknown to scholars outside the Middle East. . . (and will) significantly shift or transform how people view the history of the region".

There could be interesting quotes and passages in this manuscripts. Perhaps some of them will end up in a 21st Century Zibaldone.

What would one put in a Zibaldone?

In trying to understand better what a zibaldone contained I went to wikipedia.  And it was helpful in understanding this particular style of book.

There is the zibaldone-which "Armando Petrucci describes as "an astonishing variety of poetic and prose texts."^[5] Devotional, technical, documentary and literary texts appear side-by-side in no discernible order."(wikipedia)

There is also the commonplace book-used by writers and philosophers in England and the U.S.  Some writers like

 "Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mark Twain kept messy reading notes that were intermixed with other quite various material; others, such as Thomas Hardy, followed a more formal reading-notes method that mirrored the original Renaissance practice more closely. The older, "clearinghouse" function of the commonplace book, to condense and centralize useful and even "model" ideas and expressions, became less popular over time."(wikipedia)

It reminds me of Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book  and her lists.  She has some interesting ones: Things That Make One Uncomfortable, Hateful Things, and Things of Beauty.

In looking more closely at what a traditional Zibaldone was and how it was utilized. It seems it is a collection of various snippets of text-scientific formula, poems, prose, ideas, and pithy sayings all jumbled together. Some would perhaps break their book into sections, but most just put wrote down what caught their eye, as they came across it.

(There are a couple of more famous zibaldones-Zibaldone da Canal and the Zibaldone di pensieri.)

As a read this description I recognized how familiar it was to some of my notebooks.  I have several filled with items to be written about, commented on, names for characters, snippets of dialogue.  Then there are pictures of clothing and people(who remind me of characters in my stories), and decor, and architectural elements.  I have laminated pages of sayings from historical figures, sports stars, leaders in business, politics and society.  The only difference is I rarely refer to my notebooks after I put  the item in them.

They, the notebooks and the collected items sit.  While I suffer under the burden of "I should be using these"; "I could be using these"; "I would use these but....I don't know how."  Or I feel so overwhelmed I can't do anything with the stuff.  Several times I have come close to throwing it all away-all of it.  Fortunately I still have it.  Now I can plug it into my 21st Century Zabaldone.  And maybe finally get rid of all the paper clippings.

Zibaldone-21st Century Style

I came across an article about something called a Zibaldone.  According to the article (which I can't remember or find, but it was on Facebook) it was a 13th Century version of a Tumblr/Pinterest/diary mashup.

Instead of traditional diary though it is more of collection of how one spends time, and interests, and things one does and has done.

It sounded really cool.  So I thought I would turn my blog here into my 21st Century version of a zibaldone.

Can't wait to see how it turns out.